Brettia

I’ve titled this version of Organon, “Flame-Broiled.” It’s not hard to figure out why. This design is a historic culmination of my skills in CSS-based web design. Fresh off the heels of a website for my aunt and uncle that was very successful (I know my mom liked it, at least) and well received, I bring you my first Red (capitalized because it is just that red) design, though I had planned on using a Red design months ago for my little blogging engine, which hasn’t been worked on since April.

Though it’s only been a week since I last blogged, my fingers are sluggish on the keyboard, as if they need to warm up after so many days of lazy disuse. I must confess that the rest of me really hasn’t done much this week either, save for work on the site for my relatives and stuff myself with junk food. I can feel myself swelling up like a ripe grape. But things should be picking up a bit Friday, as I have a dentist appointment and I’ll be going back to CSHS (the horror!) to work with Mr. Trapani on the school website. He finally won’t be besieged by students and teachers trying to get his attention, so I’ll get to actually talk to him without interruption. I like that.

For now, our plans are this: we’ll look at every page and file and decide whether it needs to be there or not (a lot of information is outdated or superflouous). Then we’ll combine some pages, get rid of others, layout a directory structure, make the pages (using bare markup, no CSS), and finally, apply the final design, which you can look at here. Simple, right? More than likely it won’t be, but we’ll get through it.

As far as the network goes, we really aren’t completely sure about what we want to do. Priority one is to get rid of the Internet proxy that we are forced to connect through. That’s fine for the school network, but ours is not handling the proxy very well, and we were promised a T1 long ago anyway. In the hopefully unlikely event that the school refuses to give us the T1 or a similar pipe (I bet they’ll give us some cheesy $10/month dial-up Internet service), I’ve found an alternative recently that might fit the bill, at least as far as the web server and streaming video server goes.

It all began last week, when the company I’m hosted with, MediaCatch, started getting denial-of-service attacks from some hacker freak. They don’t know who it is, nor can they find out, since the hacker continually changes their IP address. This also means that MC can’t block the hacker, since he can just go to another IP and keep attacking. So my email and websites have been down sporadically for the last several days or so, which is not at all good for me since I also host several other websites that are not my own, such as those of my church, parts of my school’s site, and the new wedding site for my relatives that I just finished.

The attack recently stopped, just a few hours ago, actually, but this has happened before. It stopped on Wednesday for an hour or so too, but then it just started right back up again. So we’ll see if I can even post this or not, as it may have started again before I finish. Anyway, the inability to receive email to my primary address is quite infuriating and frustrating, and so I began looking for another host yesterday, just in case I decided that I wanted to switch. (I won’t unless the attack persists for more than another week or so.) I read through my host’s service policy to see if I would be refunded for the downtime (they have a 99% uptime guarantee), but I was annoyed to find that the guarantee doesn’t cover denial-of-service attacks. That seems stupid to me, since it’s their problem, not mine, but they obviously don’t see it that way.

Anyway, I was looking around to see if there were any other hosts that have the same features and disk space and such as MC, and I found a company called Redwood Virtual. Rather than host individual websites, Redwood gives customers an entire server for their usage. Now, this isn’t the same as a dedicated server for one reason: Redwood’s virtual servers are on the same computer as other virtual servers, but they remain fast and flexible. Not only that, but a customer can choose one of three operating systems (two Debian flavors and Fedora Core 1) to use, even if others on their server are using completely different ones! Cool, eh? Also, you can request that your operating system be changed at any time, as long as you back up your files and settings beforehand.

How much would you expect to pay for this service? Some dedicated servers run as high as $100/month, though virtual servers are about as good. So maybe $50/month? No. Okay, $20/month. Nope. For only $10/month (or $100/year), I can get 2GB of disk space, 64 MB of RAM, the Linux OS of my choice, and 10 Gb of bandwidth. Compare this to my current host, where I get 800MB of space, a 7% CPU usage limitation, and a predefined OS and programs for the same price. The only snag here is that Redwood Virtual’s servers have nothing preconfigured, no control panel, no nothing. I would have to pretty much start from scratch. I’m not sure if I’m up to it, since I don’t know much about how important things like DNS and such work. But I could learn, right?

