China: “Google needs to be punished!”

Okay, so I failed to update my blog in the last three days. Sorry! (In my defense, I never promised a daily posting schedule. That TASP essay will have to wait, however.)

What I have learned over the last few days:

-German trains run like clockwork. In the sense of a rusted, mangled pile of unstable machinery less accurate than a sundial at midnight.

-Even though 1 Euro is approximately 1.6 USD, prices are actually 1.6 times more expensive in units of currency, meaning something worth $10 USD here is sold for something like $16 Euro on the other side of the Atlantic.

-China is fucktarded.

When Google announced its censorship compliance policy with the Chinese Government back in January 2006, a huge barrage of criticism befell the company and their stocks dropped massively, with Congress comparing Google to “Nazi collaborators”. Although sites that showed up in Google’s search results were already censored by China’s content-filtering firewall, the newly-established Google.cn would

How NOT to do your RSI application

UPDATE: I just noticed that I posted an early draft instead of the autosaved latest one… Sorry! Some of my incoherent rambling must have been hard on the reader’s eyes and mind. Should be fixed now.

I have noticed recently that a large portion of my blog hits came from Google searches like “rsi teacher recommendation”,  “rsi application 2010”, “mit rsi application”, “research science institute rsi acceptanc[sic]”, etc. Note that it is now January 10th. The application is due January 15th (not the postmarked date). The US Post Office typically takes 2-3 days to send Priority and First Class mail, so it means you have somewhere around 1-2 more days to actually do the application and get the recommendations if you haven’t already done so. That’s assuming that USPS actually gets your application to CEE on time. It’s not like USPS screws up on a regular basis or anything, right?

Just no. Procrastinating so much for an important application like this can be extremely bad for your chances, and when you send in the application at the same time as about over 9000 other applicants, chances are it’ll get lost in the frenzy, and you’re left to wonder why your self-addressed postcard hasn’t been returned yet. A lot of people applied early (some even started as early as August 2009).

Now, I’m assuming that we got past the programming fail in the application (mirror, .pdf) and finished the individually completed sections without much trouble. Let’s say your credentials look like this: