I would have titled this post "London Bridge is Falling Down", but that bridge is still fine, as far as I know. (I prefer the Tower Bridge in London to the London Bridge anyways. I personally consider the Tower Bridge to be prettier.)

The bridge I'm referring to is the Internet. What other thing connects people from all over the world better than this does, in our modern age? But lately I've been having trouble with it, because certain sites that I frequent have been misbehaving.

The first of the sites to go down was Tumblr. One day I decided I wanted to do some posting and reblogging, but Tumblr apparently had other ideas. I kept getting errors, and sometimes pages wouldn't even load. Eventually I became frustrated with it and gave up. There was also a time when it was down for maintenance, which was also quite annoying. I know it really can't be helped, but all the same, I want to blog while I still can. (Summer vacation is nearly over, and who knows how much free time I'll have when the school year gets under way.)

DeviantArt was next to go down with errors. And I made some mistakes of my own on the site. There's a badge that you can give people called a Llama badge. It started out at the beginning of April. There are now a lot of people who give and receive llamas, myself included. The problem is, I have a tendency to act before I think, so sometimes I give a llama before reading a person's journal. I've already messed up by giving llamas to two people who didn't want to receive llamas. I wonder why I didn't learn from my mistakes the first time. I would think that after messing up many times I would learn to be careful, but it never seems to happen.

Well, anyhow, the third site that had problems was Beauty in Everything, a website with many beautiful photos (the photos come from Flickr users). I was trying to access it so I could perhaps look for some nice pictures. However, the site would not load, even when I came back to try again later on. It seems to be back up today, though, and I'm glad. I guess I've gotten attached to things all over again, even though I've been trying not to. But maybe it's something a person can't help doing.

Imagine, though, if the Internet really broke down, if all the sites crashed and no one could get on the web anymore. I figure it would really cause panic all over the place. People have become so reliant on the Internet, and it's become a part of life...I wonder if people would ever be able to adjust to not having Internet, like in the days before it was invented. (Then again, there are also many people who don't use the Internet, which can be bad in some ways, although at the same time I figure if I had never gotten onto the Internet, I wouldn't have wasted so much of my youth.)

Labels: adjust, attached, badge, beauty in everything, bridge, deviantart, error, internet, learning, llama, meltdown, mistakes, photography, problem, tumblr, waste, website, what if

I just realized that I had made a mistake in the previous blog post, " ' Tis the Season to be Jolly ". Though I'd submitted the Monday cooking recipe as Baguette Costrini, it is actually Mozzarella Costrini. Pardon the error. (Did anyone notice on their own?)

Today I got distracted from my math homework and ended up browsing a few of the online catalogs of local libraries. What I found funny was that some manga books which were copyrighted back around 2001 were only just bought, in 2009. I guess the library isn't reliable when it comes to buying books as they come out. Maybe because it's cheaper to buy a book once it's old?

Then I took a look at my hold requests. I requested a lot of books online. Two of them are ready - one is Full Moon o Sagashite (a manga by Arina Tanemura) - and the other is Inkdeath, a book in the "Ink" serious written by Cornelia Funke. It turns out I requested that back in December 2008, and it is only just ready, even though there are probably many copies of the book. Whew.

I was afraid we were going to run the mile today in PE class, but it turns out it was postponed because the track is still muddy. We are instead running tomorrow. I don't know whether to be relieved or freaked out. I guess it is a mixture of the two.

I'd heard strange rumors from other people in Village I about the video we are watching in science class. Someone said that all of a sudden, in the video, a girl wearing a swim suit runs out of nowhere onto the screen. I kept my eyes open for that, since I wanted to know if it was true, but seeing as our class is behind on watching the video, we didn't see that part.

Which then reminds me, it seems like we always watch old-timey videos in class. I think we have a DVD player but don't use it all that much. Mr. Blair's videos, well, you can tell they're old since the image is just slightly fuzzy and it seems awfully cheesy. I prefer Discovery/History/National Geographic Channel documentaries since they have good imagery. And then Mr. Brown's videos also look like that, except for a few which seem slightly more modern. I guess this means they have been teaching for quite a while.

Mr. Blair has a collection of Olmec heads. Apparently he used to make his kids make a miniature one as a project. He opened his whiteboard/cabinet thing and showed us. One of them is green and is sitting on a fake toilet (I don't really understand it, but whatever) and another one is white and made out of soap. Mr. Blair thinks we ought to bury it in our backyards, and when we move out of Cupertino, one of two scenarios may happen.
1) Wake up in the morning and suddenly remember Olmec head. Drive all the way back to Cupertino, to the old house, and sneak into the backyard to dig it up.
2) New resident of house wants to do some landscaping and digs up the Olmec head. Thinks it is a rare artifact when it is actually just a kid's abandoned homework.

