Back into the swing

Okay, getting back into the swing of things this semester is proving more difficult than I thought. I'm totally forgetting things: my keys, homework, or blog,and frankly, I don't like it. My mom suggests keeping an agenda, but I've never liked those. Maybe just a calendar book, to keep track of big events? In any case, I need to get organized.

TOK is proving an interesting course, if not exactly as I had envisioned. I suspect that it really depends on your teacher, how the course will go. Still, reading Plato on day 2 is n't what can be classified as an easy course.

Not much too interesting to report, but I've got to go.
Au revoir,
Ace

A Day of Freedom

Exams are over! No projects to worry about! No homework to keep up with! No class today! The day between semesters is the one day a year we are truly free. On normal weekends we are usually worrying about the big project due next week, or the math test on Monday, and even over the Winter Break we had work to do. Today, we have none because semester one is completely over and semester two has not begun.

The Math and History exams went well. Everyone was surprised at how easy the math exam was. I'm willing to bet some of us over-thunk parts of it. The history exam was just three essays, as it will be for the actual IB exam. We had about 45 minutes to write each one, though it wasn't broken up - just one big 2.5 hour block. I'm surprised I managed to be done in time, I'm usually a really slow writer. I hope I did well!
Tomorrow semester two begins. I've got Chem, Bio, TOK (Theory of Knowledge), and French. I'm excited to say the least, the TOK teacher is awesome.

The poll results are in!
Which exam are you most dreading? ...
... French 2 (12%)
... English 2 (12%)
... Math 9 (56%)
... History 0 (0%)
... Other 1 (6%)
... No exams for me! 2 (12%)

Obiously math is scary! And History is benign. But tomorrow semester two begins. I've got Chem, Bio, TOK (Theory of Knowledge), and French. I'm excited to say the least, the TOK teacher is awesome. But now I have to go shovel snow.
Goodbye,
Ace

Exams and Ubuntu

And once more I miss my Friday post. This will be in its stead and I'll update again probably on Tuesday or Wednesday after exams. Speaking of which, French and English exams are over! French wasn't bad, there were a few things I read and was unsure of, but English was fun. I'm afraid I was a little incoherent in my commentary by the end though, because I was rushing to get it done in time. But the greatest challenge still looms ahead: Math. I'm studying now actually, wondering what to put on my cheat sheet. Our teacher gives us cheat sheets depending upon how organized we've kept our notebooks and if we've kept up with the homework. The less you did, the smaller your sheet. I know some people who didn't even bother asking for one because they knew it would be tiny. I was lucky enough to get a full page, even though I wasn't expecting that much. Last year I got about a quarter of a page and that sufficed to get me through, tough there is a greater volume of information in this course. In any case, we'll see how it goes. These exams don't count for IB, so I'm not as concerned as I will be next year come April (and this year for French).

I have gone Ubuntu trigger-happy. I'm installing it EVERYWHERE (or trying to). I tried to install it on my iPod, but I couldn't get it to partition without killing the actual iPod. I entertained the thought of installing it in a shoe, but decided that could be a little smelly. I'm currently reading up on getting it on a USB flash drive and letting it live a while. At the current moment I don't actually have any operating system installed on my computer. I'm running off the Ubuntu LiveCD and reformatting my hard drive. I've been entertaining the thought of making my desktop computer into a server and just having my external hard drive (which is over three times bigger than my internal one) as my default computer. I see no reason this shouldn't work, besides that the server might be down whenever I use my computer.

In any case, this blog isn't for my Ubuntu-musings. And I have to go study. See you at the Suicide (Math Studying) Party tonight [7pm, on MSN, message me].

Farewell,
Ace

Exams

Dun-dun-dun! One more day before exams start! Not IB Exams, mind, just the regular OSSD exams for us semestered schools. Everyone's stressed, because today we had a Math Test, yesterday some people had the English IOP for Frankenstein, and since Thursday untill tomorrow the practice French Orals have been going on. I spent the weekend doing mostly History homework (sorry for missing another post this Friday!). Saturday I went over to a friend's house to film a bonus project about Fredrick Delano Roosevelt and Sunday I illustrated two Political Cartoons about him. We've been studying the Great Depression and FDR's "New Deal" for the past little (long) while.

