Brettia

So now it’s been another two months since I last posted. Great. I’m not even going to try to apologize anymore because I know I’ll probably have the same kind of uber-delay between this entry and the next one. I bet no one even reads these anymore. I’m going to try to do what I did the last time I posted after a long absence — recap the important things and then get philosophical with it at one point or another.

I honestly can’t believe that my school year is now three-fourths of the way finished, nor can I believe that I am almost halfway through the IB program. I’ll talk more about my current stance when it comes to IB a bit later, but I want to keep this (sort of) chronological, so I’ll start with one of the first major things that happened during my absence from this site — the arrival of my ACT scores in early March. If you remember from my last entry, I didn’t feel too confident that I had done well on the test:

I still have a feeling that I’ll get back the results only to see that I got near-perfect scores on the first two parts and shitty ones on the second two, leaving me with a rather dismal 25 or 28 rather than the 32-36 that I had been hoping for.

This is classic me; I always feel like I’ve bombed an assignment, and then I’ll get it back with an A+ and a smiley face. I have no self-confidence, yet I have an insane determination to make myself confident about the quality of my work — an impossible task. Anyway, I got the scores back, and they weren’t too bad: 35s in english, math and science, and a 28 in reading (probably because I didn’t answer the last six questions due to a lack of time). My total score: a 34. Needless to say, I was overjoyed, though I was surprised that such a comparatively terrible reading score didn’t change my average by more than a point. The only part of my results that disappointed me was the writing portion, which is new as of about two or three years ago. Out of twelve possible points, I managed a dismal eight. I almost laughed out loud when I saw it, since it was rather ironic that a student who is generally considered to be among the best writers in his grade would score that badly. There were some generic comments at the bottom of the result sheet that were supposed to tell me what was wrong with my essay, but they were all positive except for one that said something like, “Student addressed counter-arguments but did not go deeply into them.” Oh well, I guess. I’ve been told by a family friend who works in a high school counseling department that the writing portion doesn’t carry much weight with colleges because it is so new, so I won’t worry about it.

February and the first part of March were fairly uneventful other than that day. I continued my accumulation of uber-CAS hours by working on the school newspaper once more, helping people in the writing center, and some church activities. I also procrastinated - a lot. I never really got around to writing that wonderful bit of brilliance that I alluded to a couple of entries ago — not that the desire to write went away, I was just bogged down in homework. The third term was the first time that I had IB Physics as a part of the AP Physics course instead of Honors Physics, so the work suddenly became a good deal harder. It was also my first term of IB Biology, as I said before, and I shot myself repeatedly in both feet by not paying much attention in class and not doing my assigned workbook pages (which never were checked off or graded). My other classes didn’t change a whole lot: English remained difficult and stressful, yet satisfying; History continued to be incredibly easy and sometimes boring; and Spanish improved slightly yet still makes me yawn just thinking about it.

Things finally began to get interesting beginning in the middle of March, when projects started to come due and the stress level began to rise. In English, a compare-contrast paper on two different translations of Albert Camus’ The Stranger nearly destroyed me because of its difficulty — the translations were nearly identical and the only way to find any differences between them was to re-read large parts of the book in both editions. But after a grueling nine hours of tearing my hair out over what point I was trying to make with my paper and making endless revisions, I got it finished. I had to do my self-assessment at school in the morning because it was so late when I finally went to bed that night, and I figured that there was no way that it was any good, but, as usual, it came back with a happy little 20 on the back page (a perfect score) and lots of confidence-building comments.

Of course, those comments meant nothing two weeks later, when I began work on a presentation about various modern-era concepts (materialism, male domination of women, etc.) found in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House, also for English. I was scheduled to give it on Tuesday, and I was up incredibly late the night before preparing my PowerPoint for it. By the time I was done, I felt it was pretty bad, mainly because it had almost no real focus and tried to make use of too many other works along with A Doll House. I got “lucky” on Tueday when, after all that stress and general unhappiness, my presentation somehow got corrupted both on a CD that I had burned it to and on my iPod. I’m not really sure what happened, but it kept me from having to do it until Friday because Wednesday was a teacher grading day and my English teacher was sick on Thursday. I made some major revisions on that Wednesday but still didn’t feel as if it was ready; then I had no time to work on it Thursday night, so I basically figured the whole thing out in about an hour in study hall Friday morning. I printed an outline of my presentation, made plenty of notes all over it, read it over twice, never actually practiced it out loud, walked right into my English classroom, and finally got it over with. And it wasn’t half bad. My delivery could have been better — I stumbled a few times and repeated myself once or twice — but on the whole the content made sense and didn’t suck. I talked to my teacher again on Friday afternoon because I knew that term three grades had to be submitted by then and was told that I had narrowly escaped the abyss once again — I had another perfect score to add to my collection. It was a rather good day.