By the way, here is a picture of an Olmec head. (It is not the same as the Moai Statues of Easter Island) They are believed to be portraits of Mayan rulers. They can be over 8 feet tall and weigh 10 tons. If you haven't learned about the Mayans yet in 7th grade, if you have the same textbook, you may eventually read about it.

Labels: books, catalog, error, full moon o sagashite, homework, inkdeath, library, olmec head, PE class, videos

My mother is eventually going to catch me and force me to do the extra math work she assigns. I really do not look forward to it. I don't feel any particularly urge to be a hard worker, as I do not have much of that "inner drive" some people seem to think I have. Really I just want to enjoy myself while I'm still...young.

Anyhow, happy Lunar New Year to everyone! (I think it's really tomorrow, but the weekend is a better time to celebrate than Monday, if you ask me.) I didn't really do anything, myself; just got some money from my parents. Some people actually have a feast and people coming over to party and all. But I guess in the USA not as many people celebrate it seriously.

My parents were watching the Lunar New Year celebration on television. My father says that people in China look forward to the new year, like people in the US look forward to the Super Bowl.

Anyhow, the celebration thing they have (it's basically some entertainment such as acting, dancing, singing, etc.). Some celebrity guy called Jay Chou was singing earlier, along with a little boy dressed up in a miniature version of his outfit. The little boy was pretty odd...I think he was singing some kind of rap music. o_O

I was really upset earlier today because my GIMP broke down. (For those who don't know, GIMP is an image editing program which you can download on the Internet.) I was making a banner and I forgot to save it. At first I was in misery, then I went back to the computer and made another banner, which actually turned out better than the first one I made. The only bad thing, I guess, is that I wasted so much time that I could've spent doing other activities.

Labels: error, gimp, holidays, jay chou, math, music, new year, television, torture

One of the sites which I visit, Nutrinopets, seems to have a problem. Whenever I go there it says there is a problem with the database. I've gone away and come back, refreshed the page, etc. But all in vain. I guess I will wait until tomorrow to try again. Or maybe my IP address was banned? (Because someone was kicked off the website recently. If they got IP banned, if my IP is similar, I could've accidentally been banned? I have no idea at all.)

Anyhow...Today was a gloomy day. I woke up early in the morning (I don't know what time) and tried to get to sleep, but my thoughts and headache kept me awake, until at last I dragged myself out of bed around 9 am. I'm still tired even now.

At least I had a good lunch. We went to the Maru Ichi Ramen in Mountain View. I, as usual, ordered shoyu ramen, whereas my dad and mom ordered kuro ramen. (Kuro meaning black, so the soup is a color that leans towards black) And then I got some vanilla ice cream in a little paper cup, since my parents ordered the kids meal. (Which is fine, I guess, seeing as the ramen is still the same, just a smaller portion.) There was a room where a guy who worked there was supervising a machine which was churning out the noodle stuff. (It didn't look like noodles. Just a big sheet of...like dough?)

Later on my mom insisted on bringing me to a seminar. It was one of those that is meant to help you get into an Ivy League college. (I've been to two of these before, and they were kind of boring.) The guy who was talking is the Founder/CEO of something called the Ivy Review. (Is that what the suspicious building I saw in Cupertino was? It had an Ivy Review banner on it, but I thought it was just an advertisement.) Sometimes he spoke in Korean because some of the audience didn't know English.

Mr. Hull often asked people to raise their hands. For instance, he'd ask if you were in such-and-such grade, or if you took Algebra in 7th grade and Geometry in 8th grade, and so on. And he would tell some disturbing things. (Like he said it matters whether you sound optimistic or pessimistic in your application. If you sound too pessimistic they believe you are a "risk kid", one who might pour gasoline on themselves and light it up, or start a school shooting, if they get depressed by poor grades. I laughed, but he said to take him seriously, because it does happen.)

And he also said not to procrastinate on your personal statement (I'm not quite sure what that is. Is that the essay for your college app?). He said to start when you're a freshman, not four days away from the deadline. For instance, he was skiing over the vacation, and he got called by a frantic mother who said her son was having trouble with his personal statement. So Mr. Hull had to stop his vacation and try and improve the kid's college app. Mr. Hull says that kid had good grades, SAT score, # A-G lineup, and so forth (If you don't understand what I'm talking about...It's confusing) but he could've ruined it all by not starting his personal statement earlier.

By the way, you're supposed to write something compelling in your personal statement. Except nothing particularly extraordinary ever happened in my life...yet.

Labels: bad news, college, danger, error, lecture, lunch, personal statement, ramen, sleep

Top ↑