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.

“Intelligent design” cannot be mentioned in biology classes in a Pennsylvania public school district, a federal judge said Tuesday, ruling in one of the biggest courtroom clashes on evolution since the 1925 Scopes trial.

From CNN.com.

There may yet be hope for seperation of church and state.