Short Week

Man, my body feels like it has been dragged by a car. My joints are hurting from Field Day, granted I didn't do much to help my team, but then again I rarely do anything physical in the first place. Field Day went from good to bad when my forum started to lose some events. We'll do better next year, granted I'll be a senior and seniors rarely go to Field Day anyway, we'll have a better chance. Now on to CP, this week we didn't do much other than watching TED videos and a spaghetti video. I thought my problem solving skills weren't bad, but my idea to use the spaghetti tower was based on stability not on height. I thought using a triangular pyramid would be enough, but it would seem that I forgot one of the most important rules of walls. You need to have braces to reinforce the walls or else the structure will fall down. The TED videos then made me curious about why every other country uses more advanced Capcha's than 1+1. I feel a little more stupid. Argh, I also didn't finish all of the Jeroo labs either which means I have to do them over the break. All right that's it for this week.

11/18

My god, this week is finally over. I can't wait till Field Day and then Thanksgiving! I need a break. The weekends aren't enough anymore. Okay, onto Computer Programming, we are continuing with Jeroo. I finally finished with lab 3B, pinball island or something, the name escapes me, but there was pinball in there. It was super annoying, because every time I wrote a piece of code, it wouldn't work and I had to scrap it. If this is what Python is, then I'm already a little apprehensive about my ability to work with it. On to the next one, 3C, I am actually making more progress on it than 3B. I already cleared one circle of flowers and one circle of net, although I'm stuck at that part. Sad, isn't it? In any case, I am surprised that some people already past Labs 3 and 4 and on to lab 5. Whatever, I'll be there one day, perhaps after thanksgiving break. Ah, life, you can be so cruel sometimes. Oh yeah, another thing we did was that Jeroo While loops quiz. It was pretty funny, I scored a 50 on the first attempt and then a 90 on the second attempt. But the cool thing was that I forgot about the answers and I actually answered from what I knew. It's really different when you go from memory and by application. One day, I'll be able to do well in those quizzes. Well, I guess that it for this week.

11-11-11

Woohoo, another week is over and better yet I found out that I am staying in AISD. That means I won't leave LASA and my friends. That sure was a load off my chest. Now on to computer programming, this week we're having more fun with Jeroo. This program is slightly annoying because of the syntax. I can not seem to visualize the movement of the Jeroo sometimes and to fix the problem. My brain sort of hurts after going through each lab. Labs 1 were sort of easy, labs 2 slightly more difficult, and labs 3 so far has been more difficult. Methods, and loops sound the same to me, but loops require "whiles" and "ifs." My main problem is with direction and movement, which is basically the point of Jeroo. More and more each day, Jeroo seems to be more like building/doing a game. It's fun when I solve them but even then I need help which sort of takes away some of my pride. But that does not matter because I will surely find out how to do that stupid "pinball island" lab. Curse you Bob for not being able to move like a snake and just go down row by row collecting those flowers. At least I didn't do anything like David, that was weird. I guess that's it for now because it was a 4 day week. Hooray for 3 day weekends!

Finishing Scratch and Beginning Jeroo

Ahhh, we are finally done with Scratch which in retrospect was not that bad. What is better is that I finished with all of the assignments that we were meant to do. Hooray for me, today was sort of cool after all. The easiest one was probably the Guess that secret number, that one was more intuitive rather than that Random Character program. I had so much trouble with that. Maybe it's because we needed to add Random X + Current X and vice versa with Y as well. RockPaperScissors was also a pain, well mainly because my head was spinning and I was dizzy while I was making it and the numbers got scrambled up. Apparently I did not know that I put 1 as rock, 2 as rock and 3 as scissors. I am an idiot sometimes. Fortunately I feel much better afterwards and could finish it today. Oh yeah, the new thing we are working with is Jeroo, apparently named after an animal living near (please forgive my spelling) the "Sangot" islands? I still can't find a picture of it, I got a picture of a woman instead, and art too. Jeroo is about arrows, islands, flowers, nets and water. The jeroo is in the shape of an arrow and you guide it around the island using syntax like Bob= Jeroo(). Your jeroo's name is Bob and the () signify that it is at the location of (0,0), the island also uses a (y,x) coordinate system which messed me up at first but got better later. I also finished the 3 assignments, yay. But it was mainly hops, turns, plant, and toss. Hope it stays like this....That's it for today.

Worst Week of My Life

Ugh, if ever a moment in my life where I felt like I wanted to die is this week. But that is another issue, not about computer programming. Now I will talk about computer programming, let's see it was mainly about working with Scratch in more complicated areas, primarily working with variables. I have no idea how I even got through all of this. All I know is that variables are blocks that we make and can customize it to other blocks. We have mainly used variables with loops but I am sure that we'll get to more complicated topics later. Another thing is that we took a quiz over Scratch, and I did not do as well as I wanted to. I missed 3 out of 10, so that means I got a 70. 2 of the questions I would have gotten right if I had just noticed that "say" was at the very end, so the output would have only said the last number said. Darn it. Darn it. Argh, I hate you so much right now scratch. I am stuck on the character not moving outside of a 100x100x100x100 box. The only thing that I think can happen is that the sprite is going to hate to move back and forth repeatedly. The only problem is that that is probably not going to go well since I can't even do that. Curse you my ineptitude. I guess that is as much as I got to this week and that is it.

Scratch

This week, we used "Scratch" which was very fun. I actually knew how to use it, because it was not that hard to learn but it was probably to understand the functions of each command. In all truth, I missed out on how to make a keyboard because I was not here on Friday, I was at the Austin Film Festival. It was fun, sort of because I received some bad news while I was there but I cheered up, a little. But on Thursday, I was able to make my sprites "sing" and by sing I mean utter noises and sounds in a rhythmic fashion. Technically I just combined two  or three different tunes and then just said that was a song. Well, it was a song, it had music...and a wolf howling. Whatever. I also made a scene with broadcast. It was sort of making of play and that you write the dialogue. Basically you use the "looks" section and then choose "say _________ for __ seconds" and then your sprite will say something for said amount of minutes. Somehow it ended up being a story about a loan shark and a victim who did not have the money. The loan shark was going to break the kneecaps of the victim, but the story sort of ended there which may be good. In any case, I had fun with Scratch and that's it for this week.

Website Completed!

All right, I managed to finish my first website. It looks mediocre, but I put a lot of time and effort in this undertaking, especially when you consider that the computer hates me. There were so many problems with the lightbox, a javascript tool, that was so annoying. I swear it worked at first and then something happened that completely screwed up the lightbox. But after I made separate folders and then copied exactly from the website, it became so much easier. HTML is not so bad after I learned about the basics, and CSS isn't either but I still think that I will have trouble in the future. On another note, we had a quiz this week in HTML and CSS. I think I got at least a solid 80 or so. I forgot that the smallest heading would be <h7> since it is larger than <h6>, but I didn't know that could happen because we were only shown <h6> so I assumed that was only as large that it could be. Some of the questions were about things I had not known about. I didn't know that you could change the bullet into a square or any other shape for the matter. I feel stupid now. Argh, I'm just glad the week is over and all I need to do now is finish the rest of my homework. That's it for today.