Monthly Archives: June 2011

UBC VISTA TIPS

Posted on by
Reply

Argh, so I don’t know if any of you have experienced this extremely frustrating aspect of the discussion boards on vista. Every time you write up a decent chunk of text and press enter your formatting goes completely haywire! On top of that trying to work in the HTML editor really does not work!!!

Anyways so far I have found that the best way to get any type of formatting i.e. paragraphs, line breaks is to use plain and simple HTML code. Just tick the “use html” button at the bottom of the posting framey thing.

For a line break: type in <br>.

For an entire empty line: type in <p> at the beginning and </p> at the end.

For an indent: type in &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; to give you four empty spaces.

And if you are trying to insert a link try fiddling around with the html editor thing or you could try using: <a href=”put url here”> put the text you want to appear here</a>

Hope this helps… I am not really familiar with html at all, but at least I found a way to insert paragraphs into my posts! It worked for me and hopefully it might work for you!

Walking through the courtyard

Posted on by
Reply

Walking through the courtyard in front of the Irving K. Barber library tonight got me thinking. It is always quiet in the summer evenings, peaceful even. Yet I can never shake off the idea that there is something eerie about the way the trees are all planted in perfect rows. Perfectly aligned they remind me of students, or perhaps society. The way in which we are all cultivated to grow in a certain way, in the precise spot we were involuntarily placed. We can never truly escape our roots, they grip us, hold us down to the ground. They are our lifeline. Even if we try to grow as tall as can be, we are human and therefore bound by our humanity.
I wonder if the people who planted those trees ever thought much about the pattern that they were placed in? And what that pattern would represent to the students who trudge past them day by day. For one thing I know that I would really like to see a little tree in there, one that doesn’t follow the grid pattern. I don’t know why exactly I would like to see that little tree, but I think that it would signify hope. That no matter where you are planted, you can still live, breathe and grow. <3

Excited?

Posted on by
Reply

It is pretty strange for me to finally be in university! After taking two years off to pursue ballet with the Goh Ballet I am back on the academic path (to the relief of my parents, teachers, blah, blah). I have started by just taking one summer course… a little bit of a bummer seen as I was invited to go to China on tour with the Goh shortly after I registered and paid my fees for ASTU 150. I wish I was taking more courses this summer now that I am tied down to going to class.

Actually I do not mind the course one bit and I am quite glad that I am taking it before my full course load next year. It is only once a week for 3 hours and it is a class of 8 students (I am not kidding you, eight!). The building is really nice and the professor is really helpful.  I do feel quite stupid and uneducated whenever the other students are talking about movies/comics/books/political things that I have never heard of… didn’t grow up in North America and spent the last couple years of my life dedicated to dance :P. Also manage to feel quite naive whenever I speak in class… I have no idea what most university classes should be like and am therefore in my opinion slightly at a disadvantage!

So far I am a little bit perplexed as to why they like to make academic writing so complicated… I like to see the world as being accessible, adding words like epistemological, politico-aesthetic e.t.c. not only confuses people but it means that: a. the articles take much longer to read! b. not as many people will read what you are trying to say. c. some words are used so often that you have to wonder whether they can truly have meaning at all and whether the author is using them to prove a point… or whether they are just trying to sound intelligent. Also when you are writing in-class assignments and you keep having to rewrite extra long “nominal” phrases your hand does get a little tired …and it wastes ink… and it wastes trees!

That said I am a little nervous about course choices e.t.c for the fall semester. I have decided that I am perhaps not the best arts student… even if I have been a dancer and fully immersed in the arts for un vrai, vrai long time, part of me cannot take arts studies all that seriously. I walked past a classroom the other day where they were being lectured about fairies and felt extremely disappointed! How useful is that? By going to university I want to be learning about…well not about fairies.  So my plan going into university is to do the dual degree program in Arts (hopefully Cognitive Systems) and Engineering… something that is applicable and could possibly get me a real world job. That said we will have to see if I can deal with university level science courses. I have been working as a high school math tutor, and I have just done Bio and Physics 12 (99% in both! BC mark inflation to the extreme) in the last two months, but I have probably completely forgotten most of Chem 12… and Calc is just hanging in by a couple of threads. Also I am planning on taking CPSC 110 next year. Having absolutely no programming background I am frantically trying to make a little bit of sense out of the midterms e.t.c. posted online so that I have an idea of what I am getting myself into!

Anyways I am planning on taking a laissez faire attitude this year. If I am a complete failure in a certain area and do not care for it at all, I am not going to worry about it too much… right we’ll see how that goes. I’ll keep you updated! <3

First Post

Posted on by
Reply

… hmmm after all the experience I have had with blogger this looks like it will take a little time to get used to!

Like many first year students I have decided to document my thoughts online to try and make a little more sense of the world (or perhaps a little more nonsense in the world)… I know, just another first year blog on just another ubc website, but I have found other blogs here extremely useful in figuring out just exactly what I will be doing this year and where I will be going with it all…

So hopefully one day it might be useful to someone out there doing the same thing, sifting through cyberspace in the dark hours of the night. Trying to make sense of everything after being handed the license to complicate.