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.

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, 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.

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.

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.

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.

In hindsight, actually, it’s less that the quote represents my feelings, and more that I liked the quote and it was the most pertinent one I could find on short notice.

I have been censored, and it’s not a pleasant feeling.

As per my personalized gag order, my parents have informed me that I’m not allowed to discuss the issue in question. However, if you follow the blog observantly, you will have noticed that which has come and gone.

However, I am allowed to rant and rave about how censorship is hurting America. Although, past what’s been said, there’s not much to say.

To make this truly worth its entry in the Dear Diary category, here’s a summary of what’s happened of late.

Phillip’s birthday party was on Friday. After some time playing around with iBooks, we went and stuffed ourselves with very tasty Chinese food. Next, we watched Ong-bak, a Thai martial arts movie that supposedly has no stunt doubles or wires. It was really pretty fun to watch, although I have no idea what the plot was—we fast-forwarded through anything that wasn’t a fight or chase scene. Next, we similarly speed-watched Tom Yum Goong, which we referred to Ong-bak II, although it’s not. The fight sequences in both were really fun to watch, although I liked Ong-bak better than the other one.

Saturday, Sunday, and the better part of Monday were all spent working on the essays for the Presidential Scholars Program. I’m almost completely finished at this point, and I’m particularly proud of my long response—I think I managed to pull off some stylistic flair that’s usually absent from my writing. It’s either that or complete bull; I’m personally rooting for the former.

Libby, Aileen, and I recruited Ms. McFadden to play spades with us today during lunch. She didn’t know the rules for spades, but she was obviously well versed in cards; she picked up on the rules pretty quickly. Even with some initial misunderstandings about the rules, she and Aileen beat Libby and I by braking my nil on the last trick.

I’ve mentioned before that we’re reading Macbeth earlier. I’m really enjoying it. I think that, of the great Shakespearean plays, Macbeth is the most accessible. It’s short, the plot is clear, the language isn’t very obtuse, and the characters are just amusing. Especially when you have some of the people in my class reading the parts out loud.

Quizbowl this weekend is really going to be something of a pain. Thanks to a combination of Mock Trial and Science Olympiad, we’ve lost almost all of our quizbowl squad, including Will, Dallas, Peter, and Jae. Instead, I’m going to be stuck with middle schoolers and Todd. It would seem that a proper rematch between us and Rossview won’t happen until State.

To apply to be a Presidential Scholar, one must fill out all of the usual information about extracurriculars and community service, and have your school send in a form about you. Then you have to write six essays, with the shortest being about 425 words long (with the note “Please be concise”). For the most part, they are similar to questions on typical college and scholarship applications, but I can’t use any of my other writings because of the length.

The highlight, though, has to be the actual “Candidate’s Essay” (the others are apparently only considered “short answer” questions). It has a character limit of 10,600 characters. If you do the math, that works out to about 3 pages of single-spaced text.

Luckily, upon looking at the paper form, I discovered that they only have just under two pages of space, so my essay probably won’t be that long.

In any case, I think the term white elephant applies.

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.

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.