March 5th, 2005
Yes that’s the date of today. Funny how I didn’t expect much from today, but something very obscure pleased me.
It was the Physics Olympics Competition of UBC today. After I got there at 8:30 in the morning (to sign up, when the actual thing starts at 9:30), I found no one in my team there. I went back to Transition and saw all of them there making hovercrafts and mechnical timer. These two were part of the competition that could be made before-hand.
The hovercraft did not turn out as great (or even satisfactory) as I thought. First of all, it did not work at all. It’s supposed to be a piece of board with a computer fan on top blowing air to the bottom, which is an air-filled bag thing that has holes on the bottom to push the thing up. There will be a huge fan behind the hovercraft to move it horizontally. And ours, well, wasn’t what was expected. It had a balloon bag thing on the bottom the size of a Chinese mouse pad, it didn’t float at all. Not at all.
So we kind of expected despair when we got to the hovercraft session. Despair was what we deserved, but not what we got. We were making jokes about how crappy and sad our hovercraft is, and half joking that the load on top of the hovercraft (which gives more points) can be the 20kg battery that sustains the computer fan. And that’s when the thought came through. Even though it didn’t work half as well as we joked it would be, it was funny to watch the judges faces twist like their hands were stapled to our fan. The score is calculated by 2BML/T. B is equal to 4 if our battery for the fan is self sustaining (not have to be carried manually). M is the mass of the load (our gigantic battery). L is the length in which the hovercraft moves. And T is the time it takes. So finding out that M is calculated in grams, we realized that the 20kg battery will be 20,000 x our points. Most people had 40 points. If we moved our hovercraft by 0.01 meters (1 centimeter), we’d get like 200 points and win it. But nooo, it didn’t move.
I didn’t see the mech timer. TOo busy watching Jeff pwn with RPG on my paid Inf account.
And after coming back to Trans after the competition finished, we realized our teacher has gone home (or at least left the building). The door was locked. I picked at the lock for half an hour before realizing that the room next door is connected to our room in the ceiling. The ceiling. I went in there, poked out one of the tiles, and jumped into our shaky room, and unlocked it! Yay!
The left over pizza is going to stink when we get back on Monday.
A very neat idea.
First of all, I’m updating www.mtsix.com soon (before the end of the school term that is). It will have a new design and some new functions. It’ll be interesting to see how things will turn out. And I’m going to use a couple of installations of WordPress for all content, instead of coding everything myself, which is impractical and slow.
Back on topic, I just had a really neat idea. Since I’m a big fan of the Matrix and just watched the 2nd and 3rd movie a few days ago, I’ve decided to make something similar to this. Yes that was advertisement. Nonetheless, it will have many more interesting features, obviously related to the matrix.
Imagine people as Agent Smiths turning others into Smiths. There will be agents (neutral) that will come in and screw things up. It’ll be like some sort of online RPG game, only less learning and getting used to new crap since everyone is familiar with what the matrix is about. Details of the game plan is yet to be decided.
Smith will suffice.
When I pulled a muscle..
Just found a picture that I drew when my thought I broke my elbow a few months ago. I returned the x-ray and friends wanted to see disgusting pictures, and this was my best try at satisfying that thought.
W.Bloggar
I finally found the perfect tool for blogging - W.Bloggar.
It has the most extensive editting environment, including posts and templates for blogs. It’s so sweet how it supports both WordPress (which is what this site using right now), Blogger, Textpattern, and all sorts of other programs/hosts. One click post publishing will cross-post across all platforms. So far I can upload stuff automatically through this interface, click on specific buttons to make bold, italics, underline, images, and links etc.
The only thing I’m not quite into is WBloggar’s lack of support for coding standards. Although I don’t use this feature (at all), the change font button uses < font > tags instead of css styles.
A couple of screenshots (uploaded from this program =D).
Too bad LiveJournal doesn’t have a standard API that programs can ping to, unlike Blogger. I guess my LJ account can keep pulling feeds from this site. Also, I’ve decided to sync my blogspot account along, since this program does it automatically anyway.
My Chemistry Mark For Term 2
I hate marks. I hate looking at marks. I hate calculating marks. The thought of seeing a number below 90 on the report card scares me. To get into university, this was a necessity =(.
I have 3 bonus marks. They are applicable to specific assignment marks only, not as percentage. Since all assignments/tests/quizes are valued equally within a category, I have to do my best calculating the best possible uprise of my mark - which assignment I should apply them to.
Percentage Composition
- Tests: 40%
- Labs: 40%
- Quizes: 10%
- Homework: 10%
Assignments Distribution
Tests
- Test 1
- 50 marks
- 13.3% of the term mark
- Each mark is worth 0.266%
- Test 2
- 41 marks
- 13.3% of the term mark
- Each mark is worth 0.324%
- Test 3
- 29 marks
- 13.3% of the term mark
- Each mark is worth 0.459%
Labs
- 5 Lab Reports
- 25 marks each
- 5% of the term mark each
- Each mark is worth 0.320%
Quizes
- Quiz 1
- 7 marks
- 3.3% of the term mark
- Each mark is worth 0.471%
- Quiz 2
- 5 marks
- 3.3% of the term mark
- Each mark is worth 0.66%
- Quiz 3
- 7 marks
- 3.3% of the term mark
- Each mark is worth 0.471%
Homework:
- Assignment 1
- 5 marks
- 3.3% of the term mark
- Each mark is worth 0.66%
- Assignment 2
- 10 marks
- 3.3% of the term mark
- Each mark is worth 0.33%
- Assignment 3
- 10 marks
- 3.3% of the term mark
- Each mark is worth 0.33%
Ironic isn’t it? That a homework assignment is worth so much of my term mark.
This took me about 5 minutes to calculate. I’ll remember to make an automatic grades generator next time.
And for you lucky year 2 bums who read this, you know where to stick your bonus marks to =)
// Edit. Marks adjusted. For some reason, Mr.C counted one of the quizes as a homework. Damn it that drops the highest mark percentage to .66%.