The physics saga that had been playing itself out over the past few weeks has been a different story. The teacher is incredibly lax about due dates, so I waited to do many of my lab write-ups for this term until about a week ago. Then, on the day before the day that all the labs were supposedly due, I was “sick.” (I really did have a headache, but I’m not sure that it was bad enough to merit skipping school.) I did four labs that day, each one taking at least an hour to remember exactly what the experiment was all about, describe the procedure and results as concisely as possible, and then format it nicely. That final step in the process was sometimes the most time-consuming — I ended up learning way more about Microsoft Word than I ever wanted to know. For example, you can switch to subscript mode by pressing CTRL-= and superscript mode by pressing CTRL-SHIFT-=. Unfortunately, I didn’t take the time to look that up until I had wasted countless seconds going to Format -> Fontâ?¦ and changing it in the resulting dialog box when typing up the first three labs. Still, I got them all done, and I did even more over the weekend and on the Wednesday that we had off. Amazingly enough, a few of them actually didn’t suck too badly, which for me was a major improvement over some of the labs I did earlier in the year.

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out why I never can seem to “get” physics like I do other subjects. It’s not because I don’t like it; I hate math with a passion, yet I still get As in it without too much difficulty. At first I just figured that maybe I had finally found a subject that I was simply predestined to “not get.” I can’t be good at everything. But although it seemed unlikely that I would ever reach a happy relationship with my physics class, in the last term, I really tried to get it. And yet things still didn’t click. I tried actually reading our textbook, and that was kind of helpful, but I still got low Bs on several tests. I did most of the homework or at least made sure I understood the problems, and I worked with the other two IB Physics kids when I got stuck rather than trying to understand everything on my own. Even if my grade in the class stayed relatively low (a teetering A-, gasp!), I at least wanted to feel prepared for the IB Physics exam in early May.

Unfortunately, I still didn’t see even the slightest uptick in my test scores, and it was frustrating. I felt I was doing everything I possibly could to succeed, but low Bs didn’t feel like much of a reward. However, every once in a while I would be hit with flashes of brilliance — an especially good lab write-up or perfect understanding of a difficult problem. I didn’t do half bad on the electricity unit. Still, I didn’t feel that great about the class. Now that I’m no longer in it (IB Physics is only three terms), I think the real issue lay with the failings of my teacher. He was a great guy, but he neglected to give the IB students any real IB-specific material until the last two weeks of the third term. It was like he had suddenly remembered that we needed to know all the concepts that IB wanted us to know along with the usual Honors/AP physics concepts, so he had to rush to pack it all in. Also, he didn’t seem to care too much when I would score particularly badly on a test or on assessment problems, as if he had just marked me as an average or bad student who wouldn’t get any better no matter what he did. When I would ask for help, he would usually walk me through things pretty well, but I always kind of felt as if he was mocking me for being dumb enough to not understand what he was explaining the first time around. It certainly wasn’t all his fault (I know I’ll never really like science classes after being turned against them by an exceedingly boring biology class freshman year.), but I think the IB students who take physics next year will have a much better experience because he realizes that he didn’t do as well with the three guinea pig students as he could have.

While I’m going through all of my classes, I might was well mention history and Spanish. I really wish that my history class this year was as in-depth and challenging as AP European History at Cactus Shadows. My current class feels like AP Euro but dumbed-down so that even C-students can get As on just about everything. It’s not so bad, I guess, because the teacher is nice enough to let me stretch some of our assigned essay topics so that “Blame either Hitler, Truman, or Stalin for starting the Cold War and support your opinion” (an impossible prompt because no one leader sparked it) becomes “Discuss Russian animosity toward the West and how it built up over the years leading up to the Cold War.” I’m usually not really learning anything, but I guess that doesn’t matter as long as I meet the all-important IB objectives.

Something interesting did happen in history a few weeks ago, however, though it wasn’t at all educational. I and the other students arrived at class one day to find that the teacher was sick and there was a substitute. That day happened to be one of the four days each year when “student showcase” performances begin every 45 minutes in the Little Theater, the school’s tiny auditorium. Usually the performances are really good, so naturally everyone wanted to go. After much whining and coercion, we convinced the substitute to let our class go, and once she had meticulously checked to see if we were present and slowly written down the names of everyone who was absent, we were finally allowed to leave (the sub stayed behind). Unfortunately, because the sub took so long to take roll, there was no more room in the Little Theater to accomodate us. We were trudging back toward the history classroom when someone suggested that we not go back to class. Most of us balked at that idea — where could we possibly go without it being blatantly obvious that fifteen students were not where they should be?

A few places, like the library, were suggested and then shot down, but then someone shouted, “Let’s go get bagels somewhere!” For a split-second, there was a pause as everyone present tried to comprehend the absurdity of that statement and overcome the voice of reason inside them. Then, we were suddenly all walking down the main hallway again, toward a door that would lead us to the parking lot. For a moment, I briefly considered resisting, but then I realized that there was no way I could go back to class without the sub asking why the other fourteen students hadn’t returned. Anyway, it was a Friday, and we were all feeling stressed out and spontaneously mischievious. So we went.

