Lord Byron's Blog

The end

2009-12-06T14:56:00.001-08:00

Well the fall semester is nearly over and everyone is getting ready to go home for the holidays. This is a very happy and stressful time of the school semester. Everyone is happy because they get to go home, while at the same time they are stressed because of finals and trying to get all their papers and work done before they go home. This is the time of the school year when people should have someone to turn to on campus to help them relive stress and keep people from getting stressed and want to turn to drinking or something even worse. I know that are people on campus whose job it is to do this, but no one wants to go to something with counseling in the name. This is because people have a built in bias to people who call themselves consular’s. This is at least in part because their friends will make fun of them for going and seeing a counselor. This is why people should rename their office to peer helpers or something similar from their current name. That way there would be less stigma attached to going and getting the help that you may or may not need to get from them.

Key making

2009-11-29T14:07:00.001-08:00

What happens when you lose your room key when everyone else on campus is gone? Well one of my friends over Thanksgiving was on campus and lost his key, and since everyone else was gone he had a problem. All the CLs were gone so there was no one to let him room, expect the police. So there is also no one who can make a key for him, so now he has to leave his window unlocked and climb through the window to get into his room. This is not good or easy for him to do, and he was not able to get a key until the Monday after the break is over. This is why there needs to be someone in the police department who can make keys when residence life is closed. That way if someone loses their key they can still get in their room and use their meal plan as easily as possible. This would make things easier for everyone on campus who are stuck on campus over a holiday. If this was done people would be a lot happier on campus who can not go home over the holidays and make life easier for everyone.

Options of eating on campus

2009-11-15T19:12:00.000-08:00

On campus if you want to eat you have two choices, the cafeteria and the sea aggie center. While on most other college campuses they have things like fast food or at least some other option on what to eat. This is so people can have options when they eat, so they can eat what they want instead of what is just offered. This would make people a lot happier and would also lessen the lines in the cafeteria so people who class right before and after lunch would not have to worry about missing lunch or being late to class. This would make people a lot happier and also lessen the stress of the cafeteria workers. Most other campus has more options for their students to eat. This would be good for people because they would have more options to eat, instead of bringing their own food or not eating at all. Also if their were more places to eat people who are vegetarian could find more to eat if you made one place a vegetarian place. Also you could make things cheaper because if there was a fast food place you could make it where it was only the real price of the food at a comparable place.

Boredom

2009-11-08T12:04:00.001-08:00

When everyone is gone from campus and you are alone you are bored. This leaves you with few options on what to do; you could just sit in your room watch TV and play video games, or just sit around and do nothing. You having nothing to do doesn’t mean that you lack friends it just means that all your friends are gone. All you can other than sit in your room all day is drive around Galveston and be bored out of your mind and only getting yourself in trouble. So there needs to be a place on campus for people who have nothing to do meet up and go do things together. This would keep people from being alone and bored and not want to just drive around the island and risk injury with being alone while driving. This would be a great thing to have on campus that way people would not be alone and have something to do other than just sit around watching TV. And if the SGA go afford to fund something like the quidditch club, why couldn’t they fund a place that people can go meet and go do things together either on or off campus.

Smoking

2009-11-01T12:28:00.001-08:00

Why is it that you cannot smoke inside buildings, I know the short answer is that second hand smoke gives others cancer. But why is that you can’t have an area blocked off that people could smoke if they pleased. This would allow people to smoke inside and not have to go outside if it was raining or the weather was bad. This seems like this would be the fairest thing to do. And if you were worried about something getting caught on fire you could make all the furniture outdoor that way they could not burn. If you think about it if someone gives out candy in a building anyone who eats the candy could eventually get diabetes if they like the candy a lot and ate a bunch of it. This is the same concept as someone smoking, granted not to the same extent as smoking, but nonetheless it is the same concept of what the main argument against smoking today. This is why I believe that smoking should be allowed to be done inside in controlled conditions, is no more dangerous to others who stay out of the smoking area. This would be no more dangerous than walking in a very polluted area of Houston.

Drinking on campus

2009-10-25T17:10:00.001-07:00

Texas A&M at Galveston is a dry campus, which means that no one on campus if supposed to have alcohol on them or in their rooms. But people can and do get alcohol and drink it. And when they do get drunk they can cause property damage and assault other people. Now it would be nice to just say well lets just step-up enforcement and catch the people who are drinking. But no matter how much you step-up enforcement people will still find a way to get and consume alcohol. So that leaves only one logically solution, which is to make the campus wet so that the people who are of age can drink on campus if they want to. But on the same token you have to make sure that anyone under 21 did not drink. This is the same paradox that is faced all across the country anyway. This is why that I think the drinking age should be lowered to 18 so that anyone who can go die for their country can also drink a nice cold beer. This is why there is such a problem now with underage drinking because anyone under 21 can get arrested for drinking underage.

