Read-Think-b4-u-Write

Since I'm feeling sorry for myself after reading all the exciting posts from my friends at San Diego Comic Con, here's a comic website that will make you smile -- Comics with Problems . Today let's take a look at "The Insiders:  The Marijuana Mystery" . This comic from 1991 features Holly, a gymnast aspiring to win the state championship, who has a crush on Mike, a popular jock and failing student. Holly offers to tutor Mike hoping he'll ask her to the prom, but instead he rewards her with marijuana. She takes one toke off a joint and immediately quits studying for tests and misses gymnastic's practice. When she makes it back to practice she gets injured and can't go to the state championships. After confessing to her best friend that all of her new problems are due to marijuana, there's a robot intervention. Here's the facts laid out in this comic about marijuana abuse as delivered by Alpha the Robot: [BEEP.] Marijuana impairs a perso...

One thing you might miss once you move into the dorm is having those 363 channels your parents subscribed to at home for $176 per month. Yup, cable is expensive. You also might think I wouldn't recommend TV, but after a hard day's working and studying sometimes you just have to veg in front of your own personal boob tube and it doesn't have to cost a bunch of money. There are a few different ways to get free (or relatively free) television in the San Francisco Bay Area. If you have a laptop you can use that free high-speed wi fi in your dorm room to access Project Free TV . I have to admit I don't use it that much - I'm pretty old school - but I have used it on an iPad, it gets good reviews, but I'd beware of viruses. Speaking of free wi-fi, another way to watch TV is to get a Roku with an initial investment of anywhere from $50 to $120 (Costco, BestBuy, Fry's). The Roku is a streaming tv service that attaches via your TV's HDMI port and comes...

In comics this season, we studied the graphic adaption of Kafka's Metamorphosis  by Peter Kuper. In the story, a salesman wakes up and finds he has turned into a bug - seems the perfect premise for a graphic novel. Kafka's novellas led to the creation of the adjective Kafkaesque which according to Mirriam means something "having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality, such as Kafkaesque bureaucratic delays" (we've all had those). The hoops one has to jump through are often so twisted and frustrating that success is pointless. Kafka's many short stories have strange illogical, usually bureaucratic, twists that are worth reading. They reflect the disconnect in industrialized societies, the alienation that comes when life is reduced to working for faceless bureaucracies and corporations and being subjected to the rules and laws of the same. One strange twist in Kafka's Metamorphosis  is that when Gregor discovers he's turned into a b...

Predicting the future is never easy and when we look back at 1930 clothing predictions for the new millennium it all seems so ridiculous, but these styles weren't created for laughs, these designers on history's cutting edge were serious. What did they predict? Women will wear trousers (what a shock), climate controlled dresses, and even a headlight to "catch a man." The male narrator treats style for women as simply a way to attract the other sex. Maybe that's true in an evolutionary sort of way, but hey, if any guy saw the way I dressed on the weekends . . . not to mention sexuality in the 1930s could only be fathomed in the female/male variety. The one prediction designers of the 1930s seemed to get right was the portable phone--today's cell phone, except that only men would "wear" them. Predictions are a sticky business and there have been a lot of bad ones. Remember Y2K when all the computers would stop working. Or the Mayan calendar crisi...

You made it! You're in college, living on your own in the dorms or sharing a space with your best friends. Things couldn't be better until reality hits. In   The 9 Habits You Develop In College That Will Haunt Your Wallet , Maggie McGrath at Forbes talks about some real money drains, in other words how to just flush money directly down the toilet, especially if you rely on credit cards. First off, the article doesn't mention a couple things: 1) set a budget and stick to it, and 2) use CASH whenever possible. Relying on plastic just makes it too easy to do the following nine BAD habits: 1. Eating in the dining hall for every meal. Well, this should read "Eating in the dining hall for every meal AFTER your meal plan has run out." Granted there isn't a gigantic kitchen in the dorms, but, heck, Top Ramen was invented for college students, wasn't it? If you have a freezer, get stuff you can nuke. 2. Late-night bingeing. Studying at 2:00 a.m.? Need som...

FindFace is a facial recognition app developed by two Russians that boasts a 70 percent reliability rate. Why is such an app necessary? According to the creators using social media proiles it can help find missing people, your friends, or men or women that look like actors. In the case of the ersatz-famous you can send them a friend request and ask for a date. Talk about harassment?! "It works by comparing photographs to profile pictures on Vkontakte, a social network popular in Russia and the former Soviet Union, with more than 200 million accounts. In the future, the designers imagine a world where people walking past you on the street could find your social network profile by sneaking a photograph of you, and shops, advertisers and the police could pick your face out of crowds and track you down via social networks.           In the short time since the launch, Findface has amassed 500,000 users and processed nearly 3m searches." Harassment is exac...

You are getting ready to graduate and the ever-dreaded job interview is coming up. Interview Success Formula lists the Top Ten Interview Questions You Must Know How to Answer and it would be a good idea for you to prepare some responses before you hit the halls. Interview Success goes into some detail about how to answer the Top 10 Questions and provides real-world examples. Here's a brief preview: Interview Question 1. "Tell me something about yourself?" A. Don't go blathering on. List your top characteristics and motivations and then connect them to specific job strengths related to the open position. Interview Question 2. "Walk me through your resume." A. Umm, yeah, you should know every component of your resume and have something pithy to say about each position, job skill, and experience. Be sure to highlight the items related to the job you are seeking. Interview Question 3: "What makes you better than other candidates?" A. Ugh,...