There is going to be a "Suicide Party" on MSN Sunday afternoon/evening, for everyone in the SL Math course. Be sure to bring your questions and expertice, and we'll all try not to die on Monday during the eaxm.

So, I'm being yelled at to study French (my first exam, Thursday). I really don't want to. It's just going to be a simulation of the IB Exam, with three reading comprehension excercises. They're pretty easy, and other than aquireing random vocab there isn't much to do as far as studying goes. As for my other exams, English and History, they're just going to be essays (whoopie, five essays to write!). We have more essays for History actually than English, so that's a little comical. There are a few sets of plans for post-exam stress releif, some individual, some in groups. Hot bubble baths, massages, going skating (ask Beck about it if you want in), or out for a Chinese food binge.

Poll Results from forever ago:
My pollyphasic postponement...

... About time, you crazy fool!	1 (12%)
... Why did you stop? Your slow descent into insanity was amusing me.	3 (37%)
... Why did you stop? You were doing so well!	3 (37%)
... I'll be looking forward to your next trial, good luck!	1 (12%

Not much else, except that I might be starting up polyphasic sleeping again after exams. I'll be posting to thepolyphasicjourney.tk, so check it out!
Bye now,
Ace

Missed a Post!

Whoops. I missed my end-of-week post and didn't even post yesterday (Monday). I'll try to make up for it here.

Getting back to school was good. Not everyone was quite as excited as I, however nobody really begrudged it. The only panic was really the Math Task.

Wednesday night was long. Few people in my IB SL Math class got more than six hours sleep. Many got as little as four hours, and one of my classmates was up all night. Why? Our Investigative Task for the IB Math SL Portfolio (internal assessment) was due Thursday. I personally started it on the last Friday of the Break and finished up the majority on Sunday. Many of my classmates started about the same time or even later, leaving them awake late into Thursday morning. Day of, everybody was nodding off by third period, except those who had ingested caffeine earlier. After school, I actually took a nap for half an hour and would happily have slept longer, had my mom not woken me to do homework.

We also got a long talk about our French Orals, which we will be doing a "practice" of this week. I've got to talk for four minutes, in complete French about American Politics. It may sound daunting, but as our IB Coordinator (and French teacher) said, four minutes really isn't a lot.

The other History class got their Historical Investigations back on Friday, though the general results I don't know. We haven't received ours back yet, although they are marked, due to some issues. Our teacher says there is a need to speak with a few people personally first.

My weekend was interesting! Friday I was invited bowling, to find upon arrival that I would be attending the birthday party of a friend of a friend. My friend did not actually know anyone except the birthday girl, hence bringing myself and another friend, and when the birthday girl was late we skipped out to Zehrs and bought hummus and pita bread to snack on. We also got a gingerbread "Santa's Sleigh" kit, on sale for 50 cents (awesome deal right?) and actually built it in the bowling alley. We didn't feel like eating it though, so we just left it on the party table. Saturday, I went with a friend to the by-annual Psychic Expo held in town. I got a "proffesional discount" with Christena Linka because I had been in contct with her husband, Peter, about potentially starting up doing readings for money. I haven't got a job, and I ofen find myself in want of cash, so I figured doing something love, and getting payed, would be awesome. Not something I want to do for life, like the Linkas, but there's plenty of interest expressed by my classmates whenever I bring my cards to school, so I'm doing a bit of a blitz week now to give everyone who wants one a reading, and then I'm going to start advertising my "business". Also, I got a new Tarot Deck while there, Raidant Rider-Waite, because my beloved Morgan-Greer deck was destroyed by a lively puppy last year. Peter actually surprised me by buying me a pendulum as a gift and I learned about Druid sticks, which I think I'll incorporate into my readings sometime.

