Alice in Wonderland

I’m glad I get off early on Tuesdays now. I don’t think I would have been able to handle any more and I’m definitely sure I would have lost it today if I had marketing and ended up missing the bus and having to stay till 5 which would mean I wouldn’t get home till 6:30.

I managed to miss my IT class this morning. I think I may have 5 absences from that class now, 7 is the limit we can miss before we aren’t allowed to sit for the final exam. Pray I don’t reach that limit, I wouldn’t be happy to have to repeat IT next semester for something so stupid.

Management class was interesting, as usual, today. The professor talked about planning and how managers rely on it to accomplish many amazing things that wouldn’t have been achieved without prior planning. He talked very highly of Alice in Wonderland and now out of curiosity I have to go read it. [la wallah, a business professor and author of management books recommending a kids’ book of course I have to know why ^_^]. I remember seeing the cartoon as a kid but I was really really young. I just remember a talking rabbit, the purple cat and of course the blonde haired Alice. I remember nothing of the plot or what it was supposed to be about. I even recall feeling bored as I watched it cuz I didn’t understand what was going on – I guess that’s how young I was lol. I found it online though at Project Gutenburg. I really love that site, it always saves me when I get the sudden urge to read something I should have read years ago like the rest of my peers (or even my kid sister!). Anywayz here’s the link.. As for management class, I’ll of course blog about it on the Course Diary Blog.

6 Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers

Lol, the group that presented today and made their presentation into a mock live interview brought a book along with them. The girl who played the part of the manager flashed it briefly and gave us a quick overview of it. When she had flashed the book I caught a quick glimpse of part of the title which I read "6 Habits"..

I had heard of "7 Habits" and I had seen one called "8th Habit"... but never before had I seen "6 Habits". I couldn't see the full title from my seat so I memorized the author's name and resolved to look it up as soon as I layed hands on net.

That's exactly what I did too. Turns out the book was called "6 Habits of Highly Effective Bosses". Lol I should have known, it's a management class after all.

So anywayz when I googled the title it came up with an interesting blog with a post titled: 6 Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers. My interest was peaked so I read on. It was a really interesting post and I just thought I should share it with you guys =)

In other news; I took the much dreaded IT exam today...surprisingly it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. I only had to leave one question unanswered which was : how to make a bunch of little boxes inside of an existing small box (cell rather).. I was stumped on that one =X

A Perfect Response to an Imperfect Storm

So today the management presentations began..or rather I should say "the heat was turned on under every groups' bottoms.

The first group to present calls themselves "The Tornadoes" and I'd have to concede, true to their name, they really blew us away. Their presentation was on a case study about Symantec, the anti virus company. They turned their whole presentation into a 20 minute live play. I found it hilarious, as did most of the class, when in one of the scenes they had some sort of sparkling firecrackers. They were pretending to be viruses while another girl chased them around with a spray bottle of water labelled "anti-virus". Really creative. What followed though was what we found hilarious: The girl chased the other two girls out the classroom door with the sparklers still flaring (the sparks where harmless I assume, but they still gave off smoke) the smoke reached the fire detectors outside the classroom doors and set them off (come to think of it, I wonder why the sprinkler system didn't kick in and flood us all... alhamdilla though cuz our laptops and phones would have gotten all wet!)

In the end of The Tornadoes' presentation they gave out these cute boxes of chocolate (as if to smack us all in the faces and say "HA! Top that dears!")

Cute, yeah? The next presentation was presented by the M's Group (all four girls' names in that group begin with M) and was about how a home improvement company (like home depot or Ace Hardware) handled things after being hit by Hurricane Katrina. It was also well done. They made the presentation like an interview (in the style of Oprah or David Letterman's late night show). One girl took the role of the host, and the other played the manager of the Home improvement company. They also handed out chocolate (Galaxy) at the end of the presentation. The professor was really impressed. He said if he didn't know he was in UoS he would have thought he was watching presentations done by Harvard students.

And so it remains, those of us who have yet to present had best come up with something to at least rival the first two groups... [sighs]

عند العيايز كل شي يايز

[ Um Alawi displaying the fruit of success ]

I really like that picture. Um Alawi looks very cute.. Brings to mind a certain person who will get hers soon as well inshalla. I'll definitely capture the moment of her success (inshalla ya rab!) though I won't be able to share it here =P

Somehow even though I have 6 courses they didn't get evenly spread out amongst my weekly schedule. Three days a week I have 5 classes in one day and finish at 4:00. The remaining two days I only have 1 lone class which starts at 11:00 and ends 12:15. I'm happy though. Yesterday (Tues.) I started to get really annoyed in the IT class. We take it in a computer lab. The computers run along the walls so in the corners the person on the computer beside you sits with their back to you. I sit in the corner, usually there are two boys to my left behind me. I don't get any trouble from them except for the occasional chair bump if they happen to push their chairs too far back or whatever. The IT teacher managed to short out all the comps in the lab and he couldn't get them to come back on so we moved to another lab. Two girls now sat in the corner to my left. I was pretty happy about that.. my happiness was short lived though. Class hadn't even re-started yet and the girl had bumped the back of my chair at least 10 times with hers. She was swivelling her chair back and forth and each time it pass the back of my chair it'd bump it. I tried pulling in closer to my computer table but she still managed to bump my chair. It was pretty damn annoying and what was more annoying was the fact that I couldn't get up the nerve to tell her to stop. I tried to focus on something else. The girl to my right was having trouble with her laptop. We were supposed to be working with MS word and she wanted to get rid of the paragraph marks that would come up in any document she tried to work with or open. She called a third boy over (there are only 3 boys in our class and the girls only flirt with one of them) and chatted him up as he tried pathetically to get the paragraph marks off. When he finally gave up and she ran out of things to say she called the IT teacher over. He (surprisingly) didn't know how to fix it - and wouldn't admit to such either. After getting up the nerve to butt in I offered to fix it for her and she totally ignored me! I mean completely and totally. I'd shrug it off and say maybe she didn't hear me but I had pointed at the paragraph mark and was practically touching her laptop screen when I was trying to tell her how to fix it. Nigerella. I know it's her loss in the end and all but I felt pissed about it. Next class I'm going to look for a comp place farthest away from those heffas...

That same day I had my first classes in Principles of Management and Principles in Marketing. I'm not sure what the coming classes will be like but my first management class was love at first "attendance". If it were an anime, hearts would have poured out of my eyes - filled the room and spill out into the hall b3ad. The guy seems like a great professor. Enthusiastic about the class and teaching it. Funny. And so far understandable. After a brief intro about the course the first thing he told us to do was split into groups of four. We did so. Then he handed out little sheets of rectangle shaped paper with lines on them. Each paper had a place for our names, student id # and telephone # and a spot to write down the name of our group. He gave a sheet to a few girls and made them the leaders of their respective groups. It took us a while to come up with suitable names. The Tornadoes, The Flowers, The Black Roses, The M's (cuz all four girls of that group's names start with M), The Leadership Group, The Decision Makers, The Chocos, hmmm the remaining two groups I can't remember what their names are.. The girls in my group came up with "F4" (Hana yori dango). It turned out that they are Jdrama fans. Lol I'm lucky to have watched HYD otherwise I would have been lost and not have known what the heck F4 was. (Arigatou Kath =) ) Our groups are meant to work on case studies throughout the year and even though I had said I never wanted to be in another group work position again this promises to be interesting at the very least.

Gosh I'm tired, these days I can barely stay awake past 1:00 am...