Brettia

This layout isn’t final, just the default that comes with WP.

Update
I’ve changed the layout completely. Hope you like it.

Life’s been a whirlwind of events lately. Things are happening right and left; I barely have time to remember what I’m supposed to be doing, and I never know what’s going on with anyone else. I have seven books to read over the summer (that’s about one per week from May 20 through Independence Day). Not that I’m not looking forward to summer; it’s just that it isn’t the relief that it used to be. In elementary and middle school, you came home from school on the last Friday of the first week of June excited and happy, final report card in hand, thinking of all the neat things you would do over the summer. And the first month was always great, but then it was just boring after that.

I wonder why we even have such a long summer vacation. I think most kids would be happy with four or five weeks, instead of twelve or thirteen. As I’ve told numerous people, in Utah I was in a district that had a year-round schedule, where you went to school for a quarter (nine weeks) and then got a three-week break. Rinse and repeat four times, and you have a full 48-week school year, leaving four weeks for summer vacation. Not only that, but every Friday was a half-day. How can that not be awesome? Vacations in the middle of the year without missing school? Higher school capacities? (Only 3/4 of the students are there at a time with a year-round setup.) It seems win-win for everyone. Of course there are a few drawbacks, such as that parents would need to pay for day-care for their younger children in some cases, and year-round doesn’t work as well if its done incorrectly.

Cactus Shadows has four grades, 9-12. I thought I’d clarify that since some high schools only have three grades. Currently, we go to school from mid-August to mid-May. (Though it seems like it would make air-conditioning cheaper if it was from mid-September to mid-June, when it is cooler.) So each grade level would be one track, and sometimes freshmen, juniors, and sophomores would be in school, where as other times everyone but the freshmen would be there, and so on. Also, teachers would get a full year’s pay, meaning they no longer would have to worry about what job they’d do over the summer. I dunno why they don’t do it already.

But I should get back on track: I was talking about how I was so busy. Luckily, this is a good busy, a productive busy, not a “I feel like a rabbit chasing a carrot through a pit of vipers” kind of busy. So I suppose I’m not doing that bad. Anyway, Monday began with a feeling of excitement, since I was finally getting to switch my second hour class for 45 minutes of technological learning with Mr. Trapani. The first few days were kind of boring, but then I started following Brian and Greg, Trapani’s wonder-boys, around the lab as they fixed things.

A List of Everything I’ve Done So Far

• Helped mother of a middle-schooler figure out how to get to falconprep@ccusd93.org. No one seemed to realize that it was an email address, and not a website. I’ll have to remember to write a form to embed in the website and next year. Oh, and note to self: never recommend teachers in school->parent communication!
• Wrote next-generation school website homepage code. (Did this mostly at home.) I’ve been having some problems getting it to display correctly on all browsers. It looks fine in Mozilla Firebird and Internext Explorer 6 (SP2) on my machine, but the tabbed menu flurps out on Trapani’s computers. I don’t get it.
• Installed Fedora Core 1 (Linux) on an extra Dell box in the lab, hopefully I won’t be tarred and feathered by Brian for doing it, since it was a backup machine (though I had permission from both Trapani and Greg). FC1 is giving me trouble for some reason, first because I enabled the wrong network authentication system (LDAP), and second because no monitor seems to work; I’ve gone through four already.
• Slapped together a message posting system for staff members to post messages on the website weekly (or even more often).
• Fixed computer that had its refresh rate set to high, making it impossible to start the GUI without getting a monitor error message.

I’ve been busy, as you can see. And remember that I was giving up my English class to do this, so I was also having to work on a study guide for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a poem we’re studying. And then there’s the paper that I have to write about it later on. Rather than ramble about all this, another list:
Current and Future School Assignments
Assignment - Class - Priority - Due Date - Point Value

Neurofibromatosis PowerPoint Presentation - Biology - 7 - April 26, 2004 - 65

A very major project for Biology. I finished it Saturday, ready for presenting tomorrow.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Study Guide - Honors English - 5 - ? - ?

A study guide for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, with questions and definitions to complete. Takes about one hour per part, and there are seven parts total. I’ll be finished with it by Tuesday, hopefully.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Theme Essay - Honors English - 4 - ? - May 3, 2004?

The essay I mentioned earlier. I don’t know any details on this assignment yet.

Communist China under Mao Zedong Presentation - World History/Geography - 10 - 160 - April 29, 2004/April 30, 2004

One hundred and sixty points is a lot. Too much to blow off, by far. I’m about 75% finished, I just need to add some more videos and pictures to my PowerPoint and make a few formatting adjustments, and then I’ll be done.

AP European History Summer Homework - AP European History - 5 - ? - July 10, 2004

I have to read two books and do essays and stuff for this class. I probably won’t even get started for another month or so.

Honors English Summer Homework - Honors English - 6 - ? - ?

This one requires that I read five books. Now’s the time to sign up for a speed reading course.

Improve Athletic Scores - Physical Education - 9 - ? - ?

We’re graded by performance, in PE, not effort, so I get pretty crappy marks on exams and such, though I do fine on daily participation.

Thursday’s Homework Assignment - Honors Geometry - 8 - 10 - April 26, 2004

Missed part of class on Friday, had to make it up over the weekend. Did it Saturday.

