AP Chemistry Sucks

Today, I took the last of my AP tests, and man… was it bad. I answered 32 out of 75 questions (and problably not all of them were right). And the essay section was even worse. I knew how to do probably 15% of the entire essay section. But it’s OK, because I went in there going… “All right, we haven’t had a teacher to teach us the material in one of the ‘required’ essays… I really don’t like chemistry all that much, anyways… I really don’t know anything we were supposed to learn while the teacher was away on maternity leave (she gave us worksheets that were obviously meant for review to learn the material)… and most importantly, the test really doesn’t matter in the long run. (Of course, if I had done well on the test, I could have gotten credit hours for chemistry, but…) All that was required was that I took test and I get the 5-point weighted credit for the class.

So… I pretty much read through the test and did the stuff I was fairly sure I knew what I was doing… and then slept. Although I’m pretty sure I did more work than Bryant, though. I though I had finished quicly everytime, but whenever I got finished with the section, I would look around, and every time, he would already be asleep.

After that, I went with Elena, Christy, Brad, and Johnathan, and we ate at Penjamos… it was really good. (I got the chimichaunga, it was excellent.) Then we proceeded to Elena’s church, where we played Sardines, and Elena was declared the master of Sardines… we couldn’t find her for 45(!!!) minutes! After that me and Johnathan went over to Clent’s house and worked on a secret project for Days of the Geek. It should be revaled on the site soon, so be on the lookout for that. (I can attest, it’ll be pretty friggin’ sweet.)

Then, I came and updated my Xanga and wrote: “Today, I took the last of my AP tests…” but you know the rest of that. So, yeah… if you ever take any advice from me, make this be the advice you take: Don’t take Chemistry! If you can, don’t even take regular of Pre-AP chemistry, unless you have to prepare for your major or something. It will drain your life away from you (or something equally sick…). DON’T TAKE IT!!! I swear, you’ll have to sacrifice your firstborn to slate its thirst for blood or something… it’s that bad. </over-acting>

But now I can rest easy knowing that I have one school function I have to attend… mwahaha (Graduation, for ye slow of mind).

Leave me comments people…

What is it With Xanga?

A few of the readers recognized my last post as a copy and paste from my old blog. I was both awed and amazed for two reasons:
1) That people actually know about my old blog.
and
2) That people have actually read said old blog. (Even I haven’t read it in at least 3 weeks, and I’m the owner of it. )

Over the years (actually it’s only been about a year since I got my first blog) I’ve had two blogs, other that Xanga. I’ve had one blog that’s been deleted (due to a server crash) and another blog on WordPress.com.

And that got me thinking: What’s the deal with Xanga? I’ve made more posts, more frequently, and in less time that both of my previous two blogs put together. What is it about the Xanga community that makes me want to update? To tell the truth, I’ve yet to figure it out. It baffles me greatly, and I just don’t know what makes Xanga so special. Maybe my readers can give me some insight on the vast mystery that is Xanga…

The AP tests are truly evil. Plus other stuff.

So, time for a lovely update brought to you by yours truly…

This week has been crazy, literally.

First, on Tuesday, we had the band Spring Concert. It was pretty sad, actually. My last band concert, ever…. It was really sad when we had to go accept our Senior Plaques. Miss Clutts was all sad and she was crying when each of us came up and, I’ll admit it, I cried. It was even worse when they read the thing about Kayla, and gave her plaque to her parents. I think that was a good thing to do, though. Then the seniors played “I Will Remember You” (the version we played was arranged by Mr. Nguyen, which is kinda neat), while Heather Cripps read a poem. It was cool. The band I’m in played October by Eric Whitacre (if you’ve never heard this song, go find it and listen to it NOW!!! In fact, I’ll make it easy on you and tell you that there’s a recording on this page) and An American Overture for Band (don’t know who composed this one, I didn’t like it very much).

The next day (Wednesday, for those of you who haven’t been keeping track), I had to get up early and take the AP Calculus test. It wasn’t as bad as it was made out to be, and I felt fairly good until the last section of the free response section. It was killer. I still think I’ll get a two, maybe a three. Then, when we got back to school, it was time for EAST, and Mr. Clay had bought all of the seniors in EAST a USB Jump drive, a Sharpie to sign “The Table,” and some candy. It was really nice of him. Now I just have to figure out what I’m going to sign on the table. (Kinda need to figure that out since my last day is tomorrow…) Then I took Mrs. Smith’s advice on how to prepare for her AP test… I just did stuff with my friends. (Yes she did tell us just to have fun to prepare us for the test.)

