What a Day!

Weekend rather. Wednesday was school, school was good, played volleyball after school, worked on spiking, came home, led youth group, went to bed. Slept in. Woke up late (ten or so) worked on homework and such for five hours. Played Ultimate Frisbee for two hours. Came home with a friend (Jeffrey). Worked on a RPG we are making together. He spent the night. Next morning is church. After church is church picnic, with another game of ultimate and a game of volleyball. Get home with six friends. Test our RPG game for two and a half hours with friends. Update blog. Go to bed. I am all sore from all this running and jumping and throwing and catching, and my brain is dead from one hard core thinking session after another (my calculator program that is supposed to calculate die rolls for me is still not working, four versions latter...) and several major revisions have been made to our RPG. I can't think straight anymore, so if you want an analysis of how the RPG test run went, you can go to Jeffrey's blog, which is fortunately already linked. I hurt all over. Good night.

I'm Flying!

Whee! 256kbps internet! (Be though silent all you people with mad fast internet.) everything goes twice as fast as before! I am feeling the inexorable call of research...gotta run. Sorry people.

All Alone

Well, Abe went to Bab al Mandab for 10 days, Mom and Dad went hiking with some visitors for the next day and a half, Peter and Lydia are spending the night elsewhere, and I've got the house. I am considering moving my amp downstairs and really blaring pieces of my music collection over it. I could play some of the really heavy ones that the rest of my family doesn't appreciate too with out any complaints... Demon Hunter, here we come. I am looking forwards to being a bachelor. Hahaha! I could also make an addition to Xebec... We shall see. The day stretches full of possibilities before me...

Violin Run In

Well, I forgot my guitar to band class today, so I had to make due with a violin. Curious things them. First you get this thing and you put it under your chin. Then you look at it. Then you take this stick thing with more strings on it, and to produce horrid noises, you rub the strings on the stick thing on the strings of the violin thing.

Half an hour latter, I was able to quasi sight read the simplest of songs. If you gave me an hour and a half or so in a quiet place with a stick thing, a violin, and some music, I should be able to figure the basics out. My intonation was terrible, but I have a great ear for that kind of thing. It was one of the things I was born with: the ability to hear these really irritating out of tune things that nobody else can hear. It drives me mad. I was nearly ready to beat the violin thing against a wall and break the stick thing over my knee by the end of it all. (out of tune noise is one of the best ways to irritate me.)

Something May Be Wrong...

I just finished taking a shower, and instead of trying to put my shirt over my head like I'm supposed to, I for some reason tried to wear them like pants. I was busy fantasizing about beating up robbers in a break in. I woke up when I realized that my foot wasn't fitting. I then began to worry about the state of my mind. I tried math. Things seemed to be working, but then, has two plus two always equaled four? I asked Dad. He said yes. However, he then said, "but if you had said five I think I might have said yes to that too," which got me even more confused and worried, so I called after him, "so is it four or five?" no response. This is where you can help. Is two plus two five, or is it really four after all?

A Holiday from Heck

That about sums it up. I have done a large amount of school work on almost every day of this week off. Tomorrow school starts up again, and I still have a 1200 word paper to write that is due tomorrow. The econ project that has been killing me for the past several days is mostly out of the way now, all I have to do is rehearse my lines and wave pieces of paper around now before I give the presentation. If we don't get an A on this project I am going to go postal. The type in a school. The one day that I did nothing was the very first day of this crazy "vacation." I have done more work this week than on a normal week that had school. Largely school is when they teach you stuff, you don't actually work, its the homework afterwards, of which I have been doing an inordinate amount. The goal of teachers is to kill seniors. I am convinced.

Ultimate Dinosaurs

I just got back from ultimate Frisbee, where I ran around in circles for two hours straight, attacking my team with a piece of plastic. I hit Keith's hand today. Most people don't come back for seconds... I throw fairly hard. I love that game, but for some reason nobody was playing very well, so it was a sort of muted fun.

Ok, I just finished listening to "kingdom of the Dinosaurs" by five iron frenzy. However, it is far too stupid to update. This guy just yells "kingdom of the Dinosaurs" again and again to this stomping tuba music in the back that is not all that well orchestrated... I have no idea why I just listened to that. Don't listen to it unless you need a sanity check. If you think this is good music, you failed. This is kinda like the insanity test: http://www.owenrudge.net/various/insanity.htm I crack up every time... Legally insane.

