Remember Oates?

I wanted to provide a quick update to basically say that I don’t have much to write about. Unless you want to note the fact that I picked up volume two of the fifth edition of Stephen B. Oates’ Portrait of America from the "free books" table outside the History Department’s office on Tuesday, not much has been going on. With that said, I suppose you may have noticed that a lot of the pictures on this blog suddenly and mysteriously disappeared about a week or so ago. This incident was out of my control, as it happened due to the fact that Yahoo – without warning – decided to shut down my account. The official reason I was given was that I had violated some part of Yahoo’s Terms of Service, although I’m still not positive that I know exactly what part of the contract I violated, and nobody at Yahoo has yet decided to let me know. Needless to say, I had to suffer without any sort of Yahoo services for the better part of a week as I waited for customer service to handle my appeal to try to get my account back to normal. I finally did get my account back on Thursday afternoon, but since Yahoo has still not sent me an email telling me what’s going on, I have no idea whether access to my account is merely temporary.

I still have some pictures to share from a long, long time ago and I will probably make an attempt to upload them sometime later today or on Saturday. I have sort of a glut of photos right now that I’ve been meaning to share for a while, but I just haven’t gotten around to doing so. Speaking of pictures, I got an early birthday present when I went home last week – a Canon Digital Rebel XT. As far as I’m concerned, I couldn’t have selected a better camera. The Digital Rebel XT, also known as the Canon EOS 350D, is a professional-grade 8 megapixel beauty. The lens I decided to pick out was the EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM, a nice standard zoom lens that can handle both wide angle and telephoto shots with ease. Of course, since the Rebel XT is an SLR camera, I can always upgrade to any one of the many SLR lenses in the future.

Meanwhile, it’s the time of year here at UND to begin registering for spring classes. Whereas the official date to begin signing up for courses is sometime in the middle of November, I’ll be able to sign up next week. Early registration is one of the benefits of being in the honors program. Here are the classes I’m considering taking:
Chemistry 222 – Fundamentals of Chemical Analysis
Chemical Engineering 102 – Introduction to Chemical Engineering
Mathematics 166 – Calculus III
German 202 – Second Semester German II
Honors 293 – Evolution & Society

My primary dilemma is the fact that I don’t know whether I should follow the track to major in chemistry or the track to major in chemical engineering. Hopefully the introduction to chemical engineering course will give me more answers. In any event, the university recommends that I take Chemistry 116 (Introduction to Organic and Biochemistry) if I intend to major in chemistry or Physics 251 (University Physics) if I intend to major in chemical engineering. I’ve just decided to be difficult, however, and not take either class next semester. Neither one is an absolute necessity for me to take my freshman year anyway, plus I don’t have any room in my schedule to handle another class.

This was a rather random post.