High School Is Finally Finished!
Yay! Last night was fun too. Mr. & Mrs. Smith turned out better than I thought. Brad Pitt is still a jerk.
The report card was, as usual, stunningly crappy. 89% (first term), 100% (second term), and 100% (third term) happen to add up to 93% as my final mark. This was for physics too. Damn cheap government computers can’t count.
Visited my elementary school the day before. Saw some kids that I haven’t seen in a couple of years. My grade 7 teachers are all being pulled out of the school. So is the principal. This school is going nowhere.
Exactly 7 days till my flight to China for a month. Don’t know if there are pubs there. Hopefully it won’t be as hot as the weather report says it is. It’s said that if you put a raw pig into your sink (yes, inside a room), it’ll become sausages within 10 minutes. Mmm.. free bacon.
On a side note, someone replied to one of my posts as me. Yes I track your IP =). But putting that in a moderation list doesn’t prevent other people from doing this. So I put my own name in the moderation list so whenever a comment is made with my name, it goes into the bin first before I approve it. It is annoying approving your own comments though.
I Saw Laurence Fishburne!
I saw some guy that looks incredibly like Morpheus at the swimming pool today (although I don’t think Morpheus swims). I swear, if I didn’t take a closer second look, I would have tried to ask for an autograph or something. And amazingly, this guy is Chinese. I know, it’s difficult to imagine two people of difference race looking the same. But this dude just had me.
That huge black thing on his head was hair. At first I thought it was the hat thing that swimmers wear, but it looked shiny. Then later I thought it might have been a wig cause it looked really flimsy. But then that could just have been his age. He had all the stand-out features that Fishburne has. Huge eyes that stick out of the eye sockets. A really huge but flat nose. Huge lips (oh boy did I get some nasty results searching for this one). And a sliver of empty space between the two front teeth. Holy crap was it scary to see a guy so much like another guy.
Damn I suck at photoshopping. The photoshopped Fishburne looks like he’s Ethiopian or something. Anyone good at image manipulating? Try photoshopping the first photograph into a Chinese guy.
Yay Another Award
Bored on a Saturday afternoon, I found the official website for the Michael Smith Science Challenge. This is a contest organized by UBC professors, made for highschool kids.
May I Say Pwnt?
Top in Provinces
BC:
Morgan McLean, Mulgrave
Oliver Zheng, Transition
Damn smart kids have to win their $500 and leave me penniless.
Additional HTTP Request To A Link
I’ve found something common with all browsers (Internet Explorer 6, Firefox, Opera on Windows). If the onFocus event handler attached to an anchor link calls a Javascript function that changes the window.location.href, the browser will first call that function and then go to the link in that anchor.
For example,
<code>&lt;script language=&quot;JavaScript&quot;&gt;<br />
function gotoSite(url) {<br />
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;window.location.href = this.url;<br />
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;return true;<br />
}<br />
&lt;/script&gt;<br />
&lt;a href=&quot;http://mtsix.com&quot;<br />
onFocus=&quot;return gotoSite('http://google.com');&quot;&gt;Free Water&lt;/a&gt;<br />
</code>
That would make the browser first make an HTTP request to Google, and then to mtsix.com. What this means is that you could deliberately plant a tracking device for every out going link. Although it means the sacrafice of a non-valid XHTML page because of the event handler, it can be very useful.
I have implimented this method in the new banner of this site. If you don’t see the Media Temple logo on the top right corner, please refresh this page. Then click that logo. There is now an outgoing tracker that I’ve set on that link. For every referer to (mt), the counter attached to that Javascript will increase. Take a look at the code if interested.
In conclusion, the advantages to this are
- Being able to notify yourself when an outgoing link is clicked
- Looking and working normally even if Javascript isn’t enabled
- And being search engine friendly. The crawlers will still visit the link (unless rel=”nofollow”), but not necessarily the requested page by Javascript
To every solution there are always disadvantages:
- It’s Javascript — it will only work if the viewer’s browser has Javascript enabled
It will mess up a nicely coded XHTML page with the insertion of the— Not if the function is assigned inside the Javascript.onFocusevent handler
It’s always possible to make a script that redirect outgoing links, such as outgoing.php?link=http://google.com. Personally, I’ve never liked those. I don’t know what the script is actually doing (maybe I’m just paranoid). Some of them may actually be outgoing.php?linkID=4, which always puts me in doubt where I’m redirected to. It’s also bad for the stats of the redirected page. In the example above, Google would be unable to track which exact page the viewer came from, but only the outgoing.php, which isn’t very helpful for either parties.
I Like Monkeys
I like monkeys.
The pet store was selling them for five cents a piece. I thought that
odd since they were normally a couple thousand each. I decided not to
look a gift horse in the mouth. I bought 200. I like monkeys.
I took my 200 monkeys home. I have a big car. I let one drive. His
name was Sigmund. He was retarded. In fact, none of them were really
bright. They kept punching themselves in their genitals. I laughed.
Then they punched my genitals. I stopped laughing.
I herded them into my room. They didn’t adapt very well to their new
environment. They would screech, hurl themselves off of the couch at
high speeds and slam into the wall. Although humorous at first, the
spectacle lost its novelty halfway into its third hour.
