This has tend to be what happened with my (family’s) computers… we aren’t known to back up much. As a result, what can be located is kinda sparse. I long ago gave up on the files lost that time, but seeing the folder I had used for recovery, I grew curious what other digital relics that I still care about are on various CDs I have burned across time. Thus, my current employment is going through my sparse “backups” and seeing what I recover. Since all the things I decide are worth saving shall surely reveal something about me, and a blog is nothing if not a random window to a person, I decided I’d archive what all I find here as I go. The following list will be/was written as I pulled them off, so I have no idea how interesting it shall be/is. Here we go:

• Recovered an MP3 of Yellowcard’s “October Nights” from a mix CD. Yellowcard has never really been a favorite band of mine, but I do generally like them. I found their album Ocean Avenue to be fantastic! Not only are several of the songs great in their own right, but the album itself has a feel of a journey from the break-out opening of “Way Away” to the closing, reflective strains of “Back Home”, it really gives the feel of a journey of self-discovery… I think its really cool. Their albums since have not measured up in my opinion. “October Nights” is from the album before Ocean Avenue, entitled One for the Kids. I’ve never listened to most of that album, but I think the ones before it are rather atrociously repetitive and cacophonous. “October Nights” was one of those tracks that just appears on a computer from a borrowed mix CD or such.. its a really nice song, though; it invokes a lot of the feeling of the then-coming Ocean Avenue, both in the reflective, semi-romantic subject matter and the heavy use of violin that gives it a stand out tone from a lot of punk/pop music of the era.
• Tons of Linux Install Media. Okay, so this doesn’t actually count as something I recovered and saved, since I am throwing most out. Still, interesting personal history. I found my original set of Mandrake 8.2 discs that I acquired at Cybercamps many years ago, several further versions of Madrake up to 9.2 at least, some of the last versions of Red Hat before it split into RHEL and Fedora, and of course, several Knoppix CDs back from when Live CDs were novel.
• An MP3 CD that either is or is similar to the first CD I burned entitled “Da Mix”. It has several “classic” tracks that I take for granted that I have, but actually don’t have a copy of on this laptop. Amongst them:
  • “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” by Green Day
  • “The Rock Show” by Blink-182, “Fat Lip” by Sum 41
  • “Sadie Hawkins Dance” by Relient K

  It also contained a few signs of the times that I recaptured:

  • “Back Here” by BBMak
  • “Absolutely (Story of a Girl)” by Nine Days
  • a demo of “In the End” by Linkin Park (version goes “It starts with one and multiplies til you can taste the sun”).

  Further it contained some VERY dated things that I let go:

  • “Mirror Mirror” by M2M
  • “He Loves U Not” by Dream
  • “All You Wanted” by Michelle Branch

  along with a variety of Creed, Avril Lavigne, and others. Some of these were worth a listen, but not worth cluttering my HDD. Regardless, this recovery is going to clutter my iTunes Library.

• My Portfolio for the Technology Academy at Landstown High School in Virginia Beach. Though this portfolio gained me admission, I did not end up going here as I found the program to be too vocational. My portfolio was way overzealous. We were supposed to pick 3 of several “challenges” and implement them. I chose databases, web design, and a technical resume, then combined them all into a PHP/MySQL site which I ran off my own desktop, configuring it to be world viewable.I am relatively certain that everyone else who applied did the database challenge in MS Access like they expected. This is the first example of me going WAY over on an assignment with a simple technical component.The other big examples are when I wrote http://wip.donaldguy.com from scratch for my Works in Progress folder in 11th grade when everyone else used a PBwiki, and the http://english.donaldguy.com CSS/XHTML design I made for my Senior English Portfolio when almost everyone else used MS Publisher (which unfortunately only renders properly in Firefox 3 and Safari due to standards compliance).

  None of these are actually particularly impressive when compared to many projects of my future MIT classmates, but they certainly were compared to my high school classmates. This portfolio was also probably my first playing with PHP, making it in effect my first independent programming project. Also, what I considered noteworthy on a “technical resume” at the time is laughable.. I’ll leave it at that.

