Brettia

I’m pretty sure I’ve already talked before about how I’m not exactly excited about having to eventually leave Stanford, so in my usual fashion, I’ll write about it some more. I was in the lounge a few weeks ago talking with some people, and at one point or another the subject of going home came up. We all agreed that high school was going to suck after having had a taste of freedom this summer. Things like having to get a pass to walk between classes or being told we can’t wear coats when the heaters are turned off in the middle of winter because of a “safety risk” are going to feel incredibly stupid and unnecessary (not that they aren’t that way already…but it’ll feel worse, I guess). I’ve always kind of felt that high school was far too restricted because safety policies are geared toward keeping the most immature kids in check with barely any regard to the more mature ones, but until now I’ve never had a chance to experience what life might be like in the semi-real world. I’m kind of amazed that only a month ago I was actually afraid of coming here…now it seems that that fear was just a side-effect of being over-protected by a combination of an overbearing school administration (not just at OHS, but at every school I’ve been to) and my own instincts.

What amazes me most about college life, at Stanford at least, is that people seem generally okay with being intelligent. In high school, popularity often seems to be tied directly to just how stupid one can act. Not so, here. Here, people group together in the lounge to study. They read books for fun. They have discussions about politics, business, current events, and so on. Music is rampant, yet mindless rap or pop songs are somewhat rare. People randomly play guitars, pianos, trumpets, and all sorts of instruments that I’ve never heard of at all hours of the day. It’s kind of difficult to describe the feeling of being here in one word, but terms like “eclectic” and “bohemian” come to mind. It makes me wonder if this is an aura that’s unique to Stanford or if all colleges feel this way.

It amazes me how quickly things can change here. When I wrote my last entry, I had made a lot of acquaintances but few real friends. People knew my name, but not me. It wasn’t really a bad thing; it was just earlier on in the summer and most people weren’t yet comfortable about being completely open and normal with each other. I wasn’t exactly helping my situation. After days of working on my Java version of Breakout for computer science, I lost several hours of work due to Eclipse’s lack of any undo function when deleting files, and somehow the act of redoing that work ballooned into two more days of grueling coding sessions in which I barely left the cluster. I wasn’t happy about having to do it, yet at the same time I told myself that if I truly wanted to be a programmer, I’d have to be passionate enough about it to want to code for hours on end, and somehow that kept me going. I knew in the back of my mind that I was relying on circular reasoning - not a very strong foundation - but I didn’t care all that much.

I finally turned my code in two days late (we get three extra days for situations like the one I was in), and then there was more homework to do for my other class, Greek and Latin word roots. It sucked. I got finished at around three in the morning, which ended up being slightly convenient because my mom responded almost immediately when I emailed her about some new headphones I wanted to buy. I happily collected her credit card information (over the phone) so I could order them off Amazon.com, thinking about what wonderful service I enjoyed from my parental units. I mean, a response from a qualified technician not based in India in under five minutes? Incredible! (I kid, I kid.) While on the phone, I reassured her that 3 AM was a fine time to go to bed and that I would never dream of “accidentally” sleeping through my alarm the next morning in order to get a few more hours of much-needed rest. Yet, seven hours later, that’s exactly what I did, except it really was an accident. It was one of those things where you bat dazedly at the alarm immediately after you wake up and somehow manage to turn it off completely, thinking that you’d get up after just a few more minutes, that there’s no way you’d fall back asleep again, and continuing to think these things until your eyelids finally droop closed and your breathing becomes regular and you awaken once more two hours later with your roommate snoring away above you. It was the first time I’d ever skipped class. Ever. Initially, I felt bad. I told a few people, wondering what the reaction would be. Would they recoil in horror at the lack of respect for my instructor and his class that I displayed by skipping it? Nope. Instead, they told me about X class that they had skipped and how it was “hella cool” that no one cared about whether they came or not. I love college.

Last Thursday was the day I missed class, so the only thing I had left that day was CS. It was some kind of highly boring lecture about string functions, covering material that I had mostly figured out on my own days before. The kid sitting next to me, a fellow gamer/geek named John who has recently achieved Friend status (50 relationship points, like in The Sims…hwada sofada!), fell asleep, and another recent Friend, Chris, (we noodle together), laughed with me at John’s expense until he woke up. The rest of the day was pretty boring…I don’t really remember now, but I think I slept some more, still trying to make up for lost sleep over the past week. Oh yeah, Thursday night was the night of the dreaded compsci midterm, which seemed like it would be incredibly difficult after taking the practice midterm but actually turned out (for me) to not be so bad. However, everyone else said it was horrible and they didn’t have nearly enough time, so now I’m thinking that I somehow zoned out and didn’t realize that I was failing as I took it. I’ll know by tomorrow whether or not I am worthy of continued existence.

Friday was a good day, but it was also hot. Like, way hotter than it should ever be in the Bay Area. I think the temperature broke 100 degrees every day over the weekend, and possibly on Monday too. There were blackouts in some areas because of overtaxed electrical systems (luckily, Stanford has its own power plant). I began to regret the fact that I hadn’t brought a fan since the dorm isn’t air-conditioned. Generally speaking, it wasn’t a pleasant experience. But it was made better by a neat little idea that my roommate and I had: the mattress party.

Mattress parties are very simple; anyone with a lot of mattresses can have one. Basically, we moved all of our furniture out of one of our rooms (remember, I was supposed to have a third roommate who never showed, so we have a two-room suite-thing) and into the other, and we pulled our three mattresses off the beds and put them on the floor in the cleared room. They only took up about two-thirds of the space, so we invited a few more people to donate their mattresses to our goal of covering the room with mattresses from wall to wall. It worked, and the three extra mattresses fit perfectly. Then, random people who had watched mattresses pass through the halls for about ten minutes came in and flopped down with their pillows, and it became a sleepover. A co-ed sleepover. *cue dramatic music*

We didn’t do anything too bad, though. At one point or another, a game of truth or dare was started, and poor Chris had to endure a rather embarrassing question from another Friend, Tim, who had gotten Chris to tell me and a few other people the answer in private a few days before. I laughed at him anyway, especially when he gave Tim that “I’m going to pull you apart with my bare hands” look that people get when they’re put in that sort of situation and they know exactly who has put them there.

