So much for posting again on Monday. I’ll start with everything that’s happened since my last entry on the Thursday before last, and then I’ll finally post those updates about Langosta that I’ve been meaning to write about for some time now.
Friday was kind of crazy because I arrived at my newspaper class to find that we were nowhere near finished with getting the paper laid out by the deadline on Monday afternoon. My teacher finally decided that, since I had ended up with a copy of InDesign as a side-effect of getting the Adobe Creative Suite last year, I would grab a copy of all the pages from the network after school on Friday, put them on a USB drive, and take them home, where I would finish the final layout polishing over the weekend.
This seemed like a good plan, but it really wasn’t. The network hiccuped somehow, and the files didn’t copy correctly, so I arrived home on Friday with nothing but the Word documents containing all the articles, my layouts of the front and back pages, some photos and advertisements, and a big folder of tracking sheets for each article. Any work that the design editors in the other three newspaper classes had done was still on the school network, and I had no idea how far along they had been at the end of the day Friday. I had all the tools necessary to lay out the newspaper from scratch if I had to, but I was also afraid that my doing so would step on lots of toes because I would be essentially erasing their work and replacing it with my own. I talked at length with my dad about what I should do (I had no phone numbers or email addresses with which to contact my newspaper teacher), and I finally decided that I was going to have to take one for the team and spend every free hour that weekend finishing the paper.
I got about three hours of work in before going to bed at about midnight on Friday, and I was about ready to fall over and die at that point after working for a long time on the awards website that I mentioned in my last entry earlier that evening. I awoke fairly early Saturday morning to go to Six Flags, though I was able to read a bit during the two-hour car ride, which was about as relaxing as sleeping. Six Flags was fun, as usual, and the park near Chicago, Six Flags Great America, had some unique roller coasters. There was one where you stood up, another where you would hang beneath the track sitting down, and another where you started the ride sitting down but would later be rotated into a flying position (this was Superman). There were also several good wooden roller coasters, one of which I got to ride backward. But the fastest and scariest of them all was called Deja Vu, and I was beginning to have second thoughts about riding it by the time I got to the front of the line. Deja Vu is a suspended roller coaster that takes the train about 150 feet high, backward, at the beginning, so that the rider is looking straight down at the ground. Then, you’re dropped, and you free fall for a few seconds straight at the ground before the coaster turns horizontal and zooms through the station at about 80 miles per hour. Once through the station, the train goes straight up again, through a tight loop, a twist, and then another tight loop, ending up on a track parallel to the track that runs through the station, still going incredibly fast. But all that speed is suddenly gone after you pass through that section of track, because then the train goes straight upward again, where it is caught by a chain and pulled even higher up so that it is at about the same height as the first drop. However, now the rider gets to fall backward, and the entire ride is repeated once more in reverse. Deja Vu might have been one of the most intense rides I’ve ever been on, but I’d definitely do it again if I get the chance.
Anyway, I had a great time at Six Flags, especially because the lines were about one-third the normal length because it was a Kohl’s-sponsored family day where only Kohl’s employees and their families were allowed into the park. That made a huge difference - we only waited about 20 minutes maximum on all the roller coasters. But once the day was over and we were on our way home, I remembered the newspaper that awaited me once I got back. I was reluctant to work on it, but I did so anyway, getting in another four hours of work from 8:00 to midnight on Saturday. By then, I’d finished everything except the very back page (which was ironically one of the two pages that I was supposed to be working on to begin with), so I decided to call it quits and finish the rest on Monday.
Sunday was the highlight of my week/month: I was finally going to see an NFL game at Arrowhead Stadium. Amazingly enough, though my parents have been to dozens of games over the years, I had never been, except for one in San Diego that I can barely remember (I was too young then to care about watching it at that point, anyway). So I could barely contain my excitement as I read a magazine (Wired) on the plane after having run about a mile so that we would make our flight. The flight was short by my standards - only about an hour and a half. After that, we got a rental car and drove down to Truman Sports Complex, stopping only once along the way so that I could get a Chiefs hat to complement my Priest Holmes jersey.
My dad had heard that one of his friends from high school would be at the game too, so we tailgated with them for about four hours. We hadn’t planned on having to wait so long before the game, but it had been rescheduled from 12:00 to 3:15, and that kind of screwed up our plans (damn you, Fox!). Anyway, we went to our seats at about 2:30, sang the modified national anthem (it ends with “and the home of the CHIEFS!!!”), and watched a great first half, with Dante Hall executing one of his trademark touchdown runs after a kickoff and touchdowns from Priest Holmes and Larry Johnson. By about the middle of the second quarter, the score was 24 to 6, with the Chiefs killing the Eagles. The feeling in the stadium was amazing - Arrowhead is the loudest in the NFL, and seeing 80,000 fans screaming themselves hoarse for their team was almost enough to bring tears to my eyes. Almost.
But then came the second half, and it was at that point that my elation morphed slowly into frustration and then into anger as the Chiefs fell apart, going from an 18-point lead to being behind by ten by the fourth quarter. The Eagles demonstrated how a true Super Bowl contender could recover from a deficit, completing pass after pass in the face of the Chiefs’ struggling pass defense. Even though the Chiefs are my team, the Eagles are definitely my favorite in the NFC, and they proved their worth that Sunday. The final score, which my dad and I heard as we went back to the airport after leaving at the beginning of the fourth quarter to make our flight, was 37-31, Eagles.
