Last Stretch of Junior Year Day 30 - Don't Stop Believin Arrangment Preliminary Draft

This arrangement of Don't Stop Believin' is getting a bit out of hand. I forced myself to go to bed last night around 00:30 when I simply was too tired to continue working.  By working, I meant doing some calculus multiple choice questions and working on my arrangement.  The thing is that the piece is not that hard to arrange.  However, some things like voicing and harmony are too complicated to do in 20 minutes - the amount of time I had for working on the piece before I went to school.  In general, the only problem I have now is an underdeveloped viola part and transcribing the guitar solo about three minutes in the piece.

Either way, I'm glad one draft is done.  And with the rehearsal today, hopefully we (we as in my ego and superego) can make adjustments to the arrangment accordingly based on the stuff I heard.  There are some people in the class who are very passionate in hating this piece and really not wanting to do it.  And basically here's this: I am basically arranging the piece I want to do.  They can't tell me what I want to arrange, and should they be very passionate about what song they want to do, they should arrange it themsevles.  So today, I'm goign to give the warning, "for all of you who don't like this piece, please keep share you comments now.  I dont' want to hear any criticism except about my arrangment except for  how it could be improved based on our rehearsal."

I simply don't need any more belittlement in orchestra.

Last Stretch of Junior Year Day 26 - Turkey

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VID00089.MP4 (8022 KB)

While driving to school this morning I saw this turkey on my yard.  The dad told me to hurry up and get into the car, and to make sure the turkey doesn't get into our garage.  Well, here's some footage I got as we drove off to school.

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FlightGear F-14 Supersonic Flight

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flight gear f-14.wmv (2576 KB)

I was searching through some of my older recordings I made with fraps, and it's just amusing how many little snippets of flight I've recorded.  Some of them are just pointless videos, and they take up a lot of space...close to 300 MB per video on average.  I'm basically deleting a lot of them, but I found this one, and I wanted to quickly save it before deleting it.  Since it really isn't that good of a video, I decided to just quickly publish it in windows movie maker...so now I have this. 

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Last Stretch of Junior Year Day 22 - Last day of STAR testing ever

So every year, sometime in April, I have been required to take these standardized tests that show my overall competence in subjects like English, math and history.  Yeah, I've done this for a little too long and it's getting a bit annoying.  However, starting in high school, these tests started becoming amusing, and I started laughing at how some questions are so badly written, or how easy some questions are.  Of course, having taken Summative High School math twice, I can safely say it's rather stupid in that there are some things, like probability questions, are never really gone over by our teachers.  But, the literature that is chosen for the English examination is repetitively interesting.  And heck, it's not a timed test...so I could spend a very long time reading all of the good poetry and excerpts from essays and novels, and then consider working on the questions.  So projected scores, math will be highest, followed by science, and English and then history. Exact numbers, I don't know, nor do I care.  All I know is that I'll miss being able to skip class to take this test.

Last Stretch of Junior Year Day 18 - The student videographer

It is currently 02:10 as I am writing this post.  I had basically fallen asleep approximately four hours ago, after I finished watching "The Best of James" Thomas and Friends video.  It's kinda sad watching classic shows as such, especially if they are on VHS instead of DVD.  All I know is that I can hardly imagine what it would have been like creating one of those episodes using train set models.  And I'm totally spoiled with all of these digital video manipulation tools for today.

In general, I have been spending time working on producing a 5 minute clip on art forms during the great depression.  Compiling music videos/spoken words and other stuff shouldn't be too hard, but sometimes it just requires too much patience.  I am frankly too tired to want to spend very much time on splicing clips and narration together.

One thing that I have totally been very bad with lately is remembering to write a post everyday.  And likewise, I'm still working on organizing and producing those videos I recorded from Lake Tahoe during spring break.  Not to mention, I also have some blog posts in a document on the netbook that I have yet to finish writing.

Anyway, this AP Lang video will all be over in four hours, should I need that much time.

