I forgot one of the better moments of yesterday, but it requires some setup.
For the less mathematically-enlightened, here’s a picture of what most people (falsely) believe to be a parallelopiped:
Professor Hughes’s described something far different: a rare creature which, according to his reports, has π parallel legs.
Wednesday was a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. As in, one of those bad days that you only have every couple of years, that convinces you that somebody is out to get you, at least for that one day.
The day actually started out OK. Wellness, Chinese, and Math weren’t all that bad. But then it got much worse.
Xue and I got back to school, walked into the office, signed in, left the office, and went up the third floor for Science Bowl practice, like we always do on Mondays and Wednesdays.
We step out of the stairwell into the 3rd floor corridor, and Ms. Rush is standing there, waiting to catch us and write us up for a lunch detention. Dr. Heron (the science bowl coach) even came out and defended us, but Ms. Rush all but completely ignored her.
I knew we weren’t supposed to be on the 2nd and 3rd floors during lunch, but apparently there’s a 5 minute grace period following the start of lunch, after which setting foot off the 1st floor becomes a capital crime.
And, in case you hadn’t figured it out, Xue and I get back to school well after our 5 minute grace period has expired.
Mr. Brown showed up too, but refused to do anything until he could talk to Ms. Edwards.
My team then lost at science bowl for the first time ever. Not that I mind, and I’m glad that the two teams are competing well against each other, but remember that this is a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, so that just contributes to the overall Badness.
The lunch detention thing will eventually be resolved, but let’s do this in chronological order. I walked into US History, and President Bush is talking on the TV. Again, not unusually bad, but we’re talking about collective crapiness.
At the end of the period, we got progress reports for US. This part really was bad. Apparently I have been completely delirious and senioritic for the past three weeks. My average? 75.
Skip forward to 7th period, by which point I’ve realized that, if I don’t get the day of my lunch detention changed (it was supposed to be yesterday), I would probably get in trouble for being late again. So I figure that I need to get it taken care of, so I go to the office and wait to talk to Mr. Brown.
For 30 minutes.
I don’t even think there was anyone in the office for a good part of that time.
Anyway, I go in there, talk to him, he calls in Ms. Edwards, who had just gotten back to the campus, tells her the story, and she excuses me and Xue.
So I’m in a slightly better mood, and I return to English class, where we were in groups of two identifying 5 character traits of Macbeth and Banquo from Act I, Scene III. Of course, since I was late, I didn’t have a partner or time to finish, and Dr. Gilmore said that I could turn it in tomorrow/yesterday/Thursday, but it would be a late grade.
And, of course, the parents weren’t very happy about US. I’ll leave that to your imagination—remember, Jewish mother.
Thursday was actually much, much better. Didn’t make up for Wednesday, of course, but it was clearly doing its best.
It started off well—as per my punishment, I talked to Ms. Schwartz to beg for ways to save my grade, so she showed my test from last Friday. I got a 96, which, in and of itself, bumps my average up to an 83. Plus, she expects to have 2 more tests before the end of the six weeks, which is a lot of points still on the table.
I think the lecture in math class was the clearest one I’ve ever had. We very logically went about building up to the uniqueness of a matrix’s determinant and found a very easy way to work them out. It all made sense, which was good.
I totally owned the quiz in US History, which isn’t saying much, because they’re always pretty easy, but I felt like I really knew the material, which is always a good feeling.
We had a test in economics, where I think I did pretty well. I always finish tests quickly; I finished this one with 30 minutes to spare, so I spent the rest of the period working on my math homework, and managed to finish 2 of the 7 problems.
Today I did almost nothing, although I did release a new version of LJXP.
Tomorrow we have a quizbowl tournament in Lincoln County, which means that I should have gone to sleep about an hour ago. Oh well.
And that’s my life for the last three days.
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.
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:
Good video. It was from the ’80s, I think.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 LATEX 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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
On Monday. the School Board almost passed a proposal to remove the 7th and 8th grades from MLK. They delayed the vote until tomorrow, when much of the student, parental, and faculty body will be involved with the Winter Band/Orchestra Concert. In addition, the board did not notify us of this potential change through any official channels. The only reason we are aware of it is due to a tip-off to one of our guidance counselors from one of the Board members. Our principal was not aware of this proposal until Ms. White informed her of it.
I’m posting the speech I plan to give to the MNPS Board of Education tomorrow. The purpose is to focus on the benefits of MLK’s 7th-12th grade education scheme. Anyone from the area who knows the value of an MLK middle and high school education is invited to attend the meeting tomorrow evening. I know so far that Al Cocke (PTSA President), Phillip (SGA President), Xue (recent winner of Siemens Westinghouse Regional Competition), Ms. Lee (amazing 7th grade science teacher), and I (boring, ordinary senior) plan to speak.
Surprisingly, this was a good weekend. Better than I’ve had in a long time.
It helped that I had almost no homework.
And that I didn’t have to do Mid-state auditions.
In any case, I woke up around 11 on both Saturday and Sunday. I spent a good part of both days playing on my various computers.
However, I also managed to get some serious work on college apps done. As in, I submitted two this weekend. Worcester Polytechnic Institute, a college near Boston, sent me one of those e-mails where they offer you a “custom” application. I think it’s a result of National Merit Semi-finalist goodness. In any case, they waved the application fee and the essay prompt was generic enough that I could use my MIT essay (more on essay recycling later), so I went ahead and applied.
I also reused the MIT essay on my application for Columbia, so I finished that one off and sent it in. All that’s left there is an interview…and giving Mrs. Krinks and Ms. Howell the recommendation paperwork (whoops!).
I also made major progress on the Carnegie-Mellon (aka Common) App. All that’s left is an essay for the supplement where I talk about how much I love computers.
So about this whole thing of recycling essays. It’s awesome. Seriously. Write one good (well, decent at least), generic essay, and you can use it anywhere. So far, I’ve used the long essay I wrote for the MIT application on the apps for WPI, Carnegie-Mellon, Caltech, and Columbia. And if I end up applying to UTK, I’ll use it there too.
Of course, there’s still the issue of the Stanford essays, which are really a pain.
So now it’s almost midnight, and it’s time to start the cycle of suffering just one more time.
Oh how I love being an exam-exempt senior.