Google = Big Brother

Why I Don't Use MySpace

This link is for a certain friend of mine, who I hope is reading this:

The End of MySpace

I would have written a mini-essay myself, but fortunately I found this one, which covers the same points that I would have used in an anti-MySpace debate.

Woo! I can drive!

Well ... sort of. I just got a drivers' permit, which, while not yet a license, is still a remarkable accomplishment given my laziness (it took me nearly half a year to finally complete my mandatory 50 hours of driving education).

In other news, AP results are in, and I got all 5s (on Euro, Bio, Stats)! =) And I thought I'd get a 4 on Bio for sure...

Summer...

It's funny, I thought that I'd post here a lot more come summer, but in reality there's not much to write about. I'm actually glad that I'm volunteering at the library, because at least it gives me something to do, even if I'm playing more than I'm working there, heh.

There's a lot less summer work this year than last year, but I've still barely started. Out of six US History chapters and two English books, I've read ... one History chapter. I'd better pick up the pace, or I'll get stuck with a ridiculous workload in the last week of summer, just like last year ... ahh the memories ...

I just saw The Phantom Riders live, a great instrumental band. If you live in Southern California, you should check 'em out - they play in Hollywood often.

I haven't done much of my own stuff so far this summer, but I'll post if I make anything new. A new version of Little Fighter 2.5 is certainly possible, as is *but don't take my word for it* an online version of European Chess (once I figure out why Flash keeps crashing on my computer >.<).

Finally, some cool links for those of you with some free time:
*LibraryThing - Can't believe I haven't heard of this site earlier. Now I no longer have to wonder about what to read next. Kudos to AP for telling me about this one!
*BattleMaster - Best online game ever, period. Or not quite an online game? Frankly, I don't know what it can be classified under, but it's amazing. Just try it and you'll see why.
*Tactics Arena Online and SlimeAthlete - Where we library volunteers go to pass the time in between Axis and Allies games.

Personal Website Online!

After six months of work, I have finally completed my new personal site.

Features:
- Fairly comprehensive About Me and My Interests sections.
- A much expanded, much improved My Creations section (compared to my old personal site).
- A fairly active forum.
- Even a blog! Heh.

Enjoy! =)

European Chess Update

[From the Forums]

Summer has begun, so let me briefly summarize the facts about the European Chess project:

- A patent could cost upward of $10,000, although this cost may be reduced if Fienberg's uncle helps us. We still don't know about the necessity of a patent.
- We have until February 2008 to file a provisional patent (about $300 I believe), which would extend the patenting deadline by a year, giving us until February 2009 to file a full patent.
- We still don't know if a Euro Chess patent would be approved or not, due to its similarity to Chaturanji, which admittedly is a public-domain game.
- Peter Olotka, designer of Cosmic Encounter (off of which Euro Chess is partly based), could offer some help, so I'm trying to get in touch with him.
- I know nothing about what the commercial possibilities of Euro Chess. Would it sell? I have no idea.
- We still have not come up with a good name - I don't like Euro Chess much. A name design competition is a possibility.
- I am not sure about the possible legal issues that could arise from the Design Competition.
- An online game is a possibility. Do not ask me about it - if I do decide to make one it will be a surprise, but I guarantee nothing.

It's summer!

At long last, school is out. I spent the last month struggling to complete various projects (for the most part, the notorious 18-minute long Historical Figure multimedia presentation project that is often cited to scare incoming sophomores), but since this Friday, I've been free ... for the most part ...

Summer has been fairly uneventful so far, but I did sign up for volunteer work at my local library (upwards of 80 hours for doing absolutely nothing [literally nothing - some friends are even considering bringing an Axis & Allies board over to the library to pass the time]!! How could I have not thought about this before!?!

Roger Waters! [A Concert Review]

I went to a Roger Waters concert at the Hollywood Bowl yesterday night, with my dad, my brother, and some family friends. To sum it up in a word: amazing.

We didn't eat dinner before we arrived at Hollywood at 6 (concert started at 7:30), and believe it or not, we had to wander the streets for half an hour before we could find a decent place to eat (so much upscale dining in Hollywood, so little fast food), namely a Subway.

We got to the Hollywood Bowl fifteen minutes before the show was scheduled to start, but had to wait for some friends, and finally pushed toward the stadium at around 7:30. The crowd was huge, the biggest I'd ever seen in my life, but my friends estimated it to be between 10,000 and 15,000 people. Anyway, the Bowl was sold out (there were a bunch of people who went all the way to the Bowl without tickets, holding up signs like "Please give me a ticket. I am a fan, not a scalper." And plenty of scalpers too. Not to mention all of the "musicians" and T-shirt sellers standing outside the Bowl. There are a lot of business opportunities available there I suppose ...)

