💾 Archived View for danielonit.flounder.online › journal_entries.gmi captured on 2023-12-28 at 15:03:41. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-05-24)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
______________________________________________________________________
<h1>Test</h1>
<p>This is a test.</p>
______________________________________________________________________
Tomorrow is my 17th birthday and I'm super excited! It's not just my birthday, but it's also my golden birthday! If you don't know what a golden birthday is, then don't be worried. I didn't even know what a golden birthday was until a few months ago. A golden birthday is when you turn the age that you were born on. For example, my birthday is May 17 and I'm turning 17 years old. Someone who was born on May 22, there golden birthday would be when they turn 28 years old.
______________________________________________________________________
I started reading a very interesting new book series called Foundation by Isaac Asimov. I'll try to not spoil it in this entry but it's very good and I think that people who love books about Science Fiction should check it out. There's this main character, Hari Seldon, who invented this new type of science called Psychohistory which is where he's able to predict what's going to happen in the future by looking at the present psychology of civilization. That's why the science is called psycho(psychology)-history. Anyway that's it for now. Bye!
______________________________________________________________________
Yesterday was Daylight Savings Time (DST) and so I overslept a little bit before school. Luckily I got here on time and so I didn't get marked tardy. I know that there's a lot of controversy with DST and some scientists are saying that it's a bad idea. In my school we're currently preparing for the upcoming standardized tests, called SBAC. They're so boring to prepare for! Anyway that's all I wanted to say. Goodbye for now!
______________________________________________________________________
A lot of stuff has happened since my last journal entry but since I was so busy witch school and stuff that I wasn't able to really post that much. I can write a journal entry now though so I'm going to talk about a few things that happened in between the two dates and upcoming information on things happening in the near future. So I had my first ever Karate tournament in San Francisco and it was very fun although I didn't get first place sadly. My mom's birthday is coming up and it's March 21, 2023 so it's 9 days from today's journal entry. I also saw a new movie yesterday that was very good although it was very gory in some parts. It's a British zombie movie and it's called Shaun of the Dead. I really suggest checking it out but just so you know it's R rated. Anyway that's pretty much it for today's journal entry but now I'm going to work on writing a new story which I will post in the new creative writing link that I put on the main page. Anyway goodbye for now!
______________________________________________________________________
Tomorrow is Valentine's Day and I don't have a Valentine so that kind of sucks. But a girl said that she'll give me 20 bucks if I serenade her friend on Valentine's Day. I'm thinking about it. Also, I have a job interview today at Little Caesar's. I hope that I get the job. Another thing that's happening today is that there's going to be an In-N-Out food truck at our school today and anyone who bought a 5-dollar ticket can now get a burger, drink, and chips. My friend, Ethan, got me the ticket for free last Friday and I'm very thankful to him for that. So I'm excited to get that burger today since I haven't had an In-N-Out burger in a very long time.
______________________________________________________________________
I went to karate class yesterday and so now I'm sitting here with three of my knuckles having ripped skin from punching so hard yesterday. I guess that's what I get for trying to prepare for the upcoming karate tournament. Also, Valentine's Day is in a week exactly and so today I asked a girl, from my English class, to be my Valentine but turns out that she has a boyfriend. So that kind of sucks. I don't know what to do now. I might just be by myself for Valentine's Day again. We'll see what happens in the future. The thing that sucks is that everyone I know is dating someone. All of my friends have girlfriends except for one and I'm feeling very left out for not dating someone. Anyway, I'm going to stop rambling and go so goodbye for now.
______________________________________________________________________
Today I rode around my high school on my bicycle and I'm going to go get a haircut later. I might also go to my friend's house and I have to finish my programming assignment so I'm very busy today. I might also watch a movie or show today but I don't know what to do yet.
______________________________________________________________________
I haven't posted here much in the past few days because it was the weekend and I was busy doing some personal projects. A lot of things happened that I would like to talk about and so I'm going to spill a lot of that info here on these digital pages. Firstly, I'm now part of a fun group chat that I created between a few of my friends from my 1st-period English class. Also, I went to my grandparents' house and I scanned a lot of their photos from their photo albums because all of the photos don't have digital copies. If anything happened to the photos it would be very bad. Anyway, I get bored easily and I had an idea of making a collection of websites that are cool to check out when bored so I made a list of them.
The Collection of Cool Websites
______________________________________________________________________
I remembered an American movie that I want to watch. It's called "Looper" and it's about this hitman who kills people who time travel into the past but one day the person that time travels back to get killed is himself. The trailer for the movie looked good and I want to watch the movie online sometime.
