Brettia

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!

Back when I was younger, I tried many times to keep a journal and stick with it. Usually, I’d write a lot on the first day, a little less on the second, even less on the third, and then on the fourth I’d quit altogether. I didn’t realize then that a journal could still be worth writing in even if I didn’t write in it every day, or every week, or even every month. That realization finally came three years ago when I started this blog, and it’s what allowed Organon to continue to exist this long. I never thought I could keep it going even when I did know that I didn’t have to be diligent all the time, yet here it is, a massive 228,000 words contained within 238 entries that would fill 651 pages of a standard hardcover book. Even with the long pauses between some entries, I’ve managed to post a new one every 4.6 days on average, keeping with my original unofficial policy of posting at least once a week. I’ve covered all kinds of topics, from PHP programming and web design to my experiences in school to my life philosophy to random technology subjects like Internet Explorer 7 and PlayStation 3. And I’ve resisted the temptation to blog about what everyone else is blogging about, to trackback and link so much that my blog becomes nothing more than an aggregation of other people’s ideas. Okay, that’s enough self-congratulation for one entry. Moving on….

My first week of class at Stanford officially ended yesterday because my two classes only meet Monday through Thursday. Overall, it was a pretty good week. In CS 106A, my programming class, we’ve mostly done introductory stuff using a subset of the Java language called Karel. Basically, it’s the same thing as Java except without variables or methods that return anything, meaning that it can be incredibly frustrating to someone like me who has enough programming experience to realize that there are much easier ways to solve many of the problems that we are presented with if we could just use all of the available features of the Java language. The class should improve considerably next week, though, when we are finally allowed to start doing more complex work. My other class, Greek and Latin Word Roots of English, has been interesting so far but not exactly fun. So far, we’ve learned mostly about the history of the English language and how different languages develop, but we haven’t talked much about the etymology of specific words yet.

Outside of class, I’ve done more things than I can easily remember. I’ve played and watched a number of card games, from BS to Egyptian Rat Screw to the nightly poker games held in our lounge, I won (barely) at foosball, I watched about an hour of the Berenstain Bears TV show with some other kids who were pointing out the many sexual references found in children’s programming, I’ve eaten a lot of really good dorm food (fajitas for lunch yesterday, woo!), I beat one of our dorm mentors and two other kids handily at Scrabble (I managed to score 40 points on my second-to-last word), and I’ve spent hours working on programming exercises. In about an hour, I’ll be going to see the newest Superman movie with about 75 other kids, and tomorrow I’ll be spending the entire day in San Francisco participating in a city-wide scavenger hunt. Put simply, I’ve done more in the last week than I might have done in a month back at home in Wisconsin.

I was going to conclude this short entry with that last paragraph, but there’s one more thing I just have to mention: some of the kids in my dorm (Eucalipto) have invented a new sport called nutball. By “nut,” I don’t mean the kind that you eat. Think huevos, cajones, avacados, etc. Hopefully you’re getting it by now; if not, you will soon. Phil, the German kid known to some as BestBuy for his tricked-out room, and a kid named Matt who I don’t really know, came up with the game earlier yesterday afternoon when throwing around a tennis ball. At one point or another, someone was hit in the groin, and so they decided to make that the object of the game. By the time I started watching at around 10:00 in the evening, they were sitting across a room from each other with their legs spread apart, tossing the tennis ball back and forth. Every once in a while, a hit would be registered with the help of spectators in the audience, though a player could keep a hit from counting by showing that it hadn’t caused them any pain (doing jumping jacks has become the standard way of verifying this). Players are allowed to catch/block the ball, but only if it isn’t going to hit their…parts. If they catch it when it was on target, the other player gets to kneel and take a “penalty shot” at the catcher from the center of the space between them. The loser is either the first to die/pass out from pain or the first to be hit five times. Poor Phil played four nutball matches and was hit nine times, and I’m sure he wasn’t feeling too well this morning.

Yeah, I know it’s dumb, but it’s entertaining for those of us who aren’t participating in it. And maybe one day Phil and Matt will get some IP royalties out of it, especially if nutball gets picked up as an official sport by ESPN 8 (”The Ocho”). It’s too bad neither of them will be able to have children to share their wealth with….