We continued down the hallway, some of us chatting about how we would never make it without being caught; there were just too many of us. Then we were outside, a water bottle holding the door safely open so that we could get back in when returned. Clumping into car-size groups of three and four, we strode confidently into the parking lot, knowing that security cameras were recording our every move and the resident policeman could be on us at any moment. I crammed myself into a friend’s VW beetle alongside two other people, she drove out of the parking lot in the wrong lane, down the heavily-patrolled Bolson Drive, and away to freedom. I couldn’t believe it.

Somehow, we all reached the place where we were getting bagels without being caught. Even though there were fifteen of us, we ordered our food and proceeded to stay another half-hour to eat it and chat about our victory without the staff calling the school. For the first few minutes of our little escapade, I was nervous and starting to feel as if I shouldn’t have gone. But the other half of me was rebellious and ready to do something stupid for once, and that half won my inner battle. There was a kind of aura of reckless joy that was pervasive among us — we had all worked harder in school than we ever had for over a semester with no real reward or congratulations from anyone, so we felt that we deserved our 30 minutes of happiness, a momentary calm during a vicious tempest. It was one of those things that was justifiable, yet still stupid.

We had achieved the impossible — escape from our prison — but once our time was up, we had to do it all over again to get inside the school and back to class so that the sub would think that we had gone to showcase like good little IB angels. The drive back was quiet, with all present in the car knowing that we were fast approaching the moment when we were most likely to be caught. The girl who was driving parked in the same spot as before and put her parking tag back up (it had been quickly removed on the way out when we realized that it would identify us immediately as high school students). We collected ourselves for a moment, then got out of the car and walked briskly back toward the door we had “escaped” from. The four of us were the only ones there at the time; it had been decided at the bagel shop that we would try to stagger our arrivals so that it wasn’t as conspicuous as the first time around. As we approached the entryway, I looked up at the exterior security camera mounted on the wall nearby, grinned, and waved. It’s not as if they ever check those tapes, anyway. Thankfully, the water bottle propping open the door was still there, and I carefully replaced it for the other ten students after we had gone inside. Then we simply walked around the school for a few minutes until we had met everyone else, avoiding teachers like the plague, and finally we regrouped near our history classroom just as kids began to leave the Little Theater after showcase.

We all walked into the history classroom together, as if we had just come back from a really good show (we were certainly all jumpy and nervous with excitement), and we told the sub how good it was. The lies flew thick and it was difficult sometimes not to crack a smile. The bell rang about three minutes later, and we all “escaped” yet again — we got out of the classroom as quickly as we could before the sub realized that something was up. We had done it, though with the combined brainpower of fifteen IB students on our side, I guess we shouldn’t have been surprised that our little spontaneous “plan” worked. Even if we had been caught on the way back, it would have been worth it. Anyway, what would the administration have done to punish a large group of IB diploma candidates that had wantonly run off? The only “punishment” that I could think of was some kind of group therapy, since it was pretty obvious that it was the workload that drove us to do what we did. The workload, and the fact that, though it’s great to be little trophies that our parents can brag to their friends about, sometimes even IB kids have to live a little.

You may have noticed that in my latest revision of my blog template that I added a nice little blue image for each entry’s number that also acts as a permalink to the main entry page. In the older version of the template, the entry number (which is not the same as the entry ID because some draft entries have been deleted over the years) was a simple link that was fairly hard-to-find and, because of its smallness, also difficult to click on. I focused on improving this in my last round of updates to the template, deciding that a larger graphic would be easier to click while still aesthetically pleasing. However, making an image myself for every entry number (the first 228 and the hundreds in the future) was not something I wanted to do, so I worked some PHP magic to automate the process. Read on to find out how I accomplished this. This entry will be fairly technical, so you might want to skip it if you don’t understand HTML and CSS.

First, here is the code in the Langosta template that generates the HTML for the image:

Editor’s Note: Code snippets have been removed due to some corruption while moving between blogging systems. Sorry!

This is part of the template code that executes within a five-entry loop on the main blog page. For each entry, there is an Entry object stored in a temporary $entry variable that allows the programmer to access data related to the entry via its properties (ex: the entry title is stored in $entry->entry_title). Rather than try to explain further the specific HTML and PHP, I’ll just give a summary of what this code/markup is doing. It:

1. Makes a permalink to the entry using its name and puts the title of the entry in the link’s tool-tip.
2. Creates a span element (a versatile HTML element that has no real purpose except to be changable with CSS) classed as a “number” within the link.
3. Within the span element, places another span element called “number-sign” next to the entry’s number.

I know this seems a bit complex for something as simple as showing a number, but you’ll see my reasoning soon enough, if you haven’t already. Now, have a look at the CSS that makes this HTML pretty.

Editor’s Note: Code snippets have been removed due to some corruption while moving between blogging systems. Sorry!