______________________________________________________________________
I started working on my project yesterday night. I thought of an idea that I thought sounded awesome. What if I created a Discord server where I would give access to all of the students at my school? There are about four thousand students at my school, so I think that the Discord server would get pretty chaotic but it seems like a very fun project that I would like to continue pursuing in the future.
______________________________________________________________________
Today is Wednesday and turns out that today at two in the morning there was an earthquake. I didn't feel it at all. I am such a deep sleeper I could easily get killed by the mafia. I decided to search and see what kind of info I could find out about it. It was a 4.2 Magnitude earthquake that happened 11 miles off of the coast of Malibu. That's kind of close to an earthquake. Among other news, you may have noticed that the format of this online journal changed. Before I used to write about five to six different online journal entries per day but now I only write about one per day. I decided that I liked to write it more this way instead of many entries because I plan to write for a longer time with the short posts. If I continually do long posts per day then I'll go crazy and probably stop doing it.
______________________________________________________________________
This girl, from my English class, baked this blueberry-lemon muffin and gave it to me. It was very delicious. I think that she did a wonderful job baking it and I would like to know the recipe that she used.
______________________________________________________________________
So school started again and I'm very tired. I don't really like school because it's difficult for people like me to sit in a cramped class with a lot of students trying to memorize numbing facts to prepare for a supposed game of Trivial Pursuit.
______________________________________________________________________
So it looks like my and my family might go visit some snow today. Might go sledding and other snow things you do. Some news about yesterday. First, turns out that it was Lunar New Year's Eve which is kind of cool. I suspected something because when I was at the mall a group of people dressed up in dragon costumes were banging on drums and others were there dressed in red and gold. A sad thing that happened yesterday, was that turns out that after I went to sleep at around 9-10 PM, a shooting happened in Los Angeles at around 11 PM with 10 people dying. That really sucks but also the killer is still on the loose and they haven't caught him yet which they kind of should. So that's pretty much, all that I've got. Enjoy your guys' day and see you later!
______________________________________________________________________
Sorry for being so late to journal today but I was busy the whole day and I just returned home about an hour and a half ago. In the morning we left to go take my sisters to a math Olympiad class and while we were there we went to a French bakery to get some breakfast. After that, we went to the mall to go get my dad's chair that he needed and walk around. Later, we went to a very cool animal circus that ended at around 5:30 PM. We went back home and I did some math homework for an hour. Then I practiced my Italian and that was about 30 minutes ago. So you can see that I was very busy today. Hopefully, I'll be less busy tomorrow so I can do some programming and I could go visit my friend.
______________________________________________________________________
I'm now in AVID and today I have basketball. I also have karate after the basketball class too and the reason for that extra karate class is that now that my competition is coming up I have to practice it five times a week instead of the usual two for the whole amount of time left until the competition so I don't get killed when I'm fighting during my fight(s).
I just had a math exam in Algebra 2 and I did pretty alright. I got a 12/15 which is a B or 80 percent however you want to think of it. I thought that I blanked on some of the subjects but other than that I was fine.
______________________________________________________________________
I did the History Day Project Presentation and I think that it went very well for us. I think that I did a pretty good job of relating our topics and ideas to the judges. Hopefully, we get a good grade on our project. The project grade consists of the project and the presentation. On the project, we got a 90/100, and hopefully, the presentation grade is good too.
This is the period during which I have to leave early and go present my History Day Project. I just want to go get it over with since I don't want to do it at all.
There's this awesome website for programming that is useful especially if you're not on a computer with a text editor and a programming language installed. Also a text editor, in my opinion, is better than an IDE for my case. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, let me explain. A programming language is a language like English or Russian except instead of it being used to communicate with people, it's used to communicate with robots and computers. A text editor and an IDE are both places to run the programming languages except for a few differences. While an IDE is made for people to code in that specific language only, a text editor can run many different programming languages. Text editors have much fewer features than IDE's and so are lighter on computers. My favorite programming languages are Python and C++ because I'm able to do a lot more different things with them can I can with other languages.
The website is called "replit.com" and it lets people like me run programming languages online. Other websites let you run programming languages in them like "code pad. site" except replit.com has much more features like an AI programmer and a debugger. A debugger is a useful tool that programmers use to solve issues with their code like bugs which is why it's called a debugger.