The truth-or-daring got pretty loud at about three in the morning, so loud, supposedly, that a mentor opened the door and started yelling at us that he could hear us from out in the courtyard (a few hundred feet away through several walls). What made his tirade hilarious to all present was the fact that another mentor, Cole, the coolest of them all, was sitting the whole time in a corner of the room where the other mentor couldn’t see him. I could see Cole easily, and we looked at each other and the look on his face was enough to almost put me over the edge (pretend that wasn’t a run-on sentence, I’m in the middle of a story here). When the mentor was done and had shut the door, everyone immediately burst into fits of laughter. Unfortunately, we let go a little bit too early, and the door opened again seconds later with the furious mentor telling us that the party was over; everyone had to leave. That time, however, Cole showed himself and smoothed things over, so the party was allowed to last a little while longer before everyone fell asleep.

The next was another long, lazy, hot day, and most of us just kind of laid around, trying to stay cool. The computer cluster, usually deserted and considered a place where only the computerless people would go, became a cool place to be in more ways than one (ha ha, bad pun). It’s the only air-conditioned room in the Eucalipto part of the dorm complex, so at one point there was probably close to thirty people in there. It was kind of inconvenient for people like me who actually depend upon the cluster in order to work, and I was extremely annoyed when people with laptops started taking the network cables from the university desktops and using them for their own Internet connections, but it was also kind of nice to have people in there for once. At the same time, though, there’s such a thing as being in there too long…one kid slept there in a mess of food trash on the floor, and a few others have been in there for days, as far as I know, leaving only to sleep a few hours in their own rooms. I kept having to find reasons to abandon my homework in order to get away from them - I think I took a few more trips to the Jamba Juice at the student union than were necessary.

Saturday night was a Mix-n-Match dance party hosted by my house, and I went with a half-assed costume made out of my bed quilt. I ended up only staying there for about half an hour; I got sidetracked by another Friend, Garrett, who I was with in Monterey. Garrett happens to be interested in Linux and programming like I am, and he had the idea that we should try to create our own programmer’s Linux distro. I suggested that we base it off Gentoo, and at the moment that’s about as far as our plans have gotten. I started the bootstrapping process on his Core Duo laptop (which should make compiling extremely fast, I hope) that night, and we’re going to work on it again this weekend. We want it to be fast, light, small and runnable off of a USB drive on any computer, similar to SLAX or Knoppix. I dunno if the project will come to anything, but the fact that there’s another person who even knows what Linux is living right down the hall from me is awesome. Like I said, I love college.

Once the party had ended, at about one in the morning, Kyle (my roommate) and I decided to have a Mattress Party Redux, but with less people so it wouldn’t be quite as hot in our room. We all flopped down on the mattresses and were unsure of what we were going to do when who else but Tim staggers into the room, pretending (we hope) to be drunk. I thought he would do some quick drunken antics to be funny and then we’d resume whatever we were originally going to do at our little party, but instead he kept us rolling on the floor with laughter for a good two hours. Some videos of it ended up on YouTube…I’d recommend that you watch them, but not when anyone with sensitive ears is listening. If you don’t think it’s funny…well, maybe you just had to be there. I dunno how he kept it up for two full hours…it was a truly amazing comedic feat.

The next day, Sunday, was perhaps the hottest day of the weekend, and I ended up journeying to Jamba Juice to get about a gallon of pure smoothie goodness for my roommate and his girlfriend. They had already begun to melt during the ten minute walk from the student union to the dorm, but they were still somewhat cold…and so…good…peenya colada es mi amor. The reason I was at the student union in the first place was to receive my second round of homework grades for CS, and I found I’d done well on the second (very simple) assignment: check-pluses in both categories again. I’ve recently learned that a check-plus is closer to an A than an A-, which makes me happier, though I still want to get one of those elusive plus grades sometime this summer. Breakout might get it for functionality…I added everything I could think of, from a scoring system based on events to a powerup system to a brick counter to improved ball physics. The code wasn’t as clean as usual, though, and I employed some less-than-acceptable techniques in order to use global variables, but maybe I’ll get by with at least a plus/check-plus anyway. My section leader (who grades my homework assignments) works at Google, therefore he must be a good guy. As it turns out, it was a good idea to go to section on those nights when I doubted its usefulness.

The rest of Sunday was sort of subdued because people were thinking about and preparing for the week ahead, which for some hasn’t been a nice one. Midterms are falling all over the place for many of us, though some of the tests have been worse than others. Benne and Josh, two nearly-identical brothers from Chicago known as “the twins,” probably had the worst lot of all; their statistics test had questions on it that were so difficult and so cutting-edge that the answers could only be found in graduate-level term papers published within the last two or three years. Somehow, though, they got the second- and sixth- highest grades in their class (in which they are the only high school students) which to me is unbelievable. I wish my work/study ethic was as good as theirs…though it’s not as bad as it was last year now that I’m studying subjects that I’m truly interested in.

That basically brings us to Monday and today, which were basically just regular school days devoid of anything particularly interesting. I did manage to noodle with Chris twice in that period - I learned how to use chopsticks to eat my Ramen instead of slurping it up with a spoon and getting it everywhere. Meanwhile, I’ve begun reading a book by Stephen King called The Gunslinger, part of a sci-fi/fantasy series that was recommended to me by John. So far I’d recommend it, but it’s kind of on the weird side.

The rest of this week won’t be too exciting, but this weekend two or three more mattress parties are planned. I have no idea what we’ll do, but maybe we can get Tim drunk for real just to see if he really acts the way he did this past weekend when he’s wasted. (Or not, because none of us would ever dream of breaking the behavior code…probably.) There’s also a trip planned to go sailing on the bay that I’m signed up for. Also, I’m continuing my work on planning and writing low-level code for Gabo (the newspaper organization project), work that could pay off literally because of a new project I’ve been given from my Arizona-based web development employer which will probably use the same libraries I’m working on for Gabo. Gabo and the new project will both be a lot of work, but as both could be equally lucrative (one in terms of connections / reputation / recogition and the other in terms of monetary compensation), I’m hoping I can reuse as much code as possible and get both done sometime early this fall. I’m bursting to write about all the cool APIs I’ve been working on integrating into Sangre, but I’m sure you’ll hear all about it eventually. Anyway, it’s midnight and I still need to do some word roots unhappiness. I still love college, and Friends are nice too. I miss Wisconsin…and yet at the same time I never want to go back.

As I mentioned in my last entry, I was away from Stanford for most of the first half of this past weekend, first in Palo Alto with my grandparents and then in Monterey as a part of a summer college trip. My busy weekend was made complete yesterday, when I spent the day in Marin County (where the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge is located) with my grandparents and my aunt and uncle.

