Free Hugs
It's been a really long time... I'll see what I remember.
Well WYSE turned out great. I ended up going to State on both tests. Though I narrowly made it on English, I was only 5/100 points away from the person in sixth place. In the graphics test, it was more like 10/40 away, but at least I know there's room for improvement on that one.
The DI story is very similar. We won Regionals and State and got to go to Globals. I'll get to that later on.
Over spring break I went to help the technology person at another school. I got some basic experience with Windows server management... at least acquainted.
Robin Hood was great. I really enjoyed the whole thing. I'm looking forward to the senior production.
Band finished well. I liked the music, and I'll miss the people that won't be there next year. Like most of the clarinets.
Physics Day was fun. We rode a bus to Six Flags in Gurnee. Since Physics Day was a special event, the lines were really short, and we rode a bunch of rides. There were a couple instances of irony. One was the "Ragin' Cajun" with "Beauregard's General Store" right next to "Yankee Harbor." The other was the guy in the MS Office shirt meeting me in my Linux shirt.
The ride back was really long because of traffic and construction. It took a couple hours just to get past Chicago. Even though it had been about 60 all day, the bus got really hot. We stopped at a Potbelly where a guy was playing. He ended up sending us a free CD.
Sometimes my spontaneity gets me in trouble. I decided to try some different video drivers on my computer. I ended up with a situation in which I could use neither version of the driver I needed. The kernel called for one version, but a different one was installed. Yet I couldn't install the right version because the kernel had some "rivafb" enabled. I was planning in reloading everything anyway, so it was alright. I got everything back on after a lot of messing around with email and passwords. It also gave me space for a couple more GB of music.
Current library 13212 songs from 1205 albums by 2816 artists, totaling 38 days, 14 hours, and 11 minutes for 42.6 GB. I ran across the new Relient K album, which has some really good songs on it, as well as the bands Apocalyptica and Stratovarius.
Then came Globals. I really didn't know what to expect, but it was amazing. So many DI people in one place. We left at 0730 on Tuesday and got there that afternoon to get all checked in and moved in. On the ride there, Dylan and I rode with Meghann and her mom. I watched The Ringer, and listened to music and studied during the ride. Like I've said, I don't get bored. When we got to our apartment, Dylan found a cockroach in the bedroom, so he decided to sleep in the living room and let me have the bedroom. That was the last one we saw (except for the zoo). That night, Dylan and I wandered down to the aquatic center that was right across from our apartments. We threw a Frisbee and water football back and forth and then shot water guns at bugs. Our attempts to quadruple-wield did not work well. The girls came over so we shot the guns at them, too, before finally going to bed. I had some trouble getting to sleep, so I listened to music, and it helped. I got to sleep fine the rest of the nights.
The next day we didn't have anything scheduled, so we traded pins and looked around. We also went swimming that afternoon. Dylan and I pretty much just moved around finding free space. We also met a few kids. It all started when this little kid came up and wanted to know if he could ask me something, so I said sure.
In a little while he returned. He wanted to know if I thought that girl over there was hot. I answered something neutral. He talked to us a little more. He wanted to know if he was annoying, and we told him that he wasn't. He was funny, really. He later came back with two girls. One of them was the one he had mentioned, and she apologized for his craziness. We established that Dylan was Nobody and I was Somebody. After that we left, and on our way out showed them our name tags... but I don't think they remembered that over our previous aliases.
I might as well mention another little happening here. We were in the elevator heading down and a couple people got on. The woman was not in a good mood.
Opening Ceremony was that night, and it was cool to see all the countries there. The fireworks were cool, too. Dylan was our team representative, and after finding him afterwards, we all went back to the apartment and had a team meeting. Evidently the "no plastic allowed, etc." applied to not only our materials for the skit but also the containers they were in. Our nicely organized plastic bins couldn't come with us. We had enough boxes and bags, and it also helped our manager clean up after us. Our challenge was early the next day, and it went well. Even though we didn't quite finish and missed the senses we had to highlight, we had fun with it.
The wedding tradition in Russia is that the bride and groom are not called by their names and stay somewhere else while a stand-in couple takes their place. This is to prevent evil spirits from finding them. Dylan had a sign on that said "I'm not the bride," which he wore for the rest of the day, getting some interesting comments.
