September 2008 Archives
Sometimes there are some nice perks that go along with being a student
at a major university. There are all of the educational and intramural
activities that you could ever hope to be a part of. There are also the
long term perks like the name recognition that appears in job
interviews and the life lone attachment to school pride that can uplift
you for the rest of your life. There are also the clubs that you can
choose to become a part of that can both enrich your life as well as
enrich your career in ways you can't imagine when you are in the middle
of them.
I am a member of many of these school clubs, mainly surrounding social justice and international relations. For these clubs I think that it has been essential for my sake that I have the backing of a large university with all of the technological advances and recognition that comes with it. For all of these groups we often try to make our membership a part of something larger or to at least work on projects that are on a somewhat global level. To do this the university has provided us a high volume of free conferencing with our other memberships around the world. About once a week one of these groups will make a free conference call to someone domestically or abroad for various reasons that the university doesn't even bother us about. We just have a list of free conference call numbers like my favorite one www.rondee.com,
that the technology department gave us to route us to the actual place we are trying to call. Sites like this one have helped us to make some real change in the world through telecommunication and project coordination.
For the clubs that I run we also get a lot of financial support from the university to plan trips that other colleges would not be able to afford. Right now I am planning a trip that they have said they will fund for my aid group to go and help build houses in a post war area of Sierra Leone. Without the funding and the intelligence of a large university seeing the potential for real human change, trips and clubs like mine would not be able to function nearly as smoothly or effectively.
I am a member of many of these school clubs, mainly surrounding social justice and international relations. For these clubs I think that it has been essential for my sake that I have the backing of a large university with all of the technological advances and recognition that comes with it. For all of these groups we often try to make our membership a part of something larger or to at least work on projects that are on a somewhat global level. To do this the university has provided us a high volume of free conferencing with our other memberships around the world. About once a week one of these groups will make a free conference call to someone domestically or abroad for various reasons that the university doesn't even bother us about. We just have a list of free conference call numbers like my favorite one www.rondee.com,
that the technology department gave us to route us to the actual place we are trying to call. Sites like this one have helped us to make some real change in the world through telecommunication and project coordination.
For the clubs that I run we also get a lot of financial support from the university to plan trips that other colleges would not be able to afford. Right now I am planning a trip that they have said they will fund for my aid group to go and help build houses in a post war area of Sierra Leone. Without the funding and the intelligence of a large university seeing the potential for real human change, trips and clubs like mine would not be able to function nearly as smoothly or effectively.
This time of year my family always gets
wound up about the weather and the way things are going. This year
especially with the crazy things that are going on with our economy in
this country, they have been especially uptight about things like my
bills and my job. This weekend I was fortunate and cursed enough to be
able to go home and see them for a dinner before a long semester's
work. I won't be able to go back and visit until Thanksgiving so this
was sort of another going away for us all.
This time our visit was a little more heated than usual as the banking news was pouring in piece by piece all week. My father is a banker at a local branch of Bank of America so he had plenty of things to say. I was pouring out all of my economics vocabulary but still had no idea what they were talking about when they would go along with what I was trying to say. My uncle who works for a health insurance company had plenty of things to say as well. He works in the south and sells mainly Florida health insurance, Texas health insurance, and Georgia Health insurance. He was saying that he has never seen so many people just losing policies all at once because they can't afford them. For him the biggest thing that he does is that he adjusts claims for those who want to try and refinance or drop insurance's all together. The way he sees it, all of the mortgage issues, and the increasing number of powerful storms down that way in recent years has caused a lot of the financial woe for the people in those states.
I am still sort of awash in information regarding all of these seemingly world changing events. My mind is even still reeling from all of that family interaction, but I think that I am lucky for having such an insider view of what is going on within this huge problem. I just hope that this is as much involvement with those problems as I have because I don't want to end up broke from the falling state of finances in this country.
This time our visit was a little more heated than usual as the banking news was pouring in piece by piece all week. My father is a banker at a local branch of Bank of America so he had plenty of things to say. I was pouring out all of my economics vocabulary but still had no idea what they were talking about when they would go along with what I was trying to say. My uncle who works for a health insurance company had plenty of things to say as well. He works in the south and sells mainly Florida health insurance, Texas health insurance, and Georgia Health insurance. He was saying that he has never seen so many people just losing policies all at once because they can't afford them. For him the biggest thing that he does is that he adjusts claims for those who want to try and refinance or drop insurance's all together. The way he sees it, all of the mortgage issues, and the increasing number of powerful storms down that way in recent years has caused a lot of the financial woe for the people in those states.