Then today (Thursday, for the uninitiated), I again got up early to take the AP English Literature and Composition test. (AP English 12, for the regular people) It sucked. The multiple choice questions weren’t all that bad, but they weren’t good, either. But the essays SUCKED. I just BS’d them all, and I know they sucked. And the allotted time for three essays was TWO FRIGGIN’ HOURS. Not only that, but during the essay part, I suddenly got this killer headache. (Coincidence, I think not) So today sucked, BIG ONES.

Oh, and in my last post, I talked about the “practice” AP test we took for English. It turns out I had the highest score for the Multiple Choice (don’t know how that worked), and on my essays I got two 7s, and an 8. And the eight was on the essay about the e. e. cummings poem… oh, the irony. Too bad that wasn’t the REAL AP test….

I guess that’s all for now… but man, what a post…. over 2600 characters…that’s quite insane.

The Evils that are the AP tests begin to surface.

So yeah, the great evils that are the AP tests are already starting to ruin our lives. And by this I mean we had to take a FULL LENGTH AP English test today. So, if I appear slightly insane, then it’s because the stupid test has caused my brain to short circuit. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, but it was still pretty tough. I pretty much just BS’d all three of my essays. And I hate you e. e. cummings, may you be forever cursed.

Other than that, there hasn’t been much else happening lately. I did this report on Modest Mussorgsky for GT Seminar. (I <3 Wikipeida, it has to be the best source for information ever) It took like 15 minutes. I’ll proabaly take Night on Bald Mountain to play for the class. It is a cool song.

As a side note, I love the “Currently…” feature on Xanga. (And if you’ve never heard the song in my “Currently Listening” thing, then you should go listen to it, but be prepared…)

TV Star!

I guess it's time for an update….

Let's see… AP tests in one week… not looking forward to those… all the AP teachers decided that it's time for a major cram-session…. starting to not care, though…

Friday, we had a quiz-bowl pep-rally. It was really quite dum…. I think (wait, nevermind, I know) that most people just came out to it to get out of class. We had this pseudo-tunnel thing we ran through… more dumness. Many pep-talks were given… again, all of them were pointless. Had a huddle, screamed "DKDC" (if you don't know what that means, then too bad).

Saturday was the day of the Quiz Bowl State Tournament. Got up at about 7:45 (don't know why, had my alarm set for 9:30. I have this thing where if I set my alarm on a weekend, I always get up earlier than what I set the alarm for… it's kinda weird, really. I did it agian on Sunday, too. Had the alarm set for 8, and I woke up at 7:30) Anyways… just sat around for a while not doing much. Then at 11, the whole team got together at Pizza Hut and had pizza. A TON of pizza. Then at 12 we went to the quiz bowl room at school and ran through some practice questions 'til one, when we left for AETN. There we sat around until FIVE. Five friggin' o'clock. WHY THE CRAP DID WE HAVE TO GET THERE SO FRIGGIN' EARLY? So to waste time, I studided my composers and listened to my MP3s.

Then at 4:45, we went to Studio B for the filming of the match. It was about then when the nervousness started to set in. Up to that point, I was pretty mellow, but as soon as we went into the studio, the I just started to get nervous. We did good in the first round, it was like 80(us)-90(Malvern). But then things started slipping in the second round. Malvern got all but one of the questions to get the bonus, and usually got a lot of the bonus. The lightning round was pretty good… and I GOT TO GO IN! The lightning round was operas, and I got 7 of them. The other three were really obscure, and if I say they're obscure then they're obscure. (If you don't believe me, then you can come see my stack of composers study cards.) The last quarter was pretty good, but it wasn't enough to get us the win.

It was pretty dissapointing not winning, but I guess you can't win them all, eh?

Just on the side, I thought I'd show the few people who actually look at my blog this:
Girls are Evil

The Play’s The Thing…

….wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.

Or make you laugh a friggin’ lot. Which ever play you’re talking about.

The one I’m talking about, of course, is the play the students of Morrilton High School put on last night, and man, was is hillarious. Being the sound man for the play was great, and I would have to say that last night was the best preformance, ever. Everything went great. Except the day before, our soundcue CD decided to stop working, so I had to go “Ring, Ring” during the preformance, but it turned out to add to the performance, because it’s so zany, that it worked. So yeah, if you didn’t come see it, then shame on you. You shall be cursed the rest of your days.

Afterwards, the cast and crew had pizza, and listened to random music from my MP3 player and Jason’s iPod, so it was pretty fun. (Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto) The best part was not wanting to leave, but Cody (er..I mean, Mr. Vest), was begging for us to go home.

Well, that’s all for now, this goes out to you, the two people who know about my Xanga.

I Hate Telephones…

So, today was fairly useless. I had to go to play practice, which took about three and a half hours. I don’t really do anything. I’m the sound guy, and I have one four-second soundcue of a telephone ringing at the very end of the play. (Literally, I think there’s about four or five lines after the cue.) So I was pretty bored.