Just a quick note on the level of technological sophistication here - it’s pretty high. Even the computers in the student-accessible clusters are way better than what most students bring to use here. I’m currently using Mac OS X 10.4 on a dual-processor PowerMac G5, and it’s awesome. This is the first time I’ve gotten to actually use Mac OS (rather than gawk at it) for an extended period of time, and so far it’s been wonderful. I was able to set up my development environment easily on my own server using tools they had available, too, so that’s also cool. I used the Terminal program (which seems a bit underpowered compared to other OS X apps, but maybe I just haven’t dug into it yet) to tunnel over to my server via SSH, from which I could issue all the commands I needed to in order to check out another copy of Langosta from SVN, create another database to be used for development only, and create a bunch of folders for caching. I also used BBEdit to edit some files over SFTP, and I can see why some Mac users rave about how great a text editor it is, because it really is a good one. Everything in general on a Mac is so intuitive…it’s as if the developers naturally know where I would look for something if I were trying to find it. It’s nice.

(By the way, part of the reason why I want to get Langosta and Sangre working in development mode is that my computer programming instructor told us that the highest possible grade (++) would only go to a project that went way above and beyond the norm, so I thought it might be interesting to be able to do some kind of Internet-integration into one of my apps using XML-RPC or something similar. I dunno.)

Langosta really seems to hate any kind of punctuation in titles…sorry about that. I’ll fix it as soon as I can - I’m really not sure how I’m going to be working on it while I’m here as I don’t have much of a development environment set up. I guess I could just install a second copy of Langosta somewhere else on my server (say, dev.brettia.com) and then just check changes in to my Subversion repository as I normally would, but then I’d have to edit files right on the server over SSH, which has a tendency to be slow…and I’ll stop rambling now. It will be fixed sometime. However, at least Langosta has reached a level of maturity at this point where it’s actually usable and I can trust that it won’t randomly capsize and break off our loving relationship with a torrent of parse errors. Anyway….

I said before that I would be taking three classes: Programming Methodology, US-China Relations, and Calculus. As it turned out, I had to drop two of those. I went and talked to the academic advisor about whether or not I should take the lower- or higher-level programming class, and I came out fearful and unsure of whether I wanted to take a programming class at all. The program coordinators here seem to care more about making sure students have a good summer than about putting them in the most challenging classes possible, which is a good thing, but CS is what I came here to learn as well as what I will be coming here to learn in the future assuming that I’m lucky enough to get in, so I really couldn’t turn down that opportunity. I think that the advisor thought that the programming class would take up too much of my time, and it very well might (20 hours per week is a possibility, according to the instructor, but six hours per week is more common), but now that I’m down to two classes it shouldn’t be so bad. Calculus went away because the advisor felt it would be a waste of time (and money) to take a college calc course when I would basically be testing out of that same course if I passed the IB Math HL exam with a high score. US-China Relations was removed because I decided I’d rather try a Greek and Latin word roots class, which is supposed to help me with vocabulary and so far seems like a really interesting subject (I know it maybe doesn’t to an outside observer - you have to take the class to understand).

My first class of the day, then, was the word roots class, which is done seminar-style with only about 20 students around a big table. The instructor (a Ph.D candidate) seemed like a great guy, though he was much younger than I expected. Each of us had to come up with our favorite English word when we introduced ourselves, and he broke our words down into affixes and used those to decipher their meaning and origin. It was pretty cool, in a rather geeky way.

My second class was the all-important programming one, the only class that I’ll have almost every day and probably the most fun of the two. The first thing I noticed was the sheer number of people taking it (about 90 students ranging from high school kids like me to undergraduates to graduates, along with more people taking it over the Internet by watching the videos being produced live during each lecture). I originally thought that this might be a bad thing, but there’ll be extra sections every week for smaller groups to discuss their code, which should be good. Also, the instructor throws candy to keep people’s attention and to reward them for speaking. It’s hellacool, to quote my Northern Californian friends.

