Accepted to a place

A couple months ago, I sent off applications to a handful of colleges. I got automatically accepted (based on test scores and classes taken) to Iowa quite a while ago. Today, I heard back from the first Regular Decision, non-automatically-inspected application: University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). When I logged into the online application, I was greeted with this message filling the screen:

That's an acceptance! There are plenty of schools I've yet to hear from, but the University of Illinois is a very nice place and I would be very happy to go there.

Submit all the college applications

Today I submitted the last five of my college applications. I proofread the essays - so many of them - one last time and copied them from Word into the appropriate text box. Then I finalized the applications through their respective portals (mostly Common App, fortunately) and sent SAT scores to the college.

It feels really good to have them all done. Results will arrive in a few months with the first one coming in February. Right now, I am really happy to finish out the year with these handled.

Student Hunger Drive 2016

Today was Loading Day, the final day of the Quad Cities Student Hunger Drive. Yesterday, I packed up and staged the last of the donated food so it could be easily moved into the truck.

When the moving truck arrived, we quickly discovered a problem: the food we purchased from Hy-Vee had already been loaded into it, and that moving the truck a little bit caused the packaging on the pallets to burst and release individual cans all over the place. We had to very carefully open the door a tiny bit so we could grab some without stacks of partially torn open, individually sealed 12-packs falling and crushing us.

Once that was dealt with (by having a few people crawl in through the slightly open door and stack the packs correctly), we loaded locally collected boxes from the staging area into the truck.

Then we all drove to the River Bend Food Bank to unload. That went well; they fortunately had a port with a lower height so they could forklift the non-toppled pallet away without us having to rip up the packaging.

After they weighed our submissions, we learned that the school raised over 11,000 pounds (including the +2,000 bonus for winning the skit competition). That will provide several thousand meals.

Don't wear a "volunteer" shirt to a different event

Many months ago, I volunteered for a FIRST Tech Challenge robotics event. They gave me a T-shirt that says "FIRST" on the front.

Last week, I attended a cultural event at the Figge art museum. That morning, I happened to put on that shirt. At first, since none of the people I knew had arrived yet, I was standing alone. One person came up to me and asked where a certain room was. I had no idea, and I had no idea why she asked me.

Only later did I realize that my shirt said "VOLUNTEER" in large letters on the back.

Oops.

You can't fault people for disobeying a rule you just invented

It seems that some people follow this process when they see behavior they dislike:

1. Think up a rule that disallows the behavior.
2. Assert the existence of that rule.
3. Chastise the people engaging in the behavior for violating the rule.

On Stack Exchange, some behaviors people sometimes complain about are downvoting posts without a comment and closing older questions as duplicates of newer ones. (There are plenty more, of course.)

Relevant Old New Thing article: Sometimes people don't like it when you enforce a standard. The last paragraph is the best part.

To be fair, sometimes the real rules are bad and should be changed. It's happened before. But declaring that reality is other than of how it really is does nothing other than display the complainer's ignorance. And indeed, such SE comments usually earn their poster a link to the relevant help center page or meta post.

Instead of denying reality, people who feel wronged by the system should do something like this:

1. Go look up the relevant rules to see who is mistaken.
2. Try to figure out reasons for the rules being how they are.
3. If desired, explain why you believe the rules should be changed.
4. Post your ideas for discussion.

That way, if your ideas do make sense, you stand a good chance of correcting the problem as opposed to just stirring up annoyance.

Oh, and if you're curious, the two behaviors mentioned above have been constructively discussed on Meta Stack Exchange:

• Encouraging people to explain downvotes
• Should I vote to close a duplicate question, even though it's much newer, and has more up to date answers?

Student Hunger Drive Kickoff 2016

The Quad Cities Student Hunger Drive (a six-week-long food drive from area high schools) kicked off tonight with the annual skit competition. As usual, my school performed a choreographed dance involving box movements to a parody of some song or another. After all nine entrants to the skit competition did their performances, there was - like last year - a tie, and it was the same tie as last year: us and a certain other school.

So both schools redid their respective skits. The tie was again to be broken by which skit received louder cheering. To be honest, I wasn't super optimistic: we lost last year because the competing school had brought a boatload of people to cheer. To my very happy surprise, two non-tied schools started cheering for us, quite loudly, and the referee announced that we won! That's two thousand pounds of food donated by Hy-Vee on behalf of us, giving us a good head start in the competition soon to come.

Don't blindly trust the TLD

I have seen two sources now suggesting that information on web sites that end with .gov, .edu, or .org is likely to be trustworthy. Those first two are virtually always legit - you have to actually prove yourself as an appropriate type of entity (US government department or higher education institution,respectively) to register them. .org web sites, on the other hand, can be registered by absolutely anyone, for a few dollars per year. For instance, see this satirical warning website about dihydrogen monoxide (water). They even have a DMOZ organization title in Google search results.

Even .edu web sites frequently have "home folders" where teachers and sometimes students can host static content of their choosing. Though the people writing that content are certainly very smart, the work isn't likely to be peer-reviewed.

Basically, looking at the web site's top-level domain isn't enough to verify the trustworthiness of an arbitrary document under it. More importantly, please don't spread the overgeneralization that all .org web sites are high-quality.