I’m finally going to get caught up so I can go to the NJCL Convention and get behind again. Isn’t blogging wonderful?

I will admit that my memory at this point is rather poor, and I never entirely figured out what was going on in the first place.

So, I arrived in Chicago on Thursday night. The team had already gone out for dinner, I wouldn’t have been able to get to them before it was time to go, I was tired and afraid of jet-lag, and I needed to do laundry, so I went to our hotel. After checking in, I got $4 in change and headed up to the top floor where the laundry machines were. It was uncomfortably hot, and I had no reason to go anywhere else, so I waited there and read a Feynman book that I had picked up at Heathrow.

Eventually I ended up with clean clothes and the team was reunited, so we played a few practice rounds, where I pretty much sucked royally, being very out of practice.

On Friday morning we had a quick overview of the rules, where they explained preached the gospel of their Swiss pairings system. It works like this…

Every team got a card with a number on it.
At the bottom of the card was a chart with which number this number was to play for any of the first 12 rounds (10 playing rounds + 2 byes).
At the end of each round, the winner left with the lower number, the loser with the higher.
Throughout the 12 rounds, almost everybody (the exception was like 10 teams near the end of the preliminaries) played teams with the same record.

It was magical. I really don’t get how it worked.

As for the actual rounds, we lost our first one. We got matched up against a very strong team that ended up 4th. Final score was 265-225.

So anyway, we played our way through the magic card system, eventually ending up with card #28, I believe. By the time the preliminaries were over, the card represented an approximate rank. If you wish to see all the stats, check out the NAQT’s special page for our team. This includes the rather embarrassing personal stats, where you can see how much our team depended on Dallas’s knowledge.

The one round of particular interest was the second one against Edison High, not because of the round, but because of our moderator. Ken Jennings has written questions for NAQT for some time, and is always a moderator, and he happened to be moderating our room. We of course did the 20 pictures and autographs after the match, which he didn’t really seem to enjoy, but fortunately, Dad forgot to get the camera from me, so I still had it.

The format of NAQT rounds is unusual, at least for us Tennesseans, who really just play by our own rules. NAQT format is two timed halves, where you play as many questions as you can. As much as I dislike timed matches, it makes the rankings even murkier. Because the number of questions varies in every room for every round, using some statistic like total points scored or points per game can be misleading, so the people in charge instead used PP20H, or Points Per 20 Tossups Heard.

At the end of the preliminary rounds, we were ranked 36th. Then, the people in charge started doing some really strange voodoo. The finals were double elimination, but they didn’t use a standard double elimination bracket. What they did instead, I think, is took everyone still in the winners bracket and matched the best with the worst, a 1 plays 16, 2 plays 15, etc. Then they did the same for the losers bracket. I’m not sure if this is exactly what they did, but here is the effect:

In a normal playoff bracket, an upset works to the advantage of the upsetter. For example, if 16 beats 1, the 16th place team then gets rewarded by having easy matches for the rest of the tournament. In this tournament, though, assuming no other upsets, 16 ends up playing the best team in the next round, ensuring that their road to success is paved with lots and lots of challenging rounds.

I will agree that it has its merits, but since we were just over halfway down the bracket, I wasn’t a big fan of it.

Particularly since we ended up having to play Maggie Walker in our third round, the team that ended up placing 3rd. Again, we held our own for about half of the game, and I got 4 power marks (where you buzz in insanely early and get an extra 5 points for being so damn clever), which like doubled my count for the whole tournament. The very last question was about cryptographic hashes, so I felt like I went out with a pretty decent bang.

Maggie Walker still almost doubled our score, though, putting us in a 12-way tie for 25th. There was no attempt to distinguish teams who went out at the same time.

After we were eliminated, I only had a few hours before my flight, so I sat around the hotel and waited. Then I came home.

The other thing I want to talk about that’s happened since then is that I’m officially a Mac user now. I mentioned that one of my graduation presents was a shiny new MacBook Pro, which I ordered about a week before the non-pro MacBooks came out. I have no regrets, though, because this thing is awesome. It does run rather warm, but it doesn’t bother me too much.

This entry is going to get me caught up, like it or not.

First topic: Aaron’s bass.

For Science Olympiad, Aaron got to do the Sound of Music contest, where you have to bring in a homemade instrument. So Dad made this washtub bass for him to play.

However, only the strings could be from a real instrument, so Dad had to take off the actual bass tuning machines he had installed and replace them with something quite literally made of nuts and bolts. Then, since Dad couldn’t figure out how to read our electronic tuner, I spent hours and hours telling him “higher” or “lower.” Of course, whenever I did, he had to get two giant vice grips to make any adjustment.

This made for a much more interesting story when it happened, which was around the last week of March. Anyway, enjoy the pictures. The second is the top side of the tuning…mechanism, and the third is the bottom.

Next story: quizbowl, specifically the state quizbowl championship.
This was amazingly awesome, because we kicked so much ass. We were almost completely undefeatable. We had 500 or 600 points on almost every round, including the ones against Knoxville West and Ezell-Harding, the two teams I was most afraid of. The only round we lost was to Rossview. It was one of those annoying things where we were more or less neck in neck the whole time. The problem with playing Rossview is that we both know the same information.