I got up early (easier said than done as I had been up extremely late the night before) and walked to the CalTrain station, and then I somehow managed to buy a ticket, get on the train, and ride it to San Francisco all by myself (I know you’re proud). I met my family at the San Francisco station and then rode with them across the Golden Gate Bridge and into the somewhat mountainous region to the north of San Francisco. The road was windy, barely clinging to the mountainside at times, and it reminded me of driving in the mountains back in Arizona or Colorado or Utah. We ended up at Muir Woods, a little national monument that tries to protect one of the few remaining redwood forests in this area of California. We hiked around for a few hours, enjoying the peacefulness of the small creek running through the bottom of the valley and commenting on the trees’ incredible circumferences.

Afterward, we left Muir Woods for Muir Beach, where we relaxed for a while on the sand and rocks near the crashing surf. Then we all began to feel the hunger that stems from spending half a day walking around, so we drove to Sausalito and had lunch at a nice seafood restaurant there. I had some excellent halibut with pesto garlic mashed potatoes. After eating, we grabbed some ice cream at a little store down the road (can you tell by now that my family spoils me whenever I see them) and waited around a bit for a ferry to reach the harbor so that we could get back to San Francisco. Once on the ferry, my grandpa took some really nice-looking pictures of San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge (the fog had conveniently cleared for him). The ferry was exceptionally fast, taking only about half an hour to go from Sausalito to San Francisco’s ferry terminal. After reaching San Francisco, we walked to my uncle and aunt’s apartment south of the Financial District and sat around for a little while, watching a movie and talking. Finally, it was time for me to return to Stanford and back to my normal life as a student (my metaphorical homework pile was starting to get high). Rather than ride CalTrain, I was driven back so that I could take with me a nice camping chair (the chairs in my room are terribly uncomfortable).

When I got back, tired and ready to sleep a normal number of hours for the first time in several days, I somehow got sucked into watching the unrated version of The 40-Year-Old Virgin (don’t forget, parental units, if you happen to see this, I refused to watch such morally reprehensible trash). When I got back to my room at about 11:00, I found about seven people in there talking with my roommate. Garret, the same kid who I was with in Monterey, amused us by prodding random things with his “long, hard wood” (it was a board from one of the beds), and some innocent stories (full of innuendo, of course) were told. I was surprised by the fact that the three girls present seemed to laugh at the overt sexual references just as much as the boys did.

Eventually, everyone cleared out, leaving me to crash on my mattress (now located in a hole beneath my roommate’s bed) and sleep a lovely nine hours. Unfortunately, sleeping that long cost me both breakfast and lunch, but at least I didn’t miss CS, which was at 1:15. Class today was a bit better than usual, the subject being the char primitive data type and its uses, as well as a quick introduction to the String object. After class, I went back to the computer cluster at my dorm and remained shut in there for the next four hours, working to finish my version of the “Breakout” game for CS. I had some really annoying bugs that had to be worked through (usually not faults in my logic, but rather issues that came up because of differences between how Java works and how PHP works), but I managed to fix them, improve my physics calculations hugely (from four vertices per collision check to 22), and add some extra features (sounds when the ball collides, etc.), all while firming up the core architecture that my code is built upon. It might have been my most productive day since I got here, but that didn’t keep me from feeling tired (and incredibly hungry) by the time dinner rolled around.

Unfortunately, I had to miss dinner too - I had to meet with my CS section leader at 6:55 to go over the code I wrote for my first assignment and find out what my grade was. He seemed impressed and gave me a check-plus for both functionality and style, which was about what I had expected (equivalent roughly to a B+ or A-, yo creo) because the first assignment left little room for being creative or adding on extra features.

After the meeting, I grabbed a box of Pop Tarts at the student union’s convenience store and inhaled two of them once I had gotten back to the dorm. Luckily, I just recently heard that we’re going to have In-N-Out burgers at our house meeting in about an hour, so I won’t have to go hungry for much longer.

Bleeg, this was a crappy entry, sorry. This will be a busy week for me (lots of CS and word roots homework tonight, a CS contest entry due in a week, and a CS midterm on Thursday night), so my next one might not come until early next week. *returns metaphorical nose to metaphorical grindstone*

Update: In-N-Out burgers are awesome. And Eclipse desperately needs to either move deleted files to the Recycle Bin or have an undelete feature; I just lost four hours of work.

Well, now it’s been two weeks since my last entry about what I’ve been doing at Stanford. I’ve thought a lot about writing in the past few days, but things always come up and each entry takes at least an hour usually and I just didn’t have the time. Now, I still don’t really have the time, but I’ll continue with my usual habit of writing when I shouldn’t be just because that’s what I’ve always done. Yeah.

Anyway, my weekdays aren’t all that interesting as they’re filled mostly with just eating, sleeping, going to class, and being a “hall whore” (or if you prefer, one who lacks the desire to sleep in one’s own room and instead camps out in a random hallway with some friends in a kind of hobo sleepover). Most of the fun and important things happen over the weekend, which here is from Thursday afternoon to early Monday morning because most of us don’t have classes on Friday. Last weekend (which, conveniently, occurred just after the fourth of July, when I last wrote about life at Stanford), I didn’t do much of anything on Friday, choosing instead to work on Sangre/Gabo. On the next day I got up early and went on another day trip to see Pirates of the Caribbean 2, which I thought was a pretty good movie with the exception of the cliffhanger at the end. I didn’t know beforehand that they were going to stretch the story out into a third movie, so I came expecting a conclusion and was a bit put off when there wasn’t one.

By the evening after seeing Pirates of the Caribbean 2, I had slept about four hours on average over the past few days, and I “accidentally” slept in the next morning and missed the trip to the art museum in San Francisco. I can’t say I was really all that sad about it, as I’m not really that interested in art in general and I like artwork with historical meaning more than the modern art I would have seen had I gone. Instead, I spent my Sunday sleeping and finishing up a CS homework assignment that was due the next day. As you can probably tell, it wasn’t nearly as eventful a weekend as the first and second ones.

