Outsourced

The past few days I've seen run-down squirrel carcasses strewn about the roads in Nottingham Country, inbetween my house and Taylor. It's not a pretty sight. Granted, I'm probably seeing the same corpses each day, but I know there are at least two squirrels. I remember on the Buzz, when they used to air You Can't Win (Do they still do that? I haven't heard it in ages. I think they ditched all their DJ's a while back or something), one of the questions said that like over 30% of men aim for animals when they drive. That's pretty horrible. I mean, even though squirrels are supposedly naturally mean and ferocious, and they steal all the birdseed in my backyard and leave none for the birds, they don't deserve to be run over. Okay, maybe they do, but I can't help but feel a little saddened every time I see roadkill. Poor little guys.

Today and yesterday I spent a substantial amount of time practicing for State as usual, and I'm pretty burned out for now. I played a good amount of tennis today -- some of it in the rain. Terry and I lost to Alvin and Tommy, but the games are always closer than the scores indicate, since we took it to duece pretty much every game. I blame the wind.

Perhaps this weekend will give me the break I need... But, alas, I have to do my policy paper project. Luckily enough, Slashdot constantly has stories about my topic, the CAN-SPAM act. I thought they only have to be like five pages long, but apparently lots of people are writing much more than that. Argh. I hope my minimal efforts won't make me look bad.

I've also given in to the pressure to get a LiveJournal, mainly from one person. Thus, I've made an account (jeff85), though I only plan to use it to read friends-only posts and the like. So add me to your friends list, and I'll do the same. Maybe I'll give the friends-only posts a whirl.

And now, for my fellow geeks, I present Foxtrot once again:

So yesterday I thought that school started at 10:14. Even though I have A Lunch, I was thinking that I would go early so that I would get a good parking space in the parking garage. When I got there, it was completely empty, except for John, who also went early. We walked into the cafeteria to find that it was full of freshmen, and there wasn't a single senior around. We (and by we, I mean John) asked the authoritative-looking ladies (read: babysitters) what the deal was, and that's when we found out school didn't start until 10:40. So we were bummed out, and I suggested we go grab lunch and bring it back to school. However, when we tried to leave, the evil ladies wouldn't let us. I wanted a good parking space; I got a good parking space.

I've decided to put my geekiness to use in developing a somewhat useful application with my programming skills. Basically I'm writing a program that will reformat mp3 filenames to be syntactically correct, given a directory. By syntactically correct, I mean following the standard artist - song.mp3 format, with everything correctly capitalized and spaced out. However, I've run into a few problems.

• Names that are supposed to be fully capitalize won't be. Ex. DMX changes to Dmx
  
• Should it attempt to remove (1), (2), etc from songs (since some downloaded songs are copies)? What if there are multiple files with the same name and it's supposed to be there?
  
• Should it not capitalize articles that aren't the first word in the artist or song? What about other short words like "of?"
  
• Should it convert underscores to spaces?

Right now it just renames files with exactly one dash and a .mp3 ending. Thus, band names such as All-American Rejects get skipped. Ugh. Too many weird cases to think about. Anyway, I hope I'm not the only one who's annoyed by bad looking file names.

So I've fallen in love with this cover of Nena's 99 Red Balloons lyrics by Goldfinger. To quote Kevin from Songmeanings.net, "So, a couple goes and buys some balloons. They let them go. Then, they show up on some radar and they think the balloons are missles (bug in the software). Aaaah, it's war! They send our the troops and then bomb a city." It's good stuff.

Today I stayed after school to help Mrs. Aguilar, Christie, and Angela make pockets in about 55 AP government practice books that we're going to be studying with in class the next few days. It involved cutting with scissors and taping with packaging tape, and I'm not very good at either of those two things. I can't cut straight if my life depended on it. The tape also kept getting stuck to the cover of the book before I was ready. Angela had to make pre-cut strips of tape for me so that I wouldn't mess it up. Ugh. Well, I managed to get an hour or so for NHS.