That night was the costume party. Dylan had his showgirl dress on, and I wore some cool purple fabric like a skirt with black-and-white checkers like some sort of shirt and a leathery-type thing as a cloak along with my felt hair. There were some great costumes there, including a Halo character, crayons, and newspaper dresses. There were also two groups where one person was graham crackers, another was chocolate, another marshmallow, and then a last one more graham crackers, and they walked around as s'mores. We ended up playing tennis for most of the party, which was fun. I saw an OH-58, which was totally unexpected. I don't think I've ever seen one before. The band at the party was cool. I thought the guy sounded like Jimmy Buffet, and the bass player was pretty good and played a six-string. I think it was that night that we watched Accepted, which was hilarious. It had a lot of the little things that I laugh at, as well as some more outright humor.
The next day we had our instant challenge. We checked in, Dylan lost his glasses, and we went in. First, though, we did a penguin cheer. They said that penguins know how to keep cool... well yeah, they live in Antarctica. It's staying warm while swimming through the water and walking across the ice in blizzards that they're good at. Maybe the ones in southern Africa and South America and Australia and New Zealand kind of do... anyway, the instant challenge was crazy. We had two groups. One group had 30 seconds to act out a word to the other group. The other group had to guess what was being acted out and come up with a word that rhymed with it. There was no talking allowed during any of it. I think the girls did the best, since we got one and a half of theirs and ours pretty much turned into inside jokes.
After the challenge was a "Ta-Da," which I really don't understand very much. We did the same thing that we opened our skit with, and another group did the Harry Potter and the Mysterious Ticking Noise, minus the ticking noise. Later that day, Meghann and Dylan went to the pool with "Free Hugs" signs. I took a few pictures until the batteries died on my camera. The reactions were great. Total ignorance, excitement, happiness, suspicion, surprise, disgust... pretty much everything. Dylan got picked up once. After that we all went back to the apartments and got ready for the party later that night. I made a sign, too, and Dylan and Meghann took theirs. Dylan and I parked right next to a really bright light. It was great fun. We got a lot of hugs, including a group that quietly surrounded us and then rushed in in a big group hug. There was also the girl with a pizza box that said "Free Sex" that had a picture taken with Dylan and almost led him away. Also was the girl that borrowed my sign, and the guy that could solve a Rubix cube in under a minute, the guy that complimented my Linux shirt, the person from the team with "Baby Penguin," who evidently looked exactly like Tux, and the ones that kept coming back.
The next day we went to the instant challenge area while the managers went to the "Clubhouse" for massages. We did the Really Big Duct Tape Thing, on which they wouldn't let us put the 15-foot tree branch I had picked up. It made nice portable shade, and I ended up bringing it all the way back to the courtyard near our apartments. One police officer was a suspicious, but he let it go. We decided to go to the zoo, so Dylan and I brought our signs. We found out that the people at DI are a lot nicer than the ones at the zoo, especially since the patrons there were predominantly parents with their 1- to 6-year-olds. We did get some, though. It was good to see the penguins and then the chameleon.
That night was the Closing Ceremony. It took a long time to announce 6 teams (plus ties and special awards) for three levels of five challenges (plus a few fourth-level teams). One guy sat behind us and complained the whole time while another tried to start the wave, which didn't spread past our little section. When one group from Colorado passed by us, Dylan got on camera with his "Free Hugs" sign. After the fireworks at the end was the last party. Dylan and I both had our signs, and Laura brought one, too. We all stood in a line to welcome the people arriving. There were quite a few takers. At times people joined our line, including a guy dressed in a white suit, skull mask, sunglasses, and hat, as well as Superman and a kid from Mexico. The Mexican had a piece of wood with "Free Hugs" on it, and he was really good at going around and getting hugs. He traded his blanket for a state shirt. While standing there Laura got a cool necklace thing and $1.25, and Dylan and I traded our hats and the rest of the pins we had with us. I got a plastic British flag hat (from the UK) and Dylan got a light-up jester hat (from Ohio). I also got a free funnel cake (a bit crunchy) at the very beginning. The people from Asia took a lot of pictures with us. It was fun to just have an excuse to stand there and watch people. A bunch of little kids were slamming soda cans into the ground and trying to spray each other. Other kids were throwing water on each other. I guess this contributed to the depletion of the drink tub of everything but Sprite and Diet Coke. So people gathered around it to root around for the odd Coke and to dunk their heads in. Eventually some of them tried to overturn it, but found it too heavy. Finally the staff guys showed up with water to throw in. The same girl came and borrowed my sign again, and when she gave it back, her name tag was with the sign. She didn't ask for it back, so Dylan kept it. Eventually as the party wound down it started a steady rain, and we all left. Dylan was told consistently that he gives really good hugs, and one girl kept coming back. He met her in the lobby of our apartment building and they stayed talking while Laura and I went up to the room. Evidently he went up to their room and they all talked for a while into the morning.