Last week was slow in terms of actual things occurring but somewhat stressful due to a new CS homework assignment that I had to work on, which was to program the game “Breakout” in Java. This proved more difficult for me than I had thought it would. So far, we’ve gone over a lot in the class, but not really any programming concepts that I don’t utilize already in my PHP programming. (However, this is not to say that I haven’t gotten anything out of the class - the level of sophistication in my code has increased substantially, and I’ve worked out most of the nuances of the Java language and gotten over the fact that it’s strongly typed, a big difference from PHP.) The problem is that the class is meant to teach both experienced programmers and people who have never programmed before, and we’re kind of expected to stay within certain bounds of sophistication and complexity that novice programmers don’t cross very often. For the first two assignments, one of which was in the extremely limited Karel language, I was a good little boy and didn’t stray too far from what the rest of the flock was supposed to be doing, mainly because I was explicitly told not to and the assignments themselves were too simple to allow for much innovation. But on this third one, which is due on Tuesday, the limits were removed completely and I was set free to do whatever I wanted within the constraints of the Java language. At first, I just concentrated on the core functionality. I programmed a working version that did almost everything that the assignment had asked for, but then I realized that the code was fast becoming difficult to read or maintain because I had attempted to write the entire game as a single class. This was what we were supposed to do, but unless I stuck with the bare minimum feature set, it wasn’t going to prove to be a scalable method. So I wrote up another of other classes that the main game class (BreakoutGame) would use to run the game. There was one to manage the ball, one to manage the paddle, one for the bricks, one for game messages, one to represent a turn, et cetera. As I wrote the code, I found myself employing methodologies that I had snubbed or been too lazy to employ in the past, such as Top-Down Design, heavy object orientation, component-based design, and others. And each time I wrote a section, if I finished it and found it lacking, I’d rewrite it again. Some parts have been rewritten three or four times, yet the core logic of the code is basically the same. But now I have a much better platform to build off of, allowing me to add some nice new features in the hope of earning the coveted ++ grade on the assignment. We’ll see if that happens or not (there’s still a lot of work to be done), but I’ve learned a lot from all of the refactoring I’ve done. I think I can now write Java almost as easily as I can write PHP.

So Monday marked the beginning of a long week, in which I spent way more time than I wanted to working on homework for my Latin word roots class (as you may have noticed, I’m really just in this for the programming - I want to figure out if I really want to be a software engineer or not as soon as I can because it will probably impact what college I choose to go to). On Monday night there was a little meeting at the student union about the college admissions process and financial aid, and I left feeling slightly more optimistic about my ability to afford going to Stanford were I able to get in (they cover 100% of students’ demonstrated financial need). Tuesday night featured a group photo (yay?) on the steps of the Cantor Art Museum and a meeting with the Spanish Club at the student union, where we ate nachos and had a debate (en español, de acurso) about whether or not the SAT was a good thing for students. Wednesday night was the first Book Club meeting, where we discussed the first half of Old School, by Tobias Wolff, though I had to keep quiet most of the time because I’d already read the whole thing in a frenzy on Sunday night (it was difficult to put down). There was also an Intro to Engineering seminar meeting, a weekly thing that I signed up for at the beginning of the summer session where a few kids meet in the main Lagunita lounge and listen to a guest engineer talk about their job. The first one was a pretty cool mechanical engineer who works to improve the efficiency of engines, and the second was a medical R&D engineer who develops equipment for surgeons like drug-coated stents and catheters and such. Eventually there’s going to be a computer engineering guy, and that of course is the one I’m most looking forward to.

On Thursday I went to Green Library in search of books to help me in researching the Battle of Lepanto, a naval conflict that occurred in 1571 and has been termed one of the most decisive naval battles in military history. It turned out to be a good idea to do my research here; I found six books on Lepanto in English and several more in Spanish that I might check out later if I’m ever feeling really zealous about my research. Sure, I had to traverse the inky depths of the Bing Wing basement to get a few of them (scary, but would be such an awesome Counter-Strike level), but I emerged alive. Thursday night was uneventful except for an “extra discussion section” for CS that we now have to go to weekly. I wasn’t very impressed by the first one, nor was I impressed by this latest one. Basically, students just ask questions about concepts that were taught in lecture and we do a few simple problems on a chalkboard. If I could easily skip it, I would, but the section leader is the same guy who grades the homework, so I guess I should probably try to stay in favor with him.

On Friday (yesterday), I slept in in the morning, worked on some code, and then spent the rest of my day with my grandparents from Colorado, who came out here to visit my aunt and uncle who live in downtown San Francisco. They picked me up at about 12:30, and then we went out to eat at the Cheesecake Factory in Palo Alto. The food was great and it was kind of nice to be off campus and with family for the first time in three weeks. Afterward, we went back to Stanford and I took my grandparents on the grand tour of the main quad, the engineering quad, and the eastern part of the campus, where the libraries and student union are located. They dropped me off at Lagunita (my dorm) and left at about 5:30, at which time I was ready to veg for a few hours before diving back into my code and watching a really strange movie (Mulholland Drive, another movie with a fair amount of erotic scenes that are just too weird to be entertaining in the normal sense) with a few friends. I went to bed “early” (around 1:00) so that I could get up early for today’s trip, which was to Monterey Bay Aquarium.

I didn’t get up quite as early as I had hoped; I woke up at 7:02, just in time to throw on some clothes and grab my hat, wallet, phone, and key so that I could meet the rest of the group out in the courtyard at 7:00. (Yes, that means that I either got ready in negative two minutes or that I was about five minutes late - I like to think that the former was true, because I’m just special that way.) Monterey is about a 90-minute coach ride from here, so we watched 10 Things I Hate About You on the way (it was a nice coach). Once at the aquarium, I ended up with a group of two fellow Eucs (Garret and Ashley) and a girl from Ujamaa who I didn’t know that well. We kind of rushed through it, but I saw most of the animals that I really wanted to see (jellyfish, sharks, sea otters, etc.). I think we might have spent more time in the three different (yet the same) gift shops that we visited; one rule of thumb that I have learned since coming to the Bay Area is that one shalt not expecteth to not shoppeth if one placeth thyself with them of the female sex(eth?). But plush stuffed-animal manta rays were a lot better than yarn (why, oh why did it have to be yarn?), so I was okay with it.

After about two and a half hours at the aquarium, my group wandered around Monterey in search of things to do. We ended up at a Mexican restaurant (no one was particularly hungry for seafood after being lectured at about marine conservation at the aquarium) right on the ocean, which would have given us a wonderful view if it weren’t for the fog and the depressingly small waves and the little marshy seaweed/rock formations and the old men swimming. I guess I was too busy dealing with the utter euphoria brought on by the arrival of good Mexican food to pay attention to the ocean anyway. All of the food had a little more cilantro than I was used to, but it was great anyway. We talked for a while at the restaurant after our meal, and then we left to go back into Monterey and see Cannery Row, which is a slang term for “go shopping in the quaint little tourist trappy shops along what used to be a historic street.” As you may have gleaned from my entry about going to Chinatown in San Francisco, I’m not a big fan of tourist districts, and it was no different in Monterey. I endured it anyway, though shopping/driving rusty nails through John Steinbeck’s long-decayed heart was made much more enjoyable by my friend and fellow CS student Garret, who entertained the girls and myself by wearing women’s sunglasses with floppy tourist hats while clutching an “authentic” Hairy Otter stuffed animal.