• A Whole Heap of 8th Grade Work: some of the highlights includes a biography on Buddy Rich, some awful compositions (though the piano theme is decent and the drum set has an interesting fill… they are not necessarily a whole lot worse than my piano composition from AP Music theory this year: Compassion ), a report and flash video on cloud seeding, a paper that explains quadrilateral categorization by a frame story about a theoretical MMORPG named “Quadwarz”, a rap about the Constitution and the role of a citizen including 10 verses on the bill of rights, and actually decent English essays on Fahrenheit 451 and The Good Earth
  
• Beginnings of several other websites including “Phoenix Central” a forum for my middle school, a website for my Boy Scout troop, a mysterious site named “Blue Steel” (which I do not believe had anything to do with Zoolander), and a begining of a site for my high school which was probably eventually realized as the “Dolphinbook” schedule matching system I ran the last 3 summers.
• Several (3) revisions of the open source text game Province that a friend and I were trying to write. We checked it into SourceForge, and its still there, but its awful..

So, some things I learned about myself: I seem to “back up” music a lot more than anything else; I have a lot of odd, unlabeled CDs (Hiren’s BootCD, a disc of Windows optimizing utilities, combination Panic! at the Disco album/High School Musical soundtrack, and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon to name a few); some of my 8th grade work was actually half-way decent; and in middle school, I liked to start a lot of “technical” projects and not finish them.

Well .. I’ve been at this for a couple hours now. I hope this random window into my life was moderately interesting.

Until Next Time,

~Donald

Anyway, while you might think that I would be too tired to function, I have actually been surprisingly productive thus far. Firstly, I actually read all of my Friday webcomics, Slashdot, and Digg in like a half hour. Then I ate breakfast. Next, I finally finished my thank you notes for graduation money, and now I am blogging! Okay… so perhaps I should have written “productive.”

In any case, they are interesting subject to consider: our conceptions of early and late. Just as I earlier mentioned the subjectivity of interesting and routine, I think it is also illustrative to consider the different way we perceive this. There are the very real differences of time zones, for example—a fact we sometimes forget. For example, my friend Karen had told me that, bored at work, she might see fit to text me from her (ZOMG) new phone. Kind of bored and remembering that she had work at 4, I texted her around 4:50 wondering where these promised messages were. To which, of course, she replied “Chill out! I just got to work and I’m early!.” That’s when I was like “right … time zones”.

Of course, even time zones aren’t truly definitive. It has been said, for example, that while, by all reports MIT lies in the Eastern time zone, many of its students actually function on Hawaiin time (of course, it could be worse). Of course, some MIT students have given up on normal timezones completely. I speak, of course, of Random Standard Time; to quote a now removed edit from Wikipedia:

“Random Standard Time,” [is] a special timezone in effect only within Random Hall, used to avoid the inconvenience of dealing with day changes at midnight when most residents are awake. Random Standard Time uses 24 hour notation with a 6 hour offset, such that midnight becomes 2400h and 1 am of the following day becomes 2500h of the same day, which continues until 2959h when it rolls over to 0600h the following day.

See.. you (might have) learned something!

Anyway, its an interesting concept. What defines time? I don’t know, according to Einstein, it’s something that changes with velocity; according to RENT, it is best measured not in daylights, nor sunsets, nor midnights, nor cups of coffe, but, in fact, in love; according to others it is actually a cube! Maybe someone taking the “Time of Your Life” seminar can fill me in, but in the meantime, it is a fascinating thing to contemplate.

Its all about perception, I suppose. There are those with very odd perceptions, like Clive Wearing or the fictional Leonard of Memento, or Merlin in White’s Once and Future King, but in genereal we accept the concept that some people may experience things oddly. Truly, though, we have no assurance that the rest of us “normal” people are actually experiencing it the same.

I must say, my mind has certainly been in a bit of a strange place. As my time here dwindles to just 16 days or so, I find myself hanging out much more with my friends than there was time to in the school year and probably more than I have in former summers. I am becoming much closer friends with some of these people at the most inconvenient of times, and I fear this is because, in some sense, I don’t fully recognize the fact that I will actually be gone soon. Maybe it is simply a gut reaction, digging in as I find myself pulled by circumstance in another direction (albeit a direction I have wanted for a long time), but is certainly causing more than its share of confusion in me and others.

With the people whom I could hardly get closer, my family, things seem buisness as usual, but I suppose it is a bit of a facade. I know that it certainly is confusing to me that I won’t live here, that for 4 months this will not be where I return, and in a way, it will never truly be my home again. And its scary .. but also invigorating.