The next morning was the day we had to leave. We packed everything up and headed back using a different route to avoid Indianapolis and its 500. Meghann rode with the rest of everyone since Claire had flown back for her brother's graduation. Dylan and I were extremely unexciting, so Meghann's mom summoned her back to our vehicle to provide some levity. We didn't watch any movies, but I did study some more. I don't get bored, but at least with our family, it was always the last 5 or 10 percent of the trip where we got out of control. I listened to music and played with the pole from the pirate flag, which kept me occupied until we got home.
I really miss all of the people from our team and being around so many other DI kids. It's kind of hard to come back to pretty much no school, nobody around, no one but my sister that was at Globals.
The finals overall turned out better than I expected.
Wow, I really do need that shirt that says, "I'm blogging this."
Next, I tried to run the following command on a different computer:
After a little miscommunication, essentially the following command ran (no joke):
Luckily it hit some problems, but it had already trashed pretty much every package on the system. Luckily, Linux kept pushing on. Even though some of the programs were missing a lot of files, I was able to back up 15 GB of stuff from it (over the course of a day or so). It had so many dependency problems after I finally fixed aptitude that I just reloaded it. I've got files shared between the server and the XP computer better than ever, but the rest of it is still pretty bad. Hopefully I'll have time to sort that out this summer.
Hopefully I'll have time to sort a lot of things out this summer. I'll have AP Calc and Lit stuff to work on, I guess. I'll work on getting some deviations up from DI, and maybe some other ones from longer ago...
So until next time...
Well WYSE turned out great. I ended up going to State on both tests. Though I narrowly made it on English, I was only 5/100 points away from the person in sixth place. In the graphics test, it was more like 10/40 away, but at least I know there's room for improvement on that one.
The DI story is very similar. We won Regionals and State and got to go to Globals. I'll get to that later on.
Over spring break I went to help the technology person at another school. I got some basic experience with Windows server management... at least acquainted.
Robin Hood was great. I really enjoyed the whole thing. I'm looking forward to the senior production.
Band finished well. I liked the music, and I'll miss the people that won't be there next year. Like most of the clarinets.
Physics Day was fun. We rode a bus to Six Flags in Gurnee. Since Physics Day was a special event, the lines were really short, and we rode a bunch of rides. There were a couple instances of irony. One was the "Ragin' Cajun" with "Beauregard's General Store" right next to "Yankee Harbor." The other was the guy in the MS Office shirt meeting me in my Linux shirt.
The ride back was really long because of traffic and construction. It took a couple hours just to get past Chicago. Even though it had been about 60 all day, the bus got really hot. We stopped at a Potbelly where a guy was playing. He ended up sending us a free CD.
Sometimes my spontaneity gets me in trouble. I decided to try some different video drivers on my computer. I ended up with a situation in which I could use neither version of the driver I needed. The kernel called for one version, but a different one was installed. Yet I couldn't install the right version because the kernel had some "rivafb" enabled. I was planning in reloading everything anyway, so it was alright. I got everything back on after a lot of messing around with email and passwords. It also gave me space for a couple more GB of music.
Current library 13212 songs from 1205 albums by 2816 artists, totaling 38 days, 14 hours, and 11 minutes for 42.6 GB. I ran across the new Relient K album, which has some really good songs on it, as well as the bands Apocalyptica and Stratovarius.
Then came Globals. I really didn't know what to expect, but it was amazing. So many DI people in one place. We left at 0730 on Tuesday and got there that afternoon to get all checked in and moved in. On the ride there, Dylan and I rode with Meghann and her mom. I watched The Ringer, and listened to music and studied during the ride. Like I've said, I don't get bored. When we got to our apartment, Dylan found a cockroach in the bedroom, so he decided to sleep in the living room and let me have the bedroom. That was the last one we saw (except for the zoo). That night, Dylan and I wandered down to the aquatic center that was right across from our apartments. We threw a Frisbee and water football back and forth and then shot water guns at bugs. Our attempts to quadruple-wield did not work well. The girls came over so we shot the guns at them, too, before finally going to bed. I had some trouble getting to sleep, so I listened to music, and it helped. I got to sleep fine the rest of the nights.
