Allison's Notes:

Well, this morning was an improvement over yesterday.  Today started out as a good day.  Breakfast was good, and I finally ate a whole meal, instead of a few bites.  Changing time zones really makes your body be weird about meals.  I'm eating at 4:00 in the morning my time, and my body is telling me "Hey Allison!  It's too early for breakfast!  I'm not hungry."  Then when lunchtime rolls around it's still not hungry, because it's the wrong time again.  I finally got back on schedule today and ate my whole breakfast.  My friends were so happy because they had been trying to get me to eat more than a few bites.  

This morning we had our Career Awareness - Visual Imaging Workshop.  We got to put on a mini-tv show.  Jen came up with this great short story, and we got to act it out.  I have no idea what the name of the show was, but it was kind of like a cross between a B-Movie and a X-Files episode *WOO HOO! You guys know I'm a major X-Phile!*.  The show starred Mike as the dead son/husband, I forget, Claudine as either the mom of Mike or his wife, Me as the ghost, and ? as the Grim Reaper.  Anyways, we had a lot of fun doing that skit.  I loved my bandanna and I wanted to wear the dress for the rest of the day.   *laughs*  But the people on the RIT campus would probably think I was weird.  Mike did a great job fixing my hair and putting the bandanna on my head.  I have never worn one before, so it was kinda cool!

While we were doing that, they took two photos of the group with a digital camera, and uploaded it into the computer.  We got to edit the photo whichever way we wanted to by using Adobe Photoshop.  I've used that program and Quark Express Passport before for yearbook, so I was familiar with it.  But this is the first time someone's said "Okay, here are two pictures, go have fun with it."  When it was time for the class to move on to the publishing lab, we got to edit the pre-made file for our pictures and story, if we wanted to.  We printed them out on a laser printer and it was really awesome!  It looked so professional!

That afternoon, when lunch was over, we went to our last Career Awareness Workshop, which was on Information Technology.  We got to talk about computers and learn different things.  We saw the guts of a computer and that was so cool.  He was inserting some of the objects back into the computer.  I learned about how a hard drive works, how a virus works on the hard drive,  why we have fans in the computer, and about the "brain" of the computer.  It was really fascinating.

For those of you who want to know the answers to the above questions, I'll tell you, otherwise skip this paragraph.  A hard drive works by using a magnet to store and rewrite information.  A virus works by taking up space on the hard drive, and it causes itself to write itself onto the drive.  But with like the monkey virus, it jumps all over the hard drive, so you have a hard time catching it.  We have fans in the computer because we have to cool off the inside parts of the computer.  The main reasons for the fan in the computer is so we can cool off the computer's "brain".  If you have a Pentium 266 computer, that chip thinks 226 times PER second!  WHOA MAN!  When the computer thinks that fast, it will get very hot, and if it gets too hot, it can be damaged.   Here's where the fan comes in and cools down the brain so we can effectively work on our computers without "frying" them.   I find it amazing because computers today are getting faster and faster.  This tells me that this is a good field to work in, because the technology keeps changing.

After that, we got to switch back to the other side where we got to play with computer language.  LOGO was the language, and we had to program a traffic light built with legos to change.  I took a summer school class with LOGO for 3 years, and LEGO TC LOGO for one year.  It was a lot of fun!  I was experimenting with the program because I had not done it in a long time, and I forgot some of the more technical aspects of the language.

After that, we got to go on the internet and look up sites.  We had to go to MapQuest.com and look up how far it was from our house to RIT.  My results came back as 2,340 miles away.  If I was to drive from RIT to AZ, it would take me 42 hours to drive!  Whoa man!  That was kinda scary, since I don't like long car trips.  I'm thinking "uh oh" because what if I have to drive home from college?!?!?!  One thing that was so cool was that it was accurate right down to the very street I live on and the neighborhood streets.

We finished up the day and we had our last personal awareness class, where we finished all the information from before and wrapped up the week.  Our last activity was to write one nice thing about someone on a piece of paper on their back, and we had to do it for everyone in our group. After we had finished all our work, we went to the cafeteria and had dinner.  Everybody was in high spirits because tonight was the dance!

Before we could go back to our dorms, or as some people put it, "escape to our dorms" and get ready for the dance, we went to a meeting that was presented by the NTID Admissions staff.  I'm really glad they made us go, because they gave us a lot of information that was really important that other people might have missed and not know, because they won't have any way of finding out about it.  Some of those people who need to know the information that was presented were also the same people who wanted to go to the dorm and get ready instead.

When the meeting was over, we went up to the dorms and got ready for the dance.  The girls on my floor had a lot of fun, because we were getting ready together, talking to each other about hair, makeup, clothes, etc.  Typical girl stuff.  We were finally ready, so we went to the dance.  I had lots of fun that night.

We danced to a lot of different dances, listened to great music, which was really LOUD.  I'm not talking about loud, i'm talking about body-shaking, booming, vibrating type LOUD.  I can't even describe what it was like.

On the dance floor, they had a limbo contest.  I joined in,  and a lot of other people did too.  We were all dancing in line while waiting for our turn to win.  Angela, CK, Edguardo, Katie, and some of the other boys *HEY TELL ME SO I CAN GIVE YOU CREDIT* were some of the final contestants.  Our limbo champion though, is Edguardo.  Way to go and congratulations!  We enjoyed watching the contest.  It looked like it was going to be really close, and the bar was really low to the ground, making the contest really exciting!

After that, everybody went back to their floors and had a quick floor meeting before we went to bed.  However, a few people *including me* took a little longer to get into bed.  We were so hyper from the awesome night!  That's it for today, because after the floor meeting, we all went to bed.  It was a long, fun, exciting, and LOUD day!

-Allison

*who has gone deaf from the LOUD music - but then, I'm already deaf!  :-P So it doesn't matter! Sorry for the bad pun.  I couldn't resist.*

What We Did Today:
Wednesday, July 21, 1999

7:00 - 8:00 Breakfast
8:30 - 9:30 Personal Awareness
10:00 - 12:00 Career Awareness
12-00 - 1:15 Lunch
1:30 - 3:30 Career Awareness
3:45 - 4:45 Personal Awareness
5:00 - 6:00 Dinner
6:15 - 7:00 NTID/RIT Admissions Meeting
7:00 - 7:45 Get Ready For Dance
7:45 - 10:30 Dance Party
10:30 - 11:00 Floor Meeting
11:00 - Lights Out

And now what you've been waiting for. . .