This code does the following things:

1. Floats the graphic to the left
2. Changes the span from display: inline to display: block, meaning that it will acquire height and dimension like a box or paragraph rather than just a link.
3. Sets the dimensions and margins of the graphic
4. Sets the text-indent property to “-5000em” so that only the actual graphic is shown and not the number in the HTML - this is so that a user with CSS and images turned off can still see an entry number

I skipped over a couple of things in the above explanations that I will now cover. In the first code block the span element that has the class “number” also has a style attribute which is set to a background image. If you look closely, you’ll see that this background image is special because it isn’t really an image at all - it’s a PHP file with the following lines of code in it:

Editor’s Note: Code snippets have been removed due to some corruption while moving between blogging systems. Sorry!

This script fools the web browser into thinking it is an image by first setting its Content-Type header to “image/png” (meaning a PNG image). The script then figures out what number it should display from the HTTP $_GET variable that PHP provides. Before actually creating the graphic, the script checks a directory on my website that contains every graphic it has ever created in order to see if it needs to do all the work of creating a new one. If it has already created a graphic for this entry number, it simply loads that one. If not, it proceeds to make the new graphic.

Generating dynamic images in PHP is simple because of a bundled library called GD. The script uses a GD function, imagecreatefrompng to load a base entry number graphic that is the correct size and already contains a number sign and the rounded blue background. Then, another GD function, imagecolorallocate is used to tell GD that I want to use a color with the RGB values 234, 234, and 234 (a light shade of gray) for the entry number. Finally, the imagettftext GD function is used to add the number to the base graphic at a specific position (see the PHP manual for how the positioning works - it’s weird) using the color that I created earlier and a font on my server (Lucida Grande Bold). The final steps are to place the newly created graphic in the directory full of other graphics, output the image to the browser, and destroy the graphic to save memory on the server.

So why exactly is all this work necessary just to display a simple graphic? First, because I wanted to make my actual entries look as much as possible like the mockup I created in Photoshop, and this was one of the elements of that mockup. In the mockup, the entry number was well-rendered, anti-aliased text with a pleasant blue background, not the crappy, jagged text that a large number of people see on their screen. By using this method, I gained complete control over what the graphic looks like and without forcing users to turn on ClearType or use a Mac in order to see it as Photoshop might render the text. And I just didn’t want to create hundreds of little graphics, a task that could have taken hours (and more time after posting each entry), when my PHP script only took a few minutes to whip up and debug.

Hopefully you got something out of this entry - I plan on trying to write more about programming this year, if I can. I know certain readers don’t care for my more technology-orientated writing, and that’s okay - they’ll just have to put up with entries like this one every once in a while.

I kept Firefox open for an obscenely long amount of time today and eventually it slowed down considerably. This was a rather common problem for me with version 1.0 up until 1.0.7, but I’m now using Firefox 1.5 RC1. I don’t know if this was a regression where an old bug “unfixed itself,” or if it’s because of a new bug entirely (either in Firefox or in one of my extensions, but I hope it gets fixed before Firefox gets released formally in the next few weeks. Aside from that, it’s proving to be quite a release (as it should be, after a year of work), with support for native SVG, graphics drawing with Canvas, XForms (extension required, I think), drag-and-drop tab reordering, automatic updates that actually work and don’t download the entire setup file for each new revision, a back-forward cache to make going backward and forward faster, a redesigned options dialog, and lots of other bug fixes and security enhancements.

If you’ve been living under a rock for the past year (tomorrow is the anniversary of the release of Firefox 1.0), hurry up and download it already. Use it once and you’ll never look back. If you’ve been using Firefox 1.0 for a while now, try out the first release candidate for version 1.5. It migrates all your extensions, bookmarks, and preferences automatically, so there’s really nothing to lose. Also, on Windows at least, your profile is backed up when you install it, so there is no possibility of losing data from your Firefox 1.0.7 installation.

Update: Just for comparison, Firefox 1.5 RC1 starts with memory usage of about 34,000 KB. After a while, it quickly shoots up above 100,000 KB, which is just wrong. Photoshop, a way more powerful and feature-packed program, uses only 50 MB of memory at startup and usually doesn’t top 200 MB for me, though I only work with small, Web-ready graphics.

Google recently released the second beta version of Google Desktop Search. I briefly used the first version, but I found it lacking in features compared to the offerings of other competitors such as Copernic. However, version two is much improved, sporting a clean sidebar with lots of information that goes far beyond search.

After a rather fast installation, Google sends you to your personal search page. It seems to be powered by some kind of local web server, but I’m not entirely sure. On this page you can monitor the status of the indexing service, specify directories that should and should not be indexed, and enter your Gmail account information so that GDS can add that to its index as well.

When the search page appears in your browser, the Google sidebar also appears on the right side of your screen. The sidebar’s appearance is pleasing to the eye, and it is remarkably easy to work with. Each panel can be moved around or deleted, and you can visit Google’s GDS plugins page to get more panels, such as a system monitor, an iTunes control, or a clock. I did notice that there was sometimes an issue with the plugins website where I would click the Download button and end up with a screenful of garbage because Firefox was trying to display the contents of an MSI package rather than saving the MSI to my desktop. However, this did not always happen.

