Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Two things

Two things - the first just irks me and the second is sort of random or maybe not:

I skipped my running clinic tonight since I got home late from work and it was raining to boot, so instead, I went to the gym and ran on the treadmill (almost 5.5K tonight!) On my way there, I noticed something that bugged me. What's that? Well, the sprinklers. The sprinklers and the rain.

My usual gym is located in an office building that's surrounded by green lawns. Building management has these signs right by the door announcing how they conserve energy by dimming the lights so as not to stress the power grid, yet they continue to program the sprinklers to water the lawns like clockwork when it's been a dry summer and some areas have been calling for restriction on lawn watering. If they went to the trouble of putting in a sprinkler system, shouldn't they have considered putting in some kind of smart sensor that detects whether there's been rainfall so the system knows not to come online? We have an automatic sprinkler system at home and it's smart enough to do that. Inconsistencies like this bug me.

And the other thing is that I've noticed for a while now that say, 85% of the spam I get in my gmail account is Chinese spam, which isn't at all the case for the spam I get in my Yahoo account. Why do you suppose that is? I usually delete all spam without looking at it, but out of curiosity today, I opened one of the messages and my guess is that it's from Hong Kong or Taiwan because they've used Traditional Chinese characters as opposed to Simplified, which would signify a message probably from China.

And speaking of Chinese, my final is this Saturday and I haven't opened my textbook nor listened to my CDs in a couple weeks. I'm pretty much resigned to losing my 4.0 average since my teacher this term has had unrealistic expectations from the start for her mainly Canadian-born students and despite us speaking to her about these unrealistic expectations, she's carried on instructing us as if we could all read and comprehend Chinese characters fluently, which has been beyond frustrating, and de-motivating.

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