We reached the stands at about 8:00, after much pushing and shoving and security (in my backpack I had two identical opaque bottles, one with water, one with iced tea. A guard picked one at random and asked, "What's in it?" "Water?" I guessed. The guard sniffed it: "That's not water..." and looked at me suspiciously. On the other hand, my friends ran past security, and managed to smuggle in, among other things, a camcorder and a digital voice recorder.) At the back of the stage was a large display showing an antique radio that played oldies, while a hand occassionally reached in to change the channel or pour some wine. Roger Waters entered the stage at around 8:15.

The first setlist was pretty good, with both its high and its low points. The audience was so excited by In The Flesh that I was a little worried that they might take the song seriously. Mother featured a nice acoustic performance by Roger Waters but I never did like the song that much. I was surprised by the inclusion of Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun, a very old song, but it was played well and the inclusion of a slideshow old photographs in the back was in my opinion a nice touch. Shine On You Crazy Diamond was played well, and the visual transition (climbing out of the heart of the sun of the previous song, with various distorted images of Syd shown) was nice, but in my opinion David Gilmour's group played it better at the Pulse tour - one of the things I noticed about this concert was that Roger tended to keep the experimentation down to a minimum, playing exactly like the album version, while David's Pink Floyd played most songs a little differently, in some cases even better than the album version. Have a Cigar was an amazing song even in the studio, but played live it sounded even better - I was surprised by guitarist Snowy White's capability of playing exactly as David Gilmour had done in the studio, while still adding his own touch. Wish You Were Here had equally good guitar, but in my opinion it was Roger who was the weakest link here, as his vocals for this song seemed subpar, and he was speaking more than singing.

It was at this point that the songs began to go downhill. The next two songs were Southampton Dock and The Fletcher Memorial Home, neither of which I ever liked particularly. Perfect Sense was one of Roger's better solo songs, and I liked its inclusion, but I felt that Leaving Beirut was overly segmented, with a very predictable spoken verse - guitar - spoken verse - guitar pattern. Roger finally closed the first half with Sheep, which was a nice touch, as it is one of Pink Floyd's loudest songs, in other words, perfect for closing a concert. And of course, everyone cheered and began taking cell phone photos as the pig flew above the stands (although my Republican friends cringed at the "liberal propaganda") - it's too bad that we forgot to bring a camera, but binoculars did help.

Intermission lasted about fifteen minutes, during which a small dot on the back screen slowly grew into a moon, a nice visual touch.

I didn't enjoy the second set as much as the first set, for the most part because at this point the smokers seemed to lose interest in the music, something that was only helped by the two repetitive instrumental passages, On the Run and Any Colour You Like. There was a guy right in front of us who was definitely an addict - he couldn't go for more than a minute without putting that thing in his mouth. Still, we weren't the worst off - in the section where some of my friends were sitting, they were literally the only people there who didn't smoke - my friend's brother actually passed out from the fumes. Other than that, though, the Dark Side of the Moon was played admirably well (I won't go into song-by-song analysis because it was played exactly like the album). There were some amazing special effects in the end, with the giant prism and the lasers. Good times.

After Roger Waters congratulated us for being a great audience, blah blah blah, the band finally closed with five songs from the Wall. As The Happiest Days of Our Lives came to a close, the whole audience stood up for Another Brick in the Wall, singing along with Roger Waters. Similarly, after Vera, another short passage, the audience chanted Bring the Boys Back Home. personally, I only liked the last encore: Comfortably Numb, which was played very well, particularly the two guitar solos. Snowy White once again showed his talent in emulating David Gilmour!

After another twenty minutes of pushing through a crowd, we walked thirty minutes to our parking space through Hollywood at midnight (admittedly not the safest way to travel), and drove home. The End.

Correction: Dave Kilminster, not Snowy White, played lead guitar. To be fair, Snowy White played well too!

Community Service for the Donkey

I was just informed that a previous post of mine was used to save the Little Fighter 2 community forum. That's pretty cool =).

APs are over!

No more AP tests! I'm free!! Well ... sorta ...

Last week, right after the AP Bio test, I had to work all week on a reflective essay. Next week, I'm going to have to present a group Stats project that we hardly started. And two weeks after that is the Hi-Fi presentation, widely believed to be the most difficult project our high school has to offer: a 15-18 minute multimedia presentation on a historical figure. Emphasis on the 15-18 minutes. So in essence, my whole life now is just moving from one project to another.

Well, at any rate it's still an improvement?

How did the AP tests go? They were OK. Better wait for the grade sheet before I jump to conclusions about how well I did.

