So I’m back at school, and it’s the 2nd semester of my senior year. College admissions are out of my hands, and unless I fail something, my grades this semester are almost, but not quite, insignificant. That’s a very calming feeling.

Speaking of college admissions, I still need to get Ms. Nash to send off my transcript for UTK. And check that she fixed my transcript…

So I’m not quite done, but that’s not the point.

I don’t remember much from Wednesday and Thursday. Few teachers actually did anything. Plus, since Vandy is out right now, I’m feeling the full lightness of my senior schedule. With wellness, study hall, and orchestra, it takes a lot to put me under pressure.

I do remember my last two classes from Wednesday. Sixth period was my first economics class, so we ran through first-day-of-school material. Class rules, textbooks, workbook money, and ending class with a discussion of whatever economics-related stuff we could come up with. Somebody mentioned what caused Enron to collapse, and Ms. McKerley explained that the stock price had become overvalued, and investors realized that and started selling. So that was all fine and dandy, except for one problem: that’s not what happened to Enron. Enron was hiding its losses in small subsidiaries which were made to appear as separate entities…or something like that. I’m not sure if Ms. McKerley was trying to simplify it for the fresh meat or if she just didn’t know.

Our textbook, by the way, has an amazing ability to obfuscate the simple. I have read two line definitions of concepts, understood them, and then read the two page explanation of the definition that followed, and been left thoroughly confused. So I’ve more or less abandoned the textbook, at least for the time being.

So far, I don’t quite get the material when I do the homework, but by the time we’ve gone over it, I understand. Understanding her interpretation of opportunity costs and production frontier curves took a while, because it’s somewhat counter-intuitive, but I do get it now. Luckily most of my friends have had economics already, so I can always go to them.

We spent Wednesday in English doing personality tests, primarily the Myers-Briggs. I turned out to be an ISTJ, but based on descriptions I read, that doesn’t seem right. I think ISTP is more likely.

Thursday was nondescript. I honestly remember nothing.

But that brings us to Friday, which was a rather good day.

First of all, it was Homecoming. I know—our school is screwed up, because Homecoming was supposed to be months ago. I’ve never figured it out. As part of the festivities, we had our Alumni Basketball Game (seniors vs. alumni) in the afternoon. The important thing was that classes were shortened all day.

In orchestra, we decided to revive our old Spades group from several years ago, albeit with some new players. Libby and I played Max and Bergen. We’ve decided to have a persistent score, playing weekly to 2000 or something like that. From what I remember, I pulled a nice blind nil and we pulled ahead by 90 points.

Ms. Kelly, the amazing substitute teacher from last semester, came and subbed for Ms. Schwartz. We had a good argument about the Wikipedia and what should be done about it.

Finally, we did zen gardening in English.

Then I left, because I didn’t want to go to the alumni game.

In summary, last week blew by. I just have to survive 17 more of them.

On a side note, is it just me, or am I losing eloquence as I get further into this?

I tried to watch my DVD of Serenity that I bought from eBay on Saturday, only to discover that it was clearly a bootleg. There are lots of different reasons, the most convincing of which being that the UPC is for Love Actually. I watched it last night anyway, and now Mom’s trying to get our money back. At which point I’ll cave and buy it off of Amazon.

I will try to provide a brief review, not only without spoilers, but in haiku:
Was a good movie
Many main characters died
Series was better

Today, I discovered that Emmy had actually seen Serenity and a few episodes of Firefly too, so we talked about it for a while during lunch. Brett actually joined in and we had a long, nerdy discussion that involved Lord of the Rings (the movies), King Kong, Spiderman, Superman, Batman, and The Justice League (in comic, TV, and movie forms). It was quite enjoyable, actually.

I also began to understand why I’ve been feeling so uneasy in Chinese class. We’re progressing well, but I’m concerned that we’re learning fill-in-the-blank Chinese. I think that our ability to comprehend and speak the language is, for the most part, limited to slight variations on very trite example dialogues in the textbook. I’ll spare the LiveJournal users the hideousness of a sample conversation (I’m still working on getting that to work), but we can basically schedule get-togethers in person or over the phone, with blanks for time and what we’re doing (and a limited list of activities at that). Part of it is due to our very limited vocabulary, which probably doesn’t break 100 characters. If we don’t learn to be more creative with what we say, I don’t think we’ll ever be able to reach fluency.

Other than that, we still aren’t doing much in any classes.

Outside of school, I’ve been doing some work on the LiveJournal Crossposter, my most recent masterpiece. I’m slowly trying to make it handle all the complexities of posts more intelligently, without putting any burden on the user. Having a reachable target has made this much better than other projects I’ve attempted. Unlike others, the code has remained organized, and I’ve taken great care to comment it well. I tried to publicize it as best as I could in the WordPress community, and it seems to have worked well so far—I know of several people currently using it.