Honors Algebra 3-4 Summer Homework - Honors Algebra 3-4 - 4 - ? - ?

Finished this in Spanish class Friday. Hooray for substitute teachers that give you too little work to be productive!

Communication Squares - Spanish 3-4 - 9 - 35 - April 30, 2004

Eight tasks that we have to do by the specfied date. All of them require speaking Spanish to the teacher, good old Mrs. Nasr. I suck at this.

Whew! This leaves me tired just thinking about it.

Spaghetti Bolognese

I have to admit, WordPress is cool. It’s a lot faster to post with than MovableType, (no need to recompile pages and indexes), and it sports a simple, easy-to-use administration area for quick, unhindered blogging. The thing can even accept blog entries by email. How cool is that?

I’ve just about given up the notion of building my own blogging system, mainly because each germination ends up getting forgotten and replaced by a new one, which supposedly will have a better architecture. So I now hearby admit defeat, for WordPress cannot be equalled in speed or features, though, after having a look at its code, it could certainly use some refactoring in some areas. (There’s barely any object-oriented code, only the database layer and Smarty.) This poses a question that I am almost afraid to ask: Is OOP (object-oriented programming) even worth it?

First of all, I barely understand the reasoning behind it. Supposedly, having pieces of code wrapped up in objects makes them easier to reuse and edit later. But the amount of time I spend just trying to get an object written and then visualize where it should go in the entire object framework is more than the amount of time I think I would save. I’m going to try out Umbrello, a Linux program that generates UML (unified/universal modelling language), a file type that can then be converted to empty PHP objects. This should allow me to generate a model of the entire object system before writing the objects themselves. Since I can generate empty PHP classes from UML, I can just fill in the blanks.

The second problem with OOP in my opinion is the fact that PHP is not a strictly object-oriented language. This is one of its perks: it makes the learning curve less steep than that of fully object-oriented languages like Java. Because PHP is not strictly OOP, it has some major flaws that make it hard to use OOP fully, such as not being able to have objects inherit from multiple parents, and so on.

The third problem is that OOP just seems so useless to me. After reading The PHP Anthology (both volumes) by Harry Fuecks, it seemed even more useless. One example in the book shows a factory setup, where one object generates others depending on the job it needs to do. This is all well and good, but the author suggests a system that seems like an utter waste of bytes, with several classes doing the work of one. It just doesn’t make sense.

I know that if anyone with a OOP background reads this they’ll melt into the ceiling, but it’s truly what I think. The problem is that there are no good tutorials for the intermediate OOP programmer; all those that I have found have been simple and easy or way over my head. I need something that gives examples and then gives justification for the techniques used, rather than just a listing of code.

It’s these very problems that have led me to consider starting some kind of PHP knowledge base, so that people can report to the world what they learn and comment on techniques posted by others. It’d be a forum of sorts, but probably something less complicated and scaled down for my needs. It would be very helpful for storing everything I’ve learned thus far for quick reference.

Anyway, that’s enough about programming for now, since only about two of my readers (myself included) will understand what was said in it. I’ve been going through my server stats lately (provided by Webalizer), and I’ve noticed that someone who has been viewing my blog has been going to…er, less than appropriate (you know what I mean) websites beforehand. (Servers can tell which site a user has just visited through the referrer header.) I think that they were searching for some kind of Paris Hilton video and came upon one of my entries that happened to mention her. I’m on to you, buddy.

As far as other statistics go, my monthly totals have been getting gradually higher, partially because I’ve added more entries, and those entries get indexed by search engines, gradually driving more traffic here. The most popular entry is still the infamous Incompatible Browser Detected entry about how Proffs.nu used to have up this incredibly infuriating page for Mozilla and Netscape and Opera users telling them how Internet Explorer was the supreme browser. Far from true. But you can read the entry if you want the full rant.

The second most visited post is the one where I commented on German toilets after reading about them on a site I found on Spoono. The top reader of this blog is me, mainly because I uploaded all those WordPress files not long ago and they each counted as hits. After than there are some other people, not Cox users, surprisingly. I can only wonder who they are.

As I read the long list of referrers, I find among them porn sites and several search engines. I guess that’s good, isn’t it? Four people searched for “german toilets” on a search engine and found Organon, and other interesting search terms were “world toilets”, “asus k8v layout diagram”, “incompatible browser firefox”, “mcafee privacy service hack” (good to see others are trying to get rid of it too), “movie hidalgo ftp server free download” (tsk, tsk), “my retainer blog 2004″ (?), “invisalign sucks”, and “oh brother where art thou odyssey worksheet” (a classmate?).

That’s about everything Webalizer gave me. Oh, and seven hits during the month of April came from Saudi Arabia. Good to know. But in January, I got hits from 18 different countries. Could someone have been trying to hack the server? Probably, but I like to think that I have an international following.
Alright, that’s all the boring stuff. Now on to more about me, because I’m the only thing that matters. That sentence wasn’t arrogant at all. And that sentence wasn’t sarcastic at all. Yeah. I’m not really my normal humorous self today since I’ve had a long weekend and some problems have come up.

