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.

…so from now on, I’m only doing photography in black and white.

So today I was trying to print out a photo I took in Italy for a photography contest that Mom thinks I should enter.

Here’s the one I picked:

Now, one would think this would be a simple process. You edit the photo, you print the photo, and the print looks like what you see on the screen.

Wrong!

It’s actually worse than that. Not only is it all but impossible to get a print to look like what you see on the screen, but because of how Photoshop handles color, the colors change depending on whether or not you’re inside Photoshop. That is, if you open it outside of Photoshop, the colors are different, and those colors are different from what you get in the print.

Did I mention that things look really different depending on if you’re using Windows or Mac?

This is such a basic problem that you’d think it would have been dealt with years ago. I don’t think it’s an unusual expectation for my photos to look the same anywhere I open them.

Ok. There’s my rant for the day.

Edit: Did I mention that, just as I had a more or less acceptable solution, our printer ran out of ink?

Also, as part of the photo contest, we have to title the photo. Any suggestions?

Speaking of photos, I’ve edited and uploaded the photos from Vienna. You’ll get your post soon.

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.

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.

Yes, this is a short post, just like the last one. I have a longer post in the works, but until it’s finished, you’ll have to do with this one.

In the last 5 days, I’ve received 150 hits to this site from Matt’s blog. Which, if I’m not mistaken, makes commenting on Matt’s blog the single most effective thing I’ve done to boost my traffic. Ever.

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.

This entry is down to four stories.

First, we went to a quizbowl tournament last Saturday, which we won. We drove almost everyone else into the ground, which for the most part wasn’t surprising, since Rossview and Knoxville West weren’t there.

My throat’s been kind of sore lately (nothing major, just a cold sort of thing), and I didn’t want to strain it, lest I lose my voice in the middle of a match or something equally scarring, so I let Dallas be captain for the first four games. However, I decided after the fourth game that my power hunger and ego were affecting my ability to play, so I took the captainship back. Interestingly, I did actually play better (my performance for those first four rounds was rather mediocre).

The one highlight of the day was getting to play Ezell-Harding in the semi-finals. So far, we’ve only played them three times: once at this tournament last year, once at State, and on Saturday. We lost to them at State, and we beat them last year, but the questions were really screwy, so I didn’t count it as being worth anything.

This year, though, the questions were much better, and we beat them by a solid margin - 300 to 200, give or take. We all played very well—there was even a question involving Wikipedia. Disambiguation was the answer, so you can guess how the question ran.

All in all, it was a good tournament, and I had a lot of really awesome buzzes (thanks to remembering stuff from science bowl and quizbowl practice earlier in the week) and got the winning tossup in the finals round, which made me happy. Actually, it wasn’t really the “winning tossup”—it was the one that ensured the opposing team couldn’t tie the game, but let’s not mince words.

Next topic: Mid-state JCL Convention

I had a good time. Since I only sort of know Latin at this point, I don’t take many tests, so I snuck out early and helped get the grading machine working, and spent most of the day helping the machine grade tests, with the exception of when I was moderating certamen.

So, before I go back to ranting about how graphic arts are hurting America, I’ll talk about certamen. Evan Latt and I moderated Latin I (or Novice) certamen (which is, by the way, Latin quizbowl, for the uninitiated). It was largely uneventful, as most Latin I’s don’t know enough to make any borderline answers or protest anything. Also we had Upper Level (Latin III+) observers for most of the questions, who handled the answers that weren’t on our sheet, since neither of us really still remember Latin.

The one interesting episode was when the buzzer set broke in the middle of the finals round. After someone buzzed in on a tossup, it just died. Luckily, they got the question, or we really would have been in trouble. We moved into the room where Upper Level finals had just finished, so any momentum was destroyed, but it all worked out in the end.

Now, back to grading. This year, for the first time in 3 or 4 years, MLK didn’t win the overall sweepstakes; Hume-Fogg did, beating us by about 1,000 to about 700. But there’s more to this story than meets the eye.

Since I spent all day in the grading room, I started keeping my eye on the sweepstakes totals after all the academic tests were scanned. I saw how mixing the Latin V’s in with the Latin IV’s (which was supposed to have happened beforehand) brought MLK’s total down and Hume-Fogg’s up. I saw how fixing a majorly screwed up reading comprehension key did the reverse.

