reading is only worth 10%

Worked in studio until 3 last night. Got up at 9 to meet my studio professor this morning. I always seem to get shafted when it comes to desk crits. You'd think he'd be able to talk to 15 poeple in the five hours we have studio. Ah well. He liked the project, although he thought the roof was too low, for structural and aesthetic reasons. The layout works, landscaping is coming togather, just need to do it. I finished drawing the floorplan in autocad and printed it out with the furnature inside. I'm still going to draft it by hand though. Autocad is great for accuracy, but terriblely difficult and cumbersome to use. The printed lines don't have much in the way of true linewieghts either. There's really nothing with quite the appeal of a hand drawing. At least I've become faster at them. I should be able to knock out the drawing tonight, before three AM.

Then I get to start on the model. Actually, then I need to get back to studying for my history of archtiecture test which is this thursday. I'm not going to memorize the dates, because the percentage of points I lose for not knowing the dates is not worth the amount of time it takes for me to memorize them. I'm just not good at rote memorization.

In structures we learned the last new thing: bending moments and deflection in beams. Now, with our tables and equations, we can calculate how much any beam will sag in the center, or how much a cantilever will bend, and combining that with code minimums, reverse the equations to find the depth of beam and type of beam one needs. The rest of the semester will be problem solving and applications to drill this stuff into us.

In human factors we talked about affirmations. It reminded me of mom, with her affirmations. What she may not have realized though, is that reading it out loud only effects a 10% retention rate/effectiveness (according to my teacher, although he also took What the Bleep do we Know? way too seriously). However, I do admit I'd agree with him that in order to be really effective, one must visualize yourself DOING the affirmation, which brings it up to 55%.
There were also a set of guidelines for tenses, action words, and examples he showed us.

I was notified of my mentor today: the head of design for DWL Architects (www.dwlarchitects.com). The firm is local and dates back from the 1950's. They did a lot of phoenix infrastructure work, from sky harbor airport, to the two biggest libraries on campus. In fact, my brother Taylor was born in one of their hospitals, Good Samaritian. I'm really looking forward to corresponding and meeting with him. So that was good news.

I also pre-registered for classes in the spring. I can't beleive we're at midterms already. It's insane. I just got back from Europe. I signed up for three manitory classes for the major, all of them extentions of the classes I'm taking now with the same professors. I also signed up for photography (although I'll need to find a decent used camera somewhere) and latin american design. The photography class will help me develop compositional design and appreciate lighting better, and the latin american design class will bring me three credit hours away from a minor in design. That class is also taught by a very highly regarded and experianced teacher.