First of all, my parents have gotten on to this “let’s put the kids to bed really early” streak, and it’s starting to drive me crazy. I believe that responsible children (I’d like to think that I am one) should be able to decide to go to bed whenever they feel like it, within reason. Sensible people will learn from their mistakes and go to bed earlier if they find themselves tired in the morning. Up until about 7th grade, I went to be dutifully at 8:30 each night. Then came homework doom, so I got an extra hour because of that in 8th grade. This year, I usually go to bed around 10:00 or 10:30, which is actually pretty early in comparison to some kids I know.

And until just recently, my parents never had a problem with those times. Kids my age need a solid 8-9 hours of sleep to be healthy and functioning, and, if I go to bed at 10:00, that’s exactly the amount of sleep I get. I don’t need any more, because having more sleep ends up being more stressful than having less. Let me explain:
Normally, I get home from school at 3:00, check my email and all of my daily websites for new stuff, respond to that new stuff, and dink around a little bit with some new technology or programming technique. That takes about one or two hours, since I don’t always start right away, and sometimes I do something else at the same time. At 5:00 I might start on homework or I might work on various projects for the Trapanis or my family. Lately I’ve been advising Albertsons on their technology strategy as well (more on that later). Then I eat dinner at 6:30 or 7:00, and watch Whose Line is it Anyway on Fox Family (311) for an hour. At eight I begin my homework, which usually takes me anywhere from one to two hours, depending on how teachers are feeling that particular day. After I finish homework, I blog or read or play a video game or call a friend or something like that until about 10:00, when I go to bed.

But if I’m forced to go to bed at 8:30 or 9:00, which is what has happened lately, I don’t get that time to do things that need to be done for the next day, nor can I blog or read or do all my homework at the normal time. So everything has to be moved back and done faster. Some things don’t get done at all, and are pushed to the next day. Meaning that the next day, I have more things to do in the lessened amount of time. Not to mention the fact that my mom gets all b**chy when I try to resist. I don’t understand why it matters that much.

Sure, sleep is important for good health, but I think I’m old enough and responsible enough to decide when I need to go to bed. Because if I stay up late, I pay the consequences the next day when I’m feeling all drowsy and unhappy for the first two periods. I get the point my parents are trying to make, I just don’t think they need to enforce it.

With my school nights limited, I expected to have time this weekend to do things that hadn’t been done, such as my two major projects for world history and biology. But alas, it was not to be so. Friday night was spent cleaning the house, and then we went to Macaroni Grill at Desert Ridge. It was good food. The rest of the night I just played Empire Earth (like Age of Empires or Starcraft, but better). Saturday morning we discovered that my cat had some kind of urinary tract blockage, which caused him much pain and misery (but he’s better now, thankfully). Because he was trying to pee on almost every object we own, I was designated his “catsitter” and was forced to keep a close eye on him all day Saturday, except for a few hours from about 2:00-4:00 when we (my family and I) went to this orphanage called Embrace to play with the kids and see the improvements that had been made to the building. I played Lord of the Rings Risk with my brother and some other people, and I ended up with the strongest position by the end of the two hours (though we weren’t finished yet).

My parents and I went home after that and my brother spent the night, and Saturday evening I was feeling in a strategic mood so I played Risk for the computer for a while. Sunday came, and I got out of having to go to church because of the cat (he finally passed whatever was blocking his urine at about 10:00 this morning). I worked on my biology project a little bit and then left at 2:00 to go to Barro’s Pizza, where the CSHS Literary Magazine group was meeting to decide which entries would make it into the final magazine. We had a lot of fun, and we got through 67 entries in only two hours. I actually recoginzed a few entries as possible being those of my friends, but I can’t discuss them because of privacy reasons.

After the LitMag meeting had ended at 5:00, I came home and worked on my biology project until eight, when I finished it. After that I had to burn and test some Fedora Core 1 installation CDs, and then I took a shower and started writing this entry. There ya go, I was busy, contrary to popular belief, though I didn’t have any contact with any of my friends.

And that brings me to now. I’m probably going to get yelled at for even being up this late (10:13), but I no longer care. You see, my mom was even nagging at me to go to bed on weekend nights. That ticked me off even more, since I’ve never had a limitation on weekends before. I’m usually asleep by midnight, anyway, so what’s the big deal?

One might counter that my parents are only trying to look out for me, trying to make sure I get the sleep I need, but going to bed earlier isn’t helping. My internal clock is set to eight hours, and that’s all it’ll ever be. If I go to bed at eight, I wake up at four. If I go to bed at ten, I wake up at six. It’s as simple as that. And I don’t like waking up at the crack of dawn with nothing to do because my mom nagged and yelled at me to go to bed early. In the words of Pete, from Oh Brother Where Art Thou, “That don’t make no sense!”
There’s only one last thin I have to share, and it’s slightly funny. My mom learned on Tuesday that Albertsons was going to “upgrade” the PCs in her department to Pentium IIIs. Even someone who isn’t technologically advanced knows that Pentium IIIs suck, since people see advertisements for Pentium IVs every day. So I sent mom an email with full specifications and recommendations for PC vendors, which she forwarded to her boss, the Vice President of Merchandising Execution. She was floored by this, and now regards me as some kind of technology child prodigy. She even asked me for my recommendation for a new PC for her. I responded with full specs and several models to choose from, though I don’t know yet if she took my advice. Still, I was flattered that a large company like Albertsons (2,500 stores in 36 states with 200,000 employees) would need my advice in the first place (though it turned out that the PIIIs were just minimum specifications, not what they really were going to get). Anyway, it was cool.

