April 30th, a day among days

So today is the fortunate end of STAR testing. The Math sections were an hour and 30 mins long, but it wasn’t as bad as the English section. The Physics part, sucked. I could not deal with the electricity problems. We were under prepared. Our teacher decided to jump chapters and cover the electricity things, Ohms, conductors, and etc. But by rushing, we didn’t go over it well enough. Seriously, I think I did really badly on the Physics portion.

Then there was the math EAP. Holy crap haha, I had completely forgotten a lot of the stuff. Like, finding the area of a region of the circle that is sectioned off by the arc of circle and a chord, area of a pyramid, and some other weird stuff haha.

Today there weren’t problems with the bus thankfully. Got home 3ish, and enjoyed some crackers + ham + cheese from one of those snack platters. My mom had initially believed that it was meant as a meal, not as snacks haha. Pretty odd. Spent most of the day with anime and manga. Eventually, we went out to eat dinner because it was my sister-in-law’s birthday. That’s were things get interesting.

At the restaurant (Vietnamese one, over in the Paloma area by Target. Tieng Long) they had tvs up. Now this isn’t an odd thing at all, but they were showing Deal or No Deal haha. We had been there a few weeks before for dinner as well, and they were watching Deal or No Deal then too haha. The waiters and the most eaters were just watching the show haha. I could hear like, three or four different languages explaining to a friend how the game worked haha. It’s a pretty weird game if you ask me, but I’d wanna try it haha.

Now the plan was, that after eating at Tieng Long we were going to go to Baskin Robins. They had this deal, for today only, 2.5 oz. for 31 cents. But when we went out there, there was a massive line haha. It stretched out of the building and around the sidewalk haha. Because it was so damn cold outside, we decided not to go. As we were leaving though, my sister spotted some guys holding Vietnamese (yellow with 3 red stripes) flags and American flags. There was apparently a candlelight progression of people too, and a bunch of cars heading in the opposite direction. Then my mom remembered that today, April 30, was the fall of Saigon haha. We made some jokes about how today everyone was out on the streets for my sister’s birthday, and we went home for some ice cream from the freezer. Curious, I went onto Wikipedia and checked out April 30th. And would you know it? This is also the day that Hitler committed suicide. Haha. Crazy lol. Just thought today was pretty funny for that.

Timestamp – 10:00PM

Introducing the new categories, Family and Weekdays

STAR Testing today was pretty gliff.

Haha, I don’t know about the rest of you guys, but my EAP section of the STAR test had a part where they placed the nonsense word gliff in sentences and the point of the problems was to fill in the appropriate word. Well, I was zooming through the questions and and didn’t read the instructions clearly enough, and though gliff was an actual word.

I looked at it and thought, “there’s a new word. Interesting. Oh well.” From the rest of the sentence I was able to get the answer, and I just moved onto the next question. But then I saw the word “gliff” again and thought, “WTF? They are using it in a completely different part of speech! What’s going on?” So I paused for a bit and saw that the directions for the block of questions specifically said, “the nonsense word, ‘gliff’”. Haha. I got a pretty good chuckle out of that. I’m going to start using it now. It will be my new curse-word substitute, ie: Gliff you! lol.

The day itself though was pretty alright. Half the desks in the class I took the test in (French 3, 3rd period) are these super tiny decks that really only have enough space for your arm and one sheet of paper. At the beginning of the school year, when we got to pick and choose our seats, I picked the large, regular sized desk. I had forgotten that after the first semester was over, we’d switch places. Haha, curses to my forgetfulness. I had to hold the test booklet in my left hand while I answered the answer key in my right. So annoying. I can’t imagine how weird those desks would be for left handed people.

