Brettia

The last several days have been…interesting. First was the two-day drive through snow and fog from Phoenix, Arizona, to Springfield, Missouri (down in the southwest corner of the state). The entire drive was around 1300 miles…and exhausting, even though I wasn’t doing the driving. We stopped at two Cracker Barrel restaurants along the way to eat breakfast; they really do have better breakfast food than anywhere else. (Try the hashbrown casserole!)

Anyway, we reached Springfield at about 5:00 PM on the 24th, just in time to go southward to the suburb of Nixa to have Christmas at my aunt’s house. I only got three presents of note: Star Ocean III (a PlayStation 2 game), a nice CD player/clock radio, and, the piez de resistance (spl?), a LG 1720P. What is that exactly? Only the most ass-kickenest flat-panel monitor you’ll ever have the privilege of looking at. According to the box (though not LG’s website), the monitor has an ultra-fast 12 millisecond response time, enough for gaming, and its color and brightness are amazing. Remember that I’m a graphic designer by trade (at least part of the time), so color quality is important to me. I actually think that this monitor’s contrast and degree of realism (color-wise) is better than that of my old CRT, which I had lovingly dubbed “Chunky”. I’m typing this entry on a 15-inch Dell flat-panel with a native resolution of what looks to be 1024×768, and there really is no comparison - my monitor is just too awesome.

I think the results of my limited experience with my new monitor are bolstered by several favorable reviews that I’ve seen, one from a fellow graphic designer who compared the LG 1720P alongside a similar offering from Sony and found that the LG won the comparison hands-down. The only thing that he found lacking in the LG was the sturdiness of the base, which is true, but it just wobbles a bit if someone heavy walks into the room; it’s not as if it’s in danger of falling down or anything. We’ll see how it goes after further use. Before I move on, though, I should mention that, according to PCWorld’s ranking, my monitor’s sister model, the LG 1710SK, is the top one in its class. That feels good.

So now all I have to do is ensure that my computer and monitor get to Milwaukee safely. This is no easy feat, since it’s been taken in and out of the car several times. However, since I did get to hook up and use my pride and joy yesterday, I know it’s still in working order. I only hope it still will be when we get there (we leave Missouri on Friday).

I’d add a bit more about my vacation, but I really haven’t done all that much. Most of what has happened has been family stuff, like the huge, elegant dinner that was held at my other aunt’s house. The food was really good, making up for all the posing and smiling and fake laughter that had to be endured during the course of the meal. My great-grandfather’s entire family was in attendance, from his three sons and their wives on down to their children and their wives to me and my cousins and second-cousins. I think about 32 people were there, altogether.

A sort-of late Christmas gift came today, when I rode with my parents to Kansas City in order to drop my dad off at the airport. I didn’t really need to go, but I didn’t have anything else to do (though I wanted to play Star Ocean), so I went along anyway. I spent most of the day either sleeping or reading the two technology books that I got: Dive Into Python and Web Standards Solutions. The Christmas gift was a really nice Kansas City Chiefs pull-over/sweater from a little shop on US 40 near the stadium called SportsNutz. They have just about every Chiefs thing imaginable, even stuff that isn’t available in team shops or on the NFL website. So now I have something to wear other than my Priest Holmes (#31) jersey, which makes kind of an empty statement since Priest hasn’t played for several weeks because of a knee injury and might not be playing again too much. I think I’d rather have a Tony Gonzalez jersey, anyway, since he is the best tight end in the league (not many tight ends can play well as wide receivers too). I wouldn’t mind a Dante Hall jersey, or even a Jared Allen one, if I can find it (he’s a rookie who has nine sacks and has only played for part of this season). Anyway, my hunger for Chiefs stuff has been satiated for now.

I will eventually update the design of this blog when WordPress 1.5 comes out. I don’t want to get a nice new template all up-and-running only to have to update it to make it work with the new WP version (which should be released soon). While I wait for that, I will be working on the new Rounded design of BrettEpps.com, my professional site for promoting my web development services. Expect to see that up at least by February 2005, if not much sooner (I have to give myself some room in case school gets all mean and hairy with it). The new design will utilize lots of nice new CSS techniques that I learned and understood better after reading Web Standards Solutions, which I would recommend to anyone who already knows HTML and wants to move up to standards-based design.

While BrettEpps.com will lack prettiness that doesn’t work in Internet Explorer, I’m considering making Organon work in browsers based on the Mozilla Gecko and KHTML engines only. We’ll see.

BrettEpps.com now is a working domain with full hosting set up for it. I have an eight-domain package with MediaCatch that really rocks my socks (unlimited hosting for eight domains for only $95/year), so I just added on another domain. By the way, I really recommend MC for all your hosting needs. Though I’ve been waiting a long time for them to finally get around to upgrading to PHP 5, everything else has been great. Like every host, they have outages periodically, but not nearly as often as past hosts.

It’s really nice to have a clean “server” to work with…brettia’s web space has been getting cluttered with defunct projects and little experiments that never came to fruition. I think I might request that they wipe my account if I end up upgrading to MC’s basic reseller hosting package (which would allow me to host hundreds of websites on the same account for about $17/month).