Our last stop on our whirlwind shopping tour of Cannery Row was the local Starbucks, where I got my usual Strawberry-Banana Créme Frappuccino and was sucked away once more into a euphoric wonderworld where whipped cream clouds floated across a pink, blended strawberry sky and little green mermaids fed me frappuccino after frappuccino using a turkey-baster–like device. Having had my two great loves, Mexican food and Starbucks, in the same day, I decided that my existence was complete and that there was no longer anything worth striving for or achieving. My foot was tapping with joy; it annoyed my group, I think, but I didn’t care. By the way, the Strawberry-Banana Créme Frappuccino isn’t a normal Starbucks offering; you have to ask them to blend together half a Strawberries and Créme Frappuccino and half a Bananas and Créme Frappuccino in order to get it. I consider it to be perhaps the best thing ever conceived by mankind.

After I had come down from my sugar-and-bean–induced high, we walked back to the aquarium, hopped on our buses coaches (sorry, have to be proper), and went home, watching Mean Girls on the way. For being a Lindsey Lohan film, it wasn’t all that bad, pretty funny in some parts. We reached Lagunita at about 6:30, arriving late due to some slow traffic on the way. I ate a quick and late dinner (though I wasn’t very hungry), watched a kid from my house play SimCity 4, one of my favorite non-gory games, while the Bulgarian kid, Z, talked about how he had kicked a drunk guy in a graveyard a few nights ago (I told him he should have head-butted the guy in the chest). Then I made a few plans with my uncle for tomorrow, when I should be taking the CalTrain up to San Francisco so that we can cross the Golden Gate up into Marin and Sausalito. And now I’m here, in the cluster, writing perhaps one of my better entries in the past few months. This feels a lot more like the Brett of two years ago…the not-so-complainy, not-so-depressed Brett. Dare I ask if this might mean that the dark period following the move to Wisconsin is finally, completely, over, and Brett has finally rejoined the world as a semi-normal person? We’ll see. Unfortunately, though I wish I could stay here forever and simply go to college as if I were a real undergraduate, I still have to go home in August. Sigh. (I know, I always end my entries on such an upbeat note.)

I really like working on Langosta. It’s a project that suits me perfectly - something to work on on the side when I’ve got time, a relatively small project that isn’t impossibly complex and difficult to add new features to. However, Langosta has one fatal flaw: the only person it really benefits is me. In the past, it has always been the projects that I’ve done for others (such as my old high school’s website), usually for free, that have resulted in major payoffs for me in the end in the form of rewards like academic credit and a job. I’ve been attempting to find a new project like this for a while now, but a number of things, ranging from a lack of time to preoccupation with Langosta to my inability to work on any major projects for my school, kept me from succeeding in doing so. Now, the opportunity has finally come.

For me, my work on the school newspaper at OHS has become an almost exact replacement for the work I used to do on the CSHS website. However, it’s highly cyclical, and I don’t think I spend anywhere near as much time designing the newspaper as I used to spend maintaining and improving that website. Also, while the newspaper teacher has let me know repeatedly that my work is appreciated (and has bribed me with caffeine, of course), the average reader has no idea that I even exist and probably could care less about things that I nitpick about, like making sure that a line is positioned “just so” and that lines of text line up evenly across the page. So, in an effort to redouble my…um, efforts, I’m going to develop a new piece of web application software over the next year that will hopefully streamline the newspaper publishing process considerably.

The Problem

Currently, submitted articles follow a sorta-kinda-well-defined path to being published in the newspaper. It works like this:

1. Students write their articles on computers at home or at school, using Microsoft Word.
2. Students copy the Word document to a special folder on the school network’s common drive and fill out a form called a “tracking sheet” with information about the article such as: author(s) name(s), section, pullquotes (if any), and headline / subheadline.
3. The article is edited up to three times by different editors, with the number of editing rounds depending on the article’s writing quality.
4. The article is approved by the managing editor (the newspaper teacher) and the tracking sheet is put in a basket according to the article’s proposed section.
5. A team of editors meets and runs through every article, assigning it “first wave”, “second wave”, or “third wave” priority.
6. The design editors (me and usually one other person) divide up our pages by section and begin placing articles in their corresponding sections, using largely our own judgment and to some extent the priority guidelines given to us by the editors to determine which articles get the most important spots (front page, back page, above the fold in any section, etc.).
7. As each article is placed, design editors are responsible for fixing last-minute editing errors and solving any issues such as finding photos for articles and giving them captions.

As you may or may not have noticed, there are some major issues with this method:

• Huge amounts of paper are wasted because each article is printed multiple times while it is being edited and all 60-odd articles submitted for each issue have their own tracking sheet.
• A lot of work falls to the design editors in the final days before publishing, usually because of writers’ laziness (it’s not that difficult to request that a photographer take a picture for your article or to fix simple spelling or grammar mistakes) and because the editors’ prioritization system remains somewhat vague. First-wave articles can vary widely.
• Tracking sheets are easily lost and difficult to deal with / search through. I don’t like spending precious minutes on a deadline day rifling through tracking sheets looking for an article that will fit in a certain spot.

The Solution

The bigger issue that causes all of the above problems is the “hole” in the article’s path to being published where the process switches from digital to analog/paper and then back. It would be vastly easier if we could simply making the entire process automated and digital. Enter, Gabo, the latest project in the Brettia family, named with yet another Spanish word. This time, it’s a nickname for famous journalist and writer Jorge Luis Borges. Here’s what Gabo will do:

• For Writers:
  • Article submission is now done via the Internet (both more convenient and easier to manage dynamically).
  • Articles can be flagged for extra editing by specific editors, if necessary.
  • Articles have requests for photos attached to them.
  • Articles can be revised on the website, with no printing necessary.
  • Article metadata (proposed section, headline, subheadline, pullquotes, etc.) can be added and changed at will.
  • Articles can have notes or comments attached to them that are directed to users of certain roles (such as layout suggestions for design editors, editing questions for editors, journalism questions for the managing editor, etc.).
• For Editors:
  • A listing of all articles awaiting editing will always be available.
  • Articles can be tagged with priority levels or rated to establish which ones are the best.
  • Articles can be sent back to their writers with comments for further editing.
• For the Managing Editor:
  • A list of all articles awaiting final approval would be available.
  • (Can do anything that a normal editor can do, basically, as well as give final article approval.)
• For Photographers:
  • A list of all articles awaiting photos would be available.
  • Photographers would be able to attach photos (with captions) to articles.
• For Design Editors:
  • Articles are now searchable, categorized by section, rated, and have photos by the time they reach the design editors’ listing.
  • And the hidden link that makes it all work: InDesign can import articles as XML; to place an article, design editors would simply download the XML file (generated dynamically) and then place the article like they always have (except with no more dirty work).