Those desks also hampered my free time. 85 minutes were given per English portion, and that’s way too much damn time. I read too fast. At first, I wanted to save as much time as possible by only reading the passages when needed, but then I realized I’d have way too much time to do nothing, so I tried to slow down. Didn’t happen, haha. Sleeping on a small desk is hard since you don’t have the room to lay down without putting your body at an angle. I had so much time, I laid on my arm resting for so long that it almost fell asleep. It got to the stage where it has that pins and needles, charlie-horse feeling haha.

The History section, which gave us thankfully less time, still left me with too much time on my hands haha. Also, in my USAP class we had just gotten past World War II and scratched the surface of the Cold War. There were about 7 questions on the 1960s. I have a feeling I won’t be getting an “advanced” score on the history section this time around, haha.

My favorite (sarcasm) part of the day was waiting for the bus. I don’t think I’ve mentioned it before, but I go to Santa Teresa on the Magnet program, and there is a Magnet bus that picks up and drops off other Magnet-ers at their various home schools. Today, our bus driver wasn’t aware of testing today. As such, she came on the regular school day. For Santa Teresa, the schedule of days goes as such: Collaboration (think of it as a minimum day), Regular day (3:05 end time), Lab day (2:24 end time), Lab day, Regular Day. So she came one hour after we had gotten out of class as today ended at 2:05. 2:20 if you are a Junior like me and took the extra EAP testing. Also, the bus driver was having radio problems, so when a friend called the dispatchers (we call when the bus gets to be later than 20-30 mins) they told us that they couldn’t find out bus driver. Haha. Got home around 3:45. Overall though, it was a good day. Boring, but stress-free. STAR is too easy haha.

Not looking forward to tomorrow though. They are allotting 1 hour 30 mins for each math section. That’s going to be a massive pain. I’ll try to work slow haha.

Timestamp – 6:13PM

More adventures in AIM

shiokenstar: what do you plan on doing there?
Zombeh Shelaka: Buying Stuff, Reuben Langdon, Dan Southworth, Go to Both of their panels, Gaia’s Booth and enter the Quickdraw Contest again, Go to Gaia Panel…
Zombeh Shelaka: …go to Reuben and Dan’s panel if they have one again this year…
shiokenstar: lol i like the wording
shiokenstar: What do you plan on doing? Reuben Langdon
shiokenstar: haha
Zombeh Shelaka: ROFL.
Zombeh Shelaka: XDDDD
Zombeh Shelaka: First Reuben, then Dan Southworth.
Zombeh Shelaka: :3
shiokenstar: hahaha
Zombeh Shelaka: XD

Such a fangirl, haha.

Timestamp – 5:50 PM

Minesweeper: Ready, Set, Fail

So, I’ll start things off by saying I like Minesweeper. It’s 80% logic and 20% luck, but it’s a great casual game to play while I’m waiting for a page to load, or my wireless internet card to connect. It’s not so much about getting fast times, although I am pleased/peeved whenever I break/come short of a personal best. Although I play mainly on my laptop, I do play a bit on the family computer, which runs Windows Vista. Now I really don’t care what other people say about Vista, its ok if you ask me. The only issue I have with it is that it doesn’t seem to understand that I want to write files to a blank disc and instead tries to format the disc into something similar to a flashdrive. This process never works. Period.

Now anyways, the casual games that come with a computer, Solitaire, Minesweeper, Freecell, Spider Solitaire and etc are here too, but with upgraded Vista shiny aesthetics. However, somebody decided that it would be a good idea to record how many times you’ve played each game and how many times you’ve actually won. This pisses me off. I like the idea of jumping into Minesweeper, and just playing. Same with Solitaire really. But no, now my every move and failure is recorded each time I play. It gets irritating. On expert level of Minesweeper, you have to be lucky to click the first square and get a decent amount of space to work with. Sometimes you can go through 5-8 rounds of expert level before you get some wiggle room to actually start solving the field. So think about it for a second. 5-8 tries to even start to play. Then, there’s no guarantee that you’ll win since there’s almost always a situation where you cannot use logic to guess at which square is the mine. I cannot count the number of times I have lost when there was only 1 mine left, and two squares to pick from. As such, my win-to-lose rate is very, very abominable, but the fact that there isn’t a lasting impression on the loss, I can easily start a new round if I’m up for it.