Anyway, we won 1st place overall by a landslide. I’m pretty sure that we could have put our buzzers down for the last round, or at least part of it, and still won. Just for extra fun, Dallas, Will, and I all made the State All-Star Team, a purely honorary list of 8 players in the state, voted on by the coaches. We each got our own little trophies for that, in addition to the giant one we got for winning.

Next story: I have a job
I started working at a web development company called GoDesign. As I explained to Connie, they’re “like sitemason, only they work in the languages I know.” Working at Sitemason (or Monster Labs) was lots of fun, but their major products were all written in Perl, and I’ve never been quite able to get Perl.

Not only that, but I’ve got a big project. I don’t want to say what it is, because someone else could probably go and get it on the market before me, but it should be cool, and it should have a pretty large market.

Other cool things about working there: they do all their project management online, so I do all of my work from home whenever I want. Also, they have a few designers in house, which means I don’t have to do any design work (and trust me—that’s a blessing for anyone that has to use my apps).

The head programmer at GoDesign sent me an e-mail about a month ago about a PHP Users Group meeting, so I went to it. It was really cool to talk to other developers; I honestly had no idea there was so much serious development going on in Tennessee. Also, Chris Shiflett, who’s a big security guy in the PHP world, was at the meeting, so we got to talk about some security stuff that’s definitely influenced the way I develop (i.e., I think about security now, instead of ignoring it). The other cool thing was that I had more experience than the other people there with both WordPress and Ruby on Rails, so I was able to contribute to the conversation. Made me feel all special and stuff.

Next story: TJCL Convention
It was generally awesome, like always. And like always, I pretended to be a state officer even though I’m not. I didn’t pay for food all weekend, and I stayed at Rossview until midnight with the other officers to help with the ribbons and such. Also, MLK won Role Call this year. Avram and I did a knockoff of Lazy Sunday that we wrote an hour before the General Assembly. Yeah, it was that bad. But we did win.

Next story: MassJCL Convention
Connie invited me to go to the MassJCL Convention, which was lots of fun. Getting there was interesting—my first flight left at about 6:00 AM, so I had to get up around 4:00. I did make it though, and the first thing I had to do was a colloquium on technology in JCL. Let’s just say it was about as well attended as my OhioJCL colloquium on Nationals. That is to say the guy that was supposed to be helping me was there. And a few other officers came for moral support. I had the colloquium again two hours later. This time two webmasters showed up. They, however, knew what they were doing, so the basic-level presentation I had prepared wasn’t very useful. So we spent a while fixing up their website.

The other interesting event was that night. The four male officers (including me) played Risk after lights out. Actually, it was Risk: Lord of the Rings edition. I’d never played before, but the dice liked me, so I was actually doing quite well. After 2 or 3 rounds, though, we gave up, because it was like 1:00 AM.

And that was the month of April.

Now for May.

The day after I got back from MassJCL was our final in math. I actually don’t know how I did, because I never got in touch with Professor Hughes. In actuality, though, it doesn’t matter. Since I’m not earning credit, my hypothetical grade doesn’t really count for much. I’m going to just have to hope that I can test out of the class.

That next Thursday (we’re on May 4, by the way) was the AP Literature and Composition test. The multiple choice was easy; the free response sucked. That’s really about all there is to it.

Next major event: AP Microeconomics test
It was easy. Most of economics is easy; you just have to think about it the right way. I spent a good portion of the free response time drawing out the database schema for that super-secret web application I mentioned earlier.

There was one redeeming thing about the test, though. One of the questions asked you to explain why something is. Since I was bored and had plenty of time, I wrote my answer in the style of a mathematical proof—complete with a QED box at the end.

Well, there was one other thing between my two AP tests: on May 7, I turned 18. That, combined with the fact that I’m about to graduate from high school, has led to a large influx of stuff from parents and grandparents and the like. Of particular note, so far I’ve received a MacBook Pro (well, it’s still in the mail), a Canon PowerShot A620 digital camera (not as fun as Mom’s, but it does its job), and this, from my uncle.

Finally, my one other graduation present is a trip to Italy. Originally, Phillip, some other kids, and I were going to go to China this summer, but that never really happened, so Dad and I are going to Italy. It’s a 12 day trip; we leave Friday afternoon. Then, we come back June 1st through Chicago, where I stay for another 3 days because it’s the NAQT National Championship, a quizbowl tournament. This is seriously going to probably be the best two weeks of…well, at least my pre-college life.

This is made interesting, though, because I managed to place myself as a finalist in the Google Da Vinci Code Quest contest thing. I got a cryptex replica in the mail today as one of the first 10,000 people to finish all 21 of their challenges. When does the final challenge start? May 19th. Luckily, it just has to be finished within 48 hours, and it’s based on shortest time, not first done. My plan? Use our 8 hour layover at the London Gatwick Airport.

By the way, the cryptex is about 4 or 5 inches long. The code for it was on the back of the box it came in—that’s “grail” if you didn’t notice from the picture. There is no vinegar inside to dissolve the paper—they shipped it, remember. And finally, it’s not unusually well made—only the last two letters really matter. Keep in mind, though, 10,000 of these were sent out. They weren’t going to be top quality.