Panels do not attempt to show a lot of information all at once. Each one is a small summary of more information that can be viewed by clicking the little double-arrow icon. This expands a drawer showing, for example, more news headlines, a longer list of stock quotes, weather information for more cities, or more pictures from GDS’s photo randomizer panel. The use of drawers, while certainly not a new idea (Mac OS X has had them for a long time now), is still a nice touch.

As far as the panels themselves go, there are many useful ones to choose from. The default installation includes the following panels:

• Email: for Gmail, I assume, but mine is still indexing messages
• News: similar to the wonderful Google News, with the extra ability to filter out news content that you don’t care for
• Web Clips: possibly the application that will bring RSS feeds to the mainstream because it autodetects feeds on pages that you visit and adds them to your list
• Scratch Pad: a little window where you can type notes
• Photos: specify a folder or group of folders, and it will play a continuous slideshow of images from them
• Quick View: can either show frequently used items or recent items (files, websites, etc.)
• What’s Hot: displays popular topics and news headlines
• Stocks: a stock ticker that changes the current symbol every few seconds rather than scrolling (this is easier on the eyes)
• Weather: similar to the ForecastFox extension for Firefox, autodetects your zipcode (nice touch)

Now that I’ve talked about all the nice new features on the sidebar, what about the search functionality? As far as I can tell (my index is only 5% built at the moment), it’s very similar to Apple’s Dashboard. You can launch programs from the Start menu using it as well as find documents and other files. The search box is also smart enough to fall back to standard Google web search if your query isn’t coming up with anything on your computer. The quality of the search engine seems good (though that’s to be expected from Google), but I haven’t had a chance to test it heavily because my index is still so small.

Of all of GDS’s many features, my favorite has to be the ability to install plugins. This is a big reason why I like Firefox so much, too. The two plugins that I’ve downloaded for GDS (one that adds Miranda IM conversations to the index and another that lets me control iTunes in a panel) have already made a big difference in my usage of the program. I haven’t browsed the plugin website extensively, but I’m sure that since I found these useful plugins so quickly, there will be many more good ones to install.

Here concludes my quick and informal review of Google Desktop Search 2. GDS does all that I could ever want it to and more, and it has a good chance of becoming a permanent fixture on my desktop. I’ve tried other programs like this in the past, such as Konfabulator and Serence KlipFolio, but neither of those applications were as easy to use and unintrusive as GDS. I won’t give a rating for GDS right now as I haven’t had the chance to use it for more than a few hours. This is my first time reviewing anything in two years of writing on this blog, so the fact that GDS was worth taking the time to review is praise enough. Check it out if you’re running Windows 2000 or XP.

Langosta is now at version 1.1.5. This update deals mainly with the live comment preview feature, moving the preview down to the bottom of the page (below the textarea) in an effort to eliminate the bug where it would jump around. I can’t test to see if this fixed the problem, though, because I haven’t been experiencing it.

There’s something wrong with this design. It’s not that it’s incomplete (lots of small styling bugs / forms still are ugly), but that it just isn’t working for me. The header and background images are pretty, but the colors feel wrong. I hate the yellow background for the content area (it probably looks worse on other monitors than it does on mine). The problem with the yellow is that I can’t change it to white without things looking weird (there’s almost no other white on the entire website), so getting rid of it will require a new color scheme, a new design, another dozen hours of trying to get things pixel-perfect in Photoshop. Unfortunately I really don’t have time for it right now, so a new design will have to wait for a month or so, unless I experience some kind of windfall of free time soon.

I want the new design to be innovative. I want it to be unique, yet still usable. I want it to be rich and complex, with lots of attention to detail (a quality that this one lacks). Though I did a lot of new things with this design that I’ve never done before (subtle shadowing on tabs and corners with PNG alpha transparency that’s smart enough to show GIFs for Internet Explorer, a fixed background image, JavaScript for the live comment preview), I think I can do better.

In other news, the motherboard for my parents’ new computer came today (NewEgg is fast), and the other parts have been ordered. I might post detailed specs later, but for now, this is what will be in the new PC:

