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