I’m not saying the play is bad, in fact it one of the funniest I’ve ever seen, but it’s just I wish I had more to do instead of just sitting there for 99% of the play and doing nothing.

As a shameless plug, if you live in the Morrilton, AR area, you should come see it. The public performance is Moday, April 17, 2006 at 7:00 PM at H.B. White Auditorium. Come to see a hillarious play written by MHS’s own Jordan Haynes and Bryant Virden, it’s really good, and you’ll get a laugh out of it.

Gaia Online Has a Huge Concentration of Retards

For those of you who don't know, Gaia Online is one of the Internet's largest communities.  In my experiences, it's also one of the Internet's largest concentrations of just plain dumb people.  When I first saw Gaia, I though, "Hey this could be neat, there's a huge community, maybe if I ever just want to have some sort of conversation or get some help or whatever, this'll be a good place to go."  Well, I was wrong.  Nearly all the posts on the first page of General Discussion are like: "ZOMG! I r g@y.  I5 n31 3ls3 g@y 2?" or "1'm EMO" or "1 l0v3 s3xorz."  And the computer stuff isn't much better:  "My computer's broke, fix it for me because I'm a lazy asshole who doesn't know anything about computers or how to fix them, but I expect everyone to know exactly what's wrong with my computer when I give you the most obscure problem and no technical information that you could use to narrow the problem down."  I know I've personally answered a thread about how to edit an MP3 or WAV file at least 4 times.  (And if you don't know, use Audacity)  These people are just plain dumb.  And then when you try to help them but it doesn't turn out right, they hate you with a passion and then make flame-wars about how you're stupid and you don't know anything.  

If you read this and would like to defend the name of Gaia, then by all means leave a comment telling me what I'm missing, and point me in the right direction.  Until then, I consider anyone who actually posts on Gaia frequently a gay emo kid who doesn't know anything about computers. 

*And I know I slightly exaggerated on the thread names, but other than that, it's pretty accurate in my eyes. 

Hollywood Is Stooping to Even Lower Lows

This past week, I was off for Spring Break. I, of course, wasn’t fortunate enough to go somewhere cool like to Cancun or someplace like that, so I stayed at home and did pretty much nothing. I did go to a friend’s house just about everyday during Spring Break, so it wasn’t too bad. I did some work on DOT geek some and it’s coming along quite nicely.

I also went and saw two movies over Spring Break, UltraViolet and The Hills Have Eyes. Now, judging from the title of this post, do you think I thought they were good? Of course they weren’t.

First, let’s start with UltraViolet. This movie was terrible. The story was barely there and what little plot there was just caused the movie to become even dumber. The movie starts out, “I live in a world you may not understand.” And boy does that pretty much sum up the movie. Not only do you not understand it, you don’t want to understand it. The special effects were horrible, as well. Though there were some semi-cool fight scenes, nearly all of the CG looked “fake.” The movie just sucked altogether. I went with a friend and his little brother and his friend, and halfway through the movie, his little brother and friend just got up and told us they were going to go play video games in the arcade because, “this movie sucks!” Earlier, my friend had said, “Hey, this is a pretty good deal. For $24, we pretty much rented the whole theater.” We could soon see why no one else was in the theater.
Nextup for humiliation, The Hills Have Eyes. This one wasn’t much better than Violet, but it was slightly. This one is your standard dessert horror film. The cast is stranded in a desert, and they come upon a gas station manned by the crazy old geezer. Said geezer is under control of the local “mutated-radioactive-zombie-things” that kill all who come through the desert. It was very predictable. Another of my friends who went and saw this movie with me pretty much figured out the plot after 30 minutes, and almost got who would be alive at the end of the movie correct. And for the first hour, the action is so slow. Like, there’s so much story trying to get you attached to the hopless people stranded in the desert, but you just end up thinking, “come on, we know they’re going ot die, just get it over with.” Then when the killing does ensue, it ensues the violence and gore levle of this movie is well in the 8-9 range (out of ten). And there’s blood. Copious amounts of blood. Overall, it was like, “I know this is supposed to be scary, but they try too hard, and it just ends up being dumb.”

I think it was best summed up when my friend who went to both these movies with me said, “I guess we just can’t pick good movies.” It’s not us, though, it’s Hollywood releasing these crap movies and the 29th sequel to a movie no one like in the first place.

Quiz Bowl Regionals

Well, our quiz bowl team won our regionals. W00t!

Ahem….anyway, we did excellently, as most of our scores were around the high-300’s (us) to mid-hundreds (them). And I ran (got all 10 right) a lightning round (answer as many questions out of ten as you can in 60 seconds). And this shows how much of a nerd I am…it was a Computer Acronym round. Oh well. Now we’re going to state!!!