The Cafeteria

2009-10-18T14:57:00.000-07:00

If you live on campus, they make you buy a meal plan. You can either buy 15 or 21 meals a week plan. Which would be fine expect if you buy a 21 meal plan you can’t get 21 meals a week. The reason for this is that the Cafeteria on the weekends is not open long enough for you to get three meals. This may sound like I am just full of crap and am complaining about nothing, but think about it if you sit there for the entire time that they are open and eat until you can’t eat anymore they will probably throw you out for eating to much food. Also every week any un-used meals that you have left you do not get back so no matter what you will have un-used meals. On top of that if you wanted to go without a meal plan and live off-campus you would have to pay eight or nine dollars for the meal, while you could just go to CiCi’s and pay less for an all you can eat buffet. So to me at least it seems like that they are using meal plans as a way to make as much money off of the students as they can legally.

On Campus Peer Educator

2009-10-11T16:54:00.000-07:00

The peer educators on campus are a waste of money for the university and are too full of themselves. The reason that I say this is the signs that they put out are not very factual and insult people. One such sign is one that said, “There is an inverse correlation between tobacco use and education level”. Although it is true that if you are either smoking or dipping you are probably not going to have a master’s degree or even finish high school, this is still an insult to the people who do use tobacco products on campus. It’s kind of insulting to someone who uses tobacco products to be told that you are stupid because you use tobacco products. This is not an very good use of school resources to tell students that because of a choice that they make on their own about what to do with their own bodies, that is totally legal, that they can chastise them all over campus with signs. This is similar to saying that because someone has his or her ear pierced or a tattoo that their stupid for doing something to their bodies that can be just as deadly. This is why in at least my humble opinion that the peer educator office should at least stop using money to put out signs that are worthless and insulting.

Getting to class on time

2009-10-04T10:22:00.000-07:00

One of the hardest things to do in college is getting to class on time. The reasons for this could be as simple as you just don’t want to go to class, you stayed up to late, or it could be that you are sick and cant make it to class. This can be one of the hardest things to get used to about college, in high school your parents woke you up and made sure you got to class on time, but in college your parents are not here to help you to wake-up and get to class. This means that either you must learn to do it for yourself or face the fact that you may not do well in college and maybe be even forced to flunk out of college. This is one of the hardest things to figure out in life and this is why many people fail out of college and many people have trouble during their first few months of college. This is why it is so critical that you figure out how you are going to get yourself to class and how you are going to keep your grades up, and how you are going to keep yourself out of trouble.

First Impressions of college life

2009-09-27T18:00:00.000-07:00

Being at college is a lot different than high school was. For one thing there is no one on your back to do your schoolwork, to wake you up, or to wash your clothes. That means that you have to learn how to set up a schedule of things to do and what order to do things in. For the first week or two of college you have a lot trouble adjusting to how different things are, and also want to go and hang out with people and do other activities that you think are more fun than schoolwork. But if you slack off on your schoolwork and party more than you do work, you will not make if for long in college. So what I have found is that it is best to figure out a schedule of what you are going to do and in what order you will do them. This makes things a lot easier to keep up with, because if you do not do it you will have a lot trouble remembering if you did what you needed to do for a class or not. This can be difficult to do at first, mainly because you want to do other things that you think, and usually are more fun than, what you should do in college.

Do Indigenous people have the right to control their own history and what is written about them?

2009-09-20T18:05:00.001-07:00

Almost all cultures want to write about what they were like and what they did in their culture. Up until about the 1950’s the victor would right the history, an example of this is with Roman’s and the Germanic tribes. Rome would go out and conquer the tribes and then call them barbarians and say that were uncivilized. This would happen no matter if they were civilized or not. Then after WWII in the west people started to think that they deserve to write their own culture. Also after WWII, especially in the US and Canada, Arctic areas became very strategically important. Since there were still indigenous groups who were still around in the Arctic, and it would make things a lot easier for to include them and get their help to develop the area and get the resources.

This is why they are allowed more than most others peoples to write and explain their history and culture. As opposed to almost all indigenous people in the former USSR who were treated like second-class citizens and did not have even a chance to write a book about themselves. Now the question that should be asked is if everything was reversed and Anglo-Saxons never came to the Americas and were conquered by the Cherokee, would the Cherokee let the Anglo-Saxons write their own history to a greater extent then what happened in the Americas with the indigenous peoples? Now it is true that the conquering culture will not tell the whole truth, and the culture that is writing about itself will say whatever sounds the most ideal and leave out things that they think might not look good in the future. So does anyone really own their culture and history? The answer is no because at some point in their history they will leave something out, so therefore are just writing a un-true record of their civilization.

Autobiography

2009-09-09T17:21:00.000-07:00

My name is Byron Winborne, I grew up in Waxahachie, Texas. I graduated from Waxahachie High. My dad is an attorney, the reason that I mention this is that I have spent a lot of time in his office growing up. Because of this I have for the past few years wanted to become an attorney, a maritime attorney to more specific.

With what I wanted to do in mind I started to look at colleges that I would want to go to. My parents told me that I had to go to a state school in Texas. So I applied to Stephen F. Austin, Texas A&M, and Texas A&M Galveston. I got accepted to SFA and TAMUG and put on the wait list an TAMU. So I then thought about where those two school were located and the education I could get from each school. SFA is in east Texas and not very likely to be a good place to go to become an maritime lawyer. Then I thought that TAMUG is in Galveston, a place that I like very much because I have visited there many times, and that its location by the sea is a good place for anything maritime in nature.