Fettucine Alfredo.

I’ve just switched from Movable Type to WordPress. There are still some rough edges; I’ll keep you posted as I get things working correctly.

Right now, the search system doesn’t work, so don’t use it.

Here are some specs for the computer that I want:
Realistic Goal
Case: Full-Tower Chassis (420-watt power supply)
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 3200+ w/ 1 MB buffer, 1600 Mhz bus
Motherboard: ASUS K8V Deluxe
Chipset: VIA K8T800
Memory: 512MB DDR SDRAM PC-3200 (2×256MB)
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 SE 128MB 8x AGP w/DVI & S-Video
Hard Drive: 120GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 Serial ATA 7,200 RPM 8MB Cache
Optical Drive: Lite-On 16x DVD / 52×32x52x CD-RW Combo
Floppy Drive: 3.5″ 1.44 MB Floppy Disk Drive
Sound Card: Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 - 6.1
Network Card: 3COM Gigabit Ethernet Adapter
Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
Speakers: Logitech® Z-640 5.1 70-Watt Speakers
Monitor: HP M70 17″ CRT Monitor (keep old one)
Keyboard: HP Multimedia Keyboard (keep old one)
Mouse: Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer 3.0 Wireless Optical Scroll Mouse (keep old one)

Alienware says this configuration will set me back $1850. Pretty good price, actually. But I think I can do it myself for $500 less. We’ll see.

Dream PC
Case: Alienware Full-Tower Chassis (420-Watt PS) - Space Black
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 FX-53 3400+ w/ 2 MB buffer/1600 Mhz bus
Motherboard: ASUS SK8V
Chipset: VIA K8T800
Memory: 2GB Corsair XMS DDR SDRAM PC-3200 Registered ECC - 4 x 512MB Module
Video Card: ATI RADEON 9800 XT 256MB 8x AGP w/DVI & S-Video
Hard Drive: 250GB Western Digital Caviar SE Serial ATA 7,200 RPM 8MB Cache
Hard Drive 2: 250GB Western Digital Caviar SE Serial ATA 7,200 RPM 8MB Cache
Optical Drive: Plextor PlexWriter Premium 52×32x52x CD-RW - Black
Optical Drive 2: Plextor PX-708A 8x DVD±R/W Drive - Black
Floppy Drive: 3.5″ 1.44 MB Floppy Disk Drive - Black
Sound Card: Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro - 7.1
Network Card: 3COM Gigabit Ethernet Adapter
Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
Power Protection: Belkin Universal UPS 1200VA
Display One: NEC 30″ LCD3000 LCD - Black
Display Two: NEC 30″ LCD3000 LCD - Black
Speakers: Creative GigaWorks� S750 - 7.1 700-Watt Speakers
Keyboard: Microsoft Multimedia Keyboard - Black
Mouse: Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer 4.0 - USB
Printer: Lexmark-X6170 All-In-One Office Center with 6′ USB Cable
Networking: D-Link 802.11G Wireless Base Station and USB Adapter
Headphones: Sennheiser RS85 Stereo Wireless Headphones with HiDyn Plus
Webcam: Logitech QuickCam Pro 4000
Software: Lots of games, Office Pro
And all for the low, low price of $14,500.

This entry is going to quickly develop into a rant, but you should read it anyway. And I’m even more angry because Microsoft deactivated my Hotmail account. It isn’t my primary e-mail address anymore, but I’m pretty sure there was some important stuff saved on there that got deleted. Hopefully it won’t end up being too important.

Anyone who has been reading my blog for any amount of time has probably realized by now that I am cursed with a computer that is, in my opinion, worthless. According to Hewlett-Packard, I’m almost correct: according to their PC trade-in site, it’s worth exactly $39. I somehow find it hard to believe that it was ever worth $1200 to begin with. Perhaps my parents were exaggerating, and it’s actually just a cheap, $500 almost-Celeron “starter PC”. Which I guess is like a starter home, except they sell starter PCs to anyone who is computer illiterate, hoping to make another $1000 off of them in two years when their hardware is already obsolete.

I suppose I should start with the specifications:
Processor - Intel Pentium III 533 Mhz 256K Cache
Memory - 384 MB PC-133 SDRAM (Upgraded for $50 from 128 MB)
Video Card - NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 256MB PCI (Upgrade from on-board video for $120)
Hard Drive - Seagate Quantum Fireball 20 GB ATA-100
Optical Drive 1 - HP CD-Writer Plus 8000 Series (CD-RW, 32×4x8)
Optical Drive 2 - Generic 16x DVD-ROM Drive (w/ CD playback)
Floppy Drive - Generic
Sound Card - Unknown, some kind of cheap sound card/modem combo made by a company that went bankrupt. (Rockwell Riptide Sound/Conexant Modem)
Cable Modem - Motorola SURFboard SB-400
Speakers - Gateway2000 Dolby-Surround 2.1
Peripherals - Standard Keyboard; Wireless Optical Mouse; HP DeskJet 612C Series Printer; HP ScanJet 3500C Series Scanner
Case - Generic frilly plastic thing, impossible to open (takes at least two people)
Monitor - HP M70 17″ Monitor
Operating System - Windows XP (Upgraded from Windows 98SE for $100)