USAMO!

Whew - this week has been crazy. And I think we all know why ... it's USAMO time! Or was ...

Fortunately, I was able to talk to Messrs Block and Micek, and negotiated my ability to take the USAMO, but at great cost. The first day I had to take the USAMO in Micek's classroom ... while freshmen were taking the STAR testing. They were loud, to say the least, and I could focus only with great difficulty, at least until 12:20 (3:20 ET - that is, 1:40 before time was up) when the freshies left. (But don't worry, I didn't break any rules - I was proctored and I didn't chat.) This may explain my relatively poor performance on Day One.

The second day was easier, as I was able to negotiate taking the test in the library (don't worry, oh eagerly pissed-off USAMO graders, I was indeed proctored), and I performed much better. Big surprise.

I was quite out of shape mathematically. I had only started practicing seriously for the USAMO about a month before, and I couldn't seriously hope to do very well with so little practice. Of course, taking old tests is a little pointless if you can't solve a single problem... ;) In this regard, I think I did much better than I expected - in the immortal words of Ubemaya, "my goal is a non-negative score, although I'd be happy to get a negative score also."

My equipment wasn't the best either. The first day I took my dad's expensive Byelorussian sketching kit, but unfortunately the compasses there were rather dull, as they had not been used for quite awhile. Keeping this in mind, I took my own, much smaller compass set the next day, only to understand why I hadn't taken it the first day - the quality was so bad that I could hardly use them, and the set did not include a protractor, just when I needed one (for problem six, I finally had to resort to constructing right triangles on graph paper and then tracing 60 degree angles to draw a neat equilateral triangle). Once again Staedler's quality shows me why those guys should just stick to making erasers ...

But enough about working conditions. Time to talk about the problems!

As I mentioned earlier, I didn't do too well on the first day, partly because of the friggin freshmen, and partly because of my own stupidity of course. I immediately jumped ahead and solved the second problem, taking something like two hours to write up an incredibly neat, incredibly detailed solution - only to realize after faxing the solutions that I was supposed to find a circle with radius sqrt(2)/2, not a square with side length 1! Well, I hope I'll get two or three points, because other than this my solution is a pretty good one. Next, I attacked problem one, finding out some facts and then hitting a brick wall - I submitted some hastily done formulae in hope of maybe one point. And problem three - that I could hardly understand, let alone find a way to solve. Total for Day One: 3-4 points of a possible 21.

The second day I performed much better. I solved Problem Four satisfactorily, for six, maybe even seven points. The great thing about Problem Four was that it asks for an answer - 8025 - so I KNOW I got the problem right! =) And I proved the equilateral equality for #6, though I did not make any headway into proving the general inequality: I'm hoping for one or two points for the equality. Problem Five I stared at and stared at, but couldn't solve, as, I imagine after seeing the solution, neither could 99% of test takers. Total for Day Two: 7-9 points of a possible 21.

So, in total I got 10-13 points, which isn't bad at all for someone who expected to get zero (see my previous post for details about all that). After a little practice, and hopefully without interference from pesky freshmen, I may even qualify for MOP next year! (18-20 points needed to qualify for sophomores and juniors)

USAMO?

By an unfortunate coincidence, the two 4.5-hour days of the USAMO fall right in the middle of standardized testing week. To add to the problem, Mr. Micek won't be able to proctor me this time, and I'll need web access to download the problems. And suspiciously, the vice principal, Mr. Block, always seems to be in a meeting when I come by the office, and doesn't respond to my emails either. Well, tomorrow's the day before the first day of the USAMO, so I'll have to get some answers from him, even if I have to camp out outside the office.

Of course, my practice test scores are rather depressing. By a very lenient scoring system, I give myself:

0
3
6 (must've been an easy year ;) )
3
3
0
2

Keep in mind that I'm practicing off old tests (4.5 hours / 5 problems), as opposed to new ones (9 hours / 6 problems). And I should remind my readers that the olympiad starts the day after tomorrow. Hopefully that gives an indication of how screwed I am >.<

Spring Break!

Yes, Spring Break is here. But it won't be all parties for me, thanks to, you guessed it, Euro AP! As I mentioned in my previous entry, we are picking up the pace in Euro, but I never expected it to reach this level: over Spring Break we have to (1) write a 20-30 page report on the Cold War, (2) read "All Quiet on the Western Front" and write a 5 page review, and (3) reread 700 pages of our Euro textbook. All in one week! Ugh.

As if that weren't enough, it turns out that I qualified for the USAMO, something I have mixed feelings about. On the one hand, it's quite an accomplishment to make it there, but on the other hand, now I have to start practicing, so that I won't embarrass myself with a zero (which seems to be the median score on the USAMO >.<). So that's something like 5 hours Euro, 1 hour math already partitioned out each day. I'm losing almost half of my waking, non-eating hours!

