Staying Home from Skool

I woke up this morn with a headache and an unhappy belly. So I called in sick (or my mom did) and I slept until 10, when I was feeling better. So I got up, ate leftover dim sum, and cleaned my room! Yay! And then I did nothing for a while, though my Rubik's average is now 1'25". I really need to work on my cross and F2L.

Anyways, I kind of lounged about until Jay came to finish up our Sickle-Cell Anemia project. And finish it we did not. So I was stuck with finishing up the paper. Thanks to Kaeri, I was able to use Infotrac to get the "three different types of sources" our Bio teacher wanted. Did you know that you can cure sickle cell disease (in a manner of speaking) by giving the kid healthy stem cells? Too bad the current Prez vetoed stem cell research...

So we had to print every article we had used.
I got the stuff from infotrac, then I went to the first article and hit ctrl-p. A minute later, I was like "Why is it still printing?". It was 31 pages. Coupled with the infotrac stuff and the actual paper, it was 42 pages. (The paper was requested to be 2-3 pages)

This is what I said.
"No. I am NOT printing anything else."

My mom came in, and I told her about that, and she started lecturing me on defiance... Of course I defied her and just didn't print anything else. I would rather be defiant and feel that I've done right than be compliant and feel that I've done wrong.

Right. So that's your story of the day. And your philosophical statement.

Bah

I feel like the internet has nothing for me. 

Epiphany!

My tennis coach brought up a good point today: I have to focus on every stroke, on making every stroke work out, instead of just going through the motions.

My tennis game has so much in common with my life. And I've been  a zombie for a long time... I gotta change that if I'm going to do anything cool or exciting. 

All sorts of exciting things!

In this post you'll see:
- a super-easy recipe that I stole from my sister!
- a rave about Google Sketchup!
- ... okay, I guess the title should be "2 exciting things".  Oh well.

Recipe first:
Easy Garlic Bread! Yay!

INGREDIENTS:
- toaster oven
- bread
- butter
- garlic powder
- shredded cheese (optional)

PROCEDURE:
1. Stick the bread in the toaster oven. (450 degrees)
2. Once bread is lightly toasted take one piece of bread out and butter it a lot. It doesn't matter if it's not really even, once you put it in the toaster oven it'll melt and smooth itself out.
3. Put the bread back in the toaster oven, watch carefully. When all butter melts, take it out again and put as much garlic powder as you want on it, then put it back in the toaster
4. When the toast is toasted to your idea of "perfect color" take it out, sprinkle cheese on it (optional), and eat! Then brush your teeth or chew gum to get rid of the garlic breath.

---

Now, on to Google Sketchup!
2 words: ease of use.
Example: My first try with Google Sketchup was to make a spaceship. It's taken me about an hour of fiddling, only reading 2 paragraphs of tutorials, and I should be able to post it here soon!

Right, that rave wasn't well thought out, but I don't have loads of time. I hope I'll get around to blogging again soon!

Birthday

My birthday was yesterday! It was just like a normal Saturday, except for the fact that I went to Roaring Camp Railroads for most of the day. But now I'm 14.

Also, Spirit Week was last week, it was fun! I got orange and green hairspray! And ran out of hairspray before lunch on Color Day (orange for the frosh) and on Green Day! Whee! And then there was homecoming, where we crushed Santa clara 42-7!

Then there was the Homecoming dance Saturday night. Which I didn't go to. I heard it was really fun though. It might have been cool to go on my birthday, though. Everyone else was there.

Today was Chinese school. Dad couldn't go so I couldn't run away to math circle. But I got to talk with Lillian and see the Ekkhiad map that she's working on. Yay!

I rediscovered KoL the other day. A few weeks gone and there's so much more content! That's hella wicked cool!


Okay, done ranting about stuffs. Ugh. Tomorrow is another school day.

Pep Band

Pep Band rocks! We killed Wilcox 42-14 today... and I'm pumped up from playing in the Pep Band! Whoooooo

To Do!

Long weekend is coming up (I'm waiting for Varun to finish his math hw so we can check)
I want to do these things:
Tennis
Homework (before Tuesday)
Hollow Book
Shoreline?
Clarinet
Oh, here's his IM. Gotta Go!

EDIT: I was sick on Wednesday. I guess auditions for me will be tomorrow =/

Music

Band seating auditions are tomorrow... I'm nervous. And well-practiced. If about half an hour from like 9:30 at night the night before counts as well-practiced.