So yeah, that’s my new proyecto grande. But even more is possible. Think for a second: how could a huge online database of every article ever submitted, along with all the necessary metadata for publishing them, ever be useful for anything but what I’ve described already? I’ll give you a little longer before I tell you…. Okay, long enough: the database could be used to build an entire website for the newspaper, dynamically. With basically no more work than what is done to produce a print edition, an online edition of the Cooney Crier could by published simultaneously. This opens up all sorts of new avenues of growth, such as online advertising and school event promotions. Also, writers whose articles miss the metaphorical boat for the print edition could still be available online (assuming they have final editorial approval), giving them a bit more incentive to write, even if their articles aren’t the best.

When I thought all this up, it was a random Saturday in May, and I was so excited by the idea that I could barely contain myself. Now that the idea has had some time to percolate in my mind, the excitement still hasn’t gone away, and I’m already planning for Gabo 1.0 (just the backend stuff, not the public website) to be finished by September 22nd. So I ask you, dear reader, what do you think? It it unique, incredible, worth pursuing? Or have I just been carried away by excitement at a concept that really isn’t that wonderful?

As far as difficulty goes, this project definitely is the hardest one I’ve ever attempted, at least on paper. However, I have advantages now that I didn’t have a year ago, such as Sangre, my collection of core libraries that will hit 1.0 on the same day as Gabo and then become its own project separate from Gabo and Langosta. At the same time, though, Sangre isn’t perfect. I’m working currently on several improvements, such as object-relational mapping, a way of representing data in a database and relationships between bits of data as objects in code (Ruby on Rails does this), full modularization of all code into actions and views, and a better authentication layer with support for user roles and permissions (these roles would be used to control what a logged in user can and cannot do depending on their job, such as writer or photographer) integrated into views and actions, database-stored sessions, and support for multiple authentication backends, such as LDAP, PEAR::Auth, the phpBB authentication system, or pretty much anything else. It’s a lot to do, but I have a whole year to get it right. Also, this project will be a much higher priority for me than Langosta ever was because bugs will impact more people than just me and the ten people who visit my site each day.

Anyway, don’t forget to comment if you have any opinion on this, otherwise, see you next entry (which I’ll be writing soon, I promise!).

I’ve been writing a lot more than normal in the past few days, and it feels like I spend way too much time in the computer cluster though I’m really not here that often. Oh well, it feels good to actually maintain my blog again rather than leaving it to wither in a corner like I do during the school year. I’m sure that come September 5th I’ll put my nose to the grindstone once more and forget that I even have a website, but one of the things I’ve realized after being here for a the past ten days is that I really need to work on having fun every once in a while, even when I know I don’t have time for it. I know that blogging != having fun, but I guess anything is better than working all the time.

Anyway, a lot has happened since my last real entry, but with the rambling in Spanish and my Mac OS X crap-view taking up precious keyboard time, I never got to write about it. As I mentioned before, I went to see Superman Returns on Friday night in San Mateo. The movie wasn’t bad, but parts of it were even more unrealistic than your average superhero film (Spider-Man, at least, has a somewhat believable plot when it comes to how the hero got his powers). I also thought the movie referred too much to details that the audience would only have known if they had seen the first Superman movie, which was made way too long ago (1978) for me to have watched it. Oh, and the romantic aspect to it felt kind of under-developed. But really, it’s not that bad of a movie…I just liked Spider-Man better.

I got back from the movie at about eleven at night, and then I stayed up for another hour or two doing…well, something. I can’t remember at this point. My roommate, meanwhile, pulled an all-nighter in someone else’s room, which was a good thing because I had to get up at seven the next morning to be ready for the San Francisco scavenger hunt trip that was taking place all day Saturday. So I slept a lot less than I had wanted to, got up, and went out into the Lagunita courtyard to be put in a group for the scavenger hunt. Due to a stroke of (bad?) luck, I ended up in a group of five girls. At first, it didn’t seem as if it would be a problem because they were all really nice and seemed excited to do the scavenger hunt. Also, one of them, a redhead named Rebecca, is a fellow IB student, so we reminisced about the horrors of the past year together. So by the time we had reached San Francisco and gotten off the train, I was ready to have a fun day…er, “scavenging.”

Unfortunately, once we were in the city, no one seemed to care about trying to do the hunt anymore. Roughly 80% of the 17 groups (mine included) just walked around and did whatever they wanted, which was both good and bad. It was good because I got to see some parts of San Francisco that I hadn’t spent any time in, such as Chinatown, but it was bad because the girls in my group mainly wanted to shop, which to a male is about the most horrible activity ever conceived. So I somehow ended up in a yarn store, where I got in touch with my feminine side by feeling various yarns and commenting on their softness. Afterward, I walked through about twenty chintzy little shops on the main street in Chinatown, and while my fellow group members were browsing the wares I couldn’t help but feel bad for anyone whose only way of making money was to sell cheap trinkets and other mockeries of their culture to bad-mannered white tourists. I looked around too, but I didn’t buy anything.

After going to Chinatown, my group and I walked all the way to Fisherman’s Wharf, dawdled around a little by the spot where the seals usually sun themselves, and then returned to the CalTrain station via the Embarcadero. It was a really, really long walk (over an hour), and I recommended using public transportation (the F line) more than once, but one girl in our group didn’t have any money and wouldn’t take any from anyone else. For a moment I thought about telling her that I would gladly pay for her seat on the light rail train, not so that she could ride it but so that I and the other group could, but I held my tongue because she seemed too adamant about not riding it. I think maybe she had some kind of weird fear of using it, but I have no idea why. Anyway, just after reaching Market Street we realized that we had about twenty minutes to reach the CalTrain station three miles away, so we started running. Being the walrus that I am, I soon fell behind (I swear, it was my super-heavy five-pound backpack that was weighing me down; it’s not that I’m out of shape or anything!) but I still ran at least halfway. I almost got lost once the girls were out of view, but I eventually reached the station, only five minutes past the scheduled time. I had still missed the train, though, along with what turned out to be about forty other people who had budgeted their time poorly. We simply took a later train, and we made it back to Lagunita Court about an hour later than everyone else, just in time for a late dinner. After dinner I retraced our walking route through San Francisco on a mapping website and found that we had walked nearly ten miles in that one day. When combined with the 1.5-mile walk up Palm Drive to the CalTrain station that I did four times (twice Friday for the movie, and then twice again on Saturday), I walked a total of 16 miles in about 24 hours. For me, that’s a lot of walking.

