neonleonb

God freaking dammit. I have had a series of hassles in getting a GSI (a.k.a. teaching assistant) position. First, they mistook my preference for TAing the undergrad AI class as a demand, so they weren't going to give me any work. Just yesterday, though, they found a graphics class for me to TA. However, today, they sent me the forms for it and I found it was a 10-hour position. That means I'd be paid half as much.

I could live off my savings for a semester, and maybe the reduced work would help me finish my thesis, but I'd really rather not go there. I mean, I'd even checked in midway through the summer to make sure they knew I was requesting a 20-hour position, and they said "oh, yes, we know." And now they screw it up. Dammit, this is really annoying, especially with class starting on Wednesday.

[EDIT]: I recently realized I can summarize this whole post with the following sentence: If you enjoy planning trips, you're not planning thoroughly enough, since putting in more effort now will pay off when you're actually traveling.

My mother and sister seem to view trip planning as an enjoyable sort of thing. I find it rather stressful, and it gives me that sinking feeling I get when, say, I do my taxes. Perhaps they're not thinking about all the stuff you need to worry about when planning a group vacation.

Consider:

• You must optimize what the other 3 people will find interesting.
• You must optimize travel distances.
• You must optimize cost. This is especially important because you're committing other people to spend their money too.
  
• You must have not only enough plans to fill a day (which is about 4 activities by my calculation, since the afternoon has room for 2 several-hour activities), but also alternate plans.
• You should also plan for food; it's not that those plans won't likely change, it's just that being stuck somewhere without food will suck.
• You probably ought to get directions in advance, since you'll be traveling around a foreign country where they speak a language you don't understand.
• You can't just do fun things, since, to be honest, most fun things you can do at home. No, the only way traveling abroad is worthwhile is if you're doing things you can only do abroad, such as visiting ruins and local museums.
• But at the same time, you don't want to do more ruins, since you know that the trip will be filled with ruins and castles and the like.
• If you fail at any of these things, the result will be one of the following disasters:
• You get lost and waste a huge amount of time, getting everyone frustrated and cranky.
• You run out of plans, or your plans were badly-formed and so can't be completed, so instead you're forced to come up with something to do on the spot. This will surely be expensive (tourist prices) and chancy.
• People will be bored and disappointed, which really spoils the point of a vacation.

Furthermore, the things I enjoy doing can mostly be done at home, and aren't worth doing abroad. Playing any sort of game? It would be damn silly to pay O($1000) to go to a foreign country to play a game you could play at home.

Plus, you simply know that every plan you make will be bad for someone.

I find the whole thing entirely frustrating, and I have my usual reaction to such things: it makes me want to curl up and go to sleep. But having other people tell me that I ought to be enjoying this? It makes me want to write long diatribe posts like this one.

I ordered a digital camera from Newegg.com. I have had bad experiences with UPS, so I paid $3 more to have it shipped via FedEx, which is at least kind enough to have its distribution center located within a 15-minute drive. But today, looking at my package tracking, I saw this:

Date/Time	Activity	Location	Details
Sep 6, 2007	2:04 PM	At local FedEx facility	EMERYVILLE, CA	Package not due for delivery
6:49 AM	On FedEx vehicle for delivery	EMERYVILLE, CA
6:45 AM	At local FedEx facility	EMERYVILLE, CA

Um, WTF? They were all ready to deliver it, but they decided to wait because they only promised 3-day delivery? That's ass, dammit. I was looking forward to getting my camera today, and it was even on the damn truck. This was not worth the extra $3.