Today's Thursday and today I have my History Day Project Presentation. This project is one that I and my group of three did last semester. The topic we chose was Steven Spielberg: The Modern Blockbuster and the reason for that is because the prompt was about frontiers in history. We also had to choose someone or something from American History. The first person that our group chose was Alfred Hitchcock but it turns out that he was British so we couldn't use him as our person of study in the project. Also, we had to give the judges our documents for the project between 3-4 PM yesterday and 6-7 AM today. Yeah, you read that right. I didn't typo. 6-7 AM. What the hell? On a weekend I'm usually still sleeping at this time. I don't even get to school until around 7:11 AM and so the same thing happened today. Luckily, I at least got it to the judges but it was at around 7:30 AM.
______________________________________________________________________
I went to go do the written permit test at the DMV but there wasn't enough time for me to do it so I'll probably do it next Monday. The good news is that I was finally able to make my application and finally get the photo for the permit card.
Right now I'm in Chemistry class and the thing we're doing is pretty easy. We just finished our warmup and I did it quickly. Not trying to brag, just saying that it's an easy class if you pay attention. Chemistry isn't my favorite science subject though. My favorite science subject is physics. I don't count math as a science class even though it's known as a branch of science. In school, we call the math classes such as Algebra or Geometry, math classes and not science classes. The classes we call science classes are classes such as biology, chemistry, and physics. I like physics because it's just a really interesting subject that I love to research. I don't know anything about famous biologists or chemists but I know a ton about famous physicists like Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, and Neil Degrasse Tyson.
I always wondered how banks work. I know how other major businesses and companies are made but banks are confusing to understand. How are things that play with and control people's money created? I think that it must be much harder to make a bank than it is to make a general convenience store like Target. I learned something new about them last year that surprised me. Banks don't just have your money laying around in their vaults but they use people's money such as investing in the stock market. But don't be worried. The banks have a lot of actual professional investors on hand. Although, this exact way that banks use people's money is the exact reason why The Great Depression started. The only thing, that I know of, that's different between banks today and banks during The Great Depression is that banks today now, always have to keep some amount of money that they can't use just in case of an erratic drop in the stock market that causes the bank to lose a lot of money. I think about two hundred thousand dollars per person is saved just in case.
Also yesterday, the planner of the karate competition trip to San Francisco, told me that if I was going to go to the competition, then I would need to start doing karate five times a week instead of my usual two times. I would also need to start running a lot more on the weekends and even sometimes on the weekdays. The reason for the change in physical activity you ask? The reason for the change is because the people I'll be fighting in the competition will be my age and it will be very difficult for me if I don't start practicing a lot more because the karate competitions for people my age aren't a joke anymore and are very serious events.
Right now I'm in my Finance Management class and we just had to present our Google Slides presentation. I think that we did pretty well presenting it even though there were a few hiccups. Some hiccup was that each person was supposed to present their slide but a group member was missing and so I had to present their slide which I was badly informed on. Also, the teacher's computer/smart board made some loud pinging noises randomly throughout the presentation which threw us off a little bit.
I made some business flyers for myself. I created two lawn mowing flyers, one pool cleaning flyer, and one dog walking flyer. I used a website called Canva which is great for graphic design and doing all kinds of good-looking projects. My friend made a really good-looking wallpaper with that website that looked like the old Macintosh home screen.
I just thought of a funny idea. There are these things where people hold their pens and it retracts the pen right back to the circle that holds all the string. What if, instead of a pen it held the stylus and so nobody could take it because it won't ever be forgotten or stolen from the computer
The only thing that sucks right now is that I lost my computer stylus and someone took it at my school. There's a problem at my school of people taking other peoples' styluses that they lost and they selling them back to them. The reason why it sucks for me to lose my stylus is that I had to do my math homework at home with my finger and it was really difficult.
I'm in math class right now and I'm so excited. Not for math. Not that I hate math it's just that today something more interesting grabbed my attention. Today's my written permit test! I'm very nervous to do it but I also kind of feel ready for it too. I practiced a lot and I even practiced today by giving a girl my phone with questions. She would ask me questions and I would need to answer them. I truthfully didn't remember all of them so I'm going to have to practice even more today during my big break in between my zero and first-period classes. If you didn't know and don't go to my school, on Wednesdays, there's a big break in between the two classes. Also, today's Wednesday. Now you know.
______________________________________________________________________
Sorry that I'm kind of late to add more to the online journal. I finished school. After Spanish class, I had, in this exact order, Finance Management, Chemistry, AVID, and U.S. History. Later I went home, quickly got dressed for my next extracurricular, and went to karate class. Now I'm at home after the class sitting at my computer and doing my homework.