Now you know my pain. I just realized that all of my sad HP products end in ‘C’ (Pavilion 8660C computer, DeskJet 612C printer, ScanJet 3500C scanner). Now I wonder what the C means, and I begin to think that it could mean one of the following: crappy, cheap, corduroy, Canada, carp, Carly [Fiorina, CEO of HP]. Too bad I don’t really like any of the possibilities. I will never buy a computer from a “discount” or “starter” vendor ever again.

And then I cringe to think of the $270 spent on this thing to keep it running. It’s just sad. I’m tired of upgrades; it’s like throwing money down a bottomless pit, or into a black hole. Worse, it’s starting to show signs of age. The fan died not long ago after four years of good performance; it took $40 to replace it because HP doesn’t use standard parts (there was this big hood thing that directed the air to the processor, rather than a processor fan). And now iTunes has been skipping sometimes when playing music, though I think it might be the sound card, not the program, that is having issues. This morning, my mom couldn’t log into her VPN because certain services wouldn’t start. It seems I’ve pushed Windows too far by keeping it running for over a year without reimaging the computer from scratch.

It’s amazing to think that, when we first brought it home, I was thrilled to be getting a new computer. I was just as naive then as one of the neighbor kids who lives nearby. His family recently got a new Athlon XP 3000+-based system made by, who else, but HP. He seems to think that he is techno-savvy, but I had to help him register a Hotmail account, and he can’t even figure out iTunes, probably the easiest-to-use program in the world. And then, when I was over at their house a few weeks ago getting the new computer set up and running according to their needs, he asks his mom if he can have some friend or another over to work on it the next day because I wasn’t doing things the way he thought they should be done. I could barely control my anger, and was about to arrogantly proclaim that I probably knew more about computers than anyone within a ten-mile radius when he pipes up again, saying, “[insert friend here] can build his own computer. He’s done it lots of times.”
Furious inside, I just kept smiling and nodding. Who was he to tell me that his friend was better just because he could put a computer together? More than likely, this friend had rich parents who gave him whatever he wanted, so it was no big deal if he fried a motherboard. And then there was silence since he knew that I hadn’t built a computer of my own (yet), though he was obviously too thick-headed to realize that computers are expensive, even when you build them yourself, and I hadn’t the money to buy all the parts yet. He still thinks I’m just some smart kid who is good enough with computers to use Word. Urge to kill rising!

But I shouldn’t take out my anger on this kid alone. Other people are the same way. They assume, automatically, usually because of my age, that I am only a self-proclaimed computer geek who is good at pretending to know what he is talking about. And what am I supposed to say? Any attempt to refute those thoughts comes off as immodest. They learn, eventually, as I shock them by miraculously making their computer run four times as fast as normal, or by getting that seemingly irrecoverable data back from the depths of the abyss. Maybe I should get RHCE or MSCE certified, or something. Anything to show people that I am more than your token geek, your simple tinkerer.

It would help to have a particularly impressive computer system. Imagine walking around with an Alienware laptop tucked under your arm. People know you’re a geek immediately, of course, but they also think, “Wow, that looks cool…that kid must know a lot about computers to get such a nice laptop.” The same thing happens when they walk into your room to find it glowing blue because of lighted fans shining through a see-through side window. What a nightlight that would be.

But I don’t even want that. I just want power inside, not a pretty looking case or a 30″ flat-panel monitor. I’m happy with a beige-box and a CRT. But even with tradeoffs, the total still comes to about $1300. Meaning that I need money. My target date is my birthday, June 21, 2004, and I only have about $600 total. Add that to promises of summer work with Mr. Trapani, and I just might make it. I can even build the PC in his lab, if I want.

But now I’m having misgivings. Is all this work really worth it? I’ve been scraping and saving (while still spending a bit) since October. I stand to get a few more bucks in birthday money, and I’m going to ask my parents to just give me money rather than gifts. But even then…I’ve worked so hard, for so long…sometimes I just want to give up. I’ve even contemplated investing in the stock market instead, which might be a better decision. It really all depends on how much money I end up having.

Conservative Budget Estimate
Current Funds: $300
Accounts Receivable: $240
Monthly Revenue: $60 (chores) + $100 (websites) = $160/month
Monthly Expenses: $60
Monthly Profits: $100
Account Total by June 21: ~$700
With Birthday Money: ~$900
With Possible Trapani Earnings (assuming $15/hour for 4 hours/day): ~$1200
So I can still make it. And certain unexpected pitfalls may come through, such as my parents finally giving in and helping me to pay for it. Just $200, or even a $200 loan, would make a big difference. I could easily pay for a system from Best Buy in 6 months using their 6-month zero-interest policy if my mom would let me.

