Midterm Reviews

Overall things are going well half-way into the semester. I agree with a comment made by Stephanie and it is something that I am always telling myself as well, "this isn't under-grad." I find this issue arising most in my writing. In under-grad i always felt that i had a talent of being able to write good papers, (my teacher's always gave me A's, so i figured they were good) in under 3 drafts. I prefer the method of typing everything in one go and then going back to edit, but in under-grad this meant type it in one go and then turn it in and get an A, this obviously does not cut it anymore. Although i see the benefits of editing and making my pieces ever stronger, i am finding that i still struggle with editing. As we all know when you change one things it is bound to change everything else. I am working on it.

Campaign issues

So i took more than a week i guess, but hey we are all allowed a break once in a while. I am having some struggles with the campaign, i know what i want to say but it is not coming across how i want it to. I think that there is too much that i want to say and i am having problems with editing. Also my layout feels so blah... I can't seem to get the text to be engaging without it feeling messy. I hope that these issues get resolved as saturday is approaching and fast... Just needed to do a little venting now back to making it work.

Profile Text

“Like an addict coming off drugs, you don’t know how good you can feel,” says raw foodist Mike Lippy. His journey started twenty-two years ago when, as a high-school swimmer, he noticed what he ate affected his performance. A clean diet meant an efficient, fast body so he became a vegetarian. In college he spent time as both vegetarian and vegan and once did a ten-day water fast. The more he learned and experimented with different ways of eating he saw that eating raw was the only way to optimal well-being. He admits its not always easy and he has “fallen off the wagon,” claiming, “coffee and cheese are addictive and evil,” but he just hits his reset button.
As Mike talks about his experiences and discoveries his passion for health is palpable. “The more educated you become with your eating the harder it is to live in the dark, there should be a law against calling most of what people eat ‘food,’ it’s a travesty.” Raw food contains enzymes, which aid in digestion and absorption of food but are lost in processed foods. Eating raw helps him maintain an alkaline body in which he says, “no disease and no cancer can live.” Mike views everything he puts into his body as a “possible pollutant,” but says its “from pragmatism not fear.” His mission started as a personal one, but when he moved to Baltimore he opened Liquid Earth, a vegetarian café and juice bar. He works hard at serving his customers nourishing food that helps them find the path to a clean body.

Flash Drive users beware

Yesterday when I woke up and was planning how to organize my work for the day I did not factor in the possibility that other plans had already been made, just not by me. I arrive at the computer lab and unpack all of my things. After checking my email i plug my flash drive in to start work on project II. Nothing pops up on the desktop, i think that maybe i just didn't plug it in firmly enough and try again, still no icon. I start to freak out a little but reassure myself that it is just this particular computer it's not working on.
I ask the lab monitor if he has been having a problem with this particular computer, he says no. I frantically try two more computers but nothing. Now i am freaking out because in an ideal world I would have everything that i have created over the last couple of days backed up somewhere, but this is not the case. The lab monitor tries his flash drive just to prove that it is not to any fault of the computers in the lab, his icon pops up right away.
I look up and ask why? what did i do to desereve my day starting this way. Tears start to well up as i realize due to my inabilitliy to consistently back my work up that i will have to start all over for the magazine layout. Fortunately i thought to check the computer i had last used to work on this project in the lab and was able to recover some files that were still in the trash. I had to go to Best Buy and they basically said they weren't sure what happened but they had to wipe it clean and re-format it. As of now it seems to be working fine, and although i lost a lot of stuff nothing was irreplaceable. Last night after a rough start to the day i went home and backed up everything from my flash drive to my home computer. Let this be a lesson to all without actually having to go through that horrible heart dropping feeling of it actually happening to you. Always back your work up.

My Campaign

So since I am reading the Food Revolution and getting all revved up about the issues it brings to light I have decided to do my campaign on being a vegetarian. I guess it could be the positive effects of being a vegetarian, and I am not even going to do saving animals as one, since first it is overused but secondly i believe Stephanie mentioned something about no harming animals this year, understandably. So I am thinking of how being a vegetarian reduces your risk of disease, helps in our efforts to combat global warming, helps the environment, helps end the world's food shortage, helps stop wasted resources. As you can see I have to narrow things down and get a more streamlined concept. As i have noticed in some other's post I too am nervous about the large size of the poster and also having three different elements to work on. There is a lot to do...

Show and Tell

These are both from The Food Revolution by John Robbins, which i recommend everyone to read! These are examples of compare and contrast. He uses this throughout the book, taking a quote from someone in the meat/dairy industry and then comparing by contrasting it to a quote for a person who is in the health profession/science, animal rights etc... As i read this book there are many things that are upsetting about it. How eating meat effects animals, our world, our environment and our health. What upsets me the most though is that these people who are in the meat and dairy industry can put out information as if it was fact. That is what I find wrong with this picture, how can they say things that are not even remotely true? You can't blame people for making choices when they don't have all the facts. Either way this has inspired me for our third project, which i was a little overwhelmed with at first. I will save it for my next post.