Well, I’m back at UGA for spring semester. My first class is Natural Language Processing, tomorrow at 2:30.

This semester should be far less stressful for a number of reasons— I have more of a clue how to get around town; I know where the bus routes run, at least for the ones I need to use; I know where all the buildings I need to find are located…

Maybe this semester I’ll have better luck making friends up here. There’ve got to be more geeky types… I just need to know where to find them! ^_^

15 new entries have been added to The Proofreader’s Hall of Shame to mark the end of yet another year. May 2006 see many more typos…

For a while, I had wondered exactly what font is used on all the signs for buildings at the University of Georgia. I’ll have to post a picture on Flickr when I get back on campus, so you can see an example of the sign typography— it’s definitely distinctive.

Anyway, the font, as it turns out, is Ron Arnholm’s VGC Aquarius, which was designed back in the ’70s and more recently converted to digital form by Red Rooster. And I’ve seen Arnholm’s Legacy Sans used on various UGA promotional materials as well.

But the interesting part is why they used those particular fonts. Well, why not, when the designer is right there in your midst?

Edited 2006/02/05 to add: Here’s an example of one of the signs using the Aquarius font… with an added misspelling, to boot.

I cannot, for the life of me, figure out where my cell phone is. I didn’t see it at all in my room this morning (it could very well be there, but I couldn’t find it), and it’s not in the computer science department’s lost and found (which is the only other place I can think of that it might be).

And to make things worse, I tried calling it with a phone card to see if anyone had picked it up and would answer, and immediately got my voice mail – which means that the phone has either been turned off or otherwise ran out of battery life.

Though I’m hardly one for idle conversation, this is still frustrating me. For one thing, it is sort of important to be able to call my teammates for this group project I’m working on… not to mention that I need a way to keep in touch with my dad while out of the room to arrange a ride back home once the semester’s over.

Edited to add: Turns out that I’m not entirely phoneless after all; I still had my old bare-bones cell phone lying around in my apartment, and as it was from the same provider, I was able to transfer the number over to it for the time being. That definitely makes me feel a bit less stressed out, anyway!

The state motto of Georgia may be “Wisdom, Justice and Moderation,” but the drunken revelry I so frequently see around UGA is hardly wise, just, or moderate, at least as far as I’m concerned. So much for the whole symbolism of the Arch.

And sure, life may be unjust, but one would think this town would do a better job at making it possible to get places without a car, particularly with the large student population. I know I’ve said it before, but really— in lieu of better transit, are sidewalks and pedestrian crossings every couple of blocks too much to ask for?

Mrgh. I’m not asking for any preferential treatment or anything— just being able to get from store to store without either waiting an hour for the bus or trying to cross six lanes of busy traffic without getting run over would be nice! Some of us students can’t afford cars; then there are those of us who are too spacey to actually drive one without great difficulty… >_<

See this two-mile stretch of Atlanta Highway in Athens, GA? There are lots of big-name franchises along the way, most of which can be found nowhere else in town, including the shopping mall, Carrabba’s, and Krispy Kreme (why isn’t there a Krispy Kreme downtown?!)… but there is not a single place for pedestrians to cross. Not much in the way of sidewalks, either. In fact, the only crosswalk I know is at the easternmost point of the path I’ve highlighted; I’m not sure how much further west one needs to go before one actually finds another crossing, but I know there aren’t any in sight from the westernmost point marked.

Oh, yeah, and it’s an eight-lane highway, naturally. Which means that there’s pretty much no chance you’ll be able to cross the road without ending up as roadkill.

(Edited to improve the map; the original path had a U-turn in it which made it even longer. I guess it’s not too easy for cars to cross either!)

Oh, how I would love to live somewhere with public transit that was available seven days a week and at least part of the night. That, or a taxi service that was reasonably affordable. Even just having more than one or two little things in reasonable walking distance would be nice. It’s so frustrating being unable to drive sometimes. I hate my attention span. :-\

Restaurant owners… please, for the love of all that is holy, don’t blindly accept the suggestions of Microsoft Word’s spell checker, unless you’re willing to serve up another sort of flesh entirely:

And yes, that is a completely unaltered screen shot. O_o

Edited to add: Egads… it gets worse. OS X’s built-in spell checker— the one used in Safari, Mail.app, and iWork— also suggests ‘prostitute’ for ‘prosciutto’. Ouch! OpenOffice.org, on the other hand, actually recognizes ‘prosciutto’ as a word…

Yes, I know, I know, I haven’t posted anything here in ages.

Why? Well, for one thing, I’ve been rather busy lately… mainly coordinating a group assignment for a Software Engineering course. Not that this isn’t something I needed to take; in fact, I’m learning quite a bit about the development process in it, far more than I did in the corresponding course at Mercer, despite the fact that group projects were involved in each. Maybe it’s that the professor’s lectures are slightly clearer; maybe it’s that there’s more emphasis on the project (I don’t remember the workload being quite as insane, though it was heavy in Mercer’s course too), but something is helping me understand it better. Of course, it’s still extremely vague no matter who teaches it, simply because of the open-ended nature of the subject matter…

Oh, yes, and there was also the ACM Southeastern Regional Programming Competition a couple weekends ago. Fun times, even though my (new) team didn’t do nearly as well as in the past… some of the test cases they came up with on those problems were absolutely insane, because they obviously thought of situations that didn’t even cross my mind. And normally I’m quite good at spotting those strange out-of-bounds sorts of conditions…

And, well, outside of all that’s been keeping me busy in the CS department, I still haven’t a whole lot of time to blog. Something or another’s usually keeping me preoccupied… though, granted, it’s not always important. I know I spent several hours playing We ♥ Katamari when I could’ve been blogging, for instance…

…But then again, my brain’s been so foggy lately that I haven’t really been able to think of much to write, anyway.

So why am I posting right now, then? There’s a simple two-word answer to that, and that would be “fall break.” Currently I’m back home lying on the bed with a laptop on one side and a lapdog on the other. Ahhhh.

I really need to make more friends who can drive. That, or find somewhere up here that offers halfway affordable driving lessons catering to those with neurological quirks… or a taxi service that’s not $10 round-trip (if such a thing even exists)…