And that’s my life. Maybe I’ll do more regular updates now. I’ll try to handwrite entries while I’m in Italy at the very least. Speaking of which, assume that I will be totally incommunicado between May 19th and June 5th.

And now, the thrilling conclusion of MIT Campus Preview Weekend…

I slept in reasonably late again on Saturday morning, but eventually got up and had some waffles at Next House. Then I headed for ESP because once again they were doing lectures that I was interested in: The Lambda Calculus and Unlambda. I think I almost understood lambda calculus, but unlambda went so fast that I was completely lost. That’s really ok, though, because unlambda is designed expressly to be impossible to code in. I also went to the Do-it-yourself Audio lecture on making speakers, which was interesting because the guy taught mostly about the circuitry of making speakers. I’m considering taking his IAP class, although I don’t know what I would do with a good set of speakers.

Next I hit up the East Campus barbacue, which was conveniently on the way to Sloan. A group at Sloan was doing a trading game simulation. It was really cool, although I didn’t win—I couldn’t spot a .COM bursting stock bubble when it was staring me in the face. Afterwards, they fed us pizza, and we headed back for Kresge.

After an official farewell from the admissions staff, all of the MIT a capella groups performed for the prefrosh. I enjoyed the concert, although I was kind of tired, so I had to work to stay awake.

Next was the Battle of the Bands. Now, I’m not really big on concerts, and I kind of like my hearing, so I came and went a little, but I did stay and watch Ben’s band play. I was fortunate to witness one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen: Tim the MIT Beaver crowd surfing. Don’t believe me? Here’s photographic proof (courtesy of Valery ‘08):

With my ears starting to hurt, I headed out and started wandering around. In particular, I was looking forward to Capture the Flag along the Infinite Corridor, but I didn’t want to be carrying the bundles of papers, promotional material, and propoganda, so I wandered back to Next House. My host wasn’t there, so I left my stuff outside his door, figuring it probably wouldn’t go anywhere (dumb? probably). I then headed back, and spent a little while in the ESP room. I talked with them about dorms, life at MIT, general stuff. Got some good input on what to do and not to do.

So anyway, Capture the Flag. It was sponsored by ΑΔΦ, who apparently does this regularly. We met at Lobby 7 and were split up into two different groups. Lobby 10 was neutral ground, and any part of the main campus was fair play. Also, everybody got t-shirts—either red or blue—that we got to keep. Much, much fun was had by all. We played a total of 5 rounds, I believe. My team ended up winning, although I never managed to accomplish anything. Anneke and I, plus an Illinois JCLer named Max, plus a few other people formed an elite stealth team. We were very good at being stealthy, but not so good at the whole capturing the flag thing. We finished at about 4:30 in the morning, though. I sat around in the student center with some other prefrosh for a little while longer, then headed back to Next House.

Sunday was for the most part uneventful. I packed up my stuff (actually, I had a hell of a time getting my bag zipped shut with all the extra t-shirts and such) and checked out at the student center. While there, I filled out my form accepting admission to MIT and turned it in. I had a quick breakfast, took the shuttle back to Logan, and flew home.

There you go. That’s it for my CPW coverage. Now that I’m done with that and school’s winding down, I should be able to go through the rest of my backlog soon. No seriously—I promise I will; I was really hoping to not get more than a month behind.

And now, for a continuation of my series on MIT CPW.

After waking up really late, I wandered around trying to find breakfast, only to discover that I had woken up too late, and all the places doing breakfast had closed up, and the lines at all the food joints were too long, because I had to get the keynote.

The keynote lecture was given by Eric Lander, after a welcome from President Hockfield (which started off with, “So how about that cannon?”). Professor Lander basically talked about how MIT (and other places) is owning genetics. Also, we can sequence DNA really fast now. Also, MIT and others are sequencing other mammals and comparing the genomes to that of humans. They can use some spiffy computer analysis to find similarities between the genomes. Where they are similar, that section is for some reason important to the invisible hand of evolution, because otherwise random mutations would have persisted and been allowed to reproduce (natural selection and all that good stuff).

The really weird thing? Two-thirds of the similarities between the human and the mouse don’t code for genes, which is weird because it was previously believed that genes were the only things in DNA that matter; the rest of the genome (about 90%, if I remember correctly) was thought to be meaningless. Meaningless code like that should have been completely changed by the random mutations of evolution. The fact that it wasn’t means that it’s important. And nobody knows what it does.

Of course, I don’t want to really study biology, but I can get worked up about any subject. It’s that damn love for learning stuff. No seriously.

In any case, I definitely want to try and take 7.012 with Professor Lander next year.

After that, I rushed over to 54-100 to observe a lecture for 18.02. They were doing 2-D line integrals. This, actually, made me very happy. The last time I observed a math class, 18.022 in October, they were doing the Change of Variables Theorem, something we didn’t cover at Vanderbilt until February. Line integrals, however, we did several weeks ago. This is probably related to the fact that 18.02 and 18.022 are both single-semester courses.

