Welcome to New Student Weekend! If you are not a freshman this year kindly return to your correct year through the time portal in Davison 322. Scheduled events for today:
Student Orientation (up until 3:30 pm). Watching the arrow produced here ---> turn this page until it faces north. This complicates things unless you turn your head or learn to read sideways. While walking remember to turn this paper the opposite direction of whatever way you turn. North may currently be found about halfway west of the east. A useful landmark is the growing white dome of the Davieson Sports Arena, already large enough to seat the whole population of Connecticut, should they show up one day expecting to be entertained, the poor fools. While still swelling it will not envelop the rest of the campus before 2014 we hope.
Using Your New Computer (4:00 pm, Davidson 322). After receiving your user name and password for the campus computer network attend a dry, wandering lecture which begins with a long explanation of what a ``mouse'' is in computer terms and how to save a file, which is more than the file will do for you. The pace accelerates when several tired people in the back make up questions by drawing words at random from a Linux networking book, which the speaker attempts to answer without realizing the joke. It concludes with a rapid and antecedent-deprived explanation of all the ways your computer may be attacked over the Internet, which should leave you despairing and feeling helpless.
Our School, Our History (5:00 pm, Dayvedson 322). Learn the heritage of our school, from its founding in 1878 to teach the insane useful trades, to its change a decade later in teaching the sane useless trades. Two years later it began trading the sane usefully, and did great until the Panic of 1893 burst the speculative bubble and lost them hundreds of students, some of whom were being found in the special collection stacks in Daverson Library whole decades later. Presidential Son Quentin Roosevelt changed the small school into a university while meaning to inoculate draftees against influenza. The school attempted to become co-ed in 1971 and learned it never had any rule against women attending, and review the highly embarrassing search for any women who wanted to. After the president has finished disgruntled students will continue, explaining sincerely how many profitable inventions -- Velveeta, silver-nitrate film stock, mobile phones, teddy bears -- were really created at the university but the patents all taken by massive corporations so the school gets nothing.
Actually Using Your New Computer (6:00 pm, Daviedson 322). Before discovering how many Daiverson-Hall Commons Dining Hall offerings require a thick layer of melted cheese product to be edible, tinker with your computer and briefly explore usenet. This puts you in touch with people who graduated as few as nine years ago and are still angry about the time the university changed the naming scheme for remote-access computers away from the minor characters of Tiny Toon Adventures and are ready with their hyperbolic yet sarcastically funny screeds about it. Two minutes later continue with your life and never consider them again. They are, in their fashion, happy.
Introduction To Campus Buses (7:00 pm, Dayvieson 322). Guide to locally famous bus routes such as ``D'' and ``L'', and efficient ways to get to the same destinations at the same time everyone else wants, including tips on how to compress to two-dimensionality to fit on such buses as number 833. Panel lead by Julie Collyer, who controversially rode buses during the finals of 1998 in the order spelling out ``A BAD AGED LAD HAD ALL BAGGAGE GAGGED'', leading to the cancellation of all vowel-designated bus routes.
Discovering This Schedule (Eight weeks and four days from now, about 2:15 am, with David Sun in 322). Find this schedule crumpled in the bottom of your book bag, with a note scrawled on back ``STANG W/O TWIZ'' in what looks like your handwriting, but somehow in crayon. Read the schedule for the first time and consider how useful it would have been.
Trivia: Samuel Johnson's contract to write his Dictionary specified he was to be paid £1,575 in installments for the work. Source: The Story of English, Robert McCrum, William Cran, Robert MacNeil.
Currently Reading: Henry and Edsel: The Creation of the Ford Empire, Richard Bak.