And then I saw how entering the graphics arts results gave Hume-Fogg 400 of their 1,000 points.

So Hume-Fogg beat us in the overall sweepstakes. But I’m OK with that. After all, MLK and Hume-Fogg are academic magnets. And we beat Hume-Fogg in academics. I say let Hume-Fogg have their moment of glory and their trophy that’s an inch taller than ours. Because we beat them where it really counts.

Besides, they had twice as many people as we did.

And now for a demonstration of my total inability to transition…

Tiresias, the server this site is hosted on, experienced a hard drive failure on Tuesday. This in and of itself is not a big deal; site5 just needed a few hours to transfer all the data onto a new hard drive. After that, they rebooted the server and everything was sunshine and daisies. For about 30 minutes.

Then, all of a sudden, I couldn’t contact Tiresias at all. It didn’t respond to HTTP, pings, anything. But only if it came from my IP address.

Long story short, it was all very annoying, and I was in tears that I couldn’t check my e-mail or my website, and actually, I think it was all karma again, since I had just subscribed to the wp-hackers mailing list, which got something like 120 messages while I was gone. After several exchanges with site5 tech support that were getting nowhere, the server suddenly appeared again, and there was much rejoicing.

So, I was originally going to call this post Website Withdrawals, but I didn’t, because this next story makes for a much better title.

Our math class just gets more and more amusing. I think it’s because we’re doing lots of manifold related stuff, which is one of Professor Hughes’s areas of focus, so he has a bunch of jokes, like the parallelepiped.

So today, we were discussing line integrals over vector fields, and he was making sure we understood what vector fields were. I shall come as close to a quote as possible (I’m working from memory here).

You all know the Beatles, right? Well, you know they had a song called Strawberry Fields. If you think about a strawberry field, it’s a field, and at every point, there’s a strawberry.

He goes on to also invoke the analogy of a corn field, but, he noted, not a corn field like the one in Kansas where it’s flat and all the stalks point straight up; we wanted one that was kind of hilly so the corn stalks were pointing in different directions—that’s a vector field.

To make up for my last post, which had a rather boring title, I’ve spent a long time working on the title for this one. It will be explained in the 2nd story.

Yes—I’ve actually outlined my post to make sure I cover all the good stories.

1. First, we watched a video on alcohol and alcoholism in wellness on Friday. I took notes on what I believe to be the most important lessons from the video:

   • Teens are more likely to drink if they think it’s OK to drink.
   • Teens drink because they want to be like their parents
   • Drunks are aggressive because society expects them to be

   Good video. It was from the ’80s, I think.

2. Quizbowl tournament at Cookeville High School on Saturday.

   We went to another tournament in Cookeville this weekend. The tournament was well run, as Cookeville ones usually are, although the questions aren’t as good as they used to be. We dominated the preliminaries, going 5-0 with about 300 or 350 points per game.

   In our third game, we played Rossview, which I was actually looking forward to. The final score initially was 300 to 280, but we had a protest. The question read, “Give the past form of the infinitive to drive.” So I buzzed and said “to have driven,” which is a past infinitive. However, they didn’t take it; the answer they had was “drove.”

   I protested, so each team wrote down answers to the bonus questions; we both got all of them. Since those 30 points would make the difference, they of course looked into the protest and sustained it in our favor.

   Rossview ended up going 3-2. Guess where they seeded. In a playoffs bracket of 8 teams, they seeded 8th, we seeded 1st, so we got to play them again. Like I said, quizbowl karma.

   We held our own, but I for one wasn’t on the caffeine high I had going 3 games in. We fell behind by the last 5 questions and lost by about 60 or 80 points. On the plus side, they went on to win the tournament.

3. I finally got my file synchronization working.

   Every minute, any documents that aren’t music or pictures are synced between all three of my computers. Music and pictures sync every 30 minutes. This means that I can now spend more time switching between Windows and OS X.

4. New blog design.

   In case you didn’t notice, I put up a new design for my blog. I’ve been working with Catherine for a few weeks to come up with a design, and I really like how this one turned out. I’m also going to start working with her in her web design company, so we’ve been cleaning up that site in addition to putting my own together.

   For my site, I took the default WordPress template and adapted it by changing only the stylesheet. I changed a few other elements of the HTML for other reasons (such as being more specific about which parts of the site are under the Creative Commons license), but all design work was done through CSS. Ms. Howell thought that the font size was too small, and I may have fixed that, but I’m not sure. Her screen displayed the font unusually small for some reason.