I have to say, there’s something about this entire experience that makes it feel almost surreal. There are literally people here from almost every corner of the world (though, not surprisingly, I seem to be the only one from Wisconsin), yet everyone seems to have a kind of common side to themselves, a geekier, nerdier side, but still something in common nonetheless. There are a lot of kids who brought their computers and have spent almost all their time on them, so I can at least feel a little bit better about my own technology addiction (I’ve actually been pretty good about not using the computer clusters too much in the past few days). At the same time, though, it’s not a geek camp - there remains a fair number of kids who seem pretty normal, almost to the point where you wonder how they could have even gotten into the program (until they tell you about how they got fives on all their AP tests and a perfect score on the SAT, that is). The craziest thing though, is sitting at a table with one kid who has Pakistani parents but lives in California, another who is half Filipino, a girl who looks like your everyday American but is actually one-fourth Korean and can speak the language fluently, a kid from Korea who actually lives in Jakarta and does great magic tricks, a kid from Pennsylvania who looks Korean but has no accent and is excellent at reflex games like foosball and Egyptian Rat Screw, et cetera, et cetera. For someone who comes from a community where basically everyone is white, conservative, American, Anglo-Saxon, and Christian, this is kind of a big change. Yet at the same time, I really don’t mind it. These people are way, way more interesting because of their ethnic differences and international experiences (sorry, Wisconsinites).

I’ve also done some pretty weird things since I got here, and I’m only on my third day. On the first night, everyone in my dorm (Eucalipto) went fountain hopping, which pretty much means that we ran around to different fountains on campus and swam in them. It’s a good thing we did it at night, though, because it turned out that the water wasn’t exactly clean. Last night, we had this ice cream progressive thing, where kids randomly dressed up and got ice cream and cheesecake from our dorm mentors. On another night, I watched part of EuroTrip in BestBuy’s room (my roommate has nicknamed a horny German from Marin “BestBuy” because of all the sweet electronics he has in his room). It was pretty funny. (By the way, if my parents ever read this, I politely declined to watch a movie so devoid of moral value or restraint.) Then, last night my dorm had a house meeting and we made up a dorm cheer, which we then showed off to the other students by parading around the hallways and performing it for at them.

All in all, it’s been fun so far. I’m looking forward to some of the organized trips that will be taking place on weekends, and of course to continuing my classes now that I’ve finally gotten them sorted out. It’s definitely better than spending my last real summer before college in humid, kinda-boring Wisconsin.

Today will be my first full day at Stanford after having been dropped off and “orientated” yesterday. I arrived in the San Francisco area on Friday, stayed the night at my uncle’s apartment downtown, and came to the campus at about 3:00 on Saturday after visiting the Googleplex (I just had to). Now I’ve got a bit of free time to write between lunch and a meeting at 1:30 when we’ll get our Stanford ID cards so that we’ll have access to all the buildings. (By the way, at the moment Langosta won’t let me set a specific timezone for an entry, so all times will remain Central even though I’m currently on Pacific Time. Also, a warning: this keyboard is a bit sticky sometimes…typos are probably going to happen.)

Obviously, I can’t make too many judgments or conclusions about the kids here or what the summer will be like as I’ve only been here about a day, but there are a few things I feel I can mention. First, some of the kids here are truly amazing in terms of their academic and athletic achievements. I thought I was special because I was the second-best speller in the Cave Creek Unified School District a few years ago (I missed “dichotomy,” and the other kids had to spell hypochondria, which I would have gotten easily…*grumble*), but there’s a kid here who was 12th in the nation in 2003 and had his fifteen minutes of fame on SportsCenter because of his reaction to getting a word correct that he had guessed on. There are others, too, kids who somehow are great athletes and will be valedictorian of their graduating class and participate in about ten billion clubs and have social lives. It’s more than a little intimidating, at times.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m in the right place. I don’t question whether or not I should be in this program specifically, but rather whether or not I really belong with the students that I am most often grouped with these days. The thing is, though I try to fit in, I’m really not like many of these kids at all. I don’t really care about school spirit or participating in a hundred activities just because I can. I don’t really care about having a social life, or at least I don’t care about having an incredibly busy one. And I don’t have to be occupied with something every second of every day to be happy. I like to be lazy and unproductive.

