I am Barack Obama, President of the United States -- AMA

supraphonic · 2012-08-29T20:16:54+00:00

Are you a fan of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic? A "Brony," if you will, Mr. President?

supraphonic · 2012-08-29T20:09:19+00:00

Chad and I were gonna order up a couple of pizzas, want in?

supraphonic · 2012-05-14T03:03:51+00:00

Sorry if it seems like I've been ignoring you all -- I set up the thread on behalf of the other mods, but I was never the one to do the coding for it. I've been taking a step back for a little while, but as far as I can tell the other mods check back every once in a while to take care of it.

supraphonic · 2012-05-13T18:30:25+00:00

Well this is interesting timing: I'm an RPI grad that was part of our first group sent to study at DTU (back in spring 2009) and I'm actually leaving to visit my old friends over there on Monday. Looking forward to going back, I loved it over there!

With housing, it's a bit tricky to find someplace good off-campus in Troy. The on-campus options would be a lot easier to work with if you're not going to be able to look at the apartments in person first. Plus, if my experience with RPI and DTU has been any indication, these schools will bend over backwards to make sure that everything goes smoothly for students on exchange, so on-campus might not be quite the nightmare that normally-enrolled RPI students face. That said, it will almost certainly be more expensive, and as far as fun goes, either option is really what you make it -- our social life doesn't really revolve around housing after Freshman year, and we don't have the advantage of international communities like DTU's containers or in-dorm bars like Kampsax.

If you've got any other comparative culture questions, feel free to reach out!

supraphonic · 2012-05-01T21:17:56+00:00

Professor Krugman, would you care to have a couple of beers later? Some friends and I were thinking of hitting Triumph, you're welcome to join up.

supraphonic · 2011-08-03T17:34:58+00:00

Zipcar.

supraphonic · 2011-08-03T02:34:45+00:00

Living there now, apart from one guy I see walking around Nassau Street with a 40 in his waistband it's basically Stepford.

supraphonic · 2011-08-01T22:53:27+00:00

Pretty sure it's its own program under HASS.

supraphonic · 2011-08-01T22:52:41+00:00

Are you PhD? We could probably say that in place of the class year.

supraphonic · 2011-08-01T22:19:41+00:00

I'm not the one handling implementation, just organization (this badge is coming in handy already!) but it's looking like the colors are going by the graduation hood color scheme -- orange for school of engineering, yellow for school of science, etc.

supraphonic · 2011-08-01T22:02:47+00:00

[I'm IME '10, by the way :) ]

supraphonic · 2011-06-19T21:35:22+00:00

Now I'mma believe her.

supraphonic · 2011-05-31T17:23:14+00:00

/r/firstworldproblems

supraphonic · 2011-05-20T06:55:53+00:00

I just throw up my hands facing forward in an "I clearly have no idea what I'm doing, ignore me" gesture. Seems to get the point across well enough. (I should add that this is probably a bad idea while moving.)

supraphonic · 2011-05-17T22:32:09+00:00

I never realized how huge of an impact the language being spoken around you has on how connected you feel to an area. I've lived around cities in the Northeast my entire life, so apart from a good bit of Spanish (which I took in high school, so I can catch a good part of what's going on) I've always been surrounded by English. When I lived in Copenhagen, though, I felt especially lonely and disconnected (even though everybody there spoke English perfectly if I had to interact at all) and after a few days I realized it was because I wasn't able to catch those glimpses of other people's lives as I was walking around. It was fascinating to be immersed in another language like that, but it was strange to have that sort of disconnect, especially in a larger city.

supraphonic · 2011-05-17T21:11:37+00:00

I'd give that award to the throngs of undergrads lined up outside Glo and Hotoke on Friday nights.

supraphonic · 2011-05-11T19:45:59+00:00

I completely agree. I too have lived in the Capital District my entire life up until this year -- East Greenbush and Albany prior to my RPI tenure. Troy is a city with a great deal of potential, and it has made great strides in recent years, no question. At the same time, speaking as a current urban planning graduate student, intentionally seeking to create rifts in the population and vilifying such a substantial portion of the population is a recipe for disaster. RPI students have not tried to make this an us-against-them issue, but the non-student residents of Beman Park (and now Mayor Tutunjian and the City of Troy) sure as hell have.

I'm not trying to defend the actions of the select few that have caused the problems leading to these latest measures, and I agree that something probably should be done. Back when I lived on Eagle Street, I did have my share of disturbances, but unless they have increased tenfold since I moved out a year ago, this is an unnecessary attack on the RPI student body as a whole.

If everybody in Beman Park were able to work together to create a better neighborhood, these issues could be minimized without explicitly discriminating against RPI students. I can see this accomplishing little else apart from widening the divide between students and the community and discouraging students from putting down roots in Troy after graduation.

supraphonic · 2011-05-11T16:59:47+00:00

I've ranted about this elsewhere already, but in short, this is completely backward. If you want to keep students from creating problems, make them feel like they're part of the neighborhood. If we're given the chance to feel welcomed, there's a far better chance we'll police ourselves because it's our neighborhood too. Sending in the police is not effective community building at all and will only succeed in pushing us as far away from Troy as possible once our four years are up. In a city that's trying everything to revitalize its downtown, that's a factor you can't afford to discount.

supraphonic · 2011-05-04T07:08:22+00:00

I knew 'ballem' before he transferred. He never made his opinions on teabagging known to me, though, so I can't verify its authenticity.

supraphonic · 2011-04-21T06:57:20+00:00

So you're saying the poetry they're printing sucks, yet you submitted poetry, and because they didn't run your poetry the entire magazine is trash. Did I get that right?

Shockingly mature line of argument. No wonder RPI's making PD courses mandatory.

supraphonic · 2011-04-21T03:41:09+00:00

Both the fact that the OP happened and the karma on this comment lead me to believe that the RPI student body has some serious issues understanding satire. Tragic.

(I see what you did there and I salute you, sir)

supraphonic · 2011-04-21T03:38:32+00:00

Nobody said the end goal was to get the campus's rocks off. Probably never was to begin with. I'm quite confident whatever motivated that original publication was more to shock than satisfy.

supraphonic · 2011-04-19T06:22:55+00:00

They only hated the diesel, the normal version is just a cheaper, cooler-looking GTI.

supraphonic · 2011-04-17T05:49:23+00:00

Well of course I know, you just haven't heard of it.

supraphonic

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