The next day we didn't have anything scheduled, so we traded pins and looked around. We also went swimming that afternoon. Dylan and I pretty much just moved around finding free space. We also met a few kids. It all started when this little kid came up and wanted to know if he could ask me something, so I said sure.
Will you go out with me?
[Long, confused pause] Um, no.
Liar.
In a little while he returned. He wanted to know if I thought that girl over there was hot. I answered something neutral. He talked to us a little more. He wanted to know if he was annoying, and we told him that he wasn't. He was funny, really. He later came back with two girls. One of them was the one he had mentioned, and she apologized for his craziness. We established that Dylan was Nobody and I was Somebody. After that we left, and on our way out showed them our name tags... but I don't think they remembered that over our previous aliases.
I might as well mention another little happening here. We were in the elevator heading down and a couple people got on. The woman was not in a good mood.
...I did not come all this way to have my kids treat me like crap... I'm this close to just going home...
[man looks around at us astonished and comments about her outbursts]
I don't care, I don't know these people.
Opening Ceremony was that night, and it was cool to see all the countries there. The fireworks were cool, too. Dylan was our team representative, and after finding him afterwards, we all went back to the apartment and had a team meeting. Evidently the "no plastic allowed, etc." applied to not only our materials for the skit but also the containers they were in. Our nicely organized plastic bins couldn't come with us. We had enough boxes and bags, and it also helped our manager clean up after us. Our challenge was early the next day, and it went well. Even though we didn't quite finish and missed the senses we had to highlight, we had fun with it.
The wedding tradition in Russia is that the bride and groom are not called by their names and stay somewhere else while a stand-in couple takes their place. This is to prevent evil spirits from finding them. Dylan had a sign on that said "I'm not the bride," which he wore for the rest of the day, getting some interesting comments.
Yes you are!
Then who is the bride?
Always the bridesmaid, right?
You're not the bride?
Not yet, at least...
That night was the costume party. Dylan had his showgirl dress on, and I wore some cool purple fabric like a skirt with black-and-white checkers like some sort of shirt and a leathery-type thing as a cloak along with my felt hair. There were some great costumes there, including a Halo character, crayons, and newspaper dresses. There were also two groups where one person was graham crackers, another was chocolate, another marshmallow, and then a last one more graham crackers, and they walked around as s'mores. We ended up playing tennis for most of the party, which was fun. I saw an OH-58, which was totally unexpected. I don't think I've ever seen one before. The band at the party was cool. I thought the guy sounded like Jimmy Buffet, and the bass player was pretty good and played a six-string. I think it was that night that we watched Accepted, which was hilarious. It had a lot of the little things that I laugh at, as well as some more outright humor.
The next day we had our instant challenge. We checked in, Dylan lost his glasses, and we went in. First, though, we did a penguin cheer. They said that penguins know how to keep cool... well yeah, they live in Antarctica. It's staying warm while swimming through the water and walking across the ice in blizzards that they're good at. Maybe the ones in southern Africa and South America and Australia and New Zealand kind of do... anyway, the instant challenge was crazy. We had two groups. One group had 30 seconds to act out a word to the other group. The other group had to guess what was being acted out and come up with a word that rhymed with it. There was no talking allowed during any of it. I think the girls did the best, since we got one and a half of theirs and ours pretty much turned into inside jokes.
Couchin'!
After the challenge was a "Ta-Da," which I really don't understand very much. We did the same thing that we opened our skit with, and another group did the Harry Potter and the Mysterious Ticking Noise, minus the ticking noise. Later that day, Meghann and Dylan went to the pool with "Free Hugs" signs. I took a few pictures until the batteries died on my camera. The reactions were great. Total ignorance, excitement, happiness, suspicion, surprise, disgust... pretty much everything. Dylan got picked up once. After that we all went back to the apartments and got ready for the party later that night. I made a sign, too, and Dylan and Meghann took theirs. Dylan and I parked right next to a really bright light. It was great fun. We got a lot of hugs, including a group that quietly surrounded us and then rushed in in a big group hug. There was also the girl with a pizza box that said "Free Sex" that had a picture taken with Dylan and almost led him away. Also was the girl that borrowed my sign, and the guy that could solve a Rubix cube in under a minute, the guy that complimented my Linux shirt, the person from the team with "Baby Penguin," who evidently looked exactly like Tux, and the ones that kept coming back.