Yesterday I meant to post here, but I got caught up an a 6-hour instalation of Ubuntu 8.10 onto my WD MyPassport Essential External Hard Drive, which, if you don't know, are an open-source Linux-based operating system (like Windows or Mac OS) and something simmilar to a really big USB drive, respectively. Ubuntu itself is not dificult to install, indeed it's easy, but I was having issues doing it on the External Hard Drive. I did get it eventually, but now my computer won't boot Windows without the drive plugged in, it just returns a "GRUB Loader Error", but I won't get into that. I'm currently running Ubuntu, and it's going to take some getting used to and figuring out. This is the first computer tinkering I've done, so I'm still a newbie with it all.

This week our French Oral Presentations start, with me on Friday (Day 2). Monday our "creative" segment for History class is due, and we have a Math test somewhere in there. Thursday exams start and the Thursday after we're into the new semester!

I hope that filled in the blanks sufficiently, and now I'm off to learn some more about Ubuntu.
Adieu,
Ace

Welcome 2009

First day of school  in 2009 is over! I was unusually uppity today. I'm usually a happy person, but I have a lot of unexplained gleeful energy today. We didn't do much in class today. Our math teacher started our Statistics Unit, but it was just a review of bar graphs and histograms. English we wrote children's poems and stories for the son of one of the teachers at our school who, at the age of only three, was diagnosed with lukemia over the break. In History we talked about a potential trip to Washington that our teacher would be organizing. In French we looked up articles  in issues of "L'Actualite" - a magazine out of Quebec that focuses on global issues - to find a topic for our ISU, which will be a practice for the Oral Exam we will be doing in May.

In other news, exams and Science Fair are looming nearby. Exams are in about twelve days and besides the usual ill-feeling toward such a time, I've also got a good friend leaving at the end of the semester. Not out of the city or anything, in fact the other school is rather close to ours, but it's still a change. We met in grade nine and were fast friends, and though we were obviously going to separate eventually, I'd rather expected it to be a year or so later. Still, with luck, I myself will be leaving at the end of this school year. I still have to send in my application for the UWCs, but the deadline is February 15th, so I've got to hurry! In any case, Science Fair is comming fast and my project is untouched. Got to start working on that... Also got to finish the website for it. I offered to do it over the break and I'm mostly done. I've just got to upload mostly, and fill in a little of it.

Nothing much else going on though. I had an optometrist's appointment today and luckily my perscription didn't change. I'm getting new frames though, but I won't let the cat out of the bag about all that quite yet. I've also got a New Year's resolution: to do my math homework on time. It's something I often put off and end up forgetting about, but I really want to get back on track.

A note about my polyphasic blog entries - I'll be moving them off to another blog. It was fun publishing them here, but it looks really cluttered now and there are about 45 posts that are barely IB-related. I'll leave up a link to them, but they've got to go.  Also, I'm surprised about the amount of support I got for my experiment. A lot of people were really excited about it and gave me much encouragement throughout. Thank you everyone!

And now time to go fulfill that resloution,

Au revoir,

Ace

Break Work

Good morning world!
I wanted to post a non-polyphasic sleeping update, just about what the holidays probably look like for the more normal IBs who are not trying to mess up their internal clocks. We've got no homework in French or History, and in English, all we have to do is read halfway through Frankenstein, which is a rather small book as is. Not much work at all, it seems. But we also have a Math Task to do, and this one gets sent into "IB World". Once I'm better adapted to polyphasic, I'll probably talk more about this all.

I was speaking with my friend, who had a very funny story to tell me yesterday. With permission, I post it here:

But hey, listen to this.
Somehow, I got the idea into my head that...[our math teacher] said we had to go to school on Monday to take a math test.
Like...because we didn't have enough time to finish and shit.
...and I really really thought this.
When I woke up this morning.
I was totally in sleepy panic mode
(don't know how that works)
it was all, A:LKgj:LKDGJ NOT READY NOT READY MUST STUDY [FORGET] HOLIDAYS AHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
...WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO MEEEE? ;__;

I replied with, "My friend, you are IB."

That's all I have for you right now, keep checking back for Polyphasic Updates!