There are, of course, a few bugs left, and several new features. Unfortunately, all of the remaining issues are going to take a reasonable deal of time and consideration to solve, as almost all of them involve some sort of input from the user, and I don’t take that lightly.

Once I get this working to my satisfaction (and maybe before), I’m going to take the structure of LJXP and apply it to Xanga. Unfortunately, Xanga doesn’t play nicely with other services, so it’s much harder for me to interact with it, especially through a program. In order for it to work, I will have to incorporate some code from the Xanga crossposter I used to use, which broke when I upgraded to WordPress 2.0.

Until then, it’s once more late at night, and I’m still not adjusted to running on caffeine alone.

I’ll try to update more frequently (and more concisely as well) in the future.

Since I’m running out of time before school starts back up, I suppose I had better get this out of the way.

This has quite probably been the best winter break I’ve ever had. I feel rested and refreshed, I think I accomplished something (and I wasn’t planning to, which enhances the effect), and the only downside was that I had to spend much more time with my parents and brothers than I usually like to during the week we were out of town.

My primary accomplishments over break:

• Staying up until circa 3:00 every morning and getting up circa 11:30 so as to thoroughly screw up my internal clock
• Watching the entire series Firefly over the course of a few days
• Finally writing the summary of the NJCL Fall Planning Meeting for the website (although I’m still waiting for Mr. O’Neil to set things up so it can go live)
• Taking several nifty photographs of stuff in Oregon and around here
• Almost finishing the requisite editing of said photographs (I have 18 left)
• Moving the site to a new host
• Writing a WordPress plug-in to copy posts to LiveJournal
• Having several people using the aforementioned plug-in, liking it, and even submitting some bug reports.
• Getting my site properly indexed by Google again, so the placeholder page I put up during the host transition isn’t cached by Google anymore
• Rising some in the ranks of Google due to people linking to my plug-in
• And, the big one, finishing all of my college apps, forgetting everything I learned last semester, and generally preparing myself for the last semester of high school

I’m unusually pleased about that last one, although forgetting everything may prove to be a little rough, especially in Chinese. It’s highly probable that I won’t remember how to say much more than 你好 and 再见. And as far as writing goes, I can never remember how to write 再 anyway.

For the record, I refuse to reflect on last year, make any New Year’s resolutions, predict what is to come in the new year, or do any of those sorts of things that people annoyingly like to do.

And so, at this point, I can think of nothing else to say. I will probably have more stories tomorrow once I get home from school.

Oh! There is one thing I’m excited about: we have a quiz bowl tournament in Cookeville on Saturday. Those are the good ones, and maybe we can win this time. Or at least kick Knoxville West’s or Rossview’s butt, because we haven’t beaten either of them in a good while, and I’d really like to. (I do have friends on both teams, so I mean that in the nicest way possible :))

So I finished my Stanford application around 11:30 CST, submitting it with about 2 hours to spare. I was actually surprisingly satisfied with my essays, but on the whole, I don’t think the application did a good job of talking about computer stuff. The long essay was a gush-fest about JCL, and the short essays talked about peer tutoring, the philosophy of math, and jumping Avram’s car—basically an adaptation of an earlier blog entry (yes, I am rather link happy today :)).

So I now find myself with 3 essays, 2 applications, and 1 supplemental letter between myself and being done with this whole damn processes. To be more specific, I have 2 essays for Caltech, 1 for Carnegie Mellon, write a supplemental letter to MIT begging them to accept me (I’m giving serious consideration to sending some of Mom’s brownies with it). And I’ll go ahead and submit my UTK application too.

I should offer my congratulations for Zach Fenno (accepted to Brown), and for Xue and Christine (Stanford), and my condolences to all of the other people who were deferred or rejected.

The hole in the wall,
originally uploaded by thenerdsangle.

Signs around the wall,
originally uploaded by thenerdsangle.

stones that used to be in the wall,
originally uploaded by thenerdsangle.

In other news, I have new plugin that automatically copies any posts on my site to Xanga, so those of you that have had subscriptions to my Xanga for a year and a half will now actually see some action.

Still trying to find a functional LiveJournal crossposter.

Next order of business: feeds. I’ve getting an awful lot of hits to the Atom and RSS feeds on the site. I don’t know if they’re from Technorati-type services, search engines, or what, but I’m trying to track them down. If you use the one of the feeds to read my blog, please leave a comment and let me know.

In other news, part of our wall fell down. This actually happened a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve decided that I should put some photos up just for fun.

By the way, the links bar on the right is rather empty right now. If you want me to link to your site, just let me know.

Right now it’s all stuff that powers this site, more or less.

So it’s not perfect yet, but this new software seems to have all the features I’m looking for. It’s called WordPress, and so far, it’s very easy to configure. We’ll have to see how usage is.

If you want to read posts from the old blog, go to http://www.ebroder.net/old_blog/.

All the posts are still there.