Ah, my car. A ‘95 Ford Taurus. Sort of old, sort of damaged, yet I love it still.

I always hated this car, until it became mine. It was a family car until my parents bought a new Civic. Since it was barely worth anything for trade-in, they decided to let me use it instead of junking it. I was (and still am) grateful for any car at all.

When I first started driving, I tended to mix up the brake and gas pedals when I got nervous. I hit whichever one my foot happened to be on. Sadly, three days after I got my permit, I mixed them up in my driveway and slammed the front right corner of my car into the bumper of our other one. That corner got very crunchy. A few weeks ago, I was slowing down for a stop light and the hub cap from the same side just fell off and rolled away down the road. Now one corner of my car, as you can see in the picture, looks like a wreck. The rest of it is fine.

Well, not fine. The air conditioning is broken, which means the vent can only blow hot air; it’s the bumpiest car I’ve ever ridden in; and it squeaks constantly. But it drives me from place to place and hasn’t broken down yet, so I love it.

I tend to grow fond of almost everything I own. Ugly things, things that don’t work, things that part of me hates. Their imperfections make them more attractive because they’re my imperfections. They grow on me.

All my car needs is a name. I haven’t been able to come up with a good one yet. My graphing calculator is named Geoffery, my cell phone is named Anathema Device, and my future laptop is named Newton Pulsifer. But my car? Nameless. Alas!

I’ve been looking all over for the code that makes extended MT entries sort of open and close within the page (like on Nicole Lee’s blog, where I first noticed it). I finally found the way to do it here. Let’s see if it works.
Read the rest of this entry »

Did some work on the blog archiving- I have categories now! They’re fancy. I wish I could find the template for search results, it’s ugly now and I can’t find the place to fix it.

I guess I should write about something real, as opposed to just talking on and on about the site. Nothing too interesting is going on right now. I have SAT II’s next weekend (Writing, Math IIC, and Chemistry), which I planned to study for this weekend. So far I’ve taken a practive chem test and a practice math test and haven’t done very well on either. Ouch. I really need to prepare for them. Tomorrow, perhaps.

School is almost over. Two more weeks of classes, then finals start on the next Tuesday. I can’t waiting until next year- finally, I won’t have to take anything I don’t want to. All these years I’ve taken English, Spanish, history, math, and science, but next year I’m eliminating history and Spanish from the list because I hate them both. At last! I’m so happy. It’s my senior year, I’m only taking courses I want to take. It’ll be a lot of work (5 AP’s), but it’ll be fun.

Okay, we’re back online. I’m sorry it took so long. Things still aren’t 100%, but we’ll have to live with that for now. Old entries are here, but don’t pay attention to the dates on them. The index page seems to not want to load them, which is strange, but they’re in the monthly archives.

I’m going to try to get a new layout up soon, and when I do that I’ll fix a lot of the less-than-pretty parts of the site. I used to be able to make layouts I was happy with. I can’t do it anymore.

Also, I think I had things to write about. What were they? Alas, I forget.

The site was stagnant for a bit because I was switching from Greymatter to Movable Type. So far Movable Type seems more complicated, and a little less home-made. It’s more powerful. I’m not taking full advantage of it yet, and I probably never will be.

I’ve started carrying a camera around with me, just in case. So far I have pctures of cows and my Spanish class.

I called for an interview at EasyLobby the other day, only to find that the Woman in Charge was then in a demonstration and would soon be leaving for a 1.5 week vacation. I was advised to call back at the beginning of June.

I let my coordinator know and she called me back tonight to tell me that she had someone else over at Bose (where the make giga-sound in a Very Small Box) that might be interested in me but wanted to know what programs I was familiar with. Thing is, the guy I would be working for seems to do some sort of customer relations thing. She said that his job has a lot to do with computers, and I’m sure it does, but I don’t want to spend hours entering data or running programs, or whatever he does. I want to work somewhere where they’re actually writing the programs, or in some web development department. That’s the point of an internship- to see what the industry’s like and get some experience in it. I know that I need to tell my coordinator that, but I’m bad at things like that. I know it’s ridiculous, but I feel like she’s doing me a favor by finding places for me. That’s her job, and she needs my input to be able to do her job better. I just realized that she’s going to give the URL of this site to the Bose guys. Hello, Bose guys, if you’re reading this. I probably shouldn’t post this now, but I will anyway. You’re cool, and I’d probably own something of yours if I was richer.