Two hours later I found out why all the monkeys were so inexpensive:
they all died. No apparent reason. They all just sorta’ dropped dead.
Kinda’ like when you buy a goldfish and it dies five hours later. Damn
cheap monkeys.
I didn’t know what to do. There were 200 dead monkeys lying all over my
room, on the bed, in the dresser, hanging from my bookcase. It looked
like I had 200 throw rugs.
I tried to flush one down the toilet. It didn’t work. It got stuck.
Then I had one dead, wet monkey and 199 dead, dry monkeys.
I tried pretending that they were just stuffed animals. That worked for
a while, that is until they began to decompose. It started to smell real
bad.
I had to pee but there was a dead monkey in the toilet and I didn’t want
to call the plumber. I was embarrassed.
I tried to slow down the decomposition by freezing them. Unfortunately
there was only enough room for two monkeys at a time so I had to change
them every 30 seconds. I also had to eat all the food in the freezer so
it didn’t all go bad.
I tried burning them. Little did I know my bed was flammable. I had to
extinguish the fire.
Then I had one dead, wet monkey in my toilet, two dead, frozen monkeys in
my freezer, and 197 dead, charred monkeys in a pile on my bed. The odor
wasn’t improving.
I became agitated at my inability to dispose of my monkeys and to use the
bathroom. I severely beat one of my monkeys. I felt better.
I tried throwing them way but the garbage man said that the city wasn’t
allowed to dispose of charred primates. I told him that I had a wet
one. He couldn’t take that one either. I didn’t bother asking about the
frozen ones.
I finally arrived at a solution. I gave them out as Christmas gifts. My
friends didn’t know quite what to say. They pretended that they like
them but I could tell they were lying. Ingrates. So I punched them in
the genitals.
I like monkeys
By Charles Groom, via Jon Lech Johansen.
Tables > CSS
Or so this fellow thinks so. Some of the articles are blatantly trying to pick out bones from egg yokes. Some of them actually make some sense, come to think of it.
Solitaire Is So Fun
I’ve never been into Solitaire before. It wasn’t until this week when I became really bored and started playing boring games.
The truth is it’s not boring at all. It just gets a bit plain after the 2nd hour.
There are so many things to consider when flipping a card or putting one on another. I’ve always thought Solitaire was made for colour blinded people to practice their eyesight. But it’s not that simple actually. It gets annoying when you are left with two cards unflipped under a huge pile and you are stuck. 8810 was the highest score I got.
This personalized keyboard is pretty kool too. It’s a mouse, keyboard, touchpad, tablet and all the other jazz combined.
Most Movies Are Like This
I came up with this theory on the way home from school today. Most movies are exciting, but vary in depth at different times of the movie. I found that most movies have this trend.
The movies of the late twentieth century and the twenty first century are mostly like this. A small climax and then right onto a bigger, huge one — most of the times without you realizing that’s the main climax until it gets serious. Is this interesting for viewers though? I would like to think that if a movie suddenly jumped up in the beginning and got me all perked up, and then have a really sloppy plot that doesn’t grow much in terms of excitingness, then I would say that movie sucks. But how would it get me perked up AND not disappointed?
That would be really interesting. But somehow I realized that won’t be possible, as you can’t go back in time and add a more exciting part to a plot. Oh wait, why can’t you? Technically, that graph should be a function (by definition having only one point on the y-axis for each point on the x-axis, but not necessarily vice versa). Ah-ha, but that’s for a 2d graph.
Movie plots seem to only have one perspective and one vision. Isn’t that too limited? I’d really like to see a movie that has a really interesting way of telling the story. I’m already sick of most of the drama movies. That’s why mystery ones are still on my list — they don’t reveal the plots.
Gonna watch Mr. & Mrs. Smith later. Hopefully it won’t be as bad as I described here.
So I Graduated
Congratulations to the class of 2005.
This graduation ceremony seemed to mark the end of high school for me. It seemed so significant. But now that the ceremony, formal dinner, and all night party are all finished, none of it seems to be worth it. It’s probably because I didn’t get any sleep during the party. But I just don’t feel so right about graduating. Depressing as it is already with the provincial exams, there seems to be an extra layer of tension put on me. I can’t say it’s either good or bad. The end of school now seems so empty. Nothing seems to be after this, even though I won’t even have a single spare block in the first term next year.
It’s almost as if I’d go through another two years of this non-stop hassel without too much development in the mind just so I won’t have to move on. I hate growing up gah.
Finally Watched Kill Bill
I finally witnessed the first and second volume of Kill Bill. It was definitely something I had not expected. A lot of the actions and lines seem so familiar. Indeed, it has an interesting plot that doesn’t reveal the causes of anything until the end of the second movie. And the second movie didn’t have as much action as the first one, which was surprisingly good considering it doesn’t make any sense at all.
You know what would look good on a tie?
This pattern by Vincent Cronin. I would definitely get a tie of that pattern if I needed one.
Want to lower your IQ?
This Flash cartoon would be the man. Incredibly catchy tune though.