The Roanoke College Book Club will be meeting this Sunday at Fintel Library to discuss the book Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom. They will be on the ground floor in Library Room 1 at 4:00-5:00pm.
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Save Early; Save Often: or How I learned to stop worrying and love the back-up.
The time is upon us.
Dude, Whoa, when’s it due?
The end of the semester is nigh.
OMG!…Like I have like so like many like papers and like projects to like do!
However you want to say it, midterm marks the start of the busy season. Papers and projects that seemed so abstract, and deadlines that seemed so far into the future now loom on the horizon like Viking raiders.
Don’t Panic!
And whatever you do, make sure to save your work when you are working in a campus computer lab. Make sure to save it in the right place as well. The right place to save your work is…well actually, there are two places:
- Your Z: drive. The Information Technology department goes to considerable lengths in both effort and money to maintain a reliable system of personal network drive space for students, faculty, and staff. The data there is backed-up often and is recoverable should something tragic happen, like an earthquake, or a zombie apocalypse. You have to PAY ATTENTION to where you are saving that paper you have been working on for the past umpteen hours, make sure it gets onto your Z: drive.
- Your personal USB flash drive, or thumb drive, or whatever you want to call it. These devices are inexpensive, effective, and come in many fashionable colors. Having the added security of a second copy of your work is a good thing. The only downside of USB flash drives is that, because they are so small and work so transparently, they are easy to forget. Every year, thousands of thumb drives are abandoned by their owners in USB ports all over the country. Please help bring this tragic neglect to an end. Remember to take your Flash drive with you when you leave.
The C: drive is not your friend.
Speaking of tragedy, every year some students will experience the heartbreak of losing a paper or project (forever and for real) because he or she inadvertently saved work to the C: drive of the lab PC he or she was working on. This loss is often accompanied by actual tears, sometimes some foul language, and always a bit of genuine panic because the lost work is due in a very short time.
When the lab computer restarts, which it will do on its own if left alone for 90 minutes, by the way, all changes (this includes papers) are wiped out instantly, completely, and permanently. They are not recoverable; they are gone, gone, gone forever and anon.
The reason the security software is so, shall we say vigorous and mean in its cleansing is so that any malware, keystroke loggers, viruses, worms, or other creepy-crawlies are exterminated before the next user comes along.
Save early, save often, and save to the right place.
National Banned Books Week- September 30-October 6 2012
It’s National Banned Books Week, and to celebrate the event we wanted to catch an RC student reading a banned book.
RC student Dan Zimmerman (’13) is holding one of the most controversial items published in the twentieth century: Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer.
Henry Valentine Miller, an American writer and painter, had moved to Paris in 1930 and remained there until 1940 when he returned to the United States. Miller wrote Tropic of Cancer between 1930 and 1934, and its content was largely autobiographical. When asked why he chose the title, Miller replied, “It was because to me cancer symbolizes the disease of civilization, the endpoint of the wrong path, the necessity to change course radically, to start completely over from scratch.” The book was first published in 1934 in Paris, France. Immediately following its publication in France the United States banned it due to obscenity, and would not consider publishing it for another 30 years. The United States eventually allowed the publication of Tropic of Cancer in 1961, but it continued to be at the center of court trials until the Supreme Court ruled it non-obscene in 1964. Tropic of Cancer is listed as one of the top 100 banned or challenged books in the United States, and it is still considered banned in the country of Turkey.
Is one of your favorite books on the list? Celebrate the freedom to read by checking out a banned book today!
Faculty-Author Reception at Fintel Library this Friday
This Friday marks the beginning of a fantastic weekend here on campus, known as Family Weekend, and Fintel Library would like you to kick off the weekend festivities with us!
Join us for an hour of faculty-author presentations, followed by a reception hosted by Fintel Library. Faculty members will discuss and read from their recent publications and will be available to answer questions related to their books.
Mike Heller, of the English Department, will be discussing his book Mohandas K. Gandhi: The Last Eighteen Years.
Roland Minton, of the Math Department, will be discussing his book Golf by the Numbers.
Jason Hawke, of the History Department, will be discussing his book Writing Authority: Elite Competition and Written Law in Early Greece.
Lynn Talbot, of the Modern Languages Department, will be discussing her book Following the Yellow Arrow: Younger Pilgrims on the Camino.
And these authors will be joining in on the reception. The bookstore will be selling copies of all of the books as well.
John Selby, of the History Department, and his book Civil War Talks.
Gerald McDermott, of the Religion and Philosophy Department, and his books Theology of Jonathan Edwards and World Religions: An Indispensable Introduction
Robert Willingham, of the History Department, and his book Jews in Leipzig, Germany, under Nazism, Communism and Democracy.
See you at the Library on Friday, September 28, beginning at 3pm.
Movie Night?
We know you’re studying real hard right now, but maybe you should take a break and make it a movie night? Fintel Library has some excellent movies, and here is a list of new releases just waiting for you to check them out.
PN1997.85 .T84745 2012 DVD.
A pair of underachieving cops are sent back to a local high school to blend in and bring down a synthetic drug ring.
PN1997.85 .B47 2012 DVD.