In the course of moving, many documents must be emailed/faxed/telekinetically transferred back-and-forth between various parties. One of these documents came as an email attachment that wouldn’t open. We requested that the sender resend it, but I decided to go ahead and see if I could rescue the attachment (it was supposed to be a PDF) anyway. For some reason, the attachment had a .msg extension, so I tried to open it in Outlook. Didn’t work. I was more successful using Thunderbird, the Mozilla Foundation’s email client that was made as a companion to Firefox. Thunderbird couldn’t get it right either, though, but it at least opened it in a plain text format so that I could see the source code of the .msg file (equivalent to opening it in Notepad).

Because the email message code shows all of the headers that are prepended to every email message, I could tell that the attachment part of the message was encoded using the base64 algorithm, which isn’t really secure, though it is good enough to keep the encoded file or message from being readable by the average human (unless you’re really smart). Base64 is also the encoding used for HTTP passwords on websites such as private company networks and hidden control panels such as the cPanel administration area that most web hosts use.

Since the base64 algorithm is so widely used on the Internet, I decided to check and see if PHP had a function that could decode a base64-encoded string (a chunk of text). Lo and behold, it did. In seven lines of PHP, I was able to make a script that read the messed up message, pulled out the base64-encoded PHP attachment, decoded it, and rewrote the resulting code to a new PDF file. Mission accomplished.

As it turned out, our new address was wrong on the document, so the sender had to send a new one anyway. But this was the first time I ever applied PHP to a real-life problem like that, so it was kind of cool.

Behold, the very-much-alpha-quality release of “Rounded”, the new design for BrettEpps.com, which currently redirects to Brettia. It’s round and smooth, like me!

Click here to view it.

My last final exam (chemistry), is done. I got an 82%. I have a 95% in the class. Yummy.

As I noted in yesterday’s entry, today I took three finals: Algebra 3-4, AP European History, and Spanish 5-6. I think I did reasonably well on the algebra one, and I should end up with a low A in that class. In AP Euro, I got a 92%, which was good considering the difficulty of the test and my general inability to score higher than a 95% on finals. I will finish somewhere around a 97%, first-in-class. In Spanish, I got a 91%, which dropped my grade from a 97% to a 96%.

Quick Story

For a long time now, this one kid, John, has been bugging me about grades and GPAs and such. He’s a pretty smart kid, when he feels like it, but at all other times he’s just annoying and stupid. And when I say this, I mean it. Jim has said repeatedly that his hatred for John burns like the white-hot fires of a thousand suns, and though my dislike for the kid never quite reached that level, I can understand why Jim would feel that way. Anyway, John has a history of cheating on tests and such, but he is smart enough that he never gets caught for it. Because of this, he maintains a higher GPA than I have, and even though I don’t put much by GPAs (see other entries), his constant gloating about it can get tiring. But today it has been proven that what goes around comes around. In Spanish, John had some kind of insanely high grade (98%-ish) for most of the semester, which he made sure to tell me about. I just shrugged and said, “Good for you,” as I was perfectly happy with my 94%. But something happened in the last few weeks, and my grade began to trend upward while his went downward. Because of the final exam, my grade surpassed his. Of course, he wasn’t happy about this. Did I rub it in? No; I’ve learned my lesson after having to put up with him. But I couldn’t help but smile a bit as he realized that the ranking had changed. Second in a class of thirty still isn’t bad, heck, tenth out of thirty is still respectable, but I have to say that being ranked first can have its advantages.

Am I Really That Arrogant/Proud/Selfish/Mean?

Yes, probably. Everyone has their faults. And it is especially hard to be modest about one’s academic performance when one outperforms his classmates so handily. Okay, I’m done bragging now. But really, if not on a blog, where else would I do it. Anyway, I’m done. This all goes back to my earlier rant about the problems with the grading system. Students should not have to worry about their grades this much. Kids like John should not have to cheat simply because they have a brother who was valedictorian and they want to live up to his legacy. They should learn because they have fun doing it, because they feel enriched by it, and because the subject truly interests them. Just fulfilling one of those requirements is enough; or at least its better than fulfilling none of them, which happens too much these days.

How Much Do I Care?

As I said, I like being first-ranked in the class. It gives me confidence, a reason to keep going, cheers me up. But my basic goal is just to get an A. It could be a 90% or a 108%, but either way it still ends up as a 4 (or 5) on my transcript. And at the end of the day, that’s all that matters. Yes, it is nice to have a solid cushion when finals come up, but it isn’t necessary. Students can do well on finals; all they have to do is pay attention, take notes, and keep a record of questions they miss on unit or chapter tests. It’s not as hard as people think. Being a good student doesn’t make a kid smart; it just means that they have hit upon the right way to manipulate the system to their own advantages. I happen to be very good at that. From experience, I always know what will end up on tests, even if it isn’t announced. I can usually find the right answer in a multiple-choice question that I don’t know, just by thinking about the teacher and judging which answer they would most likely make the correct one. Sometimes I even look at the distribution of other answers on my Scantron answer sheet, checking to see if I have answered A more than C or C more than B or whatever. Then I just choose whichever answer is logical and has a letter that I haven’t used in a while. Stuff like that is what distances me from other students, not intellect. There are kids in my AP Euro class that could kick my ass (remember, still not profanity-free here) in an academic competition, but I can still manage to do 10% better than them on tests. It’s not fair to them, or to me, for that matter, but that’s just the way it is. In some ways I’m not much better than John.