Well, I didn't end up posting "tomorrow", but I'm back!

WARNING: Here There Be Useless Records of My Life.
So: My buddha bracelets broke a while back. And now... They're fixed! With help from Jo-Ann's (for the black elastic) and Mom (for the tips on how to re-braceletify them), I now have my bracelets back! Wheeeehooooo!

In other news, I think I'm finally starting to get the hang of swimming. I can breathe easy when freestyling, and I can do elementary breaststroke, sort of. We're gonna do disrobing (get your mind out of the gutter, we're trying to swim in here!) on Thursday. Woot.

I've rediscovered KoL as Alexander Square. I'm currently in a Pastamancer HC run, with no prior HC skills (and only 1 ascension), for those who understand what I just said. Its new content and new items are enough to keep me happy for a while.

Useless Records of My Life Are Behind You. You May Start Reading Here.

Been a few weeks

So, I've started school. For three weeks already.
Here's my schedule, for all those that wish to know:
1. Band
2. English
3. Bio
4. PE
5. Social Studies
6. Math
7. French

Wahoo.
I have a dA account now. Absolutsauron is my name.

I'm learning to swim (finally) in PE. With like 211823 people who use teaching me as an excuse to not swim laps. Wahoo. Math is interesting so far, we're talking about i. Also there are like 9 ninth graders in the class. Evan, Patricia, Nick, Varun, Joseph, Grant, Erika, and me. 8 people. Yey. French is okay... lots of boring homework though. Oh well. I've been up late the past few nights, so I'm going to go to sleep. Hopefully I will post tomorrow to fill in on some stuff.

First, news from life:
I got a job working for my dad, packing textbooks and preparing them to be shipped off. It pays pretty well: I've earned around $50 so far, and after today's work maybe even more. I get the money on a weekly basis, so I'll be getting my first paycheck tonight! Wewt!

I went earphone shopping with my sister a while ago and we found these nice earphones which had only one drawback: it was retractable, and the retracter was really heavy. And I broke open the retracter so now I own cooler earphones!

I got RK Launcher, and it is so much better than ObjectDock just because it eats less memory. If you have ObjectDock, get RK Launcher! If you want to show off your wallpaper, don't get ObjectDock, get RK Launcher! If you don't care about those extra 8 megs of memory that will be freed up, get ObjectDock!

Enough of these trivialities; let's get on to cooler things than my life!
The Planiverse is one of the coolest books in existence. In it, AK Dewdney (a professor at some university that I've forgotten the name of) describes a two-dimensional world, and how his students came into contact with it. It makes much more sense than Flatland, just because many things in Flatland are arbitrary. For example, in Flatland, "North" and "South" equal "Up" and "Down", respectively. Don't believe me? Read this and think again:

By a Law of Nature with us, there is a constant attraction to the South; and, although in temperate climates this is very slight -- so that even a Woman in reasonable health can journey several furlongs northward without much difficulty -- yet the hampering effort of the southward attraction is quite sufficient to serve as a compass in most parts of our earth. Moreover, the rain (which falls at stated intervals) coming always from the North, is an additional assistiance;

So this means that he arbitrarily sets "up" as north. But then he states:

Windows there are none in our houses: for the light comes to us alike in our homes and out of them, by day and by night, equally at all times and in all places, whence we know not.

If rain comes from "up" in our world, and so does light, why doesn't Flatland light come from his "North"? By his description it seems that it is illuminated from a third dimension, but then why doesn't the rain come from the third dimension and why don't the Flatties get pressed in one direction from the third dimension?

Okay, now let me ramble on about how cool and utterly superior the Planiverse is.
Firstly, gravity works in a similar manner to that of our own universe: The Planiverseans that we learn about live on a circular planet called Arde. It orbits around a star called Shem, in an elliptical orbit with eccentricity of 0.52. We come into contact with an Ardean from Punizla (the western half of Arde's single continent) named Yendred. He often tells the students about the world around him, and it is through him that we learn about the rest of the world around him. Many things are different in two dimensions, such as:

1. String cannot be tangled
2. A single thread can close off a space
3. Sails are useless as the mast will catch wind anyways
4. You can only ever talk to two people at a party, and that is determined by the order you came into the party in (of course you can climb over people but you don't know who's on the other side of him)

I'm only scratching the surface here, but it is truly an amazing book that describes a well thought-out universe that works in two dimensions. Unfortunately, our bad and evil Palo Alto libraries don't have it, so if you want it talk to me.

