I competed in the Oregon SkillsUSA web design competition last Saturday. My teammate, Sadie, and I competed against five other teams from other high schools in Oregon. We were all given a fictitious website proposal and had four hours to complete the task. After the competition I had lunch and sat around a couple hours for the awards ceremony (bored out of my mind.) We ended up taking first place and are eligible to represent Oregon at the national competition. However, busy schedules may prevent us from competing at nationals and we’ll probably end up giving the opportunity to second place.
The website we created was done using Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and Fireworks. It’s valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS. The design is pretty simple and generic, but it worked. I’m not sure if I can post it online for everyone’s viewing pleasure… I’ll have to look into that.
I got a lot of congratulations, handshakes, and pats on the back from friends today. How they all knew about the victory was beyond me until I saw the big banner hanging above the tech lab entrance say congratulations; that was really encouraging. It’s nice to get recognized every once in a while for stuff you’ve done. It’s unfortunate that we probably won’t go to nationals, but it happens. It was a great experience and hey, there’s always next year. 
Posted on April 16, 2007 in Code, Life, School
IB stands for Intellectual Beating International Baccalaureate. It is the creation of an organization based in Geneva, Switzerland called the International Baccalaureate Organization. This organization is made up of people who’s goal is to find cruel and unusual ways to make IB student’s lives more miserable than they already are. Needless to say, they are very efficient at it. Thousands of students can attest to their success by the number of hours of sleep lost because of IB and a blood-caffeine level far above that of any normal mortal can sustain without serious repercussions. Despite these seemingly negative features, thousands of students decide to take on the mental and physical challenge that is IB every year.
The bulk of IB is the courses. IB students are presented with challenging coursework that is specifically designed to push IB students to the limit—an endurance test if you will. An IB student who is used to finding school easy often experiences something they have never felt before: challenged. Some may quit after this emotionally traumatizing experience, but the
One of the major components of IB is CAS, which stands for Caffeine Absorption System Creativity, Action, Service. The goal of CAS is to amplify “counterbalance” the rigors of academic study through 150 hours of activities involving creativity, action, and service. The three categories involving CAS are vaguely defined in order to encompass a wide variety of activities. However, efforts to justify “imagining away to collect 150 hours with minimal effort” as creativity have failed to this date.
IB students often procure a common set of characteristics, habits, beliefs, and world views. The follow is a list of symptoms that indicate you are an IB student:
- Caffeine is your friend. IB students must maintain a constant flow of caffeine in their
caffeine blood system.
- Insomnia blows. IB students often find it hard to go to sleep before 11:00PM when they have the time because countless nights of homework until 1:00AM has screwed up their biological clock.
- “Start” and “deadline” become synonymous. Procrastination is particularly rampant among IB students. Research for a vaccine for this deadly cancer is underway. However it is still awaiting approval by the FDA.
- You know what existentialism and magic realism means.
- You know what the constant of universal gravitation is.
Despite these shortcomings, there must be something good about IB. It must serve some purpose besides preparing you for college and making you “smarter”. My theory is that it connects people. Going through IB is no small feat and taking on the challenge I think creates a commonality between people. You meet new people through IB that become some of your best friends. These are the friends who you call up at midnight asking for help on that one particularly hard math problem. These are the friends who you know are going through the same thing and make the suffering bearable. These are the friends ones who stand beside you, watch your back, and pick you up off the ground when you are about to give up. I don’t know if my theory is right. Maybe I’ll blog about it after I graduate and find the answer.
Posted on April 11, 2007 in School
Today was rather interesting… I found out that I received the highest score in the school in the national math contest I participated in a few months ago. I didn’t expect to do very well seeing as how I bombed it the last two years, but I guess all that karma is starting to paying off. What’s really weird is that I did not prepare for the exam at all and didn’t even remember it until I heard the announcement over the intercom when I walked into school that morning. I forgot to bring my calculator too; I had to use one of those dinky scientific calculators that can’t do graphs.
So what’s next? I have no idea. My friend (who has the second highest score) told me that he had heard I received the highest score during band and I went to see if it was true. I went to my math teacher and looked at the paper with the top three highest scorers and saw my name and left. I think that the top three scorers move onto the next round or something…
Posted on March 22, 2007 in Life, School
It’s finally over; all final exams have been taken. This week has been hellish despite the shortened school days. Today I had English and Spanish. I’m not sure how well I did on either of them… hopefully enough to get an A.
I’ll be taking the SAT tomorrow. That’s going to be “interesting”…
Posted on January 26, 2007 in School