• A Gigabyte Socket A motherboard with a 333 Mhz FSB and largely the same features as mine has: Serial ATA, AGP 8x, DDR400 memory, etc. I really wanted to go for Socket 754 (my motherboard is Socket 754) because AMD’s newer mid-range processors all use that socket, but it was just too expensive.
• An AMD Sempron 2600+ processor. An Athlon 64 or a Sempron 64 would have been wonderful, but both of those are Socket 754. The Sempron 2600+ is similar to an Intel Celeron (a processor family that I hate with a passion), but it’s probably more like the older AMD Athlon XP line, which used to be the flagship AMD processor before the K8s (Athlon 64, Athlon 64 FX) came out.
• 512 MB of generic DDR memory. 256 MB is just not enough anymore for Windows XP, though my parents’ computer will run Linux. Besides, Crampy had 384 MB, so 256 MB seemed like a downgrade.
• A generic DVD burner. Originally this was going to be a DVD/CD-RW combo drive, but the “burns-everything-but-toast” burner was only $10 more.
• A generic 40 GB hard drive. Some people might cringe at this choice, but 40 GB is more than enough for my parents. I’ve got an 80 GB drive, and it’s only about half full, even with a few gigabytes of music, a separate partition for Windows Vista, and lots of huge games (Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike: Source, Battlefield 2, Rome: Total War, SimCity 4, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and Guild Wars).
• A D-Link 802.11g wireless PCI card. Crampy had a really, really old 802.11b USB adapter for connecting to the Internet via our wireless router, but it was kind of buggy sometimes. Linux wireless support is less-than-stellar, so I got this one in the hope that it would be better supported than the old one (it’s on the Ubuntu HCL and is marked as working there).
• A generic black ATX mid-tower case with a 350-watt power supply.
• A floppy drive. You always end up needing one, regardless of what people say (installing SATA drivers for Windows XP setup comes to mind).
• An old Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 graphics card (PCI) that was in Crampy as an upgrade (Crampy had no AGP slots, so I had to resort to PCI).

None of these components are the best ones I could have bought. The low budget (the entire system comes in at about $360, with shipping) made it impossible to be too picky. Still, I think this system will be much better than anything that my parents could have bought from Dell or HP, even with the deals that are going on right now. My only fears are that I will screw something up or that the Linux distro I choose will refuse to install because of a lack of drivers for the hardware. But successfully putting together a computer is almost a rite of passage for geeks, so I’ve got to do it sometime. At least breaking something will only cost $50 or so with this build, whereas messing up on Marklar would have been incredibly costly ($300+).

Before I go to bed and sleep another eight hours closer to my impending doom, I should probably say something about what Marklar has done for me over the past year. If you look at previous blog entries, you’ll notice that I was fixated upon getting a new computer for a long, long time. It wasn’t an obsession, exactly, but it was close to it. Even with some extra RAM, a newer video card (certainly better than the 4 MB integrated graphics I had before), and an upgrade to Windows XP from Windows 98SE, Crampy was just not enough for me. Even with Windows XP, it crashed quite often, and before the XP upgrade, it would crash about every half an hour. I began to develop a habit of saving compulsively whenever I was writing a report or coding something or playing a game. Every 15 seconds, my fingers would hit the Control + S key combination without me even thinking about it. It was better than the computer we had before Crampy, and certainly better than not having any computer at all, but it still sucked.

The other problem with Crampy was that I was missing out on playing just about every good computer game. I felt like I was always hearing my friends talk about some new game that they could all play that was just too advanced for my PC, and I hated it. Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Halo, Final Fantasy XI, the Total War games, and so many others were all playable only in my dreams (and when I was over at a friend’s house).

Sure, not being able to play a few video games isn’t the end of the world, but even so, having to live with Crampy didn’t mean I had to like it. I now wonder why I was always so patient with that computer, why I invested so much of my time in figuring out what made it work and fixing it when it didn’t, when I could have just given up and done something else instead. Things would be very different now had that happened, but not necessarily better.

Every feeling of happiness from every birthday, Christmas, Easter, and Halloween that I’ve ever had, all rolled into one, could not equal the feeling of elation that I got when I finally ordered Marklar in July 2004. Never had I anticipated anything more than the day when the FedEx guy lugged that heavy box up to my doorstep. It wasn’t that all those other holidays and special events weren’t good ones, but rather that this special day was so much better. Besides, I had hoped, halfheartedly, on every holiday and birthday for the past two years for a package like this one to arrive, but every time I was disappointed. I knew that a computer was a big purchase for my parents, and that neither of them thought there was anything wrong with Crampy (they didn’t have to use it every day), so I never let myself get my hopes up too much, but that feeling that this Christmas or this birthday might be the one was always there.

Eventually, after months of whining on Organon about how my parents should replace Crampy post-haste, I finally decided that this was something that I’d have to earn for myself. It wasn’t a happy decision because I knew that the chances of me earning enough money for a new computer before I graduated from high school were slim at best. My only income at that time was money that my parents paid me for cleaning the house, which came to about $10 per week. I was paid $20 for each cleaning, but since the work sometimes took four hours to finish, it was barely better than minimum wage. I think my parents also got away with more than a few free cleanings, either because they didn’t pay me immediately and later forgot, or because my earnings sometimes got used to pay for family outings (I would have gladly not gone to the movies if I’d known beforehand it was going to cost me).