Bringing up the subject of my mom, I sometimes wonder if she is just plain against me having a new computer. Every suggestion I make, she won’t even listen. My dad is usually pretty open (it was he who got me all the upgrades), but mom just continues to resist. The only time I’ve even seen her use a computer for more than an hour or so was one night a couple of years ago when she played Roller Coaster Tycoon for four or five hours straight. I was amazed, and slightly bemused. But she never did such a thing again.

I know that we (my family) aren’t insanely wealthy (quite the opposite), and that we’ve had lots of expenses lately, such as a new car, new kitchen appliances, etc., but I don’t think that a couple hundred bucks is that much to ask for, especially if I promise to pay them back. They certainly won’t use the new computer as much as I will, but they use it enough that it will make a difference to them. And my mom even said that if I get a laptop she’ll take it on the road with her as a work computer when she needs one. Fat chance, if I don’t get any help with paying for it. And again, I understand that my parents pay for a lot of things, like cable Internet access and satellite TV, but isn’t that a parent’s obligation? My parents continue to use the fact that they feed and clothe me as an excuse to give me nothing that I can be proud of owning, and it’s just not right.

I’m at risk of coming off as incredibly ungrateful here, and I know it and am grateful for everything I have, but I’m just tired of having that fact pinned on me any time I want something. Do you know, I’ve never received a gift, or anything else, from my parents without an occaision? Other kids get new things all the time. They get new clothes, new cars, new gadgets, whatever, but I get nothing. I barely even get new clothes; it takes pressure from me to even get them to “splurge” for a new pair of pants. It took me six months of pleading to even get cable Internet access, and then they told me that it was my 8th grade graduation present. There always has to be an occaision.

Why? Because my parents grew up poor, or at least lower middle class. Both of them come from families that owned farms where they had to work hard to get anything they wanted. And when they were newlyweds, with me about to be born, they somehow subsisted off of $20 per week. Remember this was in the late 1980s when there was something of a recession going on, making it hard to get by for anyone. But my parents stuck it out and didn’t request money from their parents, nor did they take out huge loans (I think our credit cards are nearly paid off now). It may have taken 15 years to become financially sound, but they did it without help, only careful planning and saving.

And after all those hard times, it makes sense that they would want to reap the rewards of being a standard American middle-class family and start getting a few things that we didn’t have before. My mom’s Malib four-door sedan (no ‘u’ because it peeled off in the heat) was traded for a Toyota Sequoia (big SUV thing), and the refrigerator, oven, kitchen sink faucet, and dishwasher were replaced with better ones. Every single room in our house was painted by my mom and dad when we moved in. We got a new pool vacuum. This computer was bought in February 2000. There are faux wooden blinds in every room. Our house is one of the best-looking (on the inside) on the entire block.

And it’s hard to complain about things like that, but I must truthfully say that I don’t really use any of them. Our old stove, refrigerator, and dishwasher weren’t that bad, and I only ride in our new car perhaps four times a week. The one thing that I would truly appreciate, a new computer, is always out of reach. And anytime I try to come up with a compromise between myself and my parents, they launch into the “we went through hard times as kids and so should you” speech that always leaves my mom with tears in her eyes. I get it. Life is hard, and nor is it fair, as my parents like to remind me. But if this is true, and their lives were hard as children, why would they want to subject their own children to a less-painful form of the same thing? Some kind of sick revenge? No. And it’s wrong to say that I’m suffering or anything.

But when I’m at school, and kids talk about their 10,000 square-foot houses and their ten computers, one begins to become envious, even jealous. What can I say; I’m only human. But when I look at all they have and compare it to what I have, my belongings seem very scant. Truthfully, I don’t really have that much in things of my own, anyway. Some computer games/programs, clothes…that’s about it. One of my good friends has a dad who is very much into technology, and they have somewhere around five computers, about one for each family member. Just to have a single good one would please me, and then I won’t ask for another thing for another four years.

It rained today. Hard. It seems that rainy days always bring on heated discussions between Jim and I on the subject of school food. Here’s my opinion. (This may end up as a rant, so I apologize in advance.)

First of all, it’s hard to consider the food served at my high school as actual ‘food.’ Take the pizza, for example. I have had a boycott on school pizza since sixth grade, when I somehow ingested a mushy piece of the french bread variety and ended up with a high fever (102 degrees) and serious nausea. I blame the pizza because I can, and because I want a reason to hate it, other than the horrible taste. Jim put it best:
What they do is take a piece of rancid, old, fit-to-be-used-as-leather cheese and barf all over it, place that on a slice of white bread, freeze and thaw it not once but four times, and serve it lukewarm and mushy on a styrofoam tray probably made up of the same ingredients as the pizza.
– Jim Grant
Yup, that’s about it. Cafeteria pizza is almost always served as an option along with the regular entrees, except on Mondays when the cafeteria orders it from a local restaurant for $5 per large, cheese pizza and swindles us students by marking it up to $2.00/slice or $3.50 for two slices. That’s both outrageous and wrong. Five dollars per pizza amounts to fifty cents a slice, assuming that the pizza has ten slices. The company who runs the cafeteria could easily profit by selling the pizza for $1/slice, but no, they have to price it at a level four times higher than it should be. Some students just order a pizza themselves and have it delivered to the school to save money. (The same pizza that the cafeteria gets is $8 without the school discount that the restaurant gives the cafeteria.)