It just seems risky, that’s all. Especially with the responsibility of those other websites weighing upon me. But this is where CSHS comes in. We already want to be able to host our website ourselves so that we can have the flexibility of Python and custom PHP configurations and streaming audio and the ability to install anything we want. Why not just do it with Redwood? It makes more sense, in a way. Then there’s no need to worry as much about the proxy, since having a web server was the main thing that the proxy would block. I dunno. I’ll run it by Trapani tomorrow and see what he thinks.

It saddens me that there’s not another web host that matches MC. It really does. Partially because that means I’m stuck with MC, and partially because you’d think that prices would have come down some in the two years that I’ve had Brettia. By the way, that two-year anniversary came on May 8th. I had a little celebration and everything. The real date to remember, though, is July 24th, which will mark three years of HTML for me this summer. Not bad, since I’ll only be 15 then. I’ve come a long way, that’s for sure.
The only thing that I’ve been at longer is maintaining a virtual stock portfolio, which I started doing almost five years ago. (I was only ten!) It was in 5th grade, when we did a virtual stock market game in our class, and my team won with an 84% gain. Most of that can be attributed to Yahoo!, which rose 400% or something in a few months. I didn’t really count that gain as real, since it was made during the sharp upswing in late 1999 just before everything went to hell. I started another portfolio in March 2000 (after the major plunge had taken place), and I was able to eke out a small gain while the rest of the market tanked. I almost feel like one of the real traders on the floor of the NYSE, having weathered the tech recession and September 11th and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, I first learned about the World Trade Center attacks by watching CNBC.
When I saw the footage of the plane hitting the building, my first feeling was that it wasn’t real, was that I’d hit some kind of movie channel or something and this was some weird disaster movie. Then on came the Squawk Box anchor, Mark Haines, and all doubts vanished. The one thing that I remember most about that 15 minutes of horror in the early morning that Tuesday was when I was walking out the door to go to school, and I heard my mom screaming, “It’s falling, the building’s collapsing!” I almost wanted to cry right then, but I didn’t because I was just too shocked.

It amazes me now that September 11th happened almost three years ago. When I remember it it seems like it was just yesterday, or just this morning. Why don’t we just nuke the rest of the world to get rid of them? We could invite the British to come and live in the U.S. so that they would at least be spared for staying with us through thick and thin. I think of all the cultures in the world, the two that I admire most are the British for their resilience and good-natured resistence of all things bad and the Japanese for their long history and respect for nature. I admire Americans, too, of course, but sometimes I am not completely proud to be one.

I was going to ramble about how CSS is better than table-based design, and how Dreamweaver and FrontPage should be killed, and how people should take the time to learn HTML the right way, but I don’t have time. Somehow my appointment tomorrow got scheduled for 7:00 (AM!). That sucks; I haven’t gotten up that early since last Thursday.

Computer Fund

This estimate is iffy because it depends on several payments, but my cash hoard should equal $783 right now. Not bad, really. I actually only have $245 in cash and cash equivalents (debit card), but I’m owed $337.50 for various websites ($582.50 total) and another $200 will come in from my dad for weekly cleanings and money borrowed from me ($783 total). Also, I recently had $107 stolen from me out of my debit account by a creepy hacker dude, and if I get that back I’ll be up to $890. Throw in 10 cleanings ($200), birthday money ($170 combined if parents just give me cash), another $100 or so for working for the school, and more work for Jim, and I should easily have $1400 by the end of the summer. This is dependent on several factors, but the estimate that I give here is $300 lower than my official estimate. All I can say is, thank God for my uncanny ability to understand and embrace technology.

Long live Russia!

Creepy, eh? I discovered circular selections in Photoshop yesterday, and this atrocity was born. Organon version 4 is coming soon.

The site’s been down due to a denial-of-service (DoS) attack against my webhost. I can’t even receive email sometimes. So if you can’t get here, that’s why.

I knew the end was nigh on Wednesday morning when I wandered into PE, finding that we didn’t have to dress out (in other words, put on rancid gym shorts and gray shirts with something living in them). I had a brief feeling of sadness as I left the gym after an hour and forty minutes of staring blankly at the wall (final exam schedule, but no finals in PE). I almost cried. Or NOT!