Engine Error

Well, dad has been fooling with his internet security things again, and there is now this big huge bar that usually says "Fraud monitoring is on" across the top. However, whenever I go to my blog, it says Engine error. From this I can make paranoid conclusions:

Something has hacked into my blog and now steals everyone's credit card number.

Norton is messing up again.

The Aliens are after me again.

Speaking of different things on the computer, we got iTunes 7. I love it. It has this lovely album art viewing mode that is just downright gorgeous. I should upload all my album art just so that I can enjoy it. Apple has some zen masters designing their products. Nobody can use anything else with them, but they just work so well. (for the most part. I have this ability to crash apples just by sitting down in front of them, but then Jeffrey can crash a windows in exactly the same way.)

I am in the process of downloading Csound. I have no clue what it does just yet, however, I hope I can do some sound synthesis with it, and if it meshes with Audacity I will be most pleased. It is 18 megs (a big file for my connection). Be quiet all you people with mad fast internet. I have very little talent in the realm of music, I mostly like to make noise. I recorded one thing and turned it into mp3 using iTunes, and one day it came up when I had it randomly playing through the library. Mom came in and said, "Turn that noise off!" maybe its me, maybe its my family, or maybe I need to find a whole bunch of people who are as musically stupid as I am and make noise together.

Bab Al Yemen

Wednesday, I went to the old city with some of my friends. It is Ramadan, so we went at about 10 pm. It was packed. We wandered around Bab Al Yemen for a while, and bought a cake of sugar (the red kind is best) looked at silver antiques (don't get me wrong here, they were like silver swords and guns from before the civil war and stuff like that) Then I bought fireworks. I am physically incapable of entering the old city without buying fireworks. I just can't. Unfortunately, they didn't have any corsairs... I had to make do with double charge explosives that are nowhere near as powerful... Oh well, I guess you can't have your kiyak and heated too.

YEAH!!!!

I GOT ACCEPTED TO PURDUE!!! YEAH! And as a result, after a dull day full of computer failures, I am now hyper. Once I got off of those abominable Apples everything seemed to work fine, so I am feeling good, and I can no longer type. At all. In celebration, I am going to download some more stuff by RED. I just can't get over the brilliance of their music. Regardless of my new prestige in my life as a senior in high school, I still have to take the confounded SAT again, and on Saturday, so pray that I don't batch it any worse than I already did.

Flames

In, well, my hair. I'm fine, no one seemed to notice whatever missing hair there is and Mom and Dad don't know yet. Here's what happened so you can all laugh at me with me. (I don't doubt that Jeffrey will laugh loudest). Last night the power was out and I was working on posting calculator code on my physics blog with what remaining battery power was left to me, and I had two candles lit sitting right next to my calculator so I could see what I was doing. I heard a snapping sound, and thought, 'The candles are popping.' I looked up. Sure enough, they were snapping happily away. I looked down again, as the thought, 'my hair might be burning,' passed through some dark recess of my mind (of which there are many). Suddenly, ash began to drift downwards ever so slowly and covered the desk with blackened curled up hairs. A feeling of intense alarm swept through me as the aroma of burnt hair swept past my nostrils. The next cognitive thing I did was reach up and see if it was still burning. It wasn't, so I went back to studying in a room that didn't smell quite as good as it did before and with a little more "dust" so to speak, laying around.

On a more serious note though, I have a lot of work to do for the day after tomorrow (the ninth of whatever month it is...I really should get myself a watch that tells me the month as well as the day... Unfortunately, Casio builds stuff for smart people who can keep track of things like months, and Casio is the only brand of watch I can't shred within six weeks...I should get a job working for a watch company. If the watch survives me for a year its well worthy of being sold.) And I have no clue how I am going to get it all done, so I will log off and get back to work. Prayers would be appreciated.

Math at its Muddiest

Today several fun and interesting things happened, but first and foremost we played Ultimate Frisbee as a youth group again. People are learning. Fast. Today there was much more running, throws were lower and faster, catches were more consistent, and there was more movement, less endzone sitting. We will have a Frisbee game by the end of the year, and I am looking forwards to it. In fact, despite how I hate running, I have started, so I can be in shape for Frisbee. But I digress. This is not math. Later this evening, we had a "Quiz" random facts about just about anything. We had one "Joker" we could place as we like, and being a calculus student I was saving our joker for math. What happens? Instead of being limits and derivatives and functions and all that fun stuff, its how many earrings does Denese wear, times the number of stars on the Australian flag. Irritation. Intense irritation. Not being so observant we go 20% right out of 10. Mega bad. Bleah. It was not math it was simple arithmetic and observation. Oh well. Next time I won't put it on math.