The good news is that I still have half of spring break to call my own. ^_^ Some stuff that I'm working on:

- My site. I'm hoping to finish my new website by the end of Spring Break. I'm almost done already, so it shouldn't be too tough.

- European Chess. Ah, there's a lot of stuff going on here. First, Round 2 of the Design Competition just ended, so I have to add 3 countries, and edit a few more (people started complaining about Iraq and Mafia being too strong, and Prussia and Gaul too weak, so I'll have to balance them). Also, John wants to start a European Chess tournament next week, and although he promised to organize it himself, it'll still be a lot of work to keep up-to-date results on the website (a job that, of course, falls to me).

Now that European Chess is out and about on the Internet (a forum spam campaign on my part did a fairly good job of spreading the word), our biggest concern now is obtaining a patent. Apparently, we have less than a year to apply for a patent, or else European Chess falls into the public domain. Unfortunately, patent costs are monstrous (literally in the 5-digits), and being high school students we have nowhere near that kind of money. Our best bet is to somehow get Fienberg's uncle to provide us legal aid for free and then apply for a provisional patent, using our extra year to obtain the ~$3,000 we'll need outside of legal fees. Either that or give up, which I admit is an appealing option.

- One last item of the day: During Spring Break, and pretty much until mid-May, I have very little free time, so naturally I don't really have time to play most games, but there is one online game that takes very little time (~10 min. a day) and is incredibly addictive. I'm talking, of course, of Diplomacy, the board-game sensation that, thanks to phpDiplomacy.net, is now invading the Internet. After playing a game online with a few of my friends, I took the next step and formed what may be the first online Diplomacy league: "Donkeys United". Blatant ad: Have you got what it takes to join? Make an account on my forum and PM me for an invitation! Heh, just had to put that in.

Well, that concludes my first (and perhaps last) post during Spring Break. Ciao!

School is pain. AP exams = very yes.

The title says it all.

Euro is going nuts, with some 2 hours of mandatory studying every night now, in addition to many lunch periods and 7th periods sacrificed for "optional" videos and DBQ practice. To be fair, it is partly my fault - in February, at the start of second semeste, Mr. K asked if there was anything we would like to change in the class. Seizing the opportunity, I proclaimed that there shalt be no mandatory outlines, and it was so. Somebody else - whose name shall not be uttered - did cry out against the projects, saying "it shalt be not so," and it was declared that there shall be no mandatory outlines or projects. And then it all collapsed. We became lazy, we failed our quizzes and tests even more than what's regular for Euro (although oddly enough, I didn't change, but that's just me), and with the AP coming up, we were grossly underprepared. Finally, Mr. K made us an ultimatum last week: if we wanted to pass the AP exam, we must play by his rules, which meant even longer hours than first semester, and a return of the dreaded projects. Furtunately, I was able to set up a forum for our Euro class on Mr. K's behalf, which proved to be a good idea, as we are now able to coordinate our study and work together on class projects. Nevertheless, Euro is really becoming painful now.

But speaking of painful in the literal sense, while studying for the AP Bio test (ridiculous really, the chapters were longer than ever, and we needed to memorize the functions of 30 different hormones), I stayed up so late that when I woke up my leg was sprained so much I had to spend the morning of the test practicing walking again. (I don't know how staying up late has a connection to leg pain, but my parents assure me that it does.) It was getting better, but then we had to run two miles in the rain, a run that in retrospect I should probably have just asked to make up. My leg did not like that run at all.

Even Statistics, the easiest AP in the school, is picking up the pace now. For the first time, I actually have to work hard on the homework, and the tests are becoming challenging as we are getting ready to "battle the APE".

And to add to all that, the USAMO math olympiad is coming up in late April, and I have no idea how to study for it, or indeed, if I even qualified (though I'm fairly sure I did). The unanimous advice on how to prepare is practice, practice, practice, but there's really nothing like the sensation of sitting down, reading a test, working on it, and eventually coming to the conclusion that you can't solve a single problem. >.<

There's plenty of other topics I wanted to write about, but I really want me leg to get better, so perhaps I should stop while it's still 10:28 (by some miracle, there was little homework today; it's the first time in a week that I'm going to bed before 11 o'clock).

AIME

Took the AIME today. It was harder than I anticipated, but I still managed to answer 7 problems correctly (6-7 will probably by the cutoff, so I probably qualified for the USAMO ^_^).

I'm not allowed to discuss problems yet, so that'll have to wait for a later post.