And if you think those prices are blasphemous, at Sonoran Trails, which, like the other schools in the district, has its cafeteria managed by the same company, We were once charged four whole dollars for ONE slice of pizza. They weren’t even big slices! And even worse, kids actually bought it, because they had to if they wanted to eat. The only other option was to brave the snack bar, which was always plagued by insanely long lines and lots of “straight” jerk children who liked to hump your backpack.

Now, for the piece de resistance (spl?). A year or so ago, my family and the family of my mother’s friend all stayed three days, two nights at the Scottsdale Princess hotel, a fancy resort/waterpark where we had a timeshare thing availalbe. Sure, it’s only ten miles away, but it was still fun. Anyway, my mom’s friend who used to work with her, Laura, was laying out by the pool and decided to order a cheeseburger from the hotel restaurant that doubled as a bar to serve the pool area.

I saw the tell-tale silver and blue wrapper and knew what was coming. Yes, this was a hamburger from the same company that runs the cafeteria at Cactus Shadows. This famous burger has been found on various occasions with green cheese on it, a piece of blue plastic tucked inside, and, once or twice, a bit of charred bacon under the bun. I still end up eating it (I actually prefer it to the pizza), but I know it’s bad for me.

So, Laura bites into her “burger” hungrily while I watch from behind, chuckling. She almost seems to choke, and then she swallows forcibly to get it down. She didn’t vomit it back out, but let’s just say that was about the only bite she took.

This poses a question: if adults hate the cafeteria food as much as the kids do, then why are we still forced to eat it? And not only that, but why must we pay a full $2.00 per day to eat such garbage? In Utah, lunches were $1.25 and you actually got something that was both nutritious and tasty, qualities of which CSHS’s cafeteria food possesses neither. Furthermore, why do they grade kids by their performance in PE (rather than effort, as it should be) when they feed them such crap that it is impossible for them to ever get a good grade?

I’m not trying to blame my out-of-shape-ness entirely on the cafeteria food, but I can only imagine how much healthier I’d be were I able to eat a good lunch everyday instead of somethng that barely even amounts to grease-injected fast food.

I apologize for leaving you hanging on Monday. Here’s what happened since:
A first draft for an English project was due Thursday, and I lazed about, not starting on it until Tuesday afternoon. After about a page and a half of writing (it’s a creative story project), I got the bright idea of installing Fedora Core 2, Test 2 while I worked. I got the ISO images downloaded in a brisk two hours (awesome speed for two gigabytes of data) via BitTorrent, and I burned them to CDs, all while writing my story, which had grown to two single-spaced pages.

When the ISOs were done, I took a break from writing to repartition my hard drive. Not exactly most people’s idea of a break, but it had to be done. A few clicks in PartitionMagic 8, and it was done, ready to be applied. I clicked the Apply button (having already saved my draft and uploaded to this webserver for safekeeping while I installed) and waited ten minutes for the restart to take place. (My computer takes forever to shutdown, for some reason, though I’ve tweaked it to be pretty quick in starting up.)

Once it had rebooted, the PartitionMagic batch file (put simply, just a program that does stuff) ran and made the changes that were needed to install Linux and Windows on the same computer. For some this can be problematic, but I’ve never had an issue, until now. Once PartitionMagic was done the system rebooted again, and I inserted my Fedora installation disc into the drive. Anaconda (the Fedora installer) booted and ran fine, and I made my choices as to configuration options and packages without a hitch. Two hours later, all packages were installed, and the system rebooted.

Rather than go to Windows to make sure it was still fine, I excitedly booted into Linux to check out the changes made in Fedora Core 2, Test 2, which uses the new Linux kernel, version 2.6, that was recently released about a month or two ago. Compared to version 2.4, 2.6 is supposedly faster and more stable, with new features like the ALSA sound subsystem. Finding everything to my liking in Fedora Core 2 (though I couldn’t print), I rebooted, and selected the Windows option.

Uh oh. About thirty seconds in, I get error messages saying that xmnt2002.exe and AUTOCHK could not be found, and this results in a stop error and system halt. Windows is now inaccessible.

At this point (sometime around 10:30 PM), I panicked, desperately trying to print my story so that I could work on it during school on Wednesday. Remember, I couldn’t print in Fedora, though I could access the document because I had saved it to my webserver. Defeated, I went to bed with the thought that I would fix it in the morning.

Morning came, and nothing was fixed, except I somehow got Fedora to print the story for me. I still was afraid at this point that Windows is gone forever, and since I can only edit the document in Word 2000, I stayed after school and typed most of the rest of it in Trapani’s lab. Thank god for that, because I’d have been dead otherwise.

With a solid five-page (single-spaced) draft now taken care of, I went home and worked on fixing the problem. Through using the Internet in Fedora I found PowerQuest’s support page (PQ makes PartitionMagic) and was able to download a clean up utility and burn it to a CD. Using the PartitionMagic recovery CD, I ran the utility, and guess what? It worked! (Now is when I dance around the room, shouting for joy.)