In any case, I talked to the professor afterwards, and he basically told me that I was learning way more in my class than they were in theirs, and there was no reason for me to not test out of their calculus requirement.

Next, I took a tour of CSAIL and the Stata Center and got a free Course VI (EECS) t-shirt at the EECS Open House. Then I played Super Smash Brothers in the Student Center while I waited for the rain to die down.

Once it did, I headed for the MITBeef Beef-Off, sponsored by Random Hall. I ran into Sara Roland from GSS, who I didn’t even know would be at CPW. I ate some beef, toured Random Hall, ate some more liquid nitrogen ice cream (which really is as good as they say it is), then went back to the student center.

Oh! I said I’d deal with a dorm each day. Today’s dorm of choice is Random Hall.

Random Hall is the most moderate of the dorms for the stranger types. All (and I of course speak stereotypically here) of the D&D Obsessed, Hackers, hippies, people with died hair, etc. migrate towards either Random Hall, East Campus, or Senior House. These people tend to be very interesting, talented, enthusiastic, and lots of other good qualities. For example, one of the students in Random Hall had an 80 GB server in a RAID 5 array with one hard drive that automatically took over if one of the others failed. Now that’s cool. I have no objections to spending time at Random Hall, but I’m not sure I could live there. Plus, it’s also really far away, although not as far as Next.

The other good thing about Random, though, was that they have large kitchens and are right next to a grocery store.

Anyway, I went to the Student Center because they were having the Meet the Bloggers party, which I wanted to go to, mostly because I wanted to meet the admissions staff and the other bloggers, but also because I wanted to try and get my name to Ben as a potential blogger for next year. All of the bloggers were really nice people, and it was fun talking to them. I swear I’m not saying that because I know they’re reading right now.

While I was there, I met the other Evan, who had also been commenting on the blogs. In fact, it wasn’t until a few days after Matt’s post about admitted students that we realized there were two of us. I didn’t even notice at all; Mom did. It was made more interesting by the fact that we made no attempt to distinguish ourselves, except for the fact that I always linked back to my site. We’ve agreed to add on last initials from here on out.

After the party was over, we headed to Lobby 7 to meet up with some other prefrosh.

That’s all of the story you get for Friday.

Lucky you, but you get a couple other stories, though. Mostly related to college.

I’ll be brief: I got into Carnegie-Mellon and was waitlisted at Columbia, which was OK, because I don’t really know why I applied in the first place.

Having accepted MIT, though, I went ahead and turned down CMU, Columbia, and all of my other schools.

In a similar vein, the Presidential Scholars Program. I got my letter on Tuesday that I wasn’t selected as a semifinalist. That’s fine by me, because, while being a great resume item, I only would have gotten out of it a trip to DC if selected. I was, however, slightly annoyed, because I think I did a very good job on my insanely long essay.

On Wednesday, I was called to the office at school and handed a letter from some state representative. Congratulating me on being nominated to the program. Whoever that guy was, he gets major kudos for timing.

So, here’s the new plan: I’m going to write about my favorite parts of CPW, one day at a time. Then at the end, I’ll incorporate some of the other stories I have. If we’re lucky, these will be small enough chunks that I will actually write some, and large enough that I can start to get through the backlog of stuff.

So, Day I is Thursday, but I’m going to include through when I went to sleep, which was around 5:00 or 5:30 AM.

Flights were uneventful, although lunch in La Guardia sucked. I payed like $10 for a wrap, and after like 10 or 12 minutes (and only with prompting), the woman at the counter tells me they don’t have the one I ordered. So I change, and another 10 or 12 minutes later, they give me my food. Except it’s not what I changed to. I scurry back through security and over to a seat at the gate to inhale my sandwich and potato chips.

I was a little confused at Logan Airport (which is Boston, if you didn’t know), because I didn’t realize that a bus ride was required to go from Terminal B (where my flight came in) to Terminal E (where the bus to MIT was). Luckily I caught on, and showed up at campus…

…only to find out that I wasn’t in the computer as attending. Turns out that some of the early submissions to the CPW registration form weren’t logged in the computer. And I submitted pretty early.

However, there were a bunch more hosts than there were prefrosh, so there were hosts on standby. I got matched up with a Course VIer in Next House, Kevin Wang, who was apparently one of the original MIT Bloggers.

For a quick deviation on Next House (I’m going to do one dorm deviation per day, based on when I got an actual tour of the dorms in question)…

Next House was not a bad place. The dorms were nice, the views were good. However, Next House is a really, really long way away from the main part of campus. In fact, I checked a map, and I’m pretty sure that Next House is as far as housing gets from the Infinite Corridor without crossing the Charles River.

My other issue with Next was that it was kind of quiet. There were lots of little study/hang-out lounge-type areas, but I almost never saw anyone out there. Generally if I saw people they were just tooling on their own in their room. Which is probably what I’ll do most of the time anyway, but I think I’d rather have a dorm that at least tries to push me outside of that.

I should note that Kevin was very helpful and not at all quiet, and many people in the dorm may not be. The truth of the matter is that I tended to pick bad times to show up (like either noon or 5:00 in the morning). However, distance does not change with time (which is probably fortunate).

