Monday, October 29, 2012

Freaking old comment

I was in the Overview for Blogger and just noticed that someone had commented on a post. I went to check it out and it was some random person saying they added me on MSN and needed to talk to me right away. They also gave their email address.
Now, I don't normally talk to random people on the Internet unless I have an inkling of who they are or where they came from. I knew neither about this person. Seeing the comment date, October 20th, I replied back, saying first of all that I haven't used MSN in over four years, so that was a little suspicious, and that I needed to know who they were first before I started communicating with them.
Then I took a closer look at the date the comment was posted. It was October 20th, 2011. 
Yeah, that's how long it takes me to notice these things. XD
Don't bother searching for that comment, by the way. I deleted it and my two (yes, two) replies.

Thursday, October 25, 2012

FINALLY! Homework-free and baptism

Today marks the first day (besides yesterday, but I had my Youth group so that doesn't count) that I do not have any homework for any of my subjects!
Hooray! :D
However, I am not completely devoid of "homework" per se. I have to write out a testimony for my upcoming baptism on November 11, or Remembrance Day for us Canadian/Commonwealth folks. Since I am Protestant, I was never sprinkled with water or had water poured on me at birth, since we do not believe that really does anything. Baptism does not save; it is supposed to be a public testament of your faith. In the New Testament, back when Jesus walked the Earth, people were only baptized after they had come to faith in Jesus. There are no recordings in the Bible of baptisms at birth or of any other method of baptism other than immersion. In fact, the Greek word used for baptism, baptizo, when translated, means "to immerse."

Prepare Yourselves; Halo 4 Fast Approaches

I am a big Halo nut. Not even fan. A nut. Why? Well, starting from Halo 3 on, I have always gotten at least the Limited Edition of every game (until now there have always been Standard, Limited and Legendary Editions) and pre-ordered everything. That includes Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST (there wasn't a Limited Edition of that but the pre-order came with a stylized controller), Halo Wars (the only Halo game to not be an FPS, but an RTS), and Halo: Reach. So, it saddens me that, with Halo 4, I will not be able to afford the Limited Edition. I need Xbox LIVE Gold, as does my sister, so we'll probably get the Standard Edition, which is $59.99, and two 3-month Gold cards, which are $19.99 each. So, that makes the total the same as Limited Edition alone, $99.99 (not including tax). However, I will be pre-ordering the game, so I will still receive an armour skin and the Arctic weapon skin for the Battle Rifle (which is finally coming back after being replaced by the DMR in Halo: Reach, which is also coming back).

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Ow my neck

I have no idea why but my neck, and by extension, my head, is killing me. Massaging the especially sore spots on my neck set off sharp pain in the back of my head. Also my jaw is sore. Seems it's about time to go back to the chiropractor!
I am also quite tired and am having trouble staying awake or alert. Why? My sister brought home a mutual friend after skating yesterday, who stayed until about 10 pm. Of course entertaining guests is more important than homework, so it wasn't until 12:00 that I could finally be done with mine. So, by the time I crawled into bed, it was so late I only got about five hours of sleep (I typically get up around 6:20 or so).
Blarg.

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Pageview Spike

This is odd... a while ago, I shared the link to my blog on Facebook, because I wanted more than just myself and my teacher to read it. However, it seemed like nobody noticed, as the pageviews remained around 170 or so, while my long-abandoned blog, Random - Reviews, currently has over 800. Which is weird. Though I suppose if I changed the title of this blog, I might get more views... because I definitely post about more than programming. Maybe I should switch to Tumblr or Wordpress.
Anyway, when I checked the pageviews again, they're suddenly over 200. Apparently, some random folks decided to check out my blog (or they just hit "Next Blog>>" on whatever one they were on, which randomly displays one). Neat.
Also, obligatory Spike because his name's in the title:

Thursday, October 11, 2012

Firefox Portable - now with Flash Player!

"Handed" in - "sent" in is more accurate - my Methods Assignment for Programming. I added a button with the Enabled property set to false so you couldn't click it. Why? Because that particular question was crossed off on the sheet, and I didn't want to rename the button to something else or just continue the numbering after that question.

In other news, having Firefox Portable on my USB stick came in handy for something other than Programming. During the presentations for Art today, a classmate was having difficulty with Internet Explorer loading a Flash presentation site called http://www.prezi.com/. And no wonder - these computers are far too old and are still using Windows XP with IE8! They also don't have the latest Flash Player installed, and because of Faronic's Deep Freeze,  which provides "a fresh start with every reboot!", even if you install it on the current computer it is wiped out the next time you reboot. However, I found a way to put the Adobe Flash Player plugins in my Firefox's Data folder without installing the actual program itself. So, now my Firefox Portable installation has Flash Player 11.4.something.something. Hooray!

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Art: Convinced to stay

Today I approached my visual arts teacher with the intention of switching from the 11M course to the 11O course. I do not like the class and traditional art does not interest me. I would much rather be using a drawing tablet than paints on canvas. However, when I mentioned my preference for digital arts over traditional media, my teacher stopped me and said that in the Grade 12 class, which I have next semester, you can choose how you want to complete an assignment, be that via photography, painting, drawing or working on the computer. This piqued my interest, and I'm willing to push through the dull and difficult portions of the class if that means I can work on my digital art skills for school. But now that means I have to really work hard, because you can only take the Grade 12 class if you take the 11M course. Tonight as a result I have to put together a group presentation for tomorrow (couldn't work on it over the long weekend because I couldn't get a hold of my partner) and work on my "Figure in Motion" anatomy drawing. Much of the class has already started on the good copy of that, while I still have barely started the anatomy portion (we had to do a representational or "realistic" rendering first). It was due tomorrow, but thankfully the presentations have pushed that back till Friday.
Gah. Why do I do these things to myself? How am I supposed to get some part time work if homework for these classes takes up all my free time after school?

Thursday, October 4, 2012

Wordpress

A friend on Facebook the other day suggested using Wordpress instead of Blogger for this. I may check it out, as I've had some experience with using Wordpress and Wordpress-based sites (usually webcomics themed with Comicpress) and already have an account. Apparently Wordpress allows for far more customization than Blogger, but as I'm just doing this for my Programming class, not sure if it's worth it.
Speaking of programming, we just had our test today for Selection-Repetition (utilizing for... while... loops). The multiple choice part was easy for the most part, and the pseudo-code, what we call writing out the code on paper as if we were actually programming, was simple as it was open-book and I was able to look at the code for other programs I've done. The only thing I know I forgot was to check for negative values in a km-miles conversion, though I don't think it matters.

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Slow school computers

I'm starting to get really frustrated with the school's computers. All I have open is Dropbox and Firefox and all of a sudden it locks up. I was even trying out the lightweight browsers Slimboat and Avant but it STILL was slow! Right-clicking the taskbar and opening Task Manager, Performance tab, I can see that, even immediately after starting up, the computer is already using the page file. Page files are what the computer uses in place of physical memory (aka RAM) when it is used up. If just sitting on the desktop it's using the page file, either they have less than 512 MB of RAM (which is just sad) or someone who thought they were smart somehow disabled access to the physical memory. Likely they have 256 or less MB of RAM.
*sigh* This is what happens when your school thinks video announcements, which interrupt the curriculum for my Commtech class BTW, are better than trying to update 8 year old technology.