Occasionally, my family spontaneously decides (usually over dinner) to go to a movie. Tonight we saw Super Size Me, which was excellent. Amusing, vaguely horrifying, very good indeed. Makes me want to exercise- a lot. The point though, is that the basement of the movie theatre houses the Museum of Bad Art, usually refered to as the MOBA. Anyone in my area should see it- it’s just one dark little room with fifteen or twenty peices of art, but it’s awesome. Come to my house and we’ll go see a movie and visit the MOBA. Better than the paintings themselves are the dry, biting, and hilarious captions assigned by MOBA people. I took a couple of pictures, but they were only the first two on the roll. It’ll take a while to finish the camera. If I had my own digital camera, as opposed to one belonging to my father that I must be Very, Very Careful with, I would post many pictures of my travels- not that I usually travel anywhere except school and work. Soon there will be a picture of the front right corner of my car, which is all banged up and missing a hub cap.

I’m planning to do an internship this summer in some sort of computer science/web development field. My coordinator called my tonight with a prospect- she talked to the EasyLobby people and they were thrilled that she had someone interested in web development. I would be working in an office with two other people, trying to get one of their products online. I’m not sure exactly what I’d be doing- just something with the website involving a product called Photo Plus. My major concern is that it sounded like the woman my coordinator talked to wanted someone to come in and do the website for her. She would tell me what she wanted, I would do it. That’s very nice, and I’d be fine with it, but I don’t know much at all about that things I’d probably be working with. Really, all I know is HTML and some CSS. I’m unfamiliar with real programming, and I’ve never worked on an interactive site before. That’s one of the reasons I want to do the internship- I think I want to major in computer science in college and do this stuff for a living, but I don’t have any experience in it, so I can’t know whether I’d really like it. I think I’d rather work at some sort of software company where they can teach me about the work they’re actually doing as opposed to having me work on a side project.

I’m going to call tomorrow to set up an interview. I’ll tell the Woman in Charge what’s going on, and see if she’s planning to train me in what I need to do what she wants. If not, I guess I’ll have to wait for another chance.

nigritude ultramarine.

Details on my trip can be found here.

I am leaving for New York City tomorrow afternoon and will not return until Sunday night. So no updates for you!

Read Unicorn Jelly. It rocks like crazy. Especially if you love science.

Site things you probably don’t care about, but I do:

- Started using Site Meter, which rocks because it allows me to ignore my own IP. See, the site gets so few visitors that I have to make sure not to go to it, or I’ll end up being responsible for a fairly large percentage of the hits.

- The linkroll over on the left is being funny. It’s supposed to be listed in order of when I added the links, but it semms to be putting all the new ones at the bottom. It put some in the middle at one point, too.

- Slightly new header up top, because I still don’t trust your ability to pronounce “lodenocity” correctly. Let me know is the smaller writing is hard to read.

- The Greymatter template variables are starting to be unreliable again. I wish I knew why that keeps happening. It may have something to do with my reuploading the file that they’re in, but I don’t think that should be a problem. The new copy is automatically CHMOD’ed to the right settings and is still included in Greymatter files. So when you see weird stuff over there, it’s not me being lazy. It’s Greymatter being crazy.

- Added a Recently Reading thing over on the right sidebar. For things I’m in the middle of or have just finished. The plan it to keep five titles up at all times and update them when necessary. I don’t know how good I’ll be about updating.

For the record, I would like to officially object to the cover that I, Robot is sporting right now. They’re making a movie of the same name (it seems to have little in common with the book, other than the Three Laws and various names), and Will Smith, a star of the movie, now dominates the book cover. I hate when they adapt books to movies and then redo the book covers to match the movie. I, Robot has been around forever (even though I only got around to reading it last week), and it deserves to be its own media entity, seperate and distinct from any and all upstart adaptations.

My grandmother’s selling her house and moving to a luxury condo. The move is good, because she’s living in a sort of big house with just my grandfather, who had a stroke six years ago and hasn’t been able to talk or walk very well since. Her children do yard work for her, she gets stressed out every time it snows because she hates shovelling, and my grandfather has to climb stairs every day. So, all in all, the move is a very good thing. But it’ll be strange when they live somewhere different. I’ve been going to that house ever since I was born. When I was in first grade, I had to draw a picture of something that scared me and pretended that the creaky boards in the attic did. My cousins and I used to play school in the attic, croquet and badminton and tag in the yard, and house in the shed. We used to swim, too, but the pool was torn down a few years ago. That house was a big part of my childhood, and it’ll be strange to see it go.

I don’t really feel sad about it. It just feels like a big part of my life is over. Like I’m moving on, away from the times when I used to sit on the little exposed rock by the pool and eat ice cream cones. I feel like so many parts of my childhood have just been left behind. I used to love to go swimming, now I never do. I used to go out ever night in the summer and play hide and go seek with all the kids in my neighborhood, but that stopped years ago. It’s been a long time since I was in the woods in my back yard.

It’s not that I want to go back. I have other things to do now, and I wouldn’t want to run around with the kids next door. But it just reminds me how nothing ever stays the same. In ten years I’ll look back and say “Wow, remember all that stuff I did in high school? I went to Panera all the time and hung around at school.” And the school will be a dim memory with a certain smell, just like elementary school is now.

Life is change.