You win...THE PRIZE!

Looks like the Critic won Club of the Year. We were working on the paper while they were doing the award ceremony, but Ryan, our photo editor was likely eating in the dining hall at the time and grabbed the award after the thing ended. Good times.
















This Critic looks pretty good I think. We had two good front page stories and the stuff on the inside wasn't half bad either. The layouts went smooth too, although we didn't get to use as many China pictures as we would've liked.

We got some pretty good letters too.

Gyarr, it drives me nuts!

It seemed like we had a low turn out at the meeting today, but I knew where everyone was. We're also in better shape than we were last week. I think there's only two more issues to go, and I'd hate to get into a "Just get them done" mentality. I'd like to go out on good ones, but with this being the end of the semester, people are having final projects due and all the procrastinating they did during the semester is now coming up on their backs.

Graduating is rough, don't let anyone tell you different.

It's Reagan's fault!!!!

I went to something interesting today. The school is facing at least a 500k deficit in its budget, and money from the state doesn't look to be coming. The actual deficit might be 900k, but they're praying that's not the case.

Needless to say, there are going to be some cuts around here. I think a few of the jobs they were looking to fill are going to go unfilled and there was talk of cutting some courses with low enrollment or courses that weren't strictly necessary. I asked if that would affect retention and I got some response to the tune of "we don't want to affect students much."

What I should have asked was if we're facing a deficit, why is there an $8k television screen broadcasting nothing in the ATT? Eight grand is spare change compared to the size of the actual budget, but it does make me wonder the extent of this kind of thing.

You know who I blame? The state of Vermont. They sit there in Montpelier whining about how all the young professionals are leaving the state in droves, then they turn around and don't fund higher education. Nor do they support any industry that isn't farming or tourims related. Gee, I wonder why the population is aging? What's here for someone my age? Zilch, that's what.

Perhaps someone should write a letter to the government...

Get it while the getting's good.

This is the audio slide show I did for multimedia storytelling. I helped Kyle move out of my house and took pictures along the way. He's been around for...watch the video, it pretty much says it all.

One thing that irritates me is that while posting that above there was easy, it wasn't as easy as it should be. When I threw it up on the class blog, it was a simple matter of copying the embed code and pasting it. I had to fiddle a little to get this code to work right.

Why must I fiddle?

The Critic looks alright enough for my standards this week. I was a little dissapointed at the deadlines, but that's not suprising considering the break. The proof reading still stinks though. No one actually does it, they just look at the page and say they did it.

I had a job interview today, which I think went well. Meditech went with someone else, which spares me the pain of turning down a high paying job for a lower paying one.

I think something newsworthy will be announced on Monday. I have to dig through my e-mail and find out when it's being announced.

Get the beanbag gun.

How odd...I've got another blogger account which I signed up with using my yahoo e-mail, and I had the hardest time last night getting into it because blogger now seems to insist we all use g-mail accounts, but I didn't have an issue with this one.

The Internet is a mysterious thing.

I just got done running the booth to get the SGA's constitution ratified. Being the editor of the school's paper as well as an SGA member isn't a good thing.

Vacation was too short. Once again, I'm getting the feeling we'll have another fun Critic this week. Coming back from a break is always rough for the paper.

Bad puns are my relegion.

I've taken our paperwork into my own hands. The SGA treasurer has been telling people our forms have been signed, when they haven't. Another club guy informed me of this, and I found that we had a few weeks of paperwork backed up in the office. I took them out, had the SGA president sign them, made copies, and then hand delivered them to the Business department and put the account codes on...because no one in the SGA seems to know them.

I guess if we want anything done at all, we've got to do it ourselves.

The House meeting ran quite well I thought. It went extremely fast, and knowing we had 15k to spend, we didn't begrudge students that pay activity fees and are to busy having lives to show up to House meetings, a thousand dollars or so.

Certain other people didn't think we were being effeciant enough. They showed up about half way through and seemed suprised that we'd actually gotten a lot done in a short amount of time.

I've tried to not have an opinion, or at least a balanced one, on the level of control certain college employees have over the SGA, but I think I've got an opinion now. See, the acronym SGA stands for Student Government Association. It's not SLGA (Student Life Government Association).

Thankfully it was my second to last House meeting, and thankfully I won't be returning for another year of this. I like this college, I'm glad I came here, but I'm glad to be leaving. I've had my fill.

Here's what I think I should be doing with The Critic once we get back from break. I'm going to make a list of things Ben needs to know how to do, and start having him take charge bit by bit. I remember when I took this job, there was a lot of things I hadn't been told I needed to do, or how to do them.

That'll let me begin my slow disconnect from this school, which will make finding work once I leave easier.

Beware, the shrew.

I've decided not to bother with a certain staff member anymore. They keep doing the same things over and over again, they don't want to put effort in, and the last thing they sent me was basically a big middle finger in text format. The teacher of the class this paper is attached to can find another project to grade him on.

I've decided to team up with maintenance to keep track of Critics. When large stacks get chucked, we'll know about it. I don't think it happens often on campus, or for malicious reasons, but sometimes I get the sense people are removing large piles of Critics, and thus harming the 1st amendment.

That gets thrown around a lot, but in this case, I mean it.

And for no reason, a frog I captured late last fall.