I am still sort of awash in information regarding all of these seemingly world changing events. My mind is even still reeling from all of that family interaction, but I think that I am lucky for having such an insider view of what is going on within this huge problem. I just hope that this is as much involvement with those problems as I have because I don't want to end up broke from the falling state of finances in this country.
I was speaking to a friend of mine who lives in Canada and she was telling me all about her recent experience with her http://www.kanetix.ca/auto-insurance car insurance company. She apparently had a car accident a few months ago. She sustained some minor injuries and had to get a rental car, since her car had been totaled. Someone was trying to hurry up and turn in front of her as she was approaching a green light doing the speed limit. Well, she said it was like he came out of no where, and although she tried to clear his car, she wound up hitting the tail end of his car, because she could not completely clear it. The other party was found to be at fault and was ticketed for his actions. She said that she reported the accident right away to the insurance company and filed a claim, but that her insurance company has been giving her the run around and has not to date paid her for anything except they did replace her car, because she had an insurance policy that paid off the note on her car and so she was able to get that much done. She said that now she has had to contact the Financial Services Commission which apparently, she explained is the governing body over all http://www.kanetix.ca/auto-insurance Ontario auto insurance and all insurance in this region. They regulate and oversee problems with insurance and they accept consumer complaints and investigate them. She said that the FSC has now contacted her and are getting her claim processed for her and that she should be receiving a check in just a few weeks. She is relieved and I told her that seems like a so much better system than the whole get an attorney and sue thing that we have going on here in the US. She agreed and said that in many ways living in Canada is a much higher standard of living than in the US. She said that she is really glad that she relocated to Ontario and finds that the government there really supports and takes care of its people. I told her maybe I should pack my bags, of course I was only half kidding. I mean it sounds good, but I am not sure if I could handle the culture shock. I am kind of a creature of habit, and I am afraid that it would rock my world to take on living in a new country at this stage of the game.
Sometimes I wonder how it is that the
world ever functioned without a home computer. Computer technologies
have become so advanced so quickly that it is hard to believe that
about 20 years ago, no one owned their own home computer and now many
households have several of these already. I don't know much about the technology news,
so I am always amazed when I hear about a new advancement and the most
recent one that I discovered accidentally was Google Earth. I
don't know if you have ever seen this thing, but quite frankly it is
beyond amazing and a little bit scary. This shows the earth including
every little detail that exists. You can actually go anywhere in the
world with this online, not quite real time view. You can visit
everywhere and anywhere including the Empire State Building and after
seeing that you can go to the Eiffel Tower, it is just incredible how
much you can see. I just keep thinking that if technology can allow the
average person to see this much of the world, then how much can our
government see. I mean this diagram is so clear and real, that I just
need to wonder can the government really see everything we do and
everywhere we go. With the availability of GPS and the kind of maps
like the one on Google Earth, if the government were truly interested
in your where abouts is seems like they could see everywhere you stop
in your daily life. I know this sounds a little bit paranoid, but with
technology like this, you know they could do it. That being the case,
then why can't they find Osama Bin Laden. Don't you really think that
they could locate him with all the latest computer technology? Well,
you would think so.
If you think about it, the big brother theory is not a new one, but rather an old one. Many moons ago, George Orwell wrote a book called Nineteen Eighty Four in which he believed that the government affectionately called "Big Brother" would be watching us everywhere we go. He wrote this book in 1949 which is odd that he wrote this book and then died a year later. Perhaps he knew more about all this than he told, but it is interesting that he predicted many of the things that would happen in the world today.
If you think about it, the big brother theory is not a new one, but rather an old one. Many moons ago, George Orwell wrote a book called Nineteen Eighty Four in which he believed that the government affectionately called "Big Brother" would be watching us everywhere we go. He wrote this book in 1949 which is odd that he wrote this book and then died a year later. Perhaps he knew more about all this than he told, but it is interesting that he predicted many of the things that would happen in the world today.
