Comic for Wednesday, March 26th, 2008

Posted: 7:25 am, Wednesday, March 26th

Up bright and early again for some more baseball. So far, the Sox are flailing away at what appear to be pretty straight fastballs. So that's fun. Apparently, Manny was the MVP of yesterday's game, and got a $10,000 check for his effort. And a color copier. He says he's going to use the ten grand to buy gas, but was quiet on the subject of the color copier. I'm hoping he starts making a team newsletter. I would pay good money to read that thing.

I started trying to teach myself Flash yesterday. Soon, the Five Bucks logo will dance and spin for no clear reason, or maybe I can ad rudimentary animation to the strip, or - I know - I can have pop-up ads! Everybody hates pop-up ads! I dunno, just teaching myself some Flash for the hell over it, basically. I've heard PHP is pretty easy to learn, so maybe I'll move over to that, instead. I think the ice caps will melt before I can figure out how to write Action Script. (I meant for that to sound like a long time off. I failed.)

Alright, it's taken me an hour to get this much done, running back and forth from the living room between innings, so I think I'm just going to end this and revisit the site in a few hours, after the game.

bullfrog

Bullfrog -- Wednesday, March 26 2008, 09:04 am

That was a less thrilling game, and a more questionable use of my morning. D'oh.

I will try almost any soda. I do not know if I will try this. Although I see it's a root beer... Hm. OK, I'm in.

http://www.yesbutnobutyes.com/archives/2008/03/i_can_haz_rut_b.html

Wait, what?! I do not abide:

"And speaking of “Battlestar,” it’s been confirmed that the last season will definitely be split into two batches of 10 episodes, since the writers’ strike halted production during episode eleven. The first batch, as you know, starts airing on April 4. No word yet on when the second batch will air, but it could be this fall or even as motherfucking late as next January."

http://www.pajiba.com/mr-show-with-pajiba-and-godtopus.htm

iTunes just took the liberty of installing Safari for me. I'm practically a macster now. It gives fivebucks a different look and feel.

Wireless troubles? Booo. Somebody local needs to donate a longer network cord to Frogo. He's a man that needs a longer leash.

Not at all, MJL, this one's my own damn fault. I dropped my laptop last January, and in about August or so, the monitor konked out. Thanks to RAW, I've got my laptop wired to a big ol' monitor. The wireless works fine, it's just my laptop is no longer portable.

I was listening to the local Sports Radio station on my way to class this morning, and they had Jay Bilas of ESPN College Basketball fame. Anyway, the one thing that struck me that Davidson, one of the teams still in the Big Dance, is so Ivy League-ish that they have complimentary maid and laundry services for their 5,600 students. (Here's betting they even put chocolate mint on their pillows every night.) Their reason: so students can focus only on academics.

I'm wondering, do they have a Ph.D. program in meteorology? And do they have grad school dorms?

Complimentary maid and laundry services. Not even Harvard does that. Man, imagine what Notre Dame would be like with an army of maids doing your bed and laundry. Yikes.

MJL had complimentary laundry service as an RA senior year. I remember having him send in my suit for dry cleaning, actually.

No maids, though. We had a maid for the dorm - Skipper, right? - but thankfully the poor woman never had to come into our rooms.

But for every student... That's wild. Why would you even want that? I can understand the laundry bit, but, honestly, maid service? In a dorm? What time would they swing by? I don't know if I could name a time I'd consistently be out of the room.

You bring up some interesting points. I met someone who went to Davidson once and he was exactly as I would expect from somewhere that folds your socks and picks up your clothes for you. He also seemed to know nothing of his purported major of physics or the biology that was kind of the reason why we were at this summer program for geeks. But all that is really beside the point, because I have to say, ND isn't all that far off. For one, I'm a year ahead of you, and I'm pretty sure that depending on the dorm the guys didn't have to pay for laundry service if they didn't have laundry facilities in their dorm. This may have ended at some time and I remember tales of some enlightened ladies burning the laundry facility down because they realized the injustice or didn't want to marry dudes who couldn't even do laundry or something, so the status of laundry cost might have changed at some point during our tenure. Also, a long time ago my cousin (who is 10 years older than me) said her friend who went to ND had maid service. Luckily I was able to verify this in a NY Times article from 1990! Unfortunately they cut the maid service then. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE4DF163CF935A2575AC0A966958260 As you can see, it was a great hardship for many, including this douche ''I do not think I should pay $17,000 a year to go to Notre Dame and also care for my own room". An additional point form the article--before ND became co-ed in 1972 "housekeepers made students' beds each morning".

Seriously? I had no idea about that.

My freshman year, I definitely had St. Michael's do my laundry, but I paid for it. And I also think I remember my freshman year girlfriend saying that it wasn't even an option for them (Knott Hall), which I didn't remember until your post, Thoroughly.

After I got back from Italia, where I hand-washed my laundry in the bidet (shut up, we bleached it first), I trucked my laundry across the quad and did it in Badin. Last time I trotted through Alumni, they finally put in a laundry room.

I would never want daily maid service in my dorm room. That would creep me out.

Does anyone know a female who had laundry service at ND? I don't think I ever met one...

And Davidson has no grad school. Grafer can tell you all about the superiority complex Davidson-ites have about their school, having dated one for a while. Although I work with one now who's a great human being and thus I'm thrilled they are this years "Cinderella"

I don't know, every time I meet someone new who hear's that I'm from ND, they assume I have a superiority complex and am a total asshole (it takes them a few week to figure out that I don't have a superiority complex, but am still a total asshole). So, somehwere out there there must be someone from ND like that. I assume Davidson has the same problem.

And I'm pretty sure I never made the bed once in the four years at ND.

Bullfrog: even if the maid looks halfway sexy?