C’mon, you have to know me well enough by now after nearly a year of blogging regularly to realize that that was steeped in sarcasm. My only thought as I left the gym for the last time was: “Thank God I’ll never set foot in here ever again.” But there was a bit of a sentimental moment as I remembered all of the good times in PE (few and far between, but still there). I remember throwing bottles full of water and sticks high up in the air and letting them blow open on the concrete in 7th grade, I remember running the mile and feeling as if I was going to vomit afterward, I remember my friend Jim hitting me with a poorly thrown discus just last quarter. As much as I hated PE, there were so many things that happened during that hellish period.

But its over now, so who cares! Anyway, my second period on Wednesday was actually my third, since final exam days are 1,3,5 one day and 2,4,6 the next day, which was today. Period 3 was Geometry, and we’d already finished half of our final on Tuesday, so all that was left was a multiple choice part. Not hard, but still something to study for. Then 5th period was Biology, which I knew I would bomb because I hated that class, mainly because it was just so boring. Hopefully I won’t crash and burn in Honors Chemistry next year.

Thursday was an exciting day because it was the end, and it seemed like, even after we had been anxiously awaiting it since March, it still came up really fast. My first period (technically, second) was my English final exam, which I suppose I did okay on, though I’ll probably never see the scores on it. That was probably my hardest final yet, but it wasn’t as bad as I expected it to be. After that came my World History / Geography final, which was easy, and finally there was lunch, and I was ravenous.

Boxed pizza and Gatorade in hand, I went to our bench located in the pristine wilderness of the Ghetto, an area of our campus that is always littered with trash and goths and theatre kids, and it always seems empty. There’s an opie shrine nearby (a bathroom where pot smokers go), and our tree, the Tree of After-Lunch Conversations, hangs above us. It was recently butchered, which made us unhappy. Oh, and we established our own country, the Province of Yurg, which includes the bench (the Bench of Elevated Seating) and the surrounding area. My friend Jim (who hit me with the discus) is High Inquisitor, my friend Dylan is groundskeeper and flag bearer, and I am director of the Department of Immigration and Naturalization. We pretty much just use our sovereign status to attack people as they walk by.

Warning: The following paragraphs may include content not suitable for people with no sense of nasty humor.
Anyway, we started talking about Everfresh, this canned fruit-flavored drink that is sold at our cafeteria, one of the few things that tastes remotely good, or even has a taste at all. (They were serving charcoal briquettes on buns for lunch Wednesday and Thursday.) After Everfresh the conversation moved to Enzyte, that “male enhancement” pill that features a smiling 50’s family man on its incredibly corny commercials. Then a visiting citizen from an allied province suggested that Everfresh make a male enhancement product of its own called “Everfuck.” This was insanely funny at the time, though it only brings about a chuckle now. The Everfresh cans feature a picture of fruit on the front, depending on the flavor, and we thought that, for Everfuck, there could be a picture of a banana with two peaches next to it. Sick, I know, but we just kept laughing about it for some reason.

Then, later on, when the visiting emissary from a far-off province had already migrated away, Dylan sprawled out on the sidewalk next to our bench, saying that he hoped that if he just looked straight up then some girl with one of those 2-inch long short skirts would walk over him. I guess we were all just feeling perverted at that time, or something. He got up, spilling some of the Everfresh that he was holding, and then he just poured the rest out on the sidewalk. After about ten minutes, it was obvious that the Everfresh was never going to go away; it had just created a huge spot on the normally clean and tidy sidewalks of the Province of Yurg. All I could say was, “Dylan, you’ve Everfucked up.”
This brought lots of laughter from the citizenry of the Province of Yurg, and we came up with Everfucker, and all these other inappropriate terms with “Ever” before them. So yeah, that was my interesting lunch hour, which was actually an hour today, due to the weird schedule. After lunch was my Spanish final, which was easy, but was made harder because people from different classes kept coming in to see Mrs. Nasr (the teacher, who is very popular with students) while we were trying to work. My poor friend Sam Laggren couldn’t even finish (138 questions in 140 minutes is hard) because they kept distracting everyone. I was ready to shoot them.

