Posts Tagged with WMU

Tomorrow marks the culmination of my five years in college, three of them spent here at Western Michigan University. It’s been an experience… a good one in the end, though it wasn’t always fun. I know a lot has happened during my time here, but it doesn’t feel like I’ve accomplished much.

That isn’t true; I’ve made some unlikely friends, won awards, excelled at courses, instructed professors, recreated a college website, designed a college logo, wasted time, laughed as others stressed out over exams, nearly died trying to complete four foundation art courses and an advanced computer course in one semester, took a single class for a Writing minor I ditched in favor of an Art minor, enjoyed spending time with roommates, hated them not long after, procrastinated, explored the entire campus on foot, considered changing majors, enjoyed Midnight Breakfast, witnissed the rise and fall of Movie Night, been bested at Mega Man 2, conquered a number of video games, watched a lot of anime, made a lot of mistakes, made a handful of good choices, and loved and despaired—at the same time, no less—more than I ever thought possible.

It’s been quite the ride, and part of me is glad it’s over. I don’t think I’d be able to take much more of the bullshit anyways; if the idiots and the courses don’t kill you, university administration certainly will, and I won’t miss dealing with Western’s insanity on a daily basis. I’ll despise Clean Access Agent until the day I die, and there are a couple of professors I hope I never see again.

Part of me wishes it didn’t have to end. I actually enjoy school; not being in school is going to be very strange. I’ll probably never see some of my best friends ever again, and I really will miss dorm life and the campus atmosphere. I didn’t get involved as much as others, but that doesn’t meen I didn’t enjoy it just as much. I’ll miss all-nighters, snow days, and pack-muling.

I have only one regret.

I knew this day would come, though. It doesn’t make it much easier, but now it’s here and I’ll keep going. It’s my fatal flaw: I never know when to give up.

This post is vague, personal, and almost certainly of no interest to anyone but myself, but it’s my blog so I’m posting it. To save you all the torture, I’m hiding it under the “read more” tag. If you are interested, put forth some effort by clicking and read on. If you’re not, congratulations: you’ve already won. Go read the comic; I’m trying for weekly updates on Monday’s, so we’ll see how that goes. ^_^; (more…)

Western Michigan University is notorious for the fact that—regardless of weather—they never shut down. As this news article points out, the university has only closed for an entire day twice in the last seven years. I don’t know how the university administration feels about this (proud, no doubt), but it’s not really something right home about, especially on days like today.

I drove home last night for a scheduled teeth cleaning this morning and had the pleasure of driving through the horrible snow storm assaulting the midwest. I couldn’t see much in front of me besides the tail lights of other vehicles (what few were out), and the road disappeared under snow and ice about half way back. I also learned that spinning out while doing 40mph on a highway and nearly sliding into the car next to you is the most fun you can have while driving in a horrible snow storm, if you live through it. By the time I got off of I-94 I had to pull over and knock the ice off of my windshield wipers and scrape some off of my windshield.

Things didn’t improve much today. It wasn’t as dark, but I didn’t do more than 35mph on my way back to campus. The roads were still completely covered, and the wind was gusting to almost 40mph. Everything around WMU, including other colleges, universities, ice rinks, and businesses, was shut down today due to severe weather. In fact, most of the state was shut down, and for good reason: the weather is really nasty.

Not Western, though. They obviously don’t care about things like safety or sanity, because everything related to WMU was open today. Everything. An ice rink in downtown Kalamazoo closed because of the weather, but Western stayed open. KVCC, a community college barely 20min from WMU’s campus, was shut down, but not Western. They must realize that students usually get to class either by driving (which I wouldn’t suggest anyone do today) or walking (which is just so much fun with a windshield factor of -13).

Want to see one of my digital art pieces in person? Check out The Human User Fusion Exhibit at the Studio Arts Center in South Bend, IN. I’m not sure how long the exhibition will be up, but the opening reception is Thursday, January 24th 7-9pm. Or you could be really lazy and wait for me to post the piece on deviantArt after the exhibition.

I spent $120 on one book for my BUS 4750 class, Strategic Management.

I used the book exactly one time during the last fifteen weeks.

I sold the book back to the bookstore today for $10.

It’s been a long couple of weeks, but things are finally settling down; hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving. I was planning to post last night, but now it’s time for a rant: what’s up with Western’s network? We’ve had two network outages this semester. Yeah, things happen, but I’m paying a lot of money for their sub-par internet access, so the least they could do is try to keep it up. The worst part about last nights outage is that it only affected my floor; what the hell is that?Western half-asses everything, but (ignoring Clean Access Agent) I’ve never had any trouble with their network.

It’s rant time good readers. I’m back at Western—which is nice—and trying to get my room organized. Everything looks great. I get all of my computer stuff hooked up, then I try to access the network and…

AAAAAAAAAH!!

Western Michigan University uses a program called Clean Access Agent (CCA) to manage wired network access. CCA is probably the most worthless piece of software ever devised. It’s sole purpose is to annoy the hell out of anyone who has the misfortune of using a computer with it installed with notices to update their computer and download Norton malware. It’s so annoying, in fact, that I dedicated my first semester at Western to find a way to bypass it.  And, it turned out, CCA is so useless that you can bypass it by simply changing the user agent string on your web browser and making it think you’re using anything other than Windows, a feat easily achieved using the User Agent Switcher extensions for Firefox.

Well, this year they have a flavor of CCA for all platforms, which means I’m forced to install it. And of course, it immediately screws up. I eventually had to run down the resident OIT operative and—doing a masterful job of bridling my unbridled rage—ask how one might access the network without going through CCA. I knew he wouldn’t tell me, but he at least helped enough to get me on the network with CCA (which was pretty much broken the second I installed it).

AAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!

Now that they have version for every platform, completely bypassing it probably isn’t an option, but I’ll search for one anyways. It’s such a worthless piece of software I’ll do whatever I have to to avoid using it.