Last Stretch of Junior Year Day 17 - Sibelius 5.2.5

I am basically spending some time arranging "Don't Stop Believin'" by Steve Perry, Neal Schon and Jonathan Cain, performed by Journey.  Okay, most Americans know this piece already.  Basically, I am quickly scribbling out an arrangement of this piece for string orchestra (along with electric guitar, bass, and hopefully, drums) so that my orchestra can have something to sightread.  I've already played around with this song back in COSMOS, where my cluster performed this piece for the talent show.  And I'm the bored person pretending to look cool, by being the conductor.  In general, I more or less know the song very well by now, since we've had so many rehearsals there already.  This is my justification for arranging the piece. 

So I've busted out Sibelius to start writing in some parts.  And when the program loaded, it told me to check for updates.  So I looked at that, and my web browser pulled up saying "update to Sibelius 5.4." And then I saw "or Sibelius 5.2.5 for windows" on the website.  It's hard to imagine I've had this program for so long now.

Last Stretch of Junior Year Day 15 - AP Lang Practice Test

I am seriously behind in writing these blog posts.  But frankly, it doesn't matter since I haven't done anything important, interesting, worthwhile, exciting, necessary or exillerating for the past couple days since I went to Lake Tahoe.  Basically, a good deal of juniors are going to be taking a practice AP Lang test in the library, which means missing periods 1, 2, 3 and 4/lunch. And just to make sure we take it seriously, our instructor decided (out of the kindness of his heart) to count the three essays and multiple choice section as part of our grade.  That's all for now....

Last Stretch of Junior Year Day 12 - What happened here?

Today I got back in school since Spring Break ended.  And I am currently writing this on 2010-04-13 02:00, meaning I'm definitely staying awake doing stuff.  I frankly don't remember what I even accomplished today, because I'm still extremely scatterbrained and sleep deprived from the night before.

I am theoretically working on my AP Lang project right now, since it is extremely important we have everything be completely done for peer edits on Tuesday.  What I'm in charge of for now is to finish my part of the essay and finalize a bibliography.  Also, I'm supposed to work on my note cards for any additional sources I may have found besides the ones I already found.

Okay, other stuff I'm supposed to do...Spanish, where I'm supposed to look up some more information on Barcelona, Spain.  I will be writing 10 sentences about the place, in particular relating to a picture of the city.  This shouldn't be all that bad.

Also, I need to study for physics, if I can even find the time in this night to do so.  So yeah...I need to remember stuff regarding radioactive decays, and the amount of energy released, and some equations telling me how to compute the kinetic energy of those particles moving around, etc.  And no I don't really know what I'm talking about (yet).

So all in all, I basically have got a good deal of stuff left over for my first night right after Spring Break.  Also, I simply was too lazy to write daily entries for my time at Lake Tahoe.  I have one of the days drafted on a document on the netbook while I was on my way down from the mountain, but the other days I just got lazy or something.  And for this very moment, I don't know whether that ski trip was beneficial to my sanity or not.  I got very lucky to have another chance to go up the mountain, but now that it's all over, I'm in a slight depression.  All I can say, upon reflecting on the past few days, is "what happened here?"

Last Stretch of Junior Year Day 7 / Spring Lake Tahoe Day 1 - SLOW Internet Connection

This is post is also written late, but I don't care.  Basically, I managed to get out of the house to go skiing/snowboarding one final time.  I had been looking forward to it for a while at home.  But in general, it simply wasn't as exciting as it was in February.  But I can say that I got to sit right seat on the car ride up, and I was able to get approximately 40 minutes of continuous scenery (yeah, with some small cuts between).  Yeah...days to upload this large amount of data...and yet Embassy Suites still call it "high speed Internet."  These videos and others I recorded that day needed the past few days uploading to YouTube... while I was busy on the mountain.  And I must say that Embassy Suites is relatively enticing with it's floor plan and interior design.  Seeing a central atrium and a view all the way up to the roof really reminds me of the design of cruise ships.  Either way, I"m going to quit writing now and reflect on yesterday, since I am writing this post on Friday, April 9, for Wednesday, April 7.