After dropping off my stuff and doing some brief planning, I headed out to Random Hall for lasagna. I ate lasagna and talked to MegaHAL for a little while before heading to the Green Building.

Because, let’s face it, what’s cooler than a stolen cannon reappearing on the other side of the country?

Then I scurried down to the welcoming ceremony. Many people gave speeches and a few even sang. After an attempted icebreaker activity which really failed entirely, we were led off to the CPW Festival, where there was lots of free food and a few free t-shirts.

Around the time of the ceremony, I met up with Anneke, an NJCL friend from Boston, and her friend, Lauren. One of the things we did was a Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? game sponsored by Model UN. It was very basic geography. By sheer luck (and good timing with a buzzer—they were playing Jeopardy! style, where you can’t buzz in until the end of the question), I managed to make it to the finals, where I had to point at the countries the host named with a laser pointer. Of course, crossing the border of the country counted as “pointing,” so I just pointed at the continent and waved. I managed to get enough to go for the price stash, so I now have a DVD of X2. After having our share of chocolate, bubble tea, and liquid nitrogen ice cream, we headed for some frat parties, which I honestly thought were rather boring, mostly because I don’t dance (I’m white, male, and Jewish—three strikes) and don’t play pool.

Around midnight, I headed back for the Student Center, where ESP was sponsoring a series of interesting/amusing lectures. My favorites were the ones on black holes (the 7 ways black holes can kill you) and zombology.

After the zombie lecture, I couldn’t bring myself to stay up any longer, so I staggered (not really) back to Next and went to sleep.

And now for your other story:

During Spring Break, Mom took my car to the mechanic to get the oil changed. The plan was for her to drop me at class (because, let’s face it, Vandy classes are like a juggernaut: you just can’t stop them). However, the shop called back and said it was ready, so Mom, in all her wisdom, decided that we were going to go retrieve the car now. Never mind that class started in 15 minutes. I could afford to be late, after all.

So I get the car and speed (not in the literal sense) back to Vandy, where I nab the first parking spot I can find. I then go to class. Without putting money in the meter.

There was a $20 ticket waiting for me when I got back. Mom was kind of ticked, but she called Vandy Parking, and the excused it. So there’s your story about how I didn’t have to pay Vandy any money.

And one last brief piece of quizbowl news: Jae, Peter, Dallas, Will, and I are all committed to going to Chicago for the NAQT National Tournament, which will be awesome. So not only will we have a full team, but we’ll have our usual full team too. Which means we’ll have a chance.

I swear I had every intention of writing a long, beautiful post last night about all of CPW. This is because I know now that Ben Jones and the other MIT bloggers read my blog (shame on me for linking it from their sites), and I would honestly love to get paid to blog next year.

The quick summary was that CPW was awesome.

The slightly less quick summary of awesome events is: the Caltech Cannon, Tactics of Zombie Survival, Eric Lander, Stata Center, Free Course VI (EECS) t-shirts, Meet the Bloggers, campus tours with some guy whose whole name I couldn’t catch (Jack something?), Wall Street Trading Game, a capella concert, crowd surfing beavers, and Capture the Flag in the Infinite Basement.

There you go. You can read the long summary when I’m not completely loaded down with homework I missed / didn’t do.

I still have a separate list of things to discuss. It will be done…I promise…no, really.

On a final note, though, right before I left CPW, I gave MIT the papers accepting their offer of admission.

Check it out!

I’m posting this largely because I’m excited, but also because I’ve gotten 30 hits to the site since I linked to it on MIT Admission Officer Matt’s blog.

In other news, Mrs. Whittaker let me borrow one of her better brushes (the ones we got turned out to be pretty bad), some rice paper, an ink stick, and an ink stone. Xue also loaned me some liquid ink, which is good, because I couldn’t figure out how to get good ink out of the ink stick. I spent the two hours before decisions came out practicing my 横 (horizontal) stroke. I can mostly end it well, but the beginning of the stroke still gives me problems. Mrs. Whittaker ran off some sheets in Chinese that have an outline of a good stroke with the path of the brush on the inside, so I made a practice sheet of about 40 strokes per page and just traced the stroke over and over again.

So yes, it’s officially been a Long Time since I posted. As a result, this one’s going to be big.

Deal with it.

First item of business (now almost a month old) is Science Bowl. After throwing two teams together of quizbowl nerds and science geek seniors, we spent two days a week this semester practicing old rounds. With a definite feeling of impending doom, we headed off to Pellissippi State Technical College for the state tournament. To compensate for Lucas quitting, we adjusted the teams to try and make my team (which, by a freak accident of paperwork, was MLK II) as strong as possible.

To our surprise, not one, but both of our teams totally owned that tournament. We were two of the six undefeated teams at the end of the morning preliminaries. In the playoffs, we pulled off such feats as beating both of the Oak Ridge teams, who won the championship last year. After winning the first two games in the playoffs, my team had a bye, so we watched the other team play McCallie, a prep school in Chattanooga whom we had beaten in the preliminary rounds. They however lost, which meant that we got to play McCallie. Although we had the upper hand on the easier questions because of our speed and quizbowl experience, the further into the tournament we got, the harder the questions got. We lost to them also, going into the losers bracket of the double elimination tournament.