Sunday was a pretty relaxed day. I slept until about ten in the morning and then did some chore-like stuff such as laundry and CS homework. I finished my first assignment at about 11:00 PM (I wasn’t really cutting it that close, promise!), and then I started back to my room to go to bed. For some reason, I stopped in the hallway and sat for a while talking with my roommate and some other people, and at one point or another most of those people decided to move to our room to continue idly conversing. Suddenly, it was two in the morning and they were all still occupying our floor; Kyle and I were dead-tired and ready to climb into bed, but the others couldn’t take the hint and neither of us was impolite enough to tell them to leave. They talked about all kinds of random things, ranging from their drug usage (!) to bukkake (!!!). I was getting kind of pissed off at them by about four-ish, but luckily (for them), they decided to leave before I smited them all with my alarm clock to remind them of how late (early?) it was. So Kyle and I finally got to sleep, but only for about six hours because his family was coming to visit him in the morning. Then I had to go to class (CS 106A) at about 1:00, which was both good and bad (good because we finally got to use real Java, and bad because I nearly fell asleep, making me a prime target for a walk-by Skittling - the instructors throw candy, remember). After class I spent a long time on the computer working on setting up a website for my school newspaper, the Cooney Crier, and then I just kind of hung out in the Eucalipto lounge for a while watching some kids play Super Smash Bros. Melee on a GameCube pilfered from another house. I played once or twice and sucked; it’s an unfortunate side effect of playing that game about once per year. Then came dinner and a quick house meeting (with ice cream!), and afterward we all went out to the Oval to watch fireworks. If you were paying attention, you’ll have noticed that this happened on Monday rather than today - for some reason the fireworks got rescheduled for July 3rd. The show wasn’t too bad, though it was kind of short. Some of the kids from my house started taking flash pictures of random people, blinding them temporarily…it was kind of funny until I was one of the victims as well.

When we got back to the dorm, I watched for a while as the crazy German, Phil, leapt over a couch with about six cushions stacked up atop it. One of the mentors in the room was about to kill him for doing something that could injure him so easily (Phil is the same kid who co-invented nutball), so he ended up having to stop at six. After that I ended up in a room belonging to a fellow geek named John who has a computer similar to mine. We talked for about an hour about all kinds of things, from books to video games to music, and by the time I left I felt as if he might be the person I have the most in common with here. At about midnight, John, myself, one of the mentors, a kid from Denver named Tim, and an Asian-hating Korean-American named Chris all watched Vanilla Sky on the mentor’s TV. It was really weird - that’s all I can really say about it. There was even one highly sexual scene with Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz in it, but the movie was so messed up by that point that it was hard to…um, enjoy it. At two in the morning I finally fell into bed, going to sleep with no regard for the fact that my roommate and his sorta-girlfriend were watching a movie in the same room. It was a pretty good day, as thirds of July go.

Today was not the most incredibly fourth of July ever, though. I got up around twelve and watched the World Cup soccer match between Germany and Italy in a mentor’s room with about ten other people. It was perhaps the most boring match I’d ever seen until the final two minutes, when Italy scored twice in rapid succession, causing Germany to lose for the first time ever in Dortmund. I was kind of rooting for Germany, but Italy’s win was a good thing because it meant that we could “decorate” Phil’s door with printed-out Italian flags (Phil is from Germany, remember). He hasn’t come back and seen them yet, but I have a feeling he won’t thank us for our efforts to beautify his “space,” as they always annoyingly call rooms on HGTV.

And that’s about it…the rest of today was kind of boring except for a barbecue at dinnertime, and that brings me to now. Tomorrow and Thursday I’ll have regular classes again, finally, and then over the weekend I’ll be going to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (I don’t really like art, but it’s something to do) and to the newest Pirates of the Caribbean film. It should be fun. I’d close with something better, but I’ve got nothing today. Urf.

In the past week or so, I’ve had the chance to use Mac OS X consistently for the first time. Though the change from Windows to Mac OS hasn’t been perfect, Mac OS seems to have just about everything that Windows does, along with a few helpful extras like the Dashboard, Exposé, and Spotlight. Obviously, a week’s usage isn’t nearly enough to allow me to pass judgment on the Mac OS, but I feel there are at least a few features and bugs that I can talk about. Keep in mind that I am normally a Windows user, so all comparison will be between Mac OS X and Windows XP Home Edition (SP2). Some might say that comparing a relatively new version of Mac OS against Windows XP (which is now nearly five years old) is unfair, but it remains the newest non-beta version of Windows and the edition that most Windows users have. I’ll give Windows a slight advantage by ignoring the security issues that continue to plague its users because I personally have not had a virus or spyware problem in at least three years, but that’s it.

The first thing that any discerning computer users notices upon logging into a Mac is the overall pleasantness of the user interface. Things slide around, fade in and out, and have nice gradients and shadows applied to them. Fonts are properly antialiased. Icons zoom without losing detail because they’re either SVG or PNG images. It’s a welcome change after years of looking at the comaparatively horrid Windows UI, though much of Windows’ problems can be fixed with third-party tools. I know it’s not really a proper comparison if I pit Mac OS against my hacked up Windows installation, but the main purpose of this write-up is to evaluate Mac OS for my own future usage, not to review it for others, though I’m sure some of the things that I find to be good about Mac OS will interest others as well.

Anyway, even though my changes to the Windows UI make it bearable, Mac OS still looks much better. Even though some applications (like Safari) seem to have considerable leeway when it comes to how consistent they have to be with the rest of the OS’s UI design, at least every application adheres to a similar “look.” One glance at a Mac application, and you know it’s a Mac application. Windows apps are so varied that the only way that you know that they’re for Windows is by just how different they are from anything else you’ve ever seen. Ironically, Microsoft seems to be the worst when it comes to deviating from the standard Windows style - every recent edition of Office has a new UI that looks nothing like that of other Windows programs, and now even Internet Explorer is joining in the fun (Internet Explorer 7 switches around the menu bar and the main application toolbar for no real reason). It does look as if Windows will be more consistent once Vista is released, but it still won’t come close to Mac OS in terms of cleanliness, from what I’ve seen.

