Life As Nick Starr

So, remember the other day when I posted about my team not meeting and it turning into a problem….well it was worse than I could have thought.

I walk in and go check that my laptop works with the projector (first time doing a presentation with my new MacBook). From across the room, one of my team mates (the main advocate for me not creating the presentation) starts yelling at me that we are not using mine, we are using theirs.

This starts a yelling match, that continues for quite a while.

There was a question about my presentation which was one of their main reasons excuse to not use mine. I have 4 lines of text on top of each other, and on a flat view of the presentation, it looked like crap. However, the text would fly in one line at a time and then fly out. It never overlapped during the course of the presentation. I showed them this, and she was still screaming that we weren’t using mine.

The copy they had was created in PowerPoint, had no transitions, no animation, had pages with over 85 words on a slide, and had pratically no pictures.

Mine was created in Keynote (on a mac), had transitions that many people using PowerPoint have never seen, animations that never have been used on PowerPoint, had a appropriate visual item on each key slide, and each slide had the text reduced to the main topics. The text and presentation should only be a supplement to the verbal presentation.

Well she wouldn’t give up and kept yelling, and it was getting quite loud now. I was arguing back, and trying to show them how mine was the same, only better. In the heat of the moment I managed to curse. This set off my team-mate, and the rest of the class.

Within minutes I was whisked away in a room to discuss the situation with the teacher and my team. I was then brought into a room with some college admin staff (of which one felt the need to brag that she was also a police officer), and suspended. I was on my last leg at that school anyway, so I expect that an expulsion is coming.

BTW, they send you in the mail what is going on with your status. Even if I’m not expelled, I have failed this past class now, and if it is more than 28 days between my next class, I will lose my financial aid. Looks like it’s time to sign back up at St. Petersburg College.  

Well last weekend I took off on Saturday for Milwaukee, Wisconsin to head to where Dawn and Drew live for a meetup there at the Milwaukee Zoo.

My plane ticket was upgraded to first class the entire trip which was nice. I had to fly from Tampa to Atlanta to Wisconsin. Atlanta has to be the worst airport to fly thru, simply because your connection is never on the same level that you arrive on.

 

After making it to the hotel (which was across the street from the airport so I walked) the grossly overweight woman at the front desk made it abundantly clear that if there was “anything” I needed to make sure to call her and she would “accommodate” me. YIKES!

She called up about a half hour later to my room just to double check that everything was okay and that I didn’t need anything, strange.

There was this nasty hair in my bathroom, yuck. Also what is with this beer opener in the bathroom of the hotel?

Walking around town with Mike and Brandi Talmadge from ThoughtOut.biz there we saw a Miller Time Bar and the NRA was in town for the weekend as well. Hotels were difficult to find because of this.

 

We met up with Dawn and Drew for dinner at a unique resturaunt called Prime Quarter. You pick out your own cut of steak and cook it yourself.

 

Everyone’s meal ended out tasting great, with the exception of burnt texas toast.

Before we left, Mike gave dawn an special one of a kind Ped2.

 

Afterwards we went bowling for a few hours and had a blast. Played a total of three games and just hung out.

 

After that Dawn and Drew had never been to Coldstone Creamery so I treated them to a late night ice cream. Everyone went to bed for an early morning wakeup the next day for the big event. Sunday’s events to follow….

Check out my Flickr set of all of the Saturday pics here.

Nick’s new hair cut

Originally uploaded by NickStarr.

Here’s the end result of the hair cut. A LOT of hair was cut off….but I think it turned out okay.

Thanks for the suggestions.