Many of the kids at Stanford seem similar to those in the IB diploma program at my high school. They’re not just smart; they’re outgoing and social as well. Me…I’m just smart, I guess. For a long time, I thought that that was enough - it was all I was ever told I needed to be. In middle school and the first year or two of high school, teachers were so concerned with quieting the students who socialized too much to realize that they were creating an oppressive environment for students like me who didn’t socialize much at all. I began to think that it was better to keep my thoughts to myself than to blurt them out at random like some kids would. I finally started to break out of that shell at the beginning of my sophomore year, when school became more interesting and fun for me because of AP European History and my work on the website and my role on the debate team, but all of that progress evaporated when I moved. Even now I feel as if I’ve barely been able to move beyond the point where I was when I left Arizona.

Seeing the kids here, seeing the kind of person I would probably have to be if I ever want to have any hope of attending this university “for real,” I begin to wonder if I really should try to change myself to be more like them, and if it would even be possible to do so. It’s funny that one of the key lessons that kids are supposed to learn as teenagers is that they should “be themselves,” yet more than a few people (my parents, especially), can’t seem to accept that I might be happy with the way I am right now. It’s not even a question of whether I am happy or not; it’s a question of whether they can put aside their own biases and realize that not every person wants to conform to the model of a perfect student-athlete. It seems hypocritical to me that someone could agree with the idea of being oneself and in the same breath tell me that I should try to be more like someone else.

However, this is not to say that I think I’m perfect the way that I am or that I think I don’t need to do anything to improve myself. While here, I not only want to become a better programmer; I want to be more talkative and more interesting to people. I’d also like to at least leave Stanford feeling as if I’m in better shape than I was when I came, though my goal is to do even better than that by dropping a few of my many extra pounds. No longer can the lard be considered something funny to joke about; now I think it just makes people uncomfortable.

So far, things are going pretty well for me. I’ve met my roommate, Kyle, and I’m supposed to have another one who hasn’t showed up yet. We’re kind of hoping he won’t come because then we’d have a gigantic room all to ourselves. The dorms themselves aren’t incredible, but they aren’t bad either. There are four main buildings, each with its own lounge and computer cluster, and the buildings surround a central courtyard and a dining hall. The food has been excellent so far.

Now I’m going to make some dumb generalizations about the kids here that I’m sure I’ll end up taking back later. First of all, some of them appear to be extremely privileged. One even brought a $3,500, home-built computer with a huge monitor, 5.1 surround sound, and Sirius satellite radio. Fancy cell phones (ROKRs, SLVRs, etc), laptops, and iPods are not uncommon. I’m not sure if this is a good thing or not…I guess I’ll find out eventually. Second, many are from California and are therefore used to the more affluent California lifestyle. I guess that’s all for now.

It’s about time for that meeting I mentioned, so I’d better go. I’m going to try and write every 2-3 days, but as anyone who has read this blog for a fair amount of time will know, I tend to break those kinds of promises often. I want to try to write more about philosophy, especially about the stuff that I learned about in my TOK class that I took last school year. It should be worth reading, maybe.

*dies*

My birthday was yesterday, but I didn’t have time to write anything until now. Lately, I feel lucky when I have time to write at all. At first, it seemed as if it wouldn’t be much of a birthday compared to some I’ve had in the past. My big “present” is obviously the two months at Stanford, so I wasn’t really expecting anything more. So I spent the day checking things off of my list of things to take and getting a few things packed, doing nothing exciting really. When my parents got home from work, we all went to the local Chili’s (officially my favorite chain restaurant), where I tried not to explode with the pure joy that is produced by eating Southwestern Eggrolls and Steak and Portabello Fajitas. Afterward, we went to Target, where I used a small chunk of cash from my horde and some money from a birthday check to buy a Nintendo DS Lite and New Super Mario Bros. I might write a quick review of it later to explain exactly why I chose it over a PSP, but a major reason was that I haven’t owned a Nintendo system since the SNES. That’s right, while all my friends were enjoying their Nintendo 64s, GameCubes, and GameBoys (and the many GameBoy versions), I never had one (I know, I was so deprived) – now I do.