School is kind of boring and it's kind of hard for me to do because I have ADHD when I get bored I don't feel like sitting still but talking to someone, doing someone, or being off task. I talked about being a procrastinator but the only thing that's worse than being a procrastinator is being one with ADHD.
Now I'm in Spanish class and the bell just rang. I'm preparing for what we're doing today. My friend sits next to me in this class so that's cool. We're doing a Peardeck like always which is a slideshow software where we have to read and translate something to English or answer some questions.
I'm in English class right now and we're talking about a very difficult and controversial topic right now. Freedom of speech. How much of our lives should be free and how much should be controlled by the government? I think that there needs to be a certain center between freedom of speech and government control. I think that the government has to make sure that someone won't do someone dangerous like a terrorist attack but at the same time social media should be private and people are allowed to say their own opinion on something like a job or a person that they sein the news.
Today I have school again. It's a Tuesday and right now I'm in my Algebra 2 class. I just showed the person sitting next to me, this blog and they said they liked it. I also just checked my grades and while it's too early into the new semester to count but they're pretty good. 4 A's and 1 B. Let's go!
______________________________________________________________________
I'm about to go to my robotics extracurricular classes. I think that the classes are really fun sometimes but other times they could be kind of boring.
I think it sucks that Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg were cast in the movie "Uncharted." There's this actor called Nathan Fillion who I think would have made a much better Nathan Drake than Tom Holland. He even created a short film with Stephen Lang, the evil general from Avatar and Avatar 2, who acted as Victor "Sully" Sullivan. I'm really surprised how Mark Wahlberg was cast as Sully of all people. In my opinion, he did a horrible job in that movie and it could have been much better with just a few different casting choices. I'm going to leave a link to the short film down below and you guys decide on who's a better Nathan Drake for yourselves.
I like Sir Francis Drake's motto.
Sic Parvis Magna
That's a Latin motto that's also used in the Uncharted video game series and movie by Nathan Drake. It means "Greatness From Small Beginnings." I like to believe it means that anyone no matter where can achieve great things.
I just went bike riding with my dad and it was very fun. Although it was a bit cold and now my ears hurt because of the wind. It was a 30-35 minute ride and now I'm at home relaxing.
Having a job like Indiana Jones or Nathan Drake would be so awesome. To just travel the world looking for old treasures using maps while being on the hunt with the bad guys. That sounds amazing albeit the job doesn't exist and it's illegal.
I found this old-school project in my room that reminded me of Nathan Drake from the video game series "Uncharted". It's a map of all the explorers on a timeline, their conquests, and who they were conquesting for. It also showed the time when important inventions needed for these conquests to happen were created such as the compass or the printing press.
Ever since my parents and sisters returned from their winter vacation trip I haven't used my bike and I love riding my bike all the time so I should take it out today and maybe bike around my school.
I had a nice breakfast until it was stopped by my dog. I look over at him and saw that he stole a napkin so for the next 10 minutes I was chasing him trying to get the napkin. Also, today's Monday and there should've been school but today's Martin Luther King Jr. Day and so there's no school for anyone. It's a national holiday. I had some plans to go to an art museum today but turns out that it's closed on Mondays. That sucked.
______________________________________________________________________
I love the 1980s decade. In my opinion, the 1980s is the greatest decade to ever exist. The amount of great music, movies, and video games that were created during this decade are enormous. I am a huge fan of pop culture and nostalgia in general. But since I love the 1980s so much, I especially love the pop culture from that time. There's this great fictional book series about virtual reality which is filled with the 1980s and 1990s pop culture references on all kinds of topics. I suggest checking it out for people who love the 1980s and pop culture like me. It's called "Ready Player One" and "Ready Player Two" by Ernest Cline.
School's starting again tomorrow after the end of the weekend. I'll have to wake up at 6:30 in the morning to prepare for my first class. I have a zero-period class in school. For those of you reading this who don't know what a zero-period class is, it's a class that happens earlier than normal people's first class. I also have my robotics extracurricular happen after school tomorrow too.
I wanted to be a screenwriter. I liked writing screenplays and making up stories based on some of my silly ideas. I saw the masterclasses of the Duffer Brothers and Aaron Sorkin. I consumed all the media I could get on the subject. I took a filmmaking elective in 9th grade and had a screenwriting project. I loved that subject and went all the way in my study of it. But I realized that screenwriting isn't so great in other ways that I didn't think about before. The pay isn't great and the job seems kind of tiring after a few years because the industry seems very complicated. If I like writing stories then maybe being an author would be a better idea.