AP Lang Project Status Update 2

 Ideas for Video Project

Order: Literature, poetry, music

Clips from videos, vintage-look for videos

Author pictures should be zoomed out/video

Clips of Depression

Videos of music/music recordings

Look for: Jazz band clips, depression clips/pictures, famours author/musicians pictures, pictures of the radio

Last Stretch of Junior Year Day 6 - Legit Workday

Although this blog post is supposed to be for Tuesday (2010-04-06), yet is written two days late (2010-04-08), I feel that it's better to write about this day rather than skipping this day.  I managed to get my AP Lang project members together to do some "complicated" group work.  The most important thing we got down were some recordings of the poetry we selected.  All other stuff will have to be searched for at some website or archive. Or if I get bored, I could perform some music selections, as long as it pertains to "art in the 1930s."  Or something like that.

I also had to leave for another trip to Lake Tahoe (2010-04-07).  Why...well I kinda had two left over passes from when I went in February.  That's approximately $140 wasted if I don't go.  And besides, I think to most people who know me well enough, skiing is more important than a lot of normal everyday activities.  So is snowboarding...since I took two lessons at Boulder Lodge in February, and I feel it is another one thing to add to my tiny list of athletic capabilities I have. This hopefully explains why "mundane" desires are reducing my productivity in this project (and in school in general).

Last Stretch of Junior Year Day 5 - First Post I am Behind on Writing

I remember in COSMOS I basically managed to write some posts the following day.  Meaning, if the post was for Wednesday, I wrote it on Thursday.  Basically nothing happened today, except more goofing off on FSX and reading some papers on some Great Depression musicians.  I believe I had this next Cessna Citation 500 that I installed that day.  Anyway, it's been two days since I wrote for this post, which is kinda embarrassing.

Last Stretch of Junior Year Day 4 - Set Autopilot for Lang and Calc

One of the projects I have over the break is this AP Lang research paper on art during the Great Depression.  So today, one of my partners came over to find some more poetry that we could possibly use in the essay, and possibly read out loud in the video.  I have the list of some poems we found in this other blog post.

So one of the songs that I am now practicing for piano is "Charleston" by Mátyás Seiber.  I played it - or rather I attempted to play it - and noticed it had this sort of jazz-style syncopation.  At the bottom, I noticed that it said "Copyright 1933 by Schott Music International, Mainz."  I thought that this music might work for the Lang project since it's in the 1930s.  Plus, the music had a rather rushed and anxious tone.  But then I remembered my piano teacher told me he was a Hungarian composer.  I think I would be better off using American music.

Later in the day, I was working on some AP Calculus stuff.  This time I was reviewing polar graphs, how to find the length of the curve, and the area of the curve, and the like.  All I know is that I seriously need to memorize the half-angle and double-angle formulas for sin^2 x and sin 2x, etc.  And, I'll need to review some techniques of integration, such as splitting it up, using trigonometric substitution, and other fun stuff.

Not only did I review math, but also I reviewed English.  I worked on some sample ACT English problems. The style is a bit different compared to what I'm used to with the writing section in the SAT.  And obviously, for anyone who bothers to read this blog, my writing style is far from perfect.  I know I'd get about a 3 for each blog post had it been an essay prompt to reflect on my day.  Why?  Stylistic errors, poor structure, inconsistent tenses, less than feasible transitions, distracting digressions, grammatical errors and all kinds of other components of writing. Regardless, I still managed to get 32 out of the 45 sample questions correct.  I was too lazy to time myself, since this is my first time, and because it's just a rough idea of the areas I need to practice.  And heck no, of course I don't have patience to review the exact reason why I got each problem wrong.

