~GOOD MORNING~

Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strengths. When you go through hardships and decide not to surrender, that is strength.
 
~Arnold Schwarzenegger

I would have wrote this last night if I didn’t have to spend almost 20 minutes scouring my room for a cricket that wouldn’t stop cricketing! It’s the most annoying thing to hear when getting ready to go to bed. It’s an incessant noise that attacks your ears. It’s like trying to ignore the itching sensation from a mosquito bite, a battle most people never win.

After many attempts at trying to find the cricket including crawling on the ground with my ears close to the floor, I never found it. But I got frustrated enough to kick the wall and the cricket finally ceased. Pure luck and madness, I guess.

Now my head is clear and I can fully document the details of last night. I had arrived to class much earlier than I usually did and I’m almost always early. But this time I got to the Clarendon campus a whole hour and a half before class was supposed to start. I took the time to catch up on the assigned reading and of course prepare for the presentation I had to give on the Business Source Complete database.

I had eight slides in total and planned to devote most of my presentation to giving my classmates and professor a live preview of how the database works. I’m pretty sure much of my background knowledge came from working with two brilliant librarians at Stevenson’s School of Business Library for nearly two years.

I went over the several types of searches that can be done through EBSCOhost and gave a brief overview of the user-interface and how to navigate to key areas. I was surprised at the response I received when I was finished. Everyone clapped which is common good manners anyway and even my professor said I did a good job.

I sat through class feeling accomplished and ready for whatever task was next which just so happens to be a 4-5 page Landscape Analysis on a company/organization of our choosing. I chose Samsung Electronics only because I’m tired of Apple always stealing the spotlight from other companies who put out quality products too.

My first presentation was successful and I have another one on Thursday. Oh, and I drove all the way home without using my GPS. It just keeps getting better…

Sick parents

A Massachusetts teenager was sentenced Wednesday to two years in prison and loss of his license for 15 years for causing a fatal crash by texting while driving.

Aaron Deveau, 18, was convicted of motor vehicle homicide by texting – the first driver in Massachusetts to face such charges, the Boston Globe reported. Prosecutors said Deveau, who pleaded not guilty, was texting on Feb. 20, 2011, when his vehicle swerved across the center line of a Haverhill, Mass., street and crashed head on into Daniel Bowley’s truck, killing the 55-year-old New Hampshire father of three.

good morningggggggggg

Damascus, Syria (CNN) -- Syrian government warplanes targeted a northern town Thursday, hitting a gas station and triggering an explosion that killed at least 55 people, opposition forces said.
It's the latest salvo in Syria's bloody 18-month-old civil war that shows no sign of letting up. Dozens were wounded in the airstrike in Raqqa province that two opposition groups said was carried out by Syrian government aircraft.
The opposition Local Coordination Committees of Syria distributed videos of the site, a flat and barren landscape. They showed black smoke, charred and destroyed vehicles, holes in the ground and people milling around corpses.
The strike came a day after rebels seized a border crossing in Raqqa near Syria's border with Turkey.
The LCC claimed another 15 people were found dead at a regional security headquarters in the province.