But I soon realized that I had a lot more to offer than the ability to scrub a toilet, especially after I began working on the CSHS website in November 2003. Before starting there, I had never thought of myself as being particularly good at designing websites or programming, but that soon changed when I saw more than a fair number of terrible designs on other high school sites (the old CSHS design wasn’t exactly beautiful, either). I saw that I was good enough at designing and maintaining websites that it could become a good job or even a career for me someday, but that day came much sooner than I thought it would. Mr. Trapani, the teacher responsible for the CSHS website at the time, got me in touch with his brother, who runs a web design and hosting firm that caters mainly to Arizona-based theatre companies and related businesses. Soon, I was working a fair number of hours on various websites for the other Mr. Trapani, and I was amazed to calculate in February 2004 that, at my current rate, I would reach my goal of $1400 by August of that year. Many people think that you can never get anything out of doing something for free, but I spent countless hours working on the CSHS website for nothing, and I certainly benefited from it.

By July, my parents had finally realized that I was serious about achieving my goal, and they gave me $200 so that I could get the computer a little bit early. I ordered it on the 22nd, and it came a week later, on the 29th. It happened to be Tyler’s birthday that day, but it felt like it was mine all over again. I remember hauling the heavy box up the stairs to our office in the house in Arizona and carefully taking out everything packed inside in the top compartment. I remember removing a thin piece of cardboard and seeing my baby for the first time, half-encased in black packing foam and sheathed in plastic. About 99.9% of the world would consider this moment to be one that was hardly worth remembering, but for me, this was the culmination of almost a year-and-a-half of effort. (Adults: Don’t forget, a year-and-a-half is a long time for us whippersnappers.) I paused for a moment before removing it from the box, taking some time to simply reflect upon what it had taken to reach this point. Then, I carefully lifted it out of the box, removed the plastic, and left it sitting on the floor while I finished copying my files and iTunes music from Crampy to CD-RWs. I set it up quickly (with the minor setbacks of not being able to find the power cable and forgetting to flip the toggle switch on the power supply in the back), turned it on, and basked in the blue glow of the front LEDs and the interior lighting. There was a God.

I know it sounds incredibly geeky to say that a new computer changed my life, but that’s really what happened. Suddenly, everything was faster. Not just a little bit faster, but literally five to ten times faster. And with my new video card, I could finally play all those games that I had been missing out on. When I played Far Cry for the first time (it was included with my computer), I could have wept for joy, if I hadn’t been engrossed in the systematic killing of an infinite number of thug clones with semi-automatic weapons.

After moving to Marklar, I never looked back. I got lots of great new games (even better than the older ones that I never got to play), and all of my normal tasks (Photoshopping, writing reports, web surfing, etc.) were much faster, especially when I was doing two things at once. However, there was one problem. Ironically, it took me so long to get a new computer that, by the time I finally had one, my friends’ computers were already beginning to age. I could only play one of my games online with them, and we couldn’t talk about any of the new games I’d gotten because none of them had them. That was unfortunate, but it didn’t stop me from having a lot of fun anyway.

Even though I’ve had Marklar for a while now, and it’s no longer quite as top-of-the-line as it once was, I still don’t take it for granted. I still had to use Crampy every once in a while (at least until it died), and I used plenty of school computers that were about as good as Crampy was. There are plenty of people out there who are in the same situation that I was once in, and I sympathize with them. And, now that I’ve augmented my system with the addition of a flat-panel monitor, a new printer/fax/scanner/copier (nicknamed Boulder because it’s so big and gray) that causes earthquakes when it prints because of the vibrations, some rather nice speakers that I got free from a neighbor, and my new pair of Sennheiser headphones, I feel that I couldn’t possibly ask for anything better. Even though I find myself afflicted with a strong desire for a Mac every once in a while, I have to remember that, for the first time ever, I have a computer that is perfect for me, so how could a glitzy OS and a one-button mouse possibly be any better?

Update

According to the statistics page, I’ve just passed the 500-page milestone. If I printed Organon and put 375 words on every page (a standard amount for most books), this is how many pages it would come to. I highly doubt that I will ever become a next-generation Anne Frank (four years in a cramped attic doesn’t appeal to me), but at least I know. I’m also approaching 200,000 words, and I recently passed six million keystrokes on WhatPulse. Have you noticed that I like meaningless statistics?

It won’t be long now before I have to go back to school. I can’t say I’m exactly looking forward to it, though it’ll be nice to be busy again. I have to register tomorrow, but since I already know what my classes will be (IB students don’t get a whole lot of choice), all I’ll have to do is grab my official schedule, get my picture taken for my ID, pay them some outrageous fee, and leave. It should be quick, easy, and painless.

I honestly don’t know how to feel about going back this year. I’ve always known that school is what I’m best at, and there’s really no reason to not want to go back to doing something you’re good at doing. But I have a feeling that this year could be my most diffcult yet, which is saying something considering that last year was so painful that I came dangerously close to burning out. I think I just need to remember that no matter how much work I get, the stress that it causes me is always going to be my own fault. As long as I think about the big picture and stop worrying over small assignments and things that don’t matter, I should be fine. Being anal about my grades is tempting because I could stand a chance of being valedictorian if I do so, but if the top 5% is good enough for most people, it’s good enough for me. It’s not like I’ll have to worry that much about being accepted at most colleges if I complete my IB Diploma.