It turns out that the only reason Windows wasn’t booting was that for some reason PartitionMagic didn’t mark that it was finished with its changes when they were finished, so it kept trying to reexecute the batch file every time I booted Windows. The batch file had already been deleted by the program earlier, and this caused the stop error. The fix utility told Windows that PartitionMagic was done and did not need to be run any more, thus allowing me to boot.

Though that could easily have been much worse of a problem, I stand by my proclamation about a year ago that PartitionMagic is the single best partitioning utility out there. So don’t forsake it just because you read this; it’s still a great program.

Wednesday night I finished my story, which ended up being a grand total of 14 double-spaced pages at 10pt font, though the limit is 10 pages. Oops. Hopefully Kulinski will forgive me, though if she won’t, I can always set the page margins to 0.25 so that it will all fit. She’ll learn to not put limits on any more papers if she has to read 10,000 words at 6pt font. Then again, she could also just hand it back to me with a big zero on the front, but what can I do? There’s no way to shorten it. And I use a lot of dialogue, so hopefully she’ll see that. There will be no describing my extreme anger if I get a zero on that paper after all the stress I went through just to get the first draft in.

Otherwise, this week was pretty uneventful. I should tell you, though, of a new student teacher who rivals the infamous Mr. Johns in intolerability: Mr. Musselman. Or, as I like to think of him, Mussolini. Interesting that he was called in to lecture on World War II with a name so closely resembling that of an Italian dictator. Though I suppose he really isn’t a dictator, just boring.

I should begin from the beginning: Mr. Fogelson, my normal, cool social studies teacher (in comparison to Mussolini, at least) is not dead or gone; he just was given the charge of helping to train a student teacher mainly because he is a new teacher himself. (Supposedly new teachers get poor treatment compared to long-time employees.)

My computer just rebooted abruptly. Luckily, I had just pulsed my 8,000 keystrokes and backed up this entry in a Notepad TXT file. The cause of the reboot could either have been Azureus, a graphically-nice-but-unstable BitTorrent client, or perhaps I caused the real Mussolini to roll over in his grave and curse me. Ha, your curse backfired just like your plans to invade Libya.

So, back to Mussolini. He came just before spring break, and his first assignment was to help the class review for a test over the first half of World War II. We were all somewhat excited and amused, since Fogelson is a good lecturer/reviewer and we were eager to see if anyone could top him. As it turned out, Mussolini sucked. He droned on and on, firing questions every once in a while under his breath, practically scaring the questionee out of their wits. Then, when someone gave a correct answer, he’d say something along the lines of, “Good point,” or “Good answer.” This ticked me off because the answer was not “good,” nor was it a “point” (as in an opinion). It was the truth, according to our textbook, and nothing more. It feels uncomfortable to receive praise for doing nothing more than spout off what everyone knows already.

That was the first thing. As he got into the review, which was conducted by having students answer questions in order by row, with the classroom divided into competing teams, he made the questions harder and harder, as if he didn’t know that the test was multiple choice with no essay or short answer questions, or anything else of the kind that he was giving us practice for. But the worst part was that his questions were poorly phrased and confusing, making it hard to even understand what he wanted us to do. Worse, the aforementioned question length problem meant that we each only got one question, so if you botched the single question you were given, you had no chance of redeeming yourself.

Once I had done my question (I got it “wrong”, though I knew the answer), I ended up just dozing off and looking up periodically when Mussolini would focus his bulging eyes on me as if expecting me to answer out-of-turn just because I was “the one he would turn to if no one else knew the answer.” Wow, didn’t I feel special. I had answered one easy question right at the beginning of class before the review, and that automatically made me Mussolini’s pet. I was King Victor Emmanuel III.

Now, however, I do exactly what King Victor of Italy did - absolutely nothing. I just sit in my “spacious” palace of a desk and wait for something to happen. Hopefully the Allies will come sometime soon so that I can have Mussolini “removed from office.” Yeah, that’d be great.

I should cut him some slack, since he’s new to teaching; the people I really should be griping at is the administration for even cursing us with him in the first place. What kind of evil principal gives a class a new student teacher only eight weeks before finals without even considering the impact that teacher might have on students’ grades. I wonder if I could stop doing my work in that class and get bad grades and blame it on Mussolini. Would it work? No, my grades would be attributed to “a problem at home,” or, an “altercation.” I wish adults (and everyone in general) could just admit it when they’re wrong and take steps to fix the problem rather than stand around passing the blame. At what time do adults not admit it when they are wrong? All the time: just look at the Kerry/Bush campaign advertisements.

Bush: Kerry wants to mess up our economy by repealing my tax cuts.

Kerry: Bush messed up the economy by giving us tax cuts in the first place.

Bush: Kerry wants to remove our troops in Iraq to improve foreign relations. We shouldn’t trade foreign policy for national security.

Kerry: Bush is wrong.

Bush: Kerry sucks.

Kerry: Oh, I now agree with everything Bush says. *One day later.* Now I disagree with everything Bush says. I have no personal opinion on anything.

Bush: I should be president because my daddy was, and look at all he did for our country compared to that Clinton fellow. That’s why my daddy was in office for four years and Clinton was in only for eight. Four’s more than eight, isn’t it?

Kerry: Bush is wrong.

Bush: Kerry still sucks.

When will it all end?