Calculus and Other Classes June 3, 2008

The Room Cleaning Project continued today and the highlight of the morning was throwing away all of my various junk from the past semester.  I had about five notebooks of stuff to rifle through, and most of it wound up in the recycling bag.  However, I found a few somewhat humorous tests and quizzes that I thought I would post here.  They’re not as funny as Tortilla’s responses, but I’ll post them anyway.

First, here’s a sample of notes from my history class.  This was United States history, which I should point out has been drilled into my head every year since first grade.  I had a 100 average in this class in high school, so you would think that I might get exempt from it in college.  But no, I had to sit through a semester of US history.  Which I might point out focused mainly on slavery.  Seriously, that was all we learned about the whole semester.  Anyway, back to the notes.  I only had about four or five pages of notes for the whole semester, since I stopped taking them a week into the class.  We didn’t have tests so I didn’t see the point.  Notice the large amounts of drawings on the page.  Most of my notes look like this.  I might point out that I wound up with an A in the class.

Next, here is a quiz from my English class.  I hardly ever did the readings (see what a dedicated student I am?) because I noticed that my grades did not increase if I did the readings.  This was one of the last quizzes we had.  Question three is the one I am posting this picture for.

And this is another English quiz.  It had been a group quiz and somebody else came up with the ‘ratifying inventor’ part, but I thought it was funny so I put it on my quiz too.

Now onto Calculus.  I have a feeling that my professor used up a couple red pens on my papers throughout the semester.  This first one is my worst grade in the class.  It’s blurry, but it says 7/20 at the top.  You can clearly see all the effort I put into writing down a bunch of bullshit in the hopes of scraping a few points.

Here’s an example of how my BS didn’t even get me one measly point.  I think I should have gotten at least one point just for effort.  On the first question, my professor wrote ‘does not follow’.

This comment was written quite often on my tests and quizzes.  Whenever I didn’t know how to do the problem I’d just put it in my calculator and write down that answer.  My prof didn’t like that.

When in doubt, just write down the formula.  It’s bound to get you a point.  It worked here.  Gotta love the question mark.  It’s amazing  that she knew exactly what I was thinking when I tried to do the problem.

Last but not least, one of the bonus questions on a test.  She wrote ‘how did you get this?’  I have no idea how I got that.  I’m pretty sure I just guessed.  Must have worked because I got 2 points.

That’s all for this past semester.  Most of my classes either didn’t have tests or had multiple choice tests, which make it hard to give witty responses.  Sometime I’ll have to type up the story of the practice English Regents I took in 11th grade.  That was funny.

The Things You’ll Find June 2, 2008

In preparation for the carpet project (see previous post), I have decided to thoroughly clean out my room.  I figure the more stuff I get rid of now the less I’ll have to move when we get the new carpet.  As I was rifling through the various detritus from the past few years it became obvious how long it had been since I performed such a task.

Buried in a pile of various electronics chargers was my GameBoy Color.  I haven’t played this in ages.  Inside of it was my Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets game.

Along the same lines, I also found my Bop It Extreme.  I remember when they came out with the first Bop It when I was in elementary school.  Someone brought one to recess and we all played it.  My parents didn’t want me to get one since they can become very annoying to listen to.  Then they came out with the Bop It Extreme and I asked my aunt for it for Christmas.  She got it for me.

Even more interesting was the various junk from school.  I found a few binders full of various papers from junior and senior year of high school.  That was 2 and 3 years ago, which shows how long it’s been since I cleaned my closet.  I found a report card from junior year, my SAT admissions ticket, cards from my 16th birthday (junior year), my temporary learner’s permit, film negatives from photography class, my entire math binder from senior year (which got dumped in the recycling shortly after I found it), my senior research paper, and my first ever piece of fan fiction.  This was actually a school assignment.  In junior year I had to write a fan fic about Of Mice and Men. I looked at the grade and I got a 95 on it and my teacher wrote ‘This is great!  Wonderful job.’  I am sure that is the only assignment that I got that written on it.  Most of the assignments that year were essays about boring books that I never got above a 90 on.

Another relic I found that got unceremoniously dumped in the recycling was my chemistry review book.  This was from junior year.

Along with my Chemistry reference tables.

And last but not least my US History review book from senior year.

Believe it or not these were not the most interesting items I found.  I also found my journal from Creative Writing in senior year.  I really liked that class because I enjoy writing as long as it’s something I want to write about.  I rifled through it and found multiple story ideas and various poems.  I’ll highlight a few here, but am going to save most for future posts.  My favorite one by far was from May 1, 2006.  It’s a list of stuff I didn’t like on that particular day.