   On the Kinetic Core site, Catherine already had a template put together, so I made sure that all the layout was done without tables and that all the headers and so forth were semantically coded.

5. The Bible Board

   Our math professor is very picky about having the entire board to work with. When we first started classes in our new room this year, there was a small sign in the corner asking that people clean the boards and put the desks back when they’re done with the classroom. Professor Hughes took it down.

   Yesterday, we came in the room and found two Bible quotes on the board, apparently from some Bible study or something. I don’t remember exactly what they were (and I don’t want Google associating my site with Bible quotes anyway), but we decided that we should leave the sign up to see how the professor would react. He walked into the room, walked up to the board, ripped the sign off, and threw it in the trash.

6. Worcester Polytechnic Institute

   I got my first college acceptance letter yesterday—I was accepted to Worcester Polytechnic Institute. It’s a reasonably small science/engineering school outside of Boston. In the grand scheme of things, this means that I can turn down an acceptance from UTK, and an acceptance from anywhere else will probably mean I can turn down WPI. It was intended more as a safety.

7. Economics Charts

   We’re doing supply and demand in Economics. I always type my homework assignments when I can, and I’ve been trying to use L^AT_EX for everything, so, following the open source yellow brick road to its conclusion, I’ve been using gnuplot to generate my graphs. However, creating arbitrary supply and demand shift graphs gets old very quickly. So, last night, I created a complete set of graphs that I can just drop in that represent any change in supply and/or demand. For example, if supply increases and demand decreases, I just type in \input{sidd.tex} and the graph is automatically inserted. Once I finished all of the possible graphs, the homework took a matter of minutes.

8. LiveJournal Crossposter

   One of the larger issues with LJXP when it first came out was its lack of support for non-ASCII (aka, non-Roman alphabet) characters. I’m very excited because today I finally figured out what was causes the miscommunication between my plugin and LiveJournal. It was actually a rather easy fix—the LiveJournal interface has a value called “version.” If version is set to 0 (or not set at all), LiveJournal assumes that something non-Unicode is coming in (causing misinterpretation of non-ASCII characters). However, setting the version to 1 causes all communication to take place in Unicode, allowing for support of any modern character set. This is so much better than my other solution.

   Also, someone has volunteered to translate all of the messages for LJXP into Russian, which will be kind of nifty.

9. Thoughts about Bush’s State of the Union address (I plan to use these for US History, so they will represent a combination of my humorous thoughts, my scared-of-impending-armageddon thoughts, and my serious thoughts)

   • Bush only mentioned September 11th three times, and once indirectly.
   • Opposition to the war was noted only in extremities: if you’re not for the war, you’re an isolationist (which, in and of itself, is impressive for Bush—a five syllable word!).
   • He for once admitted that troops will be withdrawn eventually.
   • (When he read from Sergeant Dan Clay’s last letter) “Oh! So he’s wiretapping troops now!”
   • He apparently expects Hamas to reject any terrorist tendencies now that they’re part of the system.
   • I don’t think he understands the difference between HIV and AIDS, because they were only mentioned as a single entity.
   • Lots of the speech focused on measures that would enhance security at the cost of liberty (which is all increased security ever leads to), but there was no mention of the privacy of the American citizen.
   • “Protectionists want to escape competition, pretending that we can keep our high standard of living while walling off our economy.” This reads as an endorsement of outsourcing to me.
   • He used his economic policies as a way to draw in the true conservatives.
   • Bush wants to cut taxes but reduce the deficit.
   • He mentioned that non-security discretionary spending is down consistently. He didn’t mention security spending.
   • On that same note, he mentions halving the deficit, i.e., he plans to do nothing about the debt.
   • Many privacy activists are very concerned by much of potential new technology in the health industry. They are concerned that, with records digitized and everything tied to a single number, they will have no ability to protect the privacy of their medical records.
   • He wants the world to buy goods made in America, but he wants the entire American labor force to be well educated. Goods aren’t made in America without unskilled labor. Just like with the budget, he’s trying to get the best of both worlds.
   • Bush somehow expects to be able to convince 30,000 intelligent professionals to switch to teaching. I sure hope he’s got some serious increases planned for teacher salaries.
   • He disguised the exact goal, but Bush is asking Congress to ban much more than just human cloning. He’s also asking them to ban stem-cell research and many other important scientific undertakings. Way to stay ahead of the curve, there.
   • Bush’s mention of New Orleans was brief and very close to the end; I almost thought it wasn’t coming.
   • He talks about how AIDS can be treated, and he clearly uses the present tense. Apparently the Pentagon has been doing a heck of a lot of secret research.
   • There were some rather amusing shots of McCain looking annoyed, while Hillary Clinton looked very happy.
   • The Supreme Court Justices seemed to spend the entire speech trying to decide if, as justices, they were allowed to endorse Bush’s policies.