Now: My first posted work!

Here's the link: Wallpaper

That's it for today, sorry for the long post!

Long Time Gone, Xiaman's Blogspot

So it's been forever since I posted. I have an announcement, so listen/look/read carefully.

Howl gargle howl howl gargle howl gargle gargle toot howl gargle field of design blogs. Message repeats. This blog will occasionally have pretty pictures in it as a result of my forays into the field of design blogs.

In other news: I have been to China, and miraculously I have come back alive. We went to the rail yard that my dad used to work at, and it was pretty big. As in, about 500, 600 meters wide and 1 km long. We also went to my grandfather's old home, ChangZhou. It was... interesting, and we went to the ruins of a city from the Warring States period of Chinese history and got our shoes all muddy. And then we went back to Shanghai and lounged about for 3 weeks.

I also got a Rubik's Cube. I am attempting to figure out how to do it by myself, but I'm not sure I can. I can only get the first layer. I bought Flood, the third They Might Be Giants album. Their lyrics are very cool and geeky.

I'm going to watch Superman Returns with my sister today. I'm usually not that into superhero movies, but it was that or Pirates.

EDIT: I added a bunch of links to the sidebar. Check them out!

Feeble Attenpts at Pen Tricks

I was trying to spin my pencil in Chinese School on Sunday. I got marginally better, and now I can get around 10 percent of my spins to go around my thumb. Not moving my thumb while spinning is proving much harder than I thought it would.

When I was taking a break from pencil-spinning I put the Rubik's Brick (which is a 3x3x3 cube that you can make with 9 pieces, each made of 3 minicubes attached to each other by at least one edge. See Rubik's Bricks here.) I made it into a cube, but two bricks' colors are wrong. Rrrawr.

Today, when going to Carnegie with my mom I saw a guy coming out of the observatory, who my mom and I promptly asked to let us into the dome and look around. It was pretty cool; the dome swivels with the telescope. It's an optical telescope, but you can't see the picture it receives if you're looking at the telescope because there's no eyepiece. The image is transferred to the two computers sitting to the side of the telescope. Right now it has a spectrometer attached to it.

Tomorrow is Open House, so no homework tomorrow! I'll have to bring my mom to Jordan, though. I want to just let her wander and go talk to my friends... heh. Fat chance. Also, before Open House Jordan Tennis team (4th seed in the league! Wewt!) has a match which we should win easily. Before the match I'll be working on my serve with Jujhaar, which reminds me that I have to call our coach, Laura, to see if I'm playing in the match tomorrow.

Treb from Spring Break

I just took some pictures of my trebuchet made out of popsicle sticks that I made during spring break. I resized them, so now it's kinda bandwidth-friendly.
This is the swinging arm. The boxy thing is filled with pennies, which weigh 80 grams. The arm is 1 popsicle stick long, and I used a red-hot nail to burn the axle hole.
This is the frame, seen from the front.
This is the frame, seen from the side.
This is a firing.
A detail of when the trebuchet is cocked.

Bike Troubles

So I was biking to ballboy practice today. I realized it wasn't at Taube South so I set off for SCRA, but when I started biking a nail popped my rear tire. Waaah. I walked my bike home.

There's my story of the day!
Don't forget to check ekkhiad.blogspot.com and ekkhiad.eggbits.com for cool updates!

Housewarming. Blogwarming.

Well, I just moved from my lj... I wanted to escape from the community there. True, my friends from lj won't be here, but I figured what the heck. Blogger hopefully won't net me pointless comments, or at least not as many as I got in lj.

Anyways, Jordan did the May Fete Parade today (84th year!), and I've been hearing that we kicked the other schools' posteriors. We played Semper Fidelis, a Sousa march. It was fun, people were cheering for us and all that. The carnival was interesting, I saw lots of little kids trying to throw ping-pong balls into fishbowls and whatnot. And I got a $1 can of Coke. Go me, for gaining more experience in wasting money (what should I have done? I was thirsty after playing clarinet for an hour!).

Next tennis team match: Wednesday. Hopefully we'll win this one and advance in the playoffs. I have a feeling we're going to play Egan again sometime... they ruined our winning streak and are going to pay. :)

-John