Dorm Room Engineering

Too bad W&M doesn't have an Engineering major, that might have been a good fit for me after all. Keep reading to see pictures of some of the useful things I've accomplished using totally unrelated items in my dorm room.


Umbrella Hanger
Ingredients: Bungee cord, door hinge

This is one of the most important life lessons I've learned from two summers of drum corps: you can do anything with bungee cords. I brought a few to college, figuring I'd find some use for them, and I did! There was nowhere else to hang my umbrella, so I just tied some knots to get the bungee to be the right length, and voila! It doesn't even get in the way of closing the door.

Belt Hook
Ingredients: Pencil, lamp

I had to make this one for the same reason as the umbrella hanger: there are no hooks in these rooms! I was looking around my room for anywhere to hang it, and I put it on this pencil just on a whim... and it stayed! Problem solved.

Laptop Ventilation System
Ingredients: Two books of roughly equal width

I love my MacBook Pro to death, but sometime it really gets uncomfortably hot. I did discover this great program called smcFanControl which lets you turn up the internal cooling fans faster than the default setting, which helps cool it down a little bit; it's actually not bad for your computer or anything, it just makes it a little bit louder than usual. Unfortunately, that wasn't enough, so I picked out two books (Pale Fire and The Essentials of Chaos) to prop it up on (thankfully, they're close enough in width that the laptop feels basically flat). Now the bottom of the laptop gets extra airflow to cool it off, instead of being up against the desk all the time. It might seem kind of silly, but it really has cooled it off noticeably. Thanks, Nabokov and Lorentz!