Yeah, I’m boring and can’t come up with a better title.

So…now for some items that I think are worthy of note.

First, Apple released its MacBook Pro, an Intel-powered replacement for the Powerbook. As best as I can tell, it’s smaller, faster, gets better battery life, and is generally the most kick ass laptop I have ever seen. I can’t wait to get one. Cain and I agree that the only downside we see so far is that it doesn’t ship until February.

In preparation for getting a new laptop, moving off to college, and generally moving from one to multiple primary computers, I’ve been trying to work out some way to sync documents back and forth among my computers. Normally, this would be easy. There’s a utility called Unison that’s designed to do exactly what I want. However, there are problems. First of all, the directory structure of documents on a Mac is different from that on Windows is different from that on Linux (which doesn’t really have an organization standard). That can be dealt with easily enough, though. The second issue comes from non-standard characters in filenames. Thanks to having weird things like Les Misérables in my music collection, the Mac goes haywire and attempts to make multiple copies of the same directory. It’s all an issue of text encoding, which is really just a pain in the ass to have to deal with. Syncing things other than weird characters shouldn’t be an issue, though.

In Youth Symphony on Monday, we started the rehearsal with tuning, as always. We then proceeded to play the March Slav all the way through. This doesn’t sound like much, unless you know how Youth Symphony runs. We never play anything all the way through. Last semester, we hadn’t run through any of the pieces before the concert itself. Anyway, that just sort of surprised me.

Next, either Monday or Tuesday (don’t remember), I received my first pieces of college junk mail that was actually targeted at me. University of Pittsburgh sent me something about Jewish opportunities, while University of Mississippi sent something about becoming fluent in Mandarin. Actually, I’m not entirely sure the thing from Mississippi was supposed to be targeted, but it was still odd. Of course, I tossed them, like I do with all my college mail (I just like to read them first).

I’ve done some more development on the LiveJournal Crossposter. Now that people are starting to use it, the feature requests are really pouring in. I’ve done my best to accommodate the ones that I think make sense so far, although there’s still the major issue of the post headers that has to be dealt with. There are still some issues that have to be dealt with carefully, though. I don’t want to put too many options into it, because I started the project to escape the complexity of Live+Press. However, it’s not like people are making bad suggestions. Anyway, I’ll just keep trying to make everyone happy.

I’m slowly starting to work with Catherine to come up with a new design for this site. It’s kind of hard because I have no idea what I want. I’m much better at spotting what I don’t want.

Also, I talked to Mr. O’Neil (my NJCL mentor) today. It’s everyone’s fault, but we’ve been out of touch for the last month or so, but we’re going to talk tomorrow about the NJCL site and all that good stuff, so once again, I can deal with everything. The officers have also decided to overthrow Zach and establish a oligarchical dictatorship.

Now, this next bit is purely so I can write a post and check all of my categories. It just makes me feel special. Yesterday afternoon I checked with all of my colleges to see what they were still missing. It seems to be turning out surprisingly well. That being said, I still can’t confirm my status at Stanford or Caltech. MIT, Columbia, Worcester, and UTK still are missing items, although Columbia is still processing.

And finally, we had a snow day today. It was wonderful. Last night I gave up on any chances of us getting out, so I finished all my homework, leaving me with absolutely nothing to do. Of course, I still have some reading to do for English. And my math homework that’s due on Friday. And we were supposed to have an economics test today. But that’s OK. Today was a relaxing day.

Oh yes. And for those of you that aren’t familiar with the concept of a Nashville snow day, I invite you to enjoy my photo log of the event. Trust me - this is how all of our snow days are.

And now, I shall go do my math homework. Because in a sick way, I kind of want to at the moment.