But then that final bell rang, and I could hear the happy shouts echoing around the campus, and I thought that the only thing that would have made it even better was some fireworks. People were emptying their backpacks and notebooks, spreading loose papers everywhere. Janitors must hate the last day for things like this. And as I walked to my bus, it seemed that chaos reigned: people had just sort of given up on keeping any order or reason. But after only about five minutes, it ended, and we all got on our buses, and we left. My freshman year of high school was over.

I keep having these weird achey heart feelings whenever I think about how it’s all over. No more teachers, no more friends (or at least not as often), no more homework. But it’s not that that leaves me somewhat depressed, its the fact that I only have three years left. To some it may seem like a good thing that I have less school left, but to me it’s like I can see my childhood (see last entry) and my free years just evaporating one after the other. And it won’t be long before I’m off to college, and then….what? I don’t even know what I want to do when I grow up. I don’t know how I want to be, or where I’ll live, or how much money I’ll have. I have so many choices, so many possibilities, and it’s hard to figure out which ones are the right ones. I just don’t want to wake up one day and realize that, not only is school over, but my friends are gone, I’m alone, and I have nothing to do but work. That seems like a pretty unhappy existence, even if you enjoy what you do for a living. I think I’m beginning to understand now why people end up valuing family and love and play more than money and work and stuff. I can only wonder if I’m realizing this too early, if I’m going to miss out on the years of squandering my money on glittery things and partying all night and such. As bad as it maybe, as utterly devoid of true emotion that kind of life may seem, it sounds like fun.

Almost Forgot
Class - Projected Semester Grade - Final Exam Grade ([] = estimated)

• Physical Education - 90% - [40%]
• Honors English- 97% - [94%]
• Honors Geometry - 96% - 90%
• World History / Geography - 98% - 99%
• Biology - 98% - 87%
• Spanish 3-4 - 96% - [96%]

Not exactly my best final exam grades ever, but I no longer care. My As are secure, my GPA will remain a 4.333, and that’s all that really matters.

Don’t worry, my parents paid the electrical bill. On Saturday, I turned on the light in the office (where the computer is in my house), and it shorted out or something. Now I have to rely on a tiny desk lamp for light to type by. Pitiful, really, but I’ll get over it. The light shorting out reminded me of a time long ago, back when I lived in Missouri (where I was born). Here’s the story:
My first real friend when I started school was named Randall. We didn’t really meet, or “bond,” or anything like that. We just happened to be standing next to each other one day at recess in kindergarten, and he asked, “You want to be friends?”
What was I supposed to say? “Yes,” I replied.

And that was it. We were friends for that entire school year, and we were together pretty much all the time. But in first grade, he wasn’t in my class, so I found someone new, a somewhat-dorky class-clown named Chris. We sat together in class, we went to each other’s houses, we had sleepovers, we did everything that first graders do together. And one day, we were in Chris’s basement/playroom, which was stuffed to the ceiling with toys and junk, when we had the bright idea of hanging one of those white, battery-operated lights (the kind where you press it and it turns on) from an old light fixture that had no light or fan on it, just bare, rusty copper wires (he had an old house). So I, being the taller of us two, was elected to do the job, and after we had wrapped the light in that weird string that you find on balloons (flat, ribbony), I tied it to one of the copper wires.

We stepped back to admire our handiwork, and I accidentally backed into the light switch that controlled the fixture, turning it on. The thick copper wires (more like bars, really) glowed white for a moment, and than a shower of sparks came from the fixture, scattering about the room. Chris just stared, while I had the presence of mind to turn off the switch. We stamped out the areas where the sparks were singing the rug and took down the little light. Then we pretended that the whole thing had never happened, and we went out back to jump on Chris’s trampoline.

And there you have it, another interesting tale from Brett’s childhood, which, I suppose, is now over. Though I wonder, didn’t childhood last from age 0 to 17 once? Why is it that now kids feel like they’re “grown up” by age 12 or 13? My hypothesis is that it’s because their parents let them. Not so long ago, kids didn’t have hours of free time; they had to work on farms or in factories or at the family business. This also meant they didn’t have time to get with “the wrong people” and be corrupted as early as kids nowadays. So children might have been anywhere from 16-18 before they knew everything about everything and had experimented with drugs and each other and so on and so forth.
By claiming that my childhood is over, I don’t mean to say that I know everything about everything, or that I’ve done drugs or had sex, nor do I believe that the acts of doing drugs or having sex are coming of age rituals. My childhood is over because society says it is. People have come to expect that kids ages 12-17 (and older, at times) should be moody, withdrawn, sex-crazed, disrespectful, and should dress like either prostitutes or gangsters. Wasn’t there ever a time when kids were just kids? When boys wore jeans and T-shirts and girls wore dresses or T-shirts and shorts or whatever? When rich kids didn’t look as if they’d just broken out of jail?

Is it possible for me to reminisce about a time that I never lived in? Am I completely wrong? Maybe drugs and sex and disrespect and violence have always been just they way kids were. But I hope not, because I’m already ashamed to be a part of my generation; I don’t want to be ashamed to be a human too.

Only nine days remain before the last day of this school year, May 20th. And only seven of those days will be school days. And two of those seven days will be spent taking final exams. So I really only have five days of school left. And look, I added a nice little countdown thingy on the sidepanel. Cool, eh?

Okay, I promised long ago that I’d never use any JavaScript, but it’s just that one little thing…and it’s temporary, for in only nine days…I will be free!

End of School Poem
A month left, and the projects came,
Left undone, until the flames
Descended upon me,
And I was burnt, but not broken,
Tired, but not dead.

The projects are over, but homework returns,
And all the busy work…how it burns!
The flames cometh again.
But I am alive, and only singed,
I triumph once more.

Why isn’t it over now?
Why must time pass slowly?
Just get it over with.
But alas!
My cries are in vain.

I can only write this stuff late at night when I’m too tired to think about the real meaning. If that poem sucked, I am not to blame. Blame Blocko the Donkey and friends, or something.

I guess now is the time when I write about everything that has happened in the last two weeks and why I haven’t blogged in such a long time. The poem should explain my long absence, so here’s the scoop:
All this time, I’ve continued to work with Trapani. (The Mr. has been omitted for quicker typing.) Sometimes I wonder if people really want me to do what I’ve been doing. I mean, I did kind of insert myself into his class, thus pushing aside other prominent webmasterly people like Eric Kearns, the former webmaster for the school website. He really seems like an okay kid, slightly weird, but not bad. Yet he also seems to hate me for usurping his position, though this seems strange since he really didn’t like being webmaster anyway. But the fact that he is somewhat hostile to me remains, and it has spread to the rest of the web development class, all except Joe DiMarco, who knew me before I got involved with Trapani.

Joe is nice enough to keep me updated on what is going on in web development, and it seems that now everything happens because “Brett said”. Now I don’t mind sharing my advice and ideas with Trapani, but if he tells them that I was the one who suggested certain things, then I am blamed if it goes wrong or if they decide they don’t like it. I suppose I should just take responsibility for my ideas, but that’s not an easy thing to do.

Luckily for me, the two network people Trapani has running his network currently are seniors, so they don’t really care that I’m coming in to take over. They’re just really quiet. I don’t think I’ve said more than ten words to either of them. When we were discussing how I was going to somehow learn how to run the network in three days (seniors are gone after Wednesday), Trapani suggested that we talk about it, about what I needed to know and so on. Brian just wanted to write up a document with all the information I need, which he did. And though we were supposed to be talking about stuff and “bonding”, we ended up just silently going about our business.

And Trapani wants to know: am I ready to take over next year? Right now, no, but I’ve got an entire summer to get things running the way I want them to. This amounts to about two months, if I take out vacations and such. Amazingly, Brian actually suggested that I delete everything off of the server and start anew, doing things the way I want to. This is exactly what I want to do, not just because I’m a Red Hat person with a deep hatred for Debian (our current Linux distribution), but because I can’t learn anything without starting from scratch.

A final haiku for your enjoyment:
May your head be large,
May your head be square and thick –
Like a purple fig.
Adapted from Ross Young’s Purple Fig