So to end the day, I was looking around on flightsim.com to search for some scenery and some aircraft.  I found this Cessna Citation 500 I used to love flying on back when I still had my Dell  Inspiron laptop, and before the hard drive failure (which one of these days I need to find some data recovery service to retrieve my files).  So seizing the opportunity, I quickly downloaded that and installed it.  I also downloaded this Qantas A330-300, this Queen Mary cruise ship (yeah, it's configured as an "aircraft"), and some scenery for Albany, New York.  Flight sim communities are really the reason why FSX is not going to get boring for me any time soon.

So uh...all that's left is to actually enjoy playing around with the stuff I downloaded.

AP Lang Project Status Update 1

Here are the poems we selected (for now) to be incorporated into our video and essay:

Langston Huges

• Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria
• Revolution
• Cubes (for style)
• Poets to Patron

Archibald MacLeish

• Background with Revolutionaries
• Invocation to the Social Muse
• From Public Speech (1936) "Speech to Those Who Say Comrades"

Robert Frost

• "A Lone Striker"
• "To a Thinker"
• "Not Quick Social"

E.E. Cummings

• "if i"
• 13th poem from "New Poems (1938)"

Donald Justice

• "Pantoum of The Great Depression"

Wallace Stevens

• "The Man with the Blue Guitar"

Last Stretch of Junior Year Day 3 - Vectors to the Airport and AP Physics Test

I can safely say that I haven't bothered to think about any of the work I'm supposed to do during the break.  This is evidenced by the 3+ hours I've spent on flight simulation today.  Of course, this is not entirely true since I've done some academic stuff.

According to College Board, music is theoretically an academic study, as evidenced by its AP Music Theory test.  Therefore my piano lesson today is an academic endeavor.  Basically I was working on the B-flat minor scale for today.  There are of course other pieces I was working on, but I'm too lazy to write them out.

After my piano lesson, I reviewed some kinematics for physics.  Here's where the lame blog post title comes into play.  In basic projectile motion, every physics student in the right mind will remember to break up the force of a person throwing  a ball into its horizontal and vertical components to solve annoying maximum height and time to hit the ground problems.  Likewise, I reviewed that Work = (Force)(distance)(cos θ).  After studying the calculus way about how this works (the dot product of force and displacement (vectors) resulting in a scalar), it really makes sense how I got this formula in the first place.  This is probably why Physics B and high school physics in general must be so hard for teachers to teach.

As for the other part of my title, vectoring an aircraft is interesting.  Especially when the Air Traffic Control in Microsoft Flight Simulator X gives me so many instructions to turn in xyz direction before I can even respond.  Yeah, obviously a bug I've only experienced a few times:

• Southwest 420, turn right heading zero niner five. [1 second] 
• Southwest 420, turn right heading one zero zero. [1 second]  
• Southwest 420, turn left heading zero eight zero. [1 second]  
• Southwest 420, turn right heading zero niner zero.  Airport is at your 1 o'clock, one five miles.  Report runway in sight.  [1 second]
• Southwest 420, turn left heading zero eight five. [1 second]
• Southwest 420, turn right heading zero niner five. [1 second]

Fortunately there was no such thing today when I was flying a Vietnam Airlines Airbus A321 to Ho Chi Minh.  In another flight, I was flying a Ryanair Boeing 737-800 from Liverpool to Dublin.  Interesting thing is that their cheapest fair available for this flight is £6.00, without additional fees.  Adding one checked bag would cost £15.00, which is more than your own fare.  No wonder Southwest is boasting that bags fly free.

And these two flights only took up about two hours.  I used the other hour reading about how ILS works in the Learning Center tab in FSX.  All I know is that there are some  vectors I should follow for an ILS landing, according to the Jeppesen chart for xyz airport.  And no, I have not been able to successfully do a full instrument landing after flying around for so long now.  All I've really done are visual landings with a little help looking at the moving map on the Garmin GPS. So er...I guess that if I wanted to get bored, I could do this:

Say I have this runway 9 (which I got off of Flightsim.com obviously).  I'll pretend it's 3000 meters long.  So if I wanted to express this runway as a vector.  I'll say it is <3000, 0, 0> or perhaps 3000i + 0j.  That's obviously something you'd never do if you were actually seriously doing physics, calculus or aeronautical navigation.