The next day we went to the instant challenge area while the managers went to the "Clubhouse" for massages. We did the Really Big Duct Tape Thing, on which they wouldn't let us put the 15-foot tree branch I had picked up. It made nice portable shade, and I ended up bringing it all the way back to the courtyard near our apartments. One police officer was a suspicious, but he let it go. We decided to go to the zoo, so Dylan and I brought our signs. We found out that the people at DI are a lot nicer than the ones at the zoo, especially since the patrons there were predominantly parents with their 1- to 6-year-olds. We did get some, though. It was good to see the penguins and then the chameleon.
That night was the Closing Ceremony. It took a long time to announce 6 teams (plus ties and special awards) for three levels of five challenges (plus a few fourth-level teams). One guy sat behind us and complained the whole time while another tried to start the wave, which didn't spread past our little section. When one group from Colorado passed by us, Dylan got on camera with his "Free Hugs" sign. After the fireworks at the end was the last party. Dylan and I both had our signs, and Laura brought one, too. We all stood in a line to welcome the people arriving. There were quite a few takers. At times people joined our line, including a guy dressed in a white suit, skull mask, sunglasses, and hat, as well as Superman and a kid from Mexico. The Mexican had a piece of wood with "Free Hugs" on it, and he was really good at going around and getting hugs. He traded his blanket for a state shirt. While standing there Laura got a cool necklace thing and $1.25, and Dylan and I traded our hats and the rest of the pins we had with us. I got a plastic British flag hat (from the UK) and Dylan got a light-up jester hat (from Ohio). I also got a free funnel cake (a bit crunchy) at the very beginning. The people from Asia took a lot of pictures with us. It was fun to just have an excuse to stand there and watch people. A bunch of little kids were slamming soda cans into the ground and trying to spray each other. Other kids were throwing water on each other. I guess this contributed to the depletion of the drink tub of everything but Sprite and Diet Coke. So people gathered around it to root around for the odd Coke and to dunk their heads in. Eventually some of them tried to overturn it, but found it too heavy. Finally the staff guys showed up with water to throw in. The same girl came and borrowed my sign again, and when she gave it back, her name tag was with the sign. She didn't ask for it back, so Dylan kept it. Eventually as the party wound down it started a steady rain, and we all left. Dylan was told consistently that he gives really good hugs, and one girl kept coming back. He met her in the lobby of our apartment building and they stayed talking while Laura and I went up to the room. Evidently he went up to their room and they all talked for a while into the morning.
The next morning was the day we had to leave. We packed everything up and headed back using a different route to avoid Indianapolis and its 500. Meghann rode with the rest of everyone since Claire had flown back for her brother's graduation. Dylan and I were extremely unexciting, so Meghann's mom summoned her back to our vehicle to provide some levity. We didn't watch any movies, but I did study some more. I don't get bored, but at least with our family, it was always the last 5 or 10 percent of the trip where we got out of control. I listened to music and played with the pole from the pirate flag, which kept me occupied until we got home.
I really miss all of the people from our team and being around so many other DI kids. It's kind of hard to come back to pretty much no school, nobody around, no one but my sister that was at Globals.
The finals overall turned out better than I expected.
Wow, I really do need that shirt that says, "I'm blogging this."
Next, I tried to run the following command on a different computer:
sudo rm -rf /etc/ssh/*
After a little miscommunication, essentially the following command ran (no joke):
sudo rm -rf /
Luckily it hit some problems, but it had already trashed pretty much every package on the system. Luckily, Linux kept pushing on. Even though some of the programs were missing a lot of files, I was able to back up 15 GB of stuff from it (over the course of a day or so). It had so many dependency problems after I finally fixed aptitude that I just reloaded it. I've got files shared between the server and the XP computer better than ever, but the rest of it is still pretty bad. Hopefully I'll have time to sort that out this summer.
Hopefully I'll have time to sort a lot of things out this summer. I'll have AP Calc and Lit stuff to work on, I guess. I'll work on getting some deviations up from DI, and maybe some other ones from longer ago...
So until next time...
Stay away from the grits...
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