So I cradled my new baby in my arms all the way home, where I plugged it into the wall so that it could charge its battery for the first time. I settled down on the couch with the manual, but I was distracted by the fact that my parents were busying themselves suspiciously with something in the office. Then they printed something (twice – I think it came out gray the first time) and sealed it in an envelope. All of this was occurring while I sat in the other room, salivating over my charging DS and anxiously awaiting the lighting and consumption of my birthday cake, which awaited me on the counter. When the parental units were finally ready, we did the usual cheesy singing of the happy birthday song and out-blowing of the candles (those annoying trick ones that light themselves again after you think they’re out), and then I opened my only birthday card, one from my grandparents. After the ritual skimming of the card and collecting of the monies therein contained was complete, I moved on to my parents’ envelope. At this point, my mind was furiously making guesses as to what was inside, and the best thing I could come up with was that it was a picture of an iPod wall charger that they had ordered online and shipped to Stanford. I wasn’t even close. (Too bad it wasn’t an iPod charger – now I’ll have to leech off of someone’s USB port, but oh well.)

I opened the envelope and found a picture of some kind of red SUV with the words, “Happy 17th Birthday Brett!” across the top. At first I didn’t really know what to make of it; I thought maybe this was some kind of unnecessary attempt at a last-minute birthday card or something. I didn’t think for a second that my parents had actually bought me this 1995 Isuzu Trooper from my uncle, but they had. I was shocked, to say the least. Usually, I can sense these kinds of things before they come. Usually, my hyperactive analytical mind figures things like this out before the occur, or at least it presents me with the possibility. Not so this time.

This amazing gift sparked within me one of those weird moments when you suddenly feel yourself jerked back from reality, your view of the world zoomed out so that you gain a perspective on your life that is hard to get when you’re busy living it. It was one of those moments when you sit back and realize just how lucky you are, to have the things you have and to have the freedom to enjoy those things. Yet at the same time, you know that this is not what life is all about; this random philosophical moment is proof of that. No matter what happens, no matter how good or bad your life may be at a certain moment, you will always be you. Take away all the material things and you are still there – you don’t need them to be who you are, or you shouldn’t. There are too many good people out there who have nothing for that to be the case. I don’t know why I just wrote that in the second-person; usually I’m not one to lecture at my metaphorical readers. I guess what I mean to say is that when I first learned that I was going to Stanford for the summer, and in the weeks following that day, I was too wrapped up in the preparation for the trip – the nervousness, the packing, the saving-up of money – to realize just how lucky I was to be going at all.

Toward the end of my last entry, I mentioned a lot of the more negative feelings I’ve had about going, with the main one being that I’m simply nervous about being on my own for that long. But I forgot to write about one of the most positive things about the whole thing: the experience of getting an education somewhere where academics are hugely important and there’s actually a good deal of money spent to ensure each student’s success. I don’t mean to imply that my current high school isn’t passionate about educating its students as well as possible. The real problem is that all high schools are limited in just how much they can do because of monetary restrictions and because they have to make sure each and every student meets state standards. For this reason, high school computer systems are usually good enough for research, yet they often lack creative tools like an image manipulation program (Photoshop), a web development application (Dreamweaver), up-to-date programming tools (Visual Studio), or any other programs that most students don’t have already at home. This, along with the severe underpowered-ness of the hardware, pretty much takes away any reason for a student to want to use his or her school’s computers, making the systems almost worthless. The difference between university and high school education is obvious when you compare the resources of the Stanford network against the average high school’s network: at a university, the resources to help you get ahead and push yourself to the highest level are already there, whereas at a high school, you have to work/fight for them. I guess my point is (that longwinded rant wasn’t really necessary) that I’m really, really excited about being somewhere where one’s education is a serious matter, both to students and to the educators themselves.

I’m done now. Keep on plodding through my oft-crappy writing; it can only get better. (Though I do think this entry was a major improvement over the last one.)