Last Stretch of Junior Year Day 2 - 42 Day

It's finally spring break!  Or well, on the district calendar, only the school days (April 5-9) are marked as spring break.  It doesn't' really matter, and I would just like to say I hope I can accomplish what I want to do this week off.  That means: clean up my desk, work on AP Lang research project, go snowboarding and actually go down a run without falling down, organize my pictures and videos and work on various musical pieces.  I'll get into specifics later, after I write down what happened today.  But I must say that those who read or care to read this blog...everything state is true, but I do not wish to write out every detail of my life because life is short.

Today I gave Ellango a music cd as his 42 Day present in Orchestra class.  Basically the Beatles' "Yesterday" is one of his favorite songs.  I basically looped the song over again over for the entire disk.  It kinda is a waste of a CD, but it's a mundane token of well, uh, I guess we can call it friendship.

While in Orchestra, Mrs. Calonico was being nice and decided to make banana bread for us after a job well done at the concert the day before.  And thus I received an "assignment" for helping out with arranging music from "Up."

As more evidence that the day before spring break is more or less a joke, I played this element creating game thingy where 4 players had marbles represent protons, neutrons and electrons.  The object of the game is to score as many points as possible by creating a stable nucleus, a neutral atom, or a stable and neutral atom, based on instruction cards drawn.  It definitely teaches a lot about physics and helps to review for the AP Physics Test.

I'll skip further into the day.  I basically stayed after school to work with my calculus teacher on a music project.  I was playing around on a drum set, and I just have to say it was another one of those brain-stimulating activities when I'm trying to learn something new.  The feeling was much like my first time hopping on a snowboard and trying to learn what to do.

And in conclusion, I have been wasting time downloading some aircraft for Microsoft Flight Simulator X, while doing physics.

Last Stretch of Junior Year Day 1

I am just tired right now.  I am sitting on my desk, with work out, and two browsers open for different e-mail accounts.  I also forgot that I had an orchestra concert after "waking up" just now.

The concert was not the best our school has ever had, and I'm sure other people agree with me.  Of course, it's always nice being able to see elementary school students come and try to play what they have learned after those few months of training.   And really...just having any kind of music program in elementary school really does help in giving slow people the opportunity to have a "head start." 

Overall, I gave most groups an excellent as their CMEA rating.  I have the paper with my comments somewhere in that red folder I brought to the concert.  Basically excellent means between 80-89 out of 100.  I did take points off for rudeness.  A lot of kids don't have the patience to sit through a concert with their mouth shut...or at least closed while another group is playing a piece.  And that included musicians from my group as well, High School Intermediate Orchestra.

But at least we had a little fun with ourselves.  We managed to play very badly on purpose for the first few measures of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 3.  And then we had a half-spirited decree: "April Fools!"  And then we played it for real.  Either way, it was interesting, but the audience didn't really deem it all that funny since we didn't say "April Fools" together.

Aside from the concert, I also had this little assignment for journalism for who I would interview if I could.  I was thinking, I'll choose Mr. T.  After all, I've watched "The A-Team" for quite a while now.  I would really like to hear him say "I pity the fool!" in person though.  My friends (who are not in journalism) also gave interesting answers, including people Bill Gates. 

Lastly, I'd like to quickly mention Spanish class, since we are now learning about the conditional tense.  English: I would like to buy a hamburger.  Español: Me gustaría comprar una hamburguesa. So yeah.  I would like to go to bed, but I would have to finish my work first.


I'll have a title for each post in this series starting tomorrow, 42 day.

United Airlines Boeing 747 flying to Hawaii

Here is my plane en route to Hawaii...I didn't finish the flight yet, and I'll take a few screenshots when I get there.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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