Of all my new classes next year, the two that I look forward to the most are IB History of the Americas and IB Spanish. Though AP European History was difficult and painful at times, it really prepared me well for IB History of the Americas. From what I’ve heard from HotA’s teacher, that class will be really similar to AP Euro as far as the methods of research we’ll use and stuff like that goes. Yay. Oh, and I completely forgot to post about it, but I got my AP Euro test results back in July, and it turned out that all my worries were in vain (as usual). I got a 5, which is the highest possible score. The test is graded on a 1 to 5 scale, with a 3 being a passing grade for most colleges, though some require a 4 for a student to get college credit for the class. My hands were almost shaking as I tore open the letter the College Board sent me; I really did think that I was going to end up with a 3, or perhaps a 4 if I was lucky. I somehow got the idea into my head that the test was designed to be grueling, but it wouldn’t be much of a test if only 3% of those who took it were able to pass.

I’m excited about Spanish this year because it should be relatively easy compared to other years. Because I took Spanish in middle school for two semesters and have taken a year’s worth of Spanish each year since, I’m now about two years ahead of the average OHS Spanish student. IB Spanish’s difficulty level is supposed to be somewhere around Spanish III, but I’ve already taken Spanish IV (equal to 7-8 in Arizona), so I guess I’ll get to relearn some things. That’s all right though because I need to improve my speaking ability anyway.

Aside from school starting soon, there are some other things going on in Brett’s World that are worth mentioning. First, my uber-cool Sennheiser HD280 Pro surround-sound headphones came via UPS today. I listened to them for about half an hour, and they sound great! However, every review of them that I’ve read recommends that I burn them in to get the best sound out of them, so that’s what I’m doing right now (I’m going to have iTunes loop through my library once at a moderately high volume - it should take about 18 hours).

I’ve also been busy lately with web design and Photoshop work. One of my old clients from Arizona has been having me do work on the Arizoni Theatre Awards website. Last year, I spent about three weeks at the end of the summer coding a PHP application to allow them to manage their participating theatre listing, and it needed some updating. I’m actually quite proud of the project - it’s one of the most bug-free pieces of software I’ve ever written. The Photoshop work I’ve been doing is more of the same stuff I’ve been doing for Kohl’s: cropping images and saving them in the right format for their planogramming software. It’s not the most fun thing to do, but someone has to do it.

The final major thing that I’ll be doing before summer ends is something that I’ve wanted to do for a long, long time: build a computer. My parents’ computer, Crampy, which used to be my computer pre-Marklar, finally “cramped out” about two weeks ago while I was in Arizona, and it seems that the problem has to do with some failing hardware. The thing is almost six years old, so I’m not surprised. Rather than fix it, my parents agreed to let me build them one for $350 using parts from NewEgg and an old video card that was in Crampy. This should work out nicely because then if I break something, it’s not nearly as big of a loss as it would have been had I built Marklar myself.

When trying to find parts that were cheap enough to be under the $350 target, I found that it was nearly impossible to build a reliable machine for that amount if I added in the cost of Windows XP. Even if you get the cheaper OEM version, it’s still $90, which is more than 25% of the cost of the entire system! Even worse, since we won’t be using Crampy anymore, it would make sense if my parents could simply use that Windows license for the new one. Unfortunately, we bought the upgrade version of Windows XP for that one, so we can’t simply install it on the new one. The only good thing about getting a new copy of Windows is that it will come with all of the security updates (and Service Pack 2), but that’s not that time-consuming when you have broadband. Anyway, the final decision was to hold off on buying a new copy of Windows for the moment and put Linux on the new computer instead (I’m thinking Ubuntu or Kubuntu). My parent’s don’t do anything with Crampy except type Word documents, browse the Internet, and read email, so it’s not like they really *need* Windows for anything. And if it doesn’t work out, we can always fork over the $90 for Windows later on.

That’s about it. I need to work on my summer homework now, so I dunno how much time I’ll have for posting in the next few weeks.

One last thing: I have a virtual stock portfolio that I’ve been watching for about two years. You start with $100,000, and you can buy and sell any stocks you want that are above $5 in share price. Since August 2003, my $100,000 has grown to $219,424, for a gain of 119.4%. Not bad. This year hasn’t been quite as wonderful as 2004, but I think I’ve still managed about a 20% gain, compared to about a 3% loss for most of the major indices. I hit an all-time high of about $224,000 back in July, but I’ve lost a bit of ground along with the rest of the stock market since then. My best-performing holdings are Apple (AAPL), AMD (AMD), Gildan Activewear (GIL), and Red Hat (RHAT) which I no longer own, though I rode it up to $28 after buying it at $10 back in 2003. If only it were real….