I dislike biology. That's because I don't get it. Physics is the study of motion and everything around us. Mathematics is, well math. Chemistry is the study of molecules and atoms that make up everything. But what about biology? I get that biology is the study of the world on a bigger level and less microscopic than chemistry but I'm still a bit confused about what people learn. I took biology last school year and I don't even know.
Being a video game tester seems like a very fun and easy job to have. You just play games all the time and then you talk about them. There's not more that you have to do for the job, in my opinion. But I don't know the job that well so there could be more to it. Anyway, I don't want to be the guy that tests video games. I want to be the guy that makes them. Did you know that the original Minecraft game was made by just one person it's such a complicated game too. I think that's pretty amazing.
I have a friend named Ben who I'm about to hang out with right now. I like to hang out with him a lot and we do a on the weekends. I go over to his house and we watch a movie or we leave his house and go somewhere fun. It's comfortable to hang out with him because he lives close by, only a few streets away. I got to know him a lot more during and after Covid-19 because we found out that we live close by. The only thing that sucks is that I got to know Ben when we both went to the same middle school but now we go to different high schools. I have two very big friends called Jaxon and Sebastian who I love to hang out with but we see each other very rarely because they also go to two different high schools. Now we kind of separated and the only time we usually see each other is on our birthdays or holidays like Halloween.
The professor said that he taught physics at USC and that's cool because of all the sciences, not including math, physics is my favorite. There are a few reasons why I love physics so much. Not including math, physics is the purest science which I believe means that an answer is always right and unchanging in math two plus two equals four but in other subjects, the answers change like the number of elements in the periodic table for chemistry, for example.
I just returned from the park and it was awesome. I met Pretzel's sister, Hazel. She was very cute. I also met Hazel's owner who it turns out is a physics professor at USC. He's cool and he answered a lot of my questions about education and college in general. I enjoyed talking to him and hearing what he had to say. When we met Hazel's owner it was his wife but later the professor turned up on a road bicycle and started talking to us closer to the end of the meeting.
One of the suggestions was to talk about what I'm going to do after high school. So here's my plan:
1. Go to a community college.
2. Do two years of study.
3. Get good grades.
4. Transfer to the university of my choice.
I have a few reasons why I don't want to apply to the university of my choice right after high school. Firstly, my grades kind of suck. I'm a bit of a procrastinator and they aren't horrible but they're not good for a person trying to get into a nice university. Secondly, there's a small chance of me getting in right after high school. If I go to the community college and then transfer, the chance of me getting in becomes much higher. Lastly, it's much cheaper to go to a community college and do the general education there instead of at the university because it'll be free for any students from my state to go there. That'll save me a lot of money. Those are my reasons.
On Instagram, I created a story asking people for advice on what should I journal/blog about, and you guys replied. So I listened. I'm going to try and journal about some of these topics that they submitted. Other topics are going to be ignored because they're too inappropriate.
Right now we're about to go pick my sisters up from the math thing and go to the park to do something really fun. To do what you might ask? My dog Pretzel has a sister, Hazel, who we've never met before and we're about to go do that.
After Scotland, we went to England and that was just awesome. The architecture was amazing. The people were cool. The weather was so-so. But we went and saw Buckingham Palace. We went to the London Eye. England was my favorite part of the trip by far. It was cool and I'm really happy I went on that trip.
After the trip to Israel, we went and flew to Scotland. There we visited a lot of old castles and kingdoms. I remember that I went to this cool museum of illusion with my grandpa in Edinburgh (The capital of Scotland.) and it was really fun. It had things like a mirror maze, a moving room, and a camera obscura. I found it to be very fun and my favorite part of the trip (Not that I didn't like the castles. Ten years old I just found the illusion museum the most fun.)
After the Spain trip, we flew to Israel where we spent the longest duration of the trip. The reason is to see Israeli sights, visit family members, and explore. I went to the Western Wall and Old Jerusalem for the first time on that trip. I even put a note on the wall with a cool wish. The only thing that sucks is we weren't able to go into the underground part on that trip.
When I was ten years old I took a big trip during the summer where I saw 4 different countries. Israel was one of them. The reason why we go to Israel a lot is that we have a lot of family members there. Anyway, the first country I saw was Spain and that was just a layover flight to get to Israel. I and my dad had about six