Yesterday, I was going to spend the day in Galveston with a group of people, but we changed our mind because Linda couldn't go, the weather was bad, and Glinkowski would have to leave relatively soon after we got there even if we did go. So instead we hang around Tami's house and watched Kill Bill Vol. 1 and made Rice Krispie Treats. Eventually most of the people left, and we played a little DDR, which I sucked at. Absolutely nothing happened inbetween that and when we watched The King of Comedy. Nothing. Nada. Zip. It was fun, though.

I'm really excited about UIL State now because we have a really good shot at placing 1st. It appears that South Lake Carroll is going to be our biggest competition, but I think we can take 'em.

Taylor totally kicked ass at UIL Regionals. Here are the standings that I'm sure of:

• 1st - Science
  
• 1st - Computer Science
  
• 2nd - Math
  
• 1st- Social Studies

Individually, we took 1st-4th in Computer Science. I placed 2nd with a 232 out of 240. I made one really stupid mistake, which cost me 1st place, which I would have tied with David for. Ugh. I'll just have to avenge my placement at state. Terry got 3rd and Nitin got 4th. We tied for first in the hands-on programming part, but overall we came out in first place when written scores were added in. *Edit* I could have sworn I was told that social studies took 1st-4th individually, but I was mistaken. They did take 1st, 3rd, and 4th, though. Zhi placed 1st and Nitin placed 2nd in Science. Nitin also placed 2nd in Math and 6th in Number Sense. Competing at State is going to rock this year!

Check out our Computer Science scores. So far it looks like we're the highest in the state. You can see how we fared in other events there.

Although I got owned by the five chapter government test today, one positive thing did happen. Blogger offered me a chance to sign up for the GMail beta, which is Google's web-based e-mail service that gives users a whopping gigabyte of storage space. From what I've seen, it looks very nice. The unintrusive text-based ads are nearly identical to the ones you see when you perform a normal Google search. There's a good amount of features which I haven't tried out yet, too. I knew something good would come out of Google acquiring Blogger. More importantly, there's no way Travis can deny me my five dollars now. Help me celebrate this glorious occassion by sending me an e-mail to my new address at Jeff85@gmail.com.

In somewhat-related news, blogs everywhere have triumphed in linking the I'm Feeling Lucky for "waffles" to John Kerry's website. For the uninformed, go to Google.com, type in waffles, and then click I'm Feeling Lucky. Other phrases with similarly entertaining results include "miserable failure" and "weapons of mass destruction."

Tomorrow is UIL Regionals. I'm pumped, cause we're going to mop the floor with our competition (or lack thereof). Wishing us luck anyway, wouldn't hurt though. As for my government test, I started checking my answers, and after I missed ten multiple choice questions in a row (defying the odds, I should have at least gotten 2 out of 10 right), I just gave up. As those Finn kids say... "Should have studied."

While I'm ashamed about my government test, I'm also proud of myself. After playing tennis, I picked up an empty water bottle off the court and threw it in the trash. It's a shame that people litter everywhere. And besides, it wouldn't have been right if I didn't because I was wearing my T.R.E.E. (Taylor Recycling and Environmental Efforts) shirt. So yeah, I'm proud of myself.

But Tami insisted that I post this.

Not the other way around.

So I saw Kill Bill: Vol. 2 today, and it was frickin' awesome. Gordon Liu plays Pai Mei, the best character in the movie (in my own opinion, of course). His bit in the movie is hiliarious, but I won't ruin it for you. Go see it. Now.

Also, the trailer for Hero, which will be imported by Quentin Tarantino and featuring Jet Li, looked pretty awesome, though with some of the action clearly derived from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, another of my favorite movies. Of course, that's what you get when you hire Yuen Wu Ping as your choreographer. Looks like it's also being produced by the same company that produced Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Apparently it was released like a year ago in China, but still, it looks totally awesome.

As for my prom status, I'm now on five failed attempts, although three were preemptive and one doesn't really count. I've only asked one person, and she said yes, though she backed out later (for understandable reasons). Therefore, technically nobody ever said no to me, except for the aforementioned 2nd grader in my last post.

