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dinurb
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Name: Dinur
Location: Davis, California, United States
Birthday: 3/9/1983
Gender: Male
Interests: I love hanging out with friends, listening to music, watching tv (sports, sitcoms, law shows), reading, and just having a good time.
Expertise: Hangin' out, being lazy/sloth, Sports (football, hockey, soccer, baseball), Listening, Giving advice (whether it always works remains to be seen :)), Relaxing
Occupation: Student
Industry: Other
Message: message meEmail: email me
AIM:  DinurD
MSN: beefi@hotmail.com
Yahoo:  dinurb
Member Since:
4/12/2003
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| Wow, I can't believe how long I've neglected this page. I've started
life as a graduate student at the Unviersity of Connecticut. UConn is a
nice place, but it's definitely the most rural area I've ever been in.
I'm trying to find a car so I can get from my place to campus and back,
and also be able ot leave the area on some days. There are buses here,
but they run maybe once an hour, and they stop running at 7pm, which is
pretty crappy (especially since the class I TA for goes from 6-8pm).
I'm
working as a teaching assistant and a research assistant this semester.
I'm TA'ing for my faculty advisor here for his "Drugs and Society"
class. The work is relatively easy, and mostly clerical. I show up to
lectures, take notes, have office hours, and othe than that, have to
record grades and at most, grade one paper that not everyone in the
350-person class writes.
I'm working as a research assistant
in the North American Jewish Databank that's on campus. My first job
was supposed to be seeing what's in the archives (boring, but easy
work), but instead I've proofread a professor's manuscript about
philanthropy and giving to charity among various groups of Jews.
As
far as courses that I'm taking, I'm in Core Theorists, Logic of Social
Research, and Corporatization, Race, Class and Gender. The first two
classes are necessary (and honestly I'm not that excited about them),
and the last class should be interesting. What's kind of funny is some
of the readings that I had to do for Grindstaff's culture class back at
UC Davis are readings that I have to do for it. I'm pretty nervous, at
least early on, because I have to prove to myself that I can handle the
workload here and that I am on the level of my classmates.
In
non-school news, it was a great college football weekend for me.
Washington won at Syracuse 42-12, and Cal beat Tennessee 45-31. Good
times. =) | | |
| We ended up having 11 people over at our place (including Me, my folks, and Al) for Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday. It was nice (ok, the food was; most of the guests were my parents' age, but at least Oded was there or I would have gone nuts from boredom), but man, I hate cleaning the house. Not just before the meal, either (that's "stressful clean"), the cleanup after/during (dishes) sucks balls too. I won't lie, there are times I wish my parents would start rotating holidays w/friends so that we don't host Thanksgiving every year =P.
I, unlike many people, avoided malls like the plague after Thanksgiving. There's almost no way you can get me to be in the throngs and spending cash like there's no tomorrow (the el cheapo bastard in me shows up). And frankly, I always think the people who camp out overnight for deals are idiots. I dunno, I guess I'm cynical about the day after a nice holiday being reserved for massive sales, and the herd/frenzy behavior that that entails. On a good note, Marc visited from New York, and I went to see "Borat" with him and Liatt. It was good seeing Marc and catching up if only for a few hours; hopefully I'll be able to make it out to New York some time this year to visit him =).
On a brighter note, I went with Oded to tonight's Sharks-Devils game. I was excited because I've always wanted to see Martin Brodeur, New Jersey's goaltender, play live. The guy's a future hall of famer, and New Jersey doesn't come to the Tank often, so this was the first time I had gotten to see him. New Jersey used its slow, methodical, trapping system almost to perfection, and there was very little offensive flow to the game. One thing I noticed the Devils doing was to set a defenseman behind their net with the puck, and he would hold it....and hold it.....and allow the Devils to completely change lines (I'm not exaggerating)....and finally move the puck along the boards. The Sharks would check New Jersey's forwards (and defensemen, I assume) into the boards, but it really didn't seem like anyone was finishing their checks. The first two periods ended in a scoreless tie, with shots being virtually even. In the third period, however, Joe Thornton capitalized on a loose puck in the Devils' zone, and released a shot from near the left (from my point of view - I was in section 220) - faceoff dot, which beat Brodeur to the far post (Brodeur was covering the near side of the net on the shot). The Sharks kept pressing/letting New Jersey kill the clock (a good trend, as opposed to icing the puck or just getting to center and dumping it into the zone), and each team had a few scoring chances, but no goals. Late in the game (with around 1:30 left in regulation), Sharks center Patrick Rissmiller was called for high sticking, and New Jersey pulled Brodeur, giving them a 6-on-4 advantage. The Sharks successfully cleared the puck out of their zone, and with 7.7 seconds left, Sharks wing Mike Grier shot the puck from near his own blue line into New Jersey's open net, for a shorthanded goal and a 2-0 final score. Both goaltenders (Martin Brodeur and Evgeni Nabokov) played well, which was good to see (I prefer defensive games, albeit ones with more flow than this game provided). Photos will be up in a few days.
I've edited my personal statement (statement of intent) a few times, and have to make it up to Davis on Monday to open up a file for my letters of recommendation. It's a pain in the ass, but if a recommender wants/demands it, there's not much I can do. The UCLA app is due this Friday (Dec. 1), and a few more are due Dec. 15. On a fun note, I'll be going to the Big Game on Dec. 2, the Sharks-Predators game on Dec. 9, and the Sharks-Flames (and hopefully see Miikka Kiprusoff) on Dec. 23. Not looking forward to the applications, but am looking forward to the games!!!
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| Happy Thanksgiving!!! Enjoy the turkey, rest of the food, guests, and football!
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| So I haven't heard from the group of parents regarding tutoring in English/writing (the $75/hr group)...and our first session was supposed to be last Friday. Met with a new student ($40/hr) who I'm helping in writing. Turns out the kid is going to be a pain in the ass (I don't mean he doesn't understand material, I mean he's going to try and resist every effort to teach him), always fun. Oh, and this morning, I got an email from one of the profs writing me a letter of recommendation telling me to sign up for some graduate letter service through UC Davis, so that he has to write literally only one letter (as opposed to just writing a generic letter of recommendation, copying/pasting it into the appropriate text boxes, and changing the name of the school). It's a bummer because it's $90 for the service, and even more of a bummer because I'm under a time crunch with some applications being due Dec. 15 (I'm having him do the UCLA one on his own - I included postage/envelope - because that's due Dec. 1). Hopefully the service works well. Argh. Oh well, at least this week is Thanksgiving (don't like cleaning the house, love the turkey), I get to see Marc on Friday, and am going to a Sharks game with Oded. Not a bad end to the week =).
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| Done with a draft of my statement of intent for grad schools, and have narrowed down the list of schools I'll apply to to 13 (yeah, real narrow list). I also might have some new students starting this week (a group of 3 students for $75/hr, 2 hrs a week; and one more student at $40/hr. I just have to see if it all works out schedule-wise). Only things left to do are the "application" (form) parts of the applications and continue editing the thesis. Oh, and hopefully feel better, I felt a little weird today (not full-on flu, but definitely wasn't 100%). Whee.
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