So Thats why Lawyers are rich...

My dad sent me this really funny thing about salaries I got a kick out of it.

Dilbert's "Salary Theorem" states that "Engineers and scientists can never earn as much as business executives, sales people, accountants and especially liberal arts majors." This theorem can now be supported by a mathematical equation based on the following two well known postulates:

Postulate 1: Knowledge is Power. Postulate 2: Time is Money.

As everyengineer knows: Power = Work / Time.

Since: Knowledge = Power, then Knowledge = Work / Time, and Time =Money, then Knowledge = Work / Money.

Solving for Money, we get: Money = Work / Knowledge. Thus, as Knowledge approaches zero, money approaches infinity, regardless of the amount of work done.

I'm Not Alright

Just today I got this amazing cd from a good friend who is now in America: X 2006. I loved this song so much, plus I figured it was about time to change it. I have heard this song somewhere before, but I have no clue where...This is bothering me. At any rate, wherever I have heard it, it is by Sanctus Real. Aurellentia is still open to exploration should anyone be feeling ready for what I hope will be a fantastic journey.

Aurellentia

I am trying out beta version of blogger, and it is interesting. Very simmilar to Blogger, and you have to have a gmail address to try it, but I am trying it all the same. While fooling with it (before I put all my blogs over) I am going to follow the life of a fictional character through a war in Antarctica from before the last ice age: the magical land of Aurellentia. I have linked it if you care to follow.

Thursday

Ok, this is a tad late, but here goes. I had a cool last weekend. It was three days, due to Yemeni elections. Apparently, the army was used to influence voters out in the east where they still run around with machine guns most of the time, and I have heard rumors of terrorists and such, but over all its been purdy quiet...Except for last night. Ramadan started yesterday, and last night there were fireworks going off, and some one with an AK let off ten or so rounds under my window last night while I was trying to study. This morning at school, Andre was talking about the gun shots he heard last night, and everyone had their explosion stories today... At any rate, what with all the terror threats and such, youth group got cancelled on Wednesday, but when things stayed quiet, we all went out and played Ultimate Frisbee at SIS. I am out of shape. Very out of shape. I am staying after school today to run to get in shape so that I can actually play the crazy game next time. Ah well. I really should be working...

The Unending Flood

of nicknames. I thought that when Jeremy and Melanie left the tide would at least recede, but no. Kieth and Ms. Morieka have taken over for her. I am now "Bush" and "Hair" respectively. Sigh. Oh well, I guess it is simply part of the shape of the universe.

Word Recognition Software

I have done it. My calculator now recognizes three words: Yes, No, and Dunno, and responds to them. I am quite proud of it. I can program it to recognize more words, but it gets hairy fast. What I did was I assigned numbers to letters and then had the words (when multiplied together) demand responses. However, if I start doing long words and letters like z, the numbers will rack up in a big hurry and I will wind up writting a really buggy program. It works. I'm happy. Enough said.

Quasi English

After youth group this week (a lot of my life revolves around youth group, so chances are you will be hearing about it a lot) we were taking a taxi home. We found one for a reasonable price and got in. For all my Yemeni readers, we had one of those drivers that have had lessons in english, and for my non Yemeni readers, this involves bouncing back and forth in the two languages randomly. At any rate, we got about half way home before we stopped at this traffic light, and this big lalualui (land cruiser) pulls out from the right, drives around in a circle in the intersection, and then promptly stopped, hood to hood, with our taxi. I started to laugh, it was such a Yemeni move. At any rate, our taxi driver decides its time to show off his linguistic skill, raises his hands in a gesture of incomprehension, and says "What the fxxxing you?" I thought, yeah, I'm about as confused, but I didn't say it, I just laughed harder as the lalualui backed up, dodged two motorbikes in the middle of the intersection, and tore off back in the direction he had come from. I got a kick out of it. Its these little things that I live for.

Calculator Dependency

I have been developing bad habits. Lately, I have discovered that I can't do math unless I have my calculator sitting beside me with the cover off and turned on. It just has to be there for me to be able to think for some reason. Today, I turned it on and left it while I did my homework, even though I didn't use it once. Last night I tried to program it, but the manual is poorly written, so I guess I will just have to fool with it for several hours before I get it. I figured out how to do if/then functions physics this morning while I was only sorta paying attention.