-George Bush                       -Homework                         -Traffic Jams

-Getting up early                  -Regents Exams                  -This assignment

-Gas prices (this made me    -Freshmen boys (my bro     -Slow people in the halls

laugh, gas was just under      was a freshman that year)   -Middle schoolers

$3 at that point)                    -Slow Computers                 -People who walk on the wrong side of the hall

-Double physics                   -School laptops                    -Gym class

I am not sure what the purpose of that assignment was.  I didn’t even know what it was a list of until I read it.

Another favorite is this-

‘I would love to see George Bush put in jail.  I think he is one of the worst presidents.  He has done illegal stuff like domestic spying and the CIA leak, but he hasn’t been impeached.’

That’s all for now.  I’ll post more of my journal at some point.  Stay tuned for further updates on the room cleaning as well.

Poisson D’Avril April 1, 2008

Happy April Fool’s Day, everyone! Did you know that in France today is known as Poisson D’Avril? It means April Fish. In France, on April 1st, everyone makes fish out of paper and writes ‘Poisson D’Avril’ on them and then stick them to people’s backs. We did that in French class when I was in high school.

So happy Poisson D’Avril from me, Weasley, and Moony! And stick a fish on someone’s back….

I will get pics of Moony at some point.

New Computer March 27, 2008

My dad had been looking for a new desktop for a while. Our old one is really slow. You can hardly run 3 programs at once without it not working right. So he started looking for a new one. He found a used one on Craigslist. It’s a Dell, and he wasn’t going to get another Dell, but this one was really nice. A computer programmer bought it new less than a year ago and upgraded it a lot. I call it the Uber-Dell. It was only $450, so he went to see it and decided to get it. It was a really great deal.

It has 2 hard drives, each one 500 GB. So it’s a Terabyte of hard drive space. Plus it has 3 GB of ram.  It also has a DVD burner and a DVD drive. I don’t know why the guy put both in, but it works for us. My dad was originally only going to buy a new computer, but not a monitor, keyboard, etc. But this one came with a 17″ LCD monitor, keyboard, optical mouse, speakers, and subwoofer. The great part is, I get the old speakers and a mouse to go with my laptop.

I haven’t tried it yet, but my siblings say it works well. I don’t even have an account on it yet. It came with Windows XP and my dad put Linux on it. I’ll probably try it out within the next few days. My bro says it’s pretty fast. I guess I no longer have the fastest computer in the house. Here are some pics of it.

The whole set-up (sans new speakers, these are the old ones).

The Actual Computer Part

The Monitor

We set up the old one in the basement. It can’t connect to the Internet down there because it doesn’t have a wireless card, but it can still do other stuff. It looks really funny because there are 2 other old computers down there that are in partway taken apart (my bro likes to take computers apart).

Peeps March 25, 2008

Every year the local newspaper has this contest where you make a diorama out of Peeps. I’ve never entered before, but this year my siblings and I decided to do it. We made Professor Snape’s Potions class. It was fun to make. We made it entirely out of food. The cauldrons are these little brownies they sell where I work. We gouged out the insides of them and put melted marshmallow with food coloring in them to be potion.

But we didn’t win. Oh, well. Here are some pics.

We also dyed some Easter eggs. I made a Gryffindor one, a Slytherin one, and a duck one using this plastic thing that you put around the egg.

And at work last night, I bought some cheap Easter candy. I love when all the candy goes on sale. All the bulk Easter candy was 99 cents a pound, so I got a pound of that. Plus a couple truffle filled chocolate eggs that were only 89 cents down from $7. Good deal.

He Got Into The Office March 17, 2008

I knew it wouldn’t be long before I wrote an entry about Benny. Today, he somehow managed to get into the office while we were gone. He decided it would be fun to empty all the garbage cans in there and eat some of the tissues. Yuck. He also pulled some stuff out of my book bag, but luckily he didn’t eat anything from it. It could have been a lot worse. He left all the computers alone, thank goodness. That would have been bad. But, I only found one of my dad’s slippers. It was sitting on the rug in the living room along with one of his boots and a piece of the inside of the other slipper. I can’t find that slipper anywhere, so I have a feeling he ate it. A whole slipper! Slippers don’t digest properly, we found that out when he ate part of another slipper. But this was a whole slipper. I guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens. There isn’t much this dog won’t eat.

Here is a picture of the office when I came home.

And here is the living room, where I found the first slipper.

And here is a picture of the not so innocent mutt afterwards.