Even though the Chiefs lost, it was still worth going to the game. But after the plane landed at about 8:45 Sunday night, my dad and I still faced the long drive home. (We’ve since decided that flying through Chicago Midway isn’t worth the cheapness of flying Southwest - we’ll be using Milwaukee’s airport from now on.) After getting a quick dinner at Burger King, getting stuck in a traffic jam, and making some wrong turns on Chicago’s complex freeway system, we pulled into the driveway at about 11:30. I was exhausted (for the third night in a row), so I went straight to bed without even trying to work on the newspaper.
While my dad and I were at the game, my younger brother was at a friend’s house because my mom was in Seattle with some friends. Being the smart little boy that he is, he managed to break his collarbone on a bike jump that they had built in his friend’s driveway. Even though he wasn’t wearing a helmet or any other padding, he luckily only had a minor concussion, so now he just has to deal with having his arm in a sling all the time. I can’t say that I feel that sorry for him, but I was beginning to worry about my own safety after both my dad and my brother had been in major accidents in the same weekend. Sure, breaking a collarbone is something that just happens and isn’t a huge deal, but this was the first bone that he had ever broken, and I had just been thinking about how neither of us had ever broken anything before when the phone call from mom came explaining to us what had happened. Luckily, it’s been a week now and I remain in one piece, so I guess that little period of bad luck for my family has passed. Or maybe the Chiefs’ loss was supposed to count for my injury, in which case I think I was feeling pain far worse after the game than my brother did after his injury :].
On Monday, my day of reckoning for the newspaper, I brought in what I had early in the morning and showed it to the teacher. Though he was disappointed that the copy had failed, he seemed impressed that I had put so much effort into getting it done, and he was also impressed by my design abilities (I told him that it came from doing websites, so it was second-nature to me at this point). I ended up continuing to work on the newspaper during my newspaper period (45 minutes), during lunch (30 minutes), during my pre-calculus class (1 hour), and during the after-school activity period (30 minutes). Since I had already spent a total of almost eleven hours on the stupid paper, I decided to go ahead and leave at 2:45 on Monday, letting my fellow design editors finish the back page and link the document so that it could be sent to the printer.
I had a lot of homework that night and two tests to study for, so I was just as tired on Tuesday as I had been on Monday morning. I had now been up until at least midnight on five consecutive nights, meaning that I was running on about 75% of the sleep that I should have been getting. My Tuesday physics test was a reflection of that: I scored an 85%, keeping my grade right around a B+. That class has been frustrating from the start, first because the teacher doesn’t explain things well enough for me to understand the first or second time around, and second because about half the kids in the class are seniors. Normally I don’t mind seniors, but these seniors are all jocks who goof around a lot but still manage to get a better grade than me because they’ve taken calculus and because they have the added advantage of years of Wisconsin-level science classes as opposed to the crappy science classes that were taught in Arizona. I hadn’t even lit a Bunsen burner until last year, but my brother has been doing experiments with them already, and he’s only in seventh grade. Suffice to say, I’m way, way behind in my scientific education compared to most students here.
Somehow, knowing that I did terrible on that test made me do better on my next one that day: a ten-problem, 35-point “quiz” that I aced. By Tuesday night I was really beginning to feel the effects of my sleep deprivation - I was in a terrible mood, feeling depressed in a way that I hadn’t been since February. But I got a bit more sleep on Wednesday, and by Thursday, when I spent most of the evening relaxing with a game of Rome Total War in which I pwned the Numidians, Spaniards, Gauls, and Egyptions with my Carthaginian mercenary hordes, I was feeling much better.
That pretty much brings me to now, since there hasn’t been anything particularly amazing happening in the last few days (yay!). Here’s what will be taking up my time in the next few weeks:
- Langosta 1.2
- I’m hoping to have this finished in the next week so that I can begin working on Langosta 1.3, which will have Ajaxy goodness and will hopefully be done by November 1st, in time for the CSS Reboot
- A new website for an unknown client of my employer
- I have no idea what’s happening with this, but it’s going to take up a lot of my time.
- A website for my school’s basketball team
- The coach of my school’s basketball team is the newspaper teacher, so I guess all my work on the paper wasn’t for nothing (I’ll get IB service hours for this). (This is similar to the reward that I got for working so hard on my old school’s website: five semesters of honors credits and a job doing websites for my current employer.)
- Major papers for English and History of the Americas
- The English paper has to do with analyzing a literary element found in Death of a Salesman, which I had to read over the summer. The history one is on D-Day, which shouldn’t be too hard.
- Finishing the IB website for my school
- I got the honor of doing the IB website because I was the only one with any experience in creating them, and it looks like this one site will give me about a third of all the hours that I need for this year, so I’m going to be sitting pretty once it’s finished.
- Working in the OHS Writing Center
- The Writing Center is an after-school thing where IB and AP students tutor struggling students from other classes, often by revising their reports and helping them structure their ideas. It’s not my favorite thing to do in the world, but I’ll get some extra service hours for it.
- Desperately trying to get an A- in IB Physics
- An A- in IB Physics would cancel out my A+ in pre-calculus, so it’ll be like I had As in both classes. Hopefully I’ll survive it.
- Diagnosing and treating Kenny’s “random-reboot-when-scrolling” problem
- For some reason, Kenny, the office computer that I built, likes to crash when the user is scrolling a window, either with a mouse wheel or the scroll bar. I don’t know why this is happening, but I think it must be a problem with the Nvidia driver because this card was in Crampy and worked fine. Also, I’ve tried both Gentoo and SuSE on Kenny with no luck in fixing the problem, and I’ve even tried switching from Gnome to KDE with no result. I’m starting to wonder if Linux is really ready for the mainstream, if hardware support from even a “good” vendor like Nvidia is still this crappy.
Wow, that list became a lot longer than I thought it would be. The updates about Langosta will be in my next entry.