Man, daylight savings is weird. I look at the clock and see that it's 7 pm, but I look at my window and it's still bright outside. Anyway, today after school Terry, Nitin, Zhi, and Mrs. George are discussing my prom woes. Mrs. George jokingly asks Craig's (her son) girl friend if she wants to go with me to prom, and she promptly replies "no" without hesitation of any sort. I got turned down by a 2nd grader. That's just embarassing.

On the bright side, I'm pretty confident I got a 4 out of 6 on my TXML, which is good by my standards, or lack thereof. I spent a lot of time on the last question, which asked something like: If x = 3 / [7^(1/3) - 2] and integers (a,b,c) is a solution to x^3 + ax^2 + bx + c = 0, what is (a,b,c)? I spent like 5 minutes multiplying everything out and figuring out a, b, and c, then continue to verify my results in my graphing calculator only to find out my answer of (6, -12, 1) doesn't work. Then I realize I only multiplied the denominator and totally ignored the numerator. Frustrated, I didn't want to start over from scratch and turned in my paper (actually more because I always turn in my paper when Terry Ma does, it's like a tradition now). The other question I missed was because I don't know anything about probability.

This past weekend I also paid my enrollment deposit for UT, so looks like I'm definitely going there.

Remember kids, "Smokers are jokers." -Rod and Todd Flanders

And for those who don't know, from left to right by heads: Til, Terry, Zhi, Chris, Linda, and April. And yes, that's my hand. No, those aren't real cigarettes. They're candy. No, I still refused to try one.

Okay, so I just felt like posting my Winamp playlist for the heck of it. It's not every song I have, just the ones I'm listening to right now. Anyone have any suggestions for songs to add to my music library? Vanessa Mae is pretty cool; everyone should check out her classical music. I'm also liking the Smashing Pumpkins more and more these days. And if anyone can guess what song has "Fasten your seatbelts" in it, then uhhh... you win. Anyway, I played tennis for about three hours tonight. The highlight was Terry and myself against Tommy and Alvin in the rematch of the century. Terry and I were down 4-0, but managed to come back 5-5, and worked up to 7-7. However, we lost the tie breaker. I blame Zhi for taking off his shirt and chasing Terry around during the tie breaker, as that would scar anyone for life. We did pretty well, considering we made a comeback and Terry forgot his glasses.

As for the Gmail thing, I'm pretty sure it's legit and not an April Fool's joke. Travis is sure that it is, though. I have a $5 bet on it, so it better be real. Google's April Fool's joke this year was a job on their lunar facilities and in one of the past years their joke was about their PigeonRank technology. Both were obviously fake and amusing. Gmail has nothing amusing about it and is very plausible, which is why I believe it's real.

I'm also spending my time trying to learn how to use Perl, even though I should be working on other things. I managed to get the comments script to work, but for some reason the comment count part doesn't work. That's why you see [] but no number inside of the brackets. Ugh. I can't figure out what's up with it.

I don't think Bush is as bad as everyone says he is. You can't blame everything on the president, even though that was the whole point of one of the government articles we had to read. Not everything is his fault. However, that doesn't mean I agree with all of his views. I'm against the whole manned mission to Mars plan (though I think NASA is great), and I don't have a problem with same sex marriages. Hey, as long as they leave me alone, they can do whatever they want together.

That said, I'm tired of hearing about the people who complain that Bush didn't do enough about 9/11 and that he knew about it before it happened. Obviously, it wasn't like he knew exactly what was going to happen. Either way, people complain that Bush did not do enough. Now we're in Iraq on the suspicion that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction or the ability to produce said weapons. Today people complain that Bush is overstepping his bounds. So the masses complain that we don't do enough with the information (which may or may not be true) we have, then complain that we're doing too much two and a half years later?

I think that the United States is justified in its war in Iraq. Let's just say that we didn't invade Iraq and that they did in fact have weapons of mass destruction. As soon as they used them or used them as leverage, the public would accuse Bush of not doing enough. Whether our suspicions about the weapons of mass destruction are true or not remains to be seen, of course. Even though I dislike the amount of taxes that funds the war, I believe our efforts in Iraq sends a message to those who support or conduct terrorist activities. I mean, it convinced Libya to cooperate, right?