The first thing I clicked on after loggin into Mac OS X was Safari. I figured that since this was one of Mac OS’s core applications, it had to be pretty good. I wasn’t impressed. First of all, the brushed-metal-ness of the interface seems kind of dated (iTunes moved on a long time ago), and it’s really not that pretty. The icons are kind of monochrome and boring. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t have any kind of tabbed browsing feature to speak of (and even if it does have one, there must be some serious UI flaws if I haven’t found it by now). Also, it doesn’t render pages that quickly compared to Firefox on Windows (my normal primary browser), and sometimes pages look a bit wrong (though to its credit, it does fine with Brettia). After using Safari for a week, I’ve switched to the Gecko-based Camino, which seems much better.

The second application I used is probably not one that the average Mac user opens too often: Terminal. Unfortunately, it wasn’t all that great, either. Even though one of the Mac’s biggest advantages is the ability to access UNIX-like tools such as SSH just like on Linux or *BSD as well as compile software from scratch and run X applications, the main front-end to all this power, Terminal, doesn’t seem very robust. The default font is tiny and not antialiased, though you can change it to something else as long as the new font is monospaced (otherwise the font looks weird). I couldn’t figure out how to get it to antialias the font for better readability. Terminal is also missing basic features like tabs or background transparency that Linux terminals have had for a long time now. However, just about any terminal program is better than Microsoft’s horribly useless command shell (soon to be replaced with the much better Windows PowerShell), and I guess that since Mac OS tries to present the user with a nice graphical interface for everything and usually succeeds, I can’t fault it too much for having a less-than-perfect command line interface.

The next app that I tried to use was the System Preferences application (I wanted to change my desktop background). Though I was impressed by the ability to search for a preference (and the way that little applets darken or are highlighted as you type things in), I was not impressed when the application proceeded to crash and bog down the system for the rest of the time I spent working on it. This might be shocking to some, but Windows apps really don’t crash that often anymore (at least not for me) - especially not core ones like the Control Panel, the Windows equivalent of the Mac’s System Preferences. I was not nearly as peeved by the crash, though, as I was by the fact that I couldn’t seem to terminate the application so that it would stop bogging down the rest of the system. I finally found the “Force Quit…” option on the Apple menu (which responds to some other key command instead of Control-Alt-Delete, which I kind of thought was a standard thing), but it didn’t fix the problem - the System Preferences application would pop back up and crash once more. I thought I had finally fixed it by opening up Terminal, using the top command to figure out the process number for the System Preferences application, and then ending the process with the kill command, but that didn’t work either. I ended up having to restart the machine. With Windows, killing a program that is acting abnormally or crashing is a simple as pressing Control-Alt-Delete, opening the Task Manager, and killing the process in the process list. It’s still not easy for a beginning user, but it’s simpler than dropping down to the command line and always effective. I rarely run into problems so severe that I have to actually restart a Windows machine anymore - usually it’s just a service or process that needs killing. Also, it sometimes seems as if Control-Alt-Delete acts as a “wake up call” to the OS, because usually when I use it I find that hanging processes suddenly speed up and complete, and programs that are taking a long time to close finally clear themselves out of memory. It seems hackish on the part of Microsoft that they would have a key command do that rather than having it be automatic, but at least it can be done, whereas on the Mac it seems as if you just get left to die.

Now that I’ve gotten the negatives out of the way, I can talk about some of the more pleasant parts of my Mac OS X experience. First of all, I really like Exposé (F9). It’s ten times better than Alt-Tab (which still kind of works) and much better than hunting for minimized windows in a taskbar. F10 is nice too…being able to reveal the desktop quickly is sometimes difficult in Windows unless you know how to do it. I also really like the Mac OS dock, especially the way it contorts and bounces according to what I do to it. Spotlight is also nice, though I’ve never had that much use for desktop search because I’m generally pretty organized. I’ve used it mostly just to find applications because I didn’t see the Applications area in Finder until a few days after I started using a Mac.

The final two applications that I’ve used are BBEdit and Adium, both of which don’t come with Mac OS, but neither do their Windows equivalents (Crimson Editor and Miranda IM). BBEdit has the excellent feature of being able to edit files and save them over SFTP, which is wonderful for me because I need to be able to work on the Brettia development files from afar. Otherwise, it seems like a fairly generic text/HTML editor, though I haven’t dug too far into its features yet. I like it about as much as Crimson Editor, though Crimson’s find/replace system seems easier to use. Adium, on the other hand, is just about perfect, and a great replacement for iChat. So far I’ve had no problems with it and have been impressed by its ability to give me new mail notifications for my Gmail account.

And thus concludes my pictureless and not-very-in-depth “review of sorts” of Mac OS X. Given the fact that the newest Mac hardware can run Windows and uses much faster Intel processors (a switch that I once predicted, amazingly), I wouldn’t be surprised if my next computer is a Mac. For now, I can happily stay away from Windows for another seven weeks, by the end of which I’ll have enough experience with the platform for a much finer-grained review.

(Langosta won’t let me put tildes in titles…something else to fix. Anyway, this entry is going to be in Spanish for no real reason.) Ha sido mucho tiempo desde yo escribí algo en español, pero me parece que no ha perdido la abilidad de usando la lengua. Creo que necesito practicar mi español con más frequencia si no quiero olvidar como se la escribe, por eso toda esta entrada será en español. Y simplemente a mi me gusta las lenguas y como las lenguas trabajan de otra manera dependiendo de la cultura y la historía de los hablantes.

Yo encontré una chica llamada Rebecca ayer cuando estaba en el juego de búsqueda en San Francisco. Ella es una estudiante de BI también y comparte conmigo un amor para las lenguas y la historía. Hablando con ella fue muy interesante para mi porque no he hablado con muchos otros estudiantes de BI, aunque creo que hay muchos de estos estudiantes aquí. Me parece que BI es tan malo en su escuela como en mi escuela. Para ella, eso no es una cosa buena, pero a mi me gusta el hecho que otros necesitan sufrir como yo y otros estudiantes de BI a OHS.

Originalmente quería escribir más, pero a este punto estoy cansado con escribiendo las entidades de XHTML para todos los caracteres con accentos. ¡Ahora, yo devuelvo a inglés!