NCUR weekend

Some new amazing updates!

The Illusion of Shade

There are 3,000 additional students on campus this weekend from all over the country for National Conference of Undergraduate Research. It's interesting to watch how outsiders interact with this campus, even the physical landscape. I saw this one girl, lying under a tree and reading. Now, in your head, this seems perfectly reasonable, but I have never seen anyone lie on this grass under this tree in the four years I've been here. It's hard dirt with a very light layer of dead grass topping. The tree is bare. What did she think, picking th spot under the tree, that it would give her shade? Does she come from a place with no grass? Or is the only reason we don't do the same because we don't see each other lying there ever? Sorry, I've had caffeine. My mind is churning thoughts three times harder than normal.

Speaking of which, the cafe had like 7 different flavors of frappachino and I've only had the caramel, which is tasty, so I decided to try the dark chocolate raspberry because I like dark chocolate and I like raspberry. Well, yeck. It's not actually bad tasting, but it's really bland. But I drank some anyway because I needed the caffeine because I had to be up at 6:30.

Which brings me to

The Bill Miller Concert

I was scheduled to volunteer for the Bill Miller concert for 5 hours, so I told them I only need a couple more hours to fullfill my 8-hour requirement (we get free registration for NCUR if we volunteer). So they signed me up for 7:30 the following morning. Not fair. Go to bed late, get up early.

Great show, though. Tory and I were in charge of all the volunteers. Didn't fill up the house, but certainly packed a lot of 'em in. The band was brilliant too. Bill Miller plays Native American folk music. He's a UWL alumni. And our chancellor got to play some blues with them, which I bet impressed the heck out of the students from other schools.

My Presentation

I also presented at NCUR, which was awesome. Want to read more about that? Check out my writing blog post about it here.

Photobooth

Turns out you can upload pictures from your harddrive to Photobooth. I won't be doing it every day, but whenever something interesting is happening like concerts, etc. I'll try to post a picture of me there (and hey, New York to come!). So, you can follow me by clicking here.

Website Videos

Don't forget to check out my new website, jleighnelson.com. I'm putting more videos on it by loading stuff onto YouTube, but for some reason I can't update the site. At first I thought it was because of the firewall, but now I'm pretty sure it has to do with being on the school's internet. The reason is that when I'm here at school, I can't get my FTP client to connect to the site, but when I'm home, I can. So I think I'll keep uploading videos and putting them on the site, but you won't be able to see those changes until I get off this stupid paranoid school internet. You can see new videos on my YouTube page here.

Art Class

My final problem is working on a series of drawings inspired by images in Ray Bradbury's short stories. I'll post 'em when I get some work done.

In the meantime, check out our progress on our collaborative mural based on Tom Waits' song "First Kiss."