At this point, MLK I was in position to play for 3rd and 4th place. They beat Oak Ridge II again, meaning that they got to play us. We beat them, although I’m not entirely sure if we actually beat them or if they let it happen. Then, we advanced on to play McCallie yet again for the championship. Although we held our own for a while, they had a depth of knowledge that we just couldn’t match. We ended up taking home 2nd and 3rd place, which is really quite respectable, given that we were a new team.

The other cool thing about Science Bowl is that it’s funded by the Department of Energy. So, unlike most tournaments which our trying to make money, this one was trying to shower it on us. The trophies were a good 3 feet tall, and every player got a bag full of science toys—3-D puzzles and the like. In fact, DoE even covered transportation and lodging. All we had to pay for was dinner on the way there.

Moving on to more old stuff: our internet connection. For a while we’d been experiencing a problem where our cable modem would reboot itself every 10 or 15 minutes, leaving us without an internet connection for about 30 seconds. Yes, I know, big frickin’ deal, but it’s annoying. We had the Comcast people come out, take a look, and supposedly fix the problem, only to have it start again the next day. Finally, I convinced Dad that it was probably our cable modem, not the line, and he finally caved and bought a new one.

This calls for a story of its own. Comcast people are really idiots. It’s not enough to hook up the cable modem to the cable line. They have to match the modem with your account, presumably to make sure you’re not stealing bandwidth and all that good stuff. So after hooking up the modem, we call Comcast and give them the serial number and MAC address of the modem. They then put us on hold for quite literally 20 minutes while they go and do their magic. I honestly don’t know what anybody could possibly do with a serial number and a MAC address that would take 20 minutes. Dad’s theory?

“Oh, she’s gone to get a cup of coffee.”

Whatever. I’m done with homework and want an internet connection.

“Dad, it’s been 15 minutes.”

“They must’ve had to make another pot.”

After we got the new modem installed, we didn’t have any problems with spontaneous disconnections, but I did have a problem where it seemed like packets were getting dropped. I’d load a webpage and sit there for a minute and nothing would happen. I’d try again, and it loaded without trouble. I’m thinking that somehow my BitTorrent connection (whose bandwidth usage was supposed to be limited both ways) was saturating my connection. Once I finished downloading my stuff with it, I killed it, and the problem went away. My computer really is just stupid.

Close your eyes, and imagine that I can do transitions. You do not notice the lack of writing skills as I move from topic to completely unrelated topic. It appears seamless. The connection between Comcast and school is undeniable.

So the past two weeks have officially been building up to Spring Break. And by building up, I mean we haven’t done anything. Rather, I don’t suppose we haven’t done anything; rather, I just am very good at not doing anything. In economics, for example, I generally do my homework within the first 5 minutes of class, and nap for the rest (or do Sudoku puzzles). In English, we’ve been reading poetry again. Like I told Ms. Howell, “It’s like AP Latin, only you don’t have to translate!” Chinese, on the other hand, has been rather annoying, because we just finished up with the chapter on shopping. There was lots and lots of vocabulary, because the lesson covered clothing, colors, and money (formal and informal terms). More on recent developments in Chinese later.

Of particular note was the fact that Vanderbilt was on Spring Break last week, meaning that Xue and I spent 3rd period all week sleeping on Mrs. Broyles’s awesome couch. I also went to orchestra every day, which was good, since Friday was Concert Festival, the annual event where MLK gets straight Superior ratings because our music programs are just awesome.

Speaking of schools, I got a very pleasant surprise last Thursday: a letter from Stanford. I was really taken completely by surprise; I had heard of other people getting early notices, but that was only from Vanderbilt, and they were only sending them out to minority students. The bad news is that Stanford’s Admit Weekend is the same weekend as TJCL State Convention. And I really don’t care how idiotic people think I am, I’m definitely going to TJCL. In any case, MIT is putting their decisions online Saturday, so hopefully it’ll be a moot point.

Interestingly, I’m not as nervous about MIT now than I was for EA decisions. I honestly don’t know why.

I thought about putting a really bad transition about college and coffee here, but I decided to spare your eyes the pain.

As some of you know, we have had an automatic espresso machine at our house. My parents got it for themselves for their 25th anniversary. It’s one of the really automatic ones, as in it held its own beans and one button did everything from grind to espresso. However, Mom was talking to tech support for some reason, and they told her that they were taking the machines of our model back for a one-time only repair. Mom was of course skeptical, but it turns out that they discovered a flaw in the wiring. They had submitted it to one of those consumer agencies, but couldn’t call it a recall until whatever agency it was said so. In order to get a head start on the influx of faulty machines, they started taking them back for “one-time repairs.” However, they also offered the option of upgrading the machine to a more recent model. Mom finally went for it.