In Carthage, TX, assistant funeral director Bernie Tiede is one of the town’s most beloved residents. He sings in the church choir and is always willing to lend a helping hand. He befriends an affluent widow, and she soon becomes dependent on Bernie. Later it is reported that Marjorie Nugent has been dead for some time, and Bernie Tiede is charged with the murder.
PR2805 .A23 2012.
Caius Martius ‘Coriolanus’ is a feared and revered Roman general, suddenly pitted against his own city and fellow citizens. Rebelling against the power-hungry designs of his manipulative mother and rejected by his own people, Coriolanus incites a riot that expels him from Rome. The banished hero joins forces with his sworn enemy Tullus Aufidius to extract his revenge and determine his destiny.
PN1997.85 .F5796 2012 DVD.
Beginning where most romantic comedies end, the film looks at what happens when an engaged couple keeps getting tripped up on the long walk down the aisle.
The Arctic and Antarctic remain the greatest wildernesses on Earth. The scale and beauty of the scenery and the sheer power of the elements, the weather, the rough ocean and the ice, is unmatched anywhere else on our planet. Tells the compelling story of animals such as the wandering albatross, the adelie penguin and the polar bear, and paints a portrait that will take your breath away, at a moment when, melting fast, the frozen regions of our planet may soon be changed forever.
HM1281 .H69 2011.
How to start a revolution profiles Gene Sharp through interviews with his ally, Retired U.S. Army Colonel Robert Helvey, and key leaders of nonviolent revolutions around the world–all of whom testify to the power of Gene’s work in practice. This film shows how one man’s thinking has contributed to the liberation of millions of oppressed people living under some of the most brutal dictatorships in the world, and how his work in direct action and civil disobedience continues to be used today to topple dictators using the sheer force of nonviolent people power.
PN1997.85 .H853 2012 DVD.
Set in a future where the Capitol selects a boy and girl from the twelve districts to fight to the death on live television. Katniss Everdeen volunteers to take her younger sister’s place for the latest match.
QH104.5.A6 L37 2011.
The fight for the last great mountain in America’s Appalachian heartland pits the mining giant that wants to explode it to extract the coal within, against the community fighting to preserve the mountain and build a wind farm on its ridges instead. Robert Kennedy Jr. joins the fight to preserve the mountain.
PN1997.85 .L6946 2008.
Set on the Caribbean coast of South America, this love story brings together Fermina Daza, her distinguished husband, and a man who has secretly loved her for more than fifty years.
PN1997.85 .S127 2012 DVD.
When a second-rate cage fighter, Luke Wright, is tormented by the Russian Mafia and wanders the streets of New York, he witnesses a young Chinese girl, Mei, being pursued by the same mafia who want her for a priceless numerical code that they would kill for.
PN1997.85 .S7555 2010 DVD.
Detective Tom Adkins is a devoted cop haunted by the unsolved disappearance of his young son eight years earlier. But when Adkins discovers the buried remains of a boy who was brutally murdered more than half a century ago, he becomes obsessed with investigating the long-forgotten crime. Is the 1958 mystery surrounding down-on-his-luck family man Matthew Wakefield and his own abducted son linked in any way to Adkins’ tragedy?
F1234 .S76 2011.
Illuminates the complex historical, social, political, economic and cultural forces that shaped the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and the struggle to establish a democratic, stable, and prosperous nation. Features extensive archival material and interviews with Zapatistas and historians.
F2230.2.A9 V57 2007.
The social and economic relationships of the native Indians and the mestizos is depicted by focusing on the Bolivian villages of Vitocota and Ayata.
PN1997.85 .Y395.
Yentl Mendel is the boyish daughter and only child of long widowed Rebbe Mendel. He teaches Talmud to local boys and secretly to Yentl since girls are not allowed to learn the law. When her father dies, Yentl is left all alone. She makes the momentous decision to leave the village and, disguised as a boy and calling herself Anshel, she seeks and gets admitted to a Yeshiva to study. She befriends Avigdor who is engaged to Haddas. Her family calls off the wedding when they discover Avigdor’s brother committed suicide. Anshel then finds ‘him’-self in the awkward position of being called into service as substitute bridegroom.
Book review for Wild Swans
Roanoke College student Kathleen Ouyang (’13) sent us her review for the book Wild Swans. Have you read a great book lately? Send us the review and we’ll feature it on this blog.
How much do you know about the war between the Kuomintang and the Communists in China? Mao’s Great Leap Forward? or the Chinese Cultural Revolution? I just reread Wild Swans by Jung Chang, and it can easily educate you on all three through eyewitness accounts. The author records the lives of three generations of Chinese women; her grandmother, her mother and herself. The stories of these three women span a turbulent time in the history of China, from her grandmother’s forced concubinage to a Northern warlord, to the Communist takeover and her mother’s disillusionment and struggle as a Communist official, ending with Chang’s own story growing up in the Cultural Revolution. It’s nonfiction and extremely historical, but Chang writes in an extremely gripping manner, and the subject matter is so incredible that it seems like fiction. You can learn so much while enjoying this great story. It is very sad (these women faced famine, denunciation, and so much more), but it is well worth the read, and can help you understand a little more about China’s past!