At this point possibilities at MIT and beyond seem endless, but at the same time the possibilities here are quickly coming to an end. And I’m in the middle. :-/

Anyway, if you made it this far, thanks for reading. ^_^

~Donald

• maintained by an individual? *opens photobooth as a mirror* check!
• regular entries? ermm … about that.

So. Onto commentary, descreptions of events, graphics and video. I think I’ve already covered some of the commentary aspect, so I guess I should talk about events. What has happened since I last updated? Well, as I predicted (sort of), I survived the english portfolio project! I got it all turned in, have gotten it back, and recieved a 100% A+ on it. Further, AP Exams are over! There is a draft of an entry in which I was going to do a break down of each AP exam, but they are over and I don’t want to talk about them too much, so screw that entry. What I will do, since this blog’s limited history is in the habbit of prediction, is predict my scores:

• AP English Government: 5, simple, simple exam. There was an essay on the difference between monetary and fiscal policy on which I made things up and another regarding supreme court regulation of apportionment in which my answers were a bit off.. I think I can sustain both faults.
• AP English Literature: 5, 4 possible. I somehow managed to run out of time and leave a significant number of MC blank, but my essays were pretty good. Again, it  should shake out. Regardless, I got a 5 on Language last year so no FEE for me.
• AP Psychology: 5. Yea .. pretty much. (I have 104% in the class for the year, it is by far the easiest AP class I ever took)
• AP Physics C. I’m gonna say 5 on Mechanics, 4 on E&M. A 5 on E&M is possible, but unlikely. Truth be told, I don’t deserve a 5 for E&M, but since I will be taking 8.02(2) regardless, it would be very nice. Also, while I could perhaps have been a bit better prepared, fouling up this exam can not be seen as entirely my fault. First off, the class was not best taught ever. Our teacher, Mr. Boyles, is a nice guy and a pretty decent teacher, but we simply didn’t keep a good time table. This is partially because due to the double-class nature with Muti/Diff, his time was cut short most days (if you are curious what I am talking about, feel free to comment). Also, the day of the test, it was very rainy and stormy outside. We all showed up and sat in the testing room for about an hour for the test to start. Right before it did, however, an employee of the place we were testing came in saying that they needed the room for other purposes. As a result we were moved to a different room with a loading-dock sytle exterior door that preceded to make loud banging noises throughout the test. We stayed in this room for all of Mechanics and the MC of E&M, then we were moved again for the free response portion of E&M. Almost needless to say, I was a bit frazzeled by the whole ordeal, and it very well may have made the difference between a 4 and a 5. Due to this situation, I was offered a complete retest which would have been last Friday, the 23rd. Knowing that this was going to be after the English portfolio of doom(!!!), I decided it wasn’t worth the effor to prolong the exams.. thus, it now stands as it is. My socre report will, however, show a note saying that my performance was possibly affected by a disturbance in the testing room. I doubt this will give me enough sympathy points to get out of 8.01 with a 4 on E&M, but we shall see.

So yea, thats probably pretty much what the draft I never finished would have said. Hopefully it is at least slightly more condensed. In any case, for now, events… check!

I have one quick other random piece of commentary to add. Note to all advertising, marketing types and people in general: A forward slash and a backslash are different characters!! Again, note carefully:

I have repeatedly in the last few days heard radio commercials giving a web adress as ” h t t p colon slash slash [note proper usage] w w w . [almost invariably] myspace . com BACKSLASH <something> “. This is wrong! As a concrete example, I have heard the local surf shop Wave Riding Vehicles do this recently, but if you go to http://myspace.com\wrv , you get an error like you damn well should. Perhaps some marketing executive heard the term backslash and thought, “Hmm that sounds like a fancier word for slash; I should use that word instead, afterall market research shows that surfers love feeling fancy—thats why they don’t just surf the waves any more, they surf this newfangeled thing called the interblagotubes The sad thing is that I realize most listeners will also not know the difference between a slash and a backslsh, but they should! And ignorance is not an excuse to promote further ignorance! </rant>

So, that covered commentary and descriptions of events. I will leave you with “graphics or video”. This has been on the internet three days, so most of the people who will appreciate have probably already seen it. Oh well, its worth watching agin!

In any case, that is enough blogging for one time. See you next time….

^_^

Peace,

~Donald