So now we have our new espresso machine that’s even more one-button than before. It has three presets for coffee, and two of those have an automatic doubler function (i.e. one button for a single shot, another for a double). But wait, there’s more! It also comes with an attachment for the steamer that automatically froths or steams the milk, which it siphons in from a cup sitting next to the machine. The timing on the steamer can be programmed as well, meaning that the end result is a two-button cappuccino. It’s really nifty. And since I’m a good blogger and support companies that I like, it’s the Capresso S8 (the link is to the S9—they only have the S7 and the S9 on the website).

On the night of Friday the 3rd I got an IM from Scott St. Marie, Ohio JCL President, inviting me to their convention, which was March 10-12. That was sort of a surprise. Thanks to the magic of e-mail, I had all the necessary approvals and plane tickets by that Wednesday.

The convention was a lot of fun. I spent most of the time with the OJCL officers, many of whom I already knew from Nationals, and with the OSCLers, whom I also knew from Nationals. Actually, since the OJCL officers were mostly seniors, they were good friends with the OSCLers, so we didn’t really fraternize with the OJCLers that much. I helped put out a OJCL Convention Ear, which, for those who haven’t been to Nationals, is the mid-convention satirical publication typically put out by the SCLers. We were originally going to do an issue of the Torch, but the OJCL Editor decided he didn’t want the Torch associated with the complete mockery we made of the JCL. Good times, good times.

We also played several games of Mafia, which gets much more interesting the later at night it is. The best game was when our god stacked the deck to make sure the mafia would win.

Next random transition (I’ll just say it for you—if I’d just update more often, each topic could get its own post and I wouldn’t have to come up with bad transitions)…

On Tuesday Béla Fleck and the Flecktones played Live in Studio C, a show at our NPR station that features local artists. Since Mom spends way too much time answering phones during their fund drives, she has connections with most of the people at WPLN, so we got to go and watch. We basically got a private performance. Really, really awesome. Based on the songs they played, their new CD should be rather awesome as well. Again, link happiness is a donation of PageRank to things of awesomeness.

Last but not least, I said I’d come back to Chinese. Since we finished Lesson 9 on Wednesday, we’re spending the rest of the week doing Chinese calligraphy. Calligraphy, as in with a brush and everything. And, since our wellness teacher is out of town for the rest of the week, Xue and I are skipping 1st period to go and get more practice. Today I spent most of 1st period trying to get the horizontal and vertical strokes down. By the end of 2nd period, I was doing a little better with the feel and flow of things, although the only character that I managed to write to my satisfaction was 人, or rén, which means person. I tried to add an extra horizontal stroke for 大 (dà, big—think of a person standing with their arms spread to show just how big something is—that’s the picture) and completely screwed everything up. Mrs. Whittaker is letting us buy the brushes we use afterwards if we want, and Xue said she could give me some ink, so I think I’ve found a new hobby for Spring Break. It’ll be much more productive than sleeping, in any case, and Mrs. Whittaker says that calligraphy is like meditation if it’s done right.

I’ll post pictures if I ever manage to write anything worth seeing. That being said, don’t count on seeing any pictures anytime soon.

And now, since it’s the day before Spring Break and I have no homework, I’m off to bed.

So…we’re going to start with today and work our way backwards, because I still haven’t figured out just how much or what I want to say about this weekend.

Grades are difficult to comment on without saying anything incriminating (of myself and the teacher), so I’m going to avoid them for the most part. Just know that being a second-semester senior at MLK is awesome, especially when one has mostly easy classes.

The class particularly worthy of commentary is US History. After doing no work for the first half of the grading period and almost failing, I pulled the grade up to a pride-worthy 96. You may wonder how I accomplished such a feat. Well, I talked a lot in class, earning me the student teacher’s scorn (with the odd request to shut up) and lots and lots of class participation extra credit points. Also, we had three tests, each of which is worth the same as almost all the points from the first half of the six weeks, and I basically kicked their butts one at a time.

We also had another test in economics today. I thought it was pretty easy for the most part. Actually, it was all pretty easy. I mean, you know a test is to long when you get to the fifth question whose answer is some variation of “diminishing marginal returns.”

We’re reading The Importance of Being Earnest in English. I finished reading it today in class. It’s really quite humorous. However, I would encourage those that have read the whole play to draw out the family tree of the main characters once they’re finished—the relationship between Ernest and Gwendolyn proves to be an interesting one. And for the sake of those that haven’t read the play, I will say nothing else.

For a difference of only 30 calories, a Java Chip Frappuccino tastes a whole lot better than the White Chocolate Mocha one. Actually, I really find it hard to believe that the difference is that low. And that they have the same amount of sugar. Obviously, the point of getting a frappuccino from Starbucks isn’t to taste the coffee, because actual Starbucks coffee is pretty lousy, but to get an overdosage of sugar. That’s why the Java Chip Frappuccino is the best one, and why the White Chocolate Mocha really fails as a frappuccino.

Yes, I’m very opinionated when it comes to frappuccinos.

Now, I shall attempt to discuss this weekend.

I was invited, as an admitted student, to a preview weekend for WPI. We were going to leave on Saturday after the quizbowl tournament, but the tournament was cancelled due to snow, so Dad and I changed flights and left earlier.