I remember staying a night at the Grand America in Salt Lake City, which is right next door to the the Mormon Headquarters and their Temple of all Temples. The damn thing blocked my view of downtown Salt Lake City.

I came in as the maid was cleaning up the room from the last guy. She looked very hot, and was American, of all things. We talked for a while and I learned that this was her full-time job, but she also worked as a extra for a "movie production company" in Salt Lake.

So I said, "So, in other words, you work for a porn company in Salt Lake City."

"Yeah, pretty much," she replied nonchalantly. "I know, porn in Utah. A shocking concept."

I then replied that nothing surprises me much.

Grafe - I'm pretty sure the made would've turned around rather than enter our room. They couldn't pay this person enough.

Skipper did clean the bathrooms of the few R.A. rooms that had one... I wasn't so lucky though.

The laundry service was exceptionally great to have, but it had its limitations. Certain items you were much better off washing yourself: anything of greater than JC Penny value, anything delicate, and anything with sentimental value. But the ability to toss in piles of t-shirts and soccer clothes with abandon was pretty great.

Not jeans, though. Best approach with jeans is just not to wash them at all. :-)

I know two grad student ladies who get the laundry service now but they both live in Fisher. I havent asked how the inner workings of thier panty clensing ritual works.

Oops... maid, made, right.

Probably good discretion there, Wood.

To be fair, MNP, didn't all the girls dorms have laundry?

Just got to Miyaa's last.. Porn in Utah totally surprises me. 2.0 and I were just talking about what a misnomer the Utah Jazz was earlier today.

This is certainly an interesting laundry discussion.

PHP / MySQL is a good one to learn if you're planning to do quick, front-end-style contract work for smaller sites. They love the PHP thing. Bigger sites should use it too, but they're still afraid of scalability, which isn't really justified (look at Facebook). Plus, you could run your site off of Wordpress, which all the cool blogging people use.

Flash is good too, but while I like it for graphics, I think it is the bane of all other things web development.

As for porn in Utah, did you know Salt Lake City has a huge gay scene? When I worked there for the Olympics, I stayed with my uncle (who's gay) and seven of his other gay friends in a one-bedroom apartment. Aside from the sitcom-like nature of this situation, I learned that SLC has several gay bars and lots of Mormon dudes who are either still married or recently divorced.

Huh. That would explain why a person I know working at the meteorology department when I was a student loved Salt Lake City. (And yes, he's gay too.)

Interestingly enough, the Utah Jazz originated in New Orleans (who know have the Hornets). I'm surprised they didn't offer to switch nicknames when the Hornets (who originated in Charlotte) moved to New Orleans.

I would have loved maid service when I was an undergrad student. I spent four years suffering from having to go through unnaturally pink underwear. (I finally learned proper laundry cleaning protocol, but I still mess up occasionally.)

I knew about the former maid service/laundry issue. I think it came up when they had the 25th anniversary of Ladies at ND. I did not know any woman who paid for laundry service, but as Bullfrog pointed out, we all had laundry facilities.

I've encountered MANY, MANY people who think we are all assholes.

My brother was at ND when the laundry burned down, and if I remember correctly, he had free laundry service prior to the fire but had to pay for it after the fire. That would've been sometime from 1989-1993. However, I have no idea if his dorm had laundry facilities.

Well, E, I mean... That's while they were encountering *you*...

That's the thing, I'm pretty sure all girl's dorms had laundry while guys dorms generally didn't. If I'm wrong about this I'd love to know. I lived in semi-modern concrete bunker PW, but I'm pretty sure they managed to retro-fit the older ladies' dorms with laundry facilities, as evidenced by Bullfrog's heroic hauling of laundry to Badin. (Seriously, not having laundry in your building is a major handicap, and I've had laundry done for me on several occasions in such situations, I'm not against that at all. It's awesome, especially the folding.) I just like to point out annoying things like this, and imply that it is obviously the administration's fault that they could find room for the ladies to do lady-stuff like laundry, but basements of places like Morrissey were better used for dank caves where you could put 6 dudes in one room with 7 foot ceilings and exposed pipes.

I can confirm Walsh had laundry. and it was the 2nd oldest dorm on campus, I think. But also one of the first to be converted to a female dorm.

This may be much to nerd for a post here but I will try it anyway. - I completely agree with Pat that PHP is the way to go for small website development. Nice and easy, very scalable, can be done with ease on big sites too.

- I will be leaving Notre Dame for good in 8 weeks although my uncanny knack for writing difficult business cases has earned me a rotating set of tickets annually to the USC game from the faculty. That being said its on to graduate school for get a degree take 4.

- I have found a new comic which will assist in this new venture. http://www.phdcomics.com/ , I imagine you all, or those of you who have suffered through graduate school, will enjoy it.

In retrospect I should have italicized "Get a Degree Take 4" and made some cool rollovers. Too much HTML, too little time.

Wait, I thought you were at graduate school now? You confuse me.

I took my laundry to a Russian lady for a while in Q-town. It actually cost as much as doing it myself, and I only ever lost one t-shirt.

Fr. George fought laundry for a long time, because "oh, it would cost us four freshman Dawgs" every year. I'm not making that up. I think they did away with Food Sales for the laundry room, if I recall correctly.

I thought one of the coolest things that happened when I was in college was that you could student charge for use of the laundry facilities through the student identification card and have it billed out with your next month's tuition and student fees bill that I had at Missouri. Just swipe the card in and out, and no need to carry two rolls of quarters.

These days, finding an apartment where the landlord has outlets for a washer and a dryer counts as a win in my book.

I like that Jeremiah has his name sewn into his clothes.

Sorry: I was unclear.

Wood Education: BS - Rensselaer Polytech MS - Virginia Tech MBA - Notre Dame (upcoming) PhD - Maryland