It feels nice to have some time to spare and catch up on things. I've been quite busy recently, with family, life, work, and school, and the sheer volume of what's been going on had put me off from taking the time to write a blog entry about anything. For those that have kept up with me via e-mail, AIM/iChat, Skype, and the like, bear with me for just a moment.
Things start in mid-April, where I had been working on a series of videos for the senior comedy event at school. This was, more or less, the only time when we were allowed to poke fun at the eccentricities of our faculty. Though I didn't write any skits myself, I did edit and help to shoot the five hours of footage we got. The final product was around two hours long - it got cut down to 1.5 hours after the faculty censored some stuff they didn't like, but we had some live-action stuff on stage to make up for it, including me falling down the theater stairs (on purpose, of course). My editing was mostly limited to sorting and cutting among takes, amplifying audio (we shot in large places on MiniDV camcorders with small microphones), and adding sound and very basic video effects, such as turning one scene into a NewsCenter5-esque interview. Overall, though, it was a great learning experience and an insight as to what goes into something feature-length like this. I even got some compliments on the editing work later on.
Two weeks later I took five advanced-placement exams: Macroeconomics, Microeconomics, English Language, Physics B, and Statistics. Some people called me insane for taking four AP courses in a year (Macro and Microeconomics are one course at my school), but I actually found it bearable and informative, even if the crunch at the end was somewhat overpowering. AP courses can count as college courses if they're relevant to a major and one does well enough on the exam, so the six I've taken (I took European History the year before) might open doors for some other things in college.
Speaking of college, I'm headed out to Rochester Institute of Technology in late August to major in Computer Engineering - or as Antony calls it, the geek field of study. (to Antony: I'm proud of that.) RIT made it easy to fill out all of the necessary paperwork: almost everything I've filled out has been digital, including the admissions application, admissions survey, housing application, and mathematics placement exam. There's some paper correspondence as well, but most of it is sent duplicated via e-mail. I'll make sure to keep everybody posted once I get out there - I'm looking forward to going there, though I hear from some locals that there are only two seasons in Rochester: July, and winter. Better pack warm.
I graduated a couple of days ago - we had the graduation ceremony in the gym, which was the only place big enough to hold the (huge) audience. Each person got ten tickets - multiplied by 356 students, I have a feeling they were banking on only a percentage of those being used, as there were maybe fifty more people standing in back. The ceremony itself was long but not unbearably long; we had speeches by people such as the school President, Principal, leader of the Student Council, President of our chapter of the NHS, and a guest speaker that had graduated in 1959, fifty years before us. Afterwards, everybody went outside and smoked cigars - I passed on that, seeing as I'd never smoked, and probably would have made a fool of myself by coughing up a storm. Not the sort of thing I'd have wanted people to remember me by.
My grandfather passed away in late April. He had been sick with Stage IV cancer, which in non-medical terms means that the cancer had spread throughout his body. In his case, it had spread to his bones and was causing them to crack, making things like eating and breathing become difficult. He had always been very active - he had formerly been involved in the U.S. military and the local police force, and spent his summers swimming and growing things like tomatoes and green beans. After seeing him bed-ridden for four months, it was a relief to see him out of his pain. We held a funeral service where I gave his eulogy; outside there were seven police officers that he had helped train, standing at attention as we processed out, which was really the best tribute of all.
Anyway, then there's work. Without getting too specific about my employers, here's what I'm up to:
There's a bar in Boston that keeps track of what its patrons drink, so that they can offer them a free gift if they drink a certain number of beers. Currently they kept their records on a couple of boxes worth of index cards, which the waitresses had to dig through to find the correct one before serving the participants in that program. I created a system that does this using a few netbooks behind the bar, combined with a homebrew management app written in C# that accesses a SQL Server stored on a machine in the back. This was by far the biggest job I've ever had, but also the one that's allowed me to be the most creative so far.
There's a (different) restaurant in Boston that's looking to revamp their website a bit. At the moment they have a single site that looks radically different based on what part of it you're visiting. I'm going to be consolidating the three disparate sections, and adding some interactive content that will allow that restaurant to expand their profitable catering service to be able to take online orders.
There are two other jobs I may have in the works. My friend's gym is looking for somebody to redo a website and create a system that allows mass-correspondence with news and events to go out via e-mail. Some of you may remember the Tandberg Educational headset that I modified to run with standard audio hardware - I've been asked to do the same for the other 30 or so that were saved from the old Tandberg Language Lab.
As far as other miscellany goes: I've been trying out Windows 7, and it's not all that bad. A bit faster than Vista, but not appreciably so. I went out for Thai food for the first time, with a friend of mine and a former teacher, and found out that Thai food is actually really great - also learned that Porsche V8's are very fast. I also spent a few hours today building a 12 LED flashlight out of a failed LED light bulb and an old Union Carbide (yeah, it's THAT old) flashlight:
Finally, I'd like to thank Rev. Dr. Wu Yi for e-mailing me; this long-coming blog post was in part constructed from the correspondence I've had with him.