We flew into Providence via Charlotte on two puddle jumpers. There wasn’t a jetway for either; the back of the door formed the stairs into the plane. This was a new experience for me, as we always fly Southwest, and they only use 737s.

The drive from Providence to Worcester should be about 40 minutes. Of course, we got lost almost any time we had to make a turn, so it took us closer to an hour. The main problem was that there was one point when we were supposed to get off of a highway, go through a few local roads, and then get back on a different highway. However, due to some (well, actually, quite a bit of) construction, the two highways had actually been joined together.

I spent most of the drive working on LJXP. Once we got there, we decided to go see Firewall, the new Harrison Ford movie and the only thing that looked worth seeing. It wasn’t worth seeing. It’s like Indiana Jones, only Indiana is about 20 or 30 years older, he has a computer instead of a whip, and the explosions seem even more unnecessary than usual. It just really wasn’t very good.

Once we got back to the hotel, I kept working on LJXP until I had version 1.4 hammered out. Of course, we ended up getting stuck at the Providence airport for 3 hours on the way back, so between the drive back to Providence and the time at the airport, I finished version 1.5. Actually, since I didn’t have any internet access, I had to convince the plugin that I was running a LJ server locally. It makes it very simple to do work on LJXP in the future when I don’t have internet access.

I slept rather poorly at the hotel, and then headed over to WPI for the typical welcoming. We then had a student panel to discuss WPI’s project system, and all of the panel members were far more excited than is natural. Next, we were split into smaller groups where we ate lunch (WPI actually has pretty decent food) and did some icebreaker sort of things. (They figured that since we were all admitted, we might as well start to get to know each other.)

After that was over, those that hadn’t been on a tour before were offered a chance to tour the campus. We were put into a rather large group, but the tour guide was quite good (”The idea is that you change one atom and you can re-patent the drug. In return for saving them millions of dollars, the drug companies will in turn give you millions of dollars”). He was also very frank about what he thought of WPI, which was good, although most of his complaints were rather superficial.

Finally, I was matched up with my host for the night. Because I know my parents read this, it’s probably not a good idea to say anything else.

The next morning, after breakfast, I went to a philosophy class with my host and his friend. I think it was Intro to Ethics. They were discussing Hegel, but all I remember is concluding that philosophy remains a big load of bull.

The second class I went to was with my host’s friend; a Scheme (programming language) class. There I learned that Scheme only barely gives you more tools than Assembly, and that apparently all Scheme variables are really pointers in disguise. I’d probably have actually done better if I had been to all of the classes instead of just lecture 22.

The major thing I observed about WPI was that students seemed to be taking the easy way out. It was something of a point of pride that it was possible to get decent grades, travel places, but all while doing very little work. In particular, I thought their handling of failing grades was rather odd: failures aren’t recorded on the transcript.

Basically, WPI remains a safety school. I could go there if I wasn’t given any other option, but I wouldn’t choose it over any of my other schools.

With the exception of some jargon that I’m unable to translate, I can now effectively put my usual chronological blog posts into Chinese. Should I be disturbed by that?

For example (This will be enhanced over the usual post by incorporating some of the standard sentence patterns we’re using in Class. It will also be translated in a moment. Please excuse the mess I make of the Chinese language—my main issue right now is a complete inability to translate compound sentences),

今天我六点起床。洗澡以后，我吃早饭，到学校去。因为明天我睡觉很晚，今天我很累。

第一节课是健康课。我做第六节课的功课。
第二节课是中文课。因为昨天是情人节，所以老师给了我们巧克力。老师今天给我们生词，汉字的小考。考试以后，我们练习新课文。我们念“李友的一篇日记”。
第三和四节课在Vanderbilt。我们学k-forms in Rⁿ。老师两个星期以来没给我们功课。
第五节课是历史课。我们今天有帝国主义考试。我觉得考得不错。
第六节课是经济课。老师也给我们小考。因为我做了功课，小考很容易。
第七节课是英语课。Carla给同学们饭。吃以后，我们念Macbeth.我不喜欢Hamlet，但是我很喜欢Macbeth,因为董很容易。

Ok. That’s enough of that. I expect several angry Chinese-speakers to be banging down my door momentarily for the brutal slaughtering of their language. Actually, that proved to be somewhat more difficult than I expected, but a lot of the issue was vocabulary.

Translation:
Today I woke up at 6. After showering, I ate breakfast and went to school. Since I stayed up late last night, I was tired today.

First period is Wellness. I finished my homework for sixth period.
Second period is Chinese. Because yesterday was Valentine’s Day, our teacher gave us chocolate. Today we had a quiz over new vocabulary and Chinese characters. After the quiz, we studied a new text. We read “Li You’s Diary Entry.”
Third and fourth periods are at Vanderbilt. We studied k-forms in Rⁿ. Our teacher hasn’t given us any homework for a couple of weeks.
Fifth period is history. Today we had a test on Imperialism. I don’t think I did badly.
Sixth period is economics. We had a quiz on our homework. It was easy because I did my homework.
Seventh period is English. Carla brought us food. After we finished eating, we read Macbeth. I didn’t like Hamlet, but I really like Macbeth.

See? It’s just like one of my normal posts!