Up for Tomorrow

My only test tomorrow is in Honors Chemistry. I’m afraid, and for good reason. Mrs. Reisener, while a good teacher as far as knowledge of her subject goes, has this “every test should have a C-average” mentality that is not popular with her students, most of whom are used to getting straight As and Bs. On the last test, the class average was a 77%, but I somehow got a 99%. Not bad, not bad. (Note that the 99% was after the grades were curved upward by 7%.) So it isn’t impossible to ace one of her tests, just difficult. We’ll see how I do tomorrow, but either way my grade should remain stable. According to my own final exam grade calculator, I can score as low as a 50% and still eke by with a 91 in the class. Nice.

Today I was the victim of comment spam. Someone started posting stuff about poker all over the blog. It was obviously a bot, however, because it was using the old MovableType engine to do it. In other words, it was posting comments that weren’t going to show up anywhere, if it weren’t for one of MT’s “features.” You see, the main difference between MovableType and other blogging engines such as WordPress (the one I use) is that MT has to rebuild the entire website (sometimes more than a thousand pages, on large sites) every time a template is updated, and it has to rebuild the HTML for an entry page each time someone comments on it. Because pages are built when updates are made rather than on-the-fly when they are visited, a single comment, or in this case, hundreds of spammy ones, can cause a complete rebuild, overwriting the WordPress PHP files and other parts of the site. Not good. Since I can’t locate the source for my old design and I was wanting to make a new one anyway, expect to see a pretty new layout sometime in January. For now, I’ll be using the default WordPress theme, which isn’t anything special, but works fine nonetheless.

Tomorrow I take the bulk of my final exams. Am I nervous? Never. Am I confidant? Mostly. Am I prepared? Sort of. Am I trusting to fate? Yeah.

Okay, I’m not that bad off. My finals tomorrow are for Honors Algebra 3-4, AP European History, and Spanish 5-6. I’m not the best at math, but the final is supposed to be easy. I am top in my class in AP Euro (according to the latest grade printout), but the final is supposed to be very difficult. I have a 96% in Spanish, but I don’t know much of the culture stuff while I can nail the grammar and spelling part. Really, though, since my exams only count for a small portion of my grade, there is almost no way that I won’t get away with an A in all of my classes. My lowest grade is a 94% in Algebra 3-4, so I should be able to get a B on the final and still keep my A. In AP Euro, I can get as low as a 60% and still have an A (albeit a low one). In Spanish, I can score as low as a 50%-ish on the main final exam (I’ve already gotten full points on the project, written, and speaking portions). So I really should be just fine, with all this cushion.

Tomorrow I will be judged…and hopefully I will be found worthy of continued existence.

Get it? Half-Life Too, Half-Life Two? Yeah, whatever. Anyway, the point is, I have it, and it rocks my socks. I have never played a more awesome game, and I haven’t even gotten that far. Even better, I got it off Steam, meaning it downloaded to my computer from the Internet in about two hours, saving me the trip to the store (which would have only taken ten minutes, but it was neat anyway). For an extra ten bucks, I got access to the following other applications as well:

• Day of Defeat: Source (not yet released)
• Counter-Strike: Source
• Half-Life: Source
• Half-Life 2: Deathmatch
• Condition Zero
• Counter-Strike
• Day of Defeat
• Half-Life
• Condition Zero Deleted Scenes
• Team Fortress Classic
• Deathmatch Classic
• Opposing Force
• Ricochet
• Source Dedicated Server
• Source SDK
• Half-Life Dedicated Server

All for only $59.95 plus tax and shipping (there is none). That is so unbelievably cool…except my hard drive might get filled up with it all…I only have 25 Gb left (heh).

I learned today that I will be starting school January 24th instead of January 3rd because of a difference in the beginning of the second semester in Wisconsin. So even though my 1.5 week break is pretty much shot, I still get three weeks after that to get settled. Awesome!

Also, my parents returned home with pictures of the new house today. I’d post one, but I’m trying to cut down on the amount of personal information I leak to the Internet, so any photos I post will be interior only. However, I can tell you that the house is in a suburb of Milwaukee called Oconomowoc, as I mentioned before. It is somewhere around 3800 square feet, counting the massive basement. We should finally have room for the pool table that dad has always wanted. So it sounds like it’ll be nice, and I’m already working on getting the whole school thing sorted out, so I think everything will end up okay.

As far as things going on this week, I have a movie night at my house with classmates from AP European History (we’re watching The Count of Monte Cristo on my gigantic HD-ILA DLP rear-projection TV) on Wednesday, and Friday I’ll be staying the night with some friends at another friends house, during which we will get high on caffeine and play video games until we pass out. Yeah.

Forceps.