This has been such a frustrating week, and it is only the first day of class. I ordered a new router for my apartment to act as a repeater because our internet signal is such a joke. Steven was nice enough to let me use an extra access point he had in conjunction with the router to repeat the pathetic internet service provided by my building owner. He set it up for me last week and I got it from him when I was in Chicago this weekend. So, when I get back to Ames last night, and am ready to plug it in and have it work, it won’t because the people who provide our wireless decided to enable a password. And it won’t work if the signal has a password. There was NEVER a password on our service before, and now, all of a sudden, there is. I called the people who provide our internet to ask them what was going on, and I got stuck talking to the incompetent secretary, who just tried to get me off the phone rather than listen to what I had to say. I called my building manager and he acted clueless. I told him he needed to make the signal stronger or disable the password so I can use my own repeater, but he has no idea what I am talking about. Does anybody? Does anybody care that our internet signal feels like Dial-up?! I am suffering here! I was spoiled with a fast connection this summer and I am not going to put up with this crap! I have been patient long enough and I am not going to deal with this any longer. It is the 21st century and people are dependant on using the internet to pay bills, check email, and do research, especially when they are in college!
I am not even done complaining. If it wasn’t bad enough to still be dealing with a craptacular internet signal, there are things wrong on my computer. Every time I plug something into a USB, specifically my External Hard drive, the “Hardware Manager” tries to install it a million times. So I can’t get my external hard drive to work, which means I cannot back up any of my files. I DO NOT trust my computer and this makes me feel very uneasy to know that I am working hard on things and do not have another hardcopy of it somewhere.
One more thing – I am not even sure I want to go on this Rome trip. We have our Rome Prep Seminar every Monday night and the instructor that teaches it is a total fruitcake. He spent the first 15 minutes of class talking about Roman comic books. The he complains about how he can’t get the projector to work so he is just going to draw everything on the dry erase board (hardly any of my teachers can ever get those projectors to work. If I am feeling nice I will set it up for them, but most of the time I think it is sad and pathetic so I just let them blame their incompetence on the projector). So he squiggles a drawing of Italy on the board that looks like something a 5-year old might draw. Then he continues to write the names of important towns in Italy in Italian on the board, which also looks like the handwriting of a 5-year old. Then he tells us will all need to lose weight to go to Rome because we have to walk up and down a bunch of hills, and finally, he draws and names 9 different hills on the board. Before we leave he tells us we have to know everything that he drew. The only relevant information I got out of that class was were our studios and apartments are located in relation to Vatican City and the train station. And I had to redraw that onto a map of mine when I got home so that I made some sense.
The name of the studio we work in is “Palazzo Cenci.” I read online that there is a statue in front of it depicting a scene from 16C when Beatrice Cenci killed her father after he raped her, then was immediately put to her death to deter others from continuing in their family feuds. Sounds like a nice place… You can’t believe everything you read online, but I do know that the palazzo is really close to the “ghetto”, the traditional Jewish neighborhood of Rome. So it has a horrific past in relation to the Nazi treatment of Jews in World War II. I guess we will learn more about that in class if I decide to keep putting myself through the anguish of being there.
I think I am almost done complaining now. I just felt really frustrated and needed to let some of those feelings out. Now it is time for me to work on studying the Louis Kahn Exeter Library of Exeter, New Hampshire. We are doing library precedent studies in studio this week, and I am teamed up with my friend Justin on the Exeter library. We decided to do study this library because we are taking a night class that covers the work of Kahn (and also LeCorbusier), and we are going to build a model of the Exeter for our major project in that class. I thought it would be a good idea to study it for studio because it forces us to find all of the information we will need to build a model of the building and start working on it now. The Phillips Exeter Academy is a private boarding school for high-school age students. The building itself is very subtle on the exterior, appearing to be another normal brick building. When you go inside though, you see a magnificent contrast in materials, and wonderful use of natural light. I read that Kahn was originally planning to have the interior be brick, but he had to use concrete because of budget issues. I can’t imagine how it would look with brick. I just love the concrete and wood contrast. I think that an interior made of brick would have been too busy. We might visit it this semester for that night class, but I doubt it will happen. I just don’t have an extra $500 laying around, although I would love to see it in person.