However, with Windows Vista and its statistics, I practically never play expert level anymore. I can’t break the single digit win percentage, and I don’t plan on trying since it takes 5-8 loses to even start a chance to win. But I’m a Minesweeper junkie, haha. Curse you Mark Ding, you’ve infected me! So whenever I’m on the family computer, I play intermediate mode. It is infinitely easier than expert, but every now and again you make a mistake due to confidence or those guessing situations.

What I like doing on the family computer in trying to up my win percentage. So I’ve gotten to 100 games played on intermediate level of Minesweeper. 53 wins. A decent score. But, Vista tells me my win percentage is 52. 52%. Vista says, 53/100 = 52%. Goddamnit. You know, I have a 100% win percentage on beginner mode? Yeah thats right, 100%. How many games? Like, 7. I’m scared of playing beginner since I don’t wanna ruin the win rate. I decided to try bringing the intermediate rate up since way back at like, game 60 or something. But it’s a pain in the rear end when you have to win like, 3 games in a row to up your percentage by 1. And a loss will either drop you a percent or reset your attempts to bring it up. The least Vista could do for screwing my (possible?) OCD is give me a damn accurate reading. But nooooo, 53/100 is .52 to Vista. Little punks. But I can’t stop playing. <.<

Timestamp – 12:08AM

$5.4 Billion was stolen from you: What are you going to do about it?

So some of you may or may not have heard of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s planned $5.4 billion budget cut from California’s education. As a result, schools will lose teachers, class sizes will increase to upwards of 40, various extra curricular activities will go down the pipes, and overall the quality of education in California will go down.

As a result of this, Santa Teresa and dozens of schools across California chose Friday the 18th to protest. For Santa Teresa, a lot of students gathered outside on the intersection of Santa Teresa and Snell and basically marched around the crosswalks while getting cars to honk and show their support. There was a ton of people haha. My friends Pierre and Ed were roped into recording the event, but Ed didn’t film much and I took Pierre’s camera to do the filming myself. It was a pretty energetic day with some band kids bringing out their instruments, signs with crazy slogans, and lots of cars honking. The event took place after school, so that where the number of people was strongest haha.

There was a place to get your shirt sprayed with a picture of Arnold and the word “BillionERR” on it. I wanted a shirt like that, but the shirt I had on me already had a design on it so I couldn’t. Also, there was a place to write letters (a few sentences on a half sheet of paper) to Arnold, but not too many people went there.

A city council guy came out to see the event, although I don’t remember his name, haha. Sorry mister.

Overall, the day was pretty cool. I ran around a lot filming and even set up the camera to nab some sweet time-lapse shots, although Pierre is having storage issues with his computer so I don’t know when he’ll get the footage to me for editing. There was this girl who was selling like, cookies and brownies. I got a big hunk of brownie, like a 3-4 inch square of brownie, for only one of Pierre’s dollars, haha. I forgot my money, so sue me :p. It was delicious haha. It had caramel on it and just tasted so good haha. I would have gotten another had I not felt guilty about Pierre paying for it. I also got one of the noise makers they were giving out at the event. I believe it is a recorder or something haha. I’m trying to learn it, but it sounds kinda wonky for some of the notes.

It was so bad. Like two hours afterwards, and after most people had left, we get news that a News crew was on the way. After the guys in charge made the announcement to clean up and everything haha, the most devoted stayed back to at least give the circling helicopter something to film.

I left a few mins after I saw the helicopters haha. Ed, Pierre, and I would have gone to Starbucks had my thirst for awesome shots and etc not interfered. Maybe next time haha.

Sorry for missing Brawl Victoria, but I was really tired by the time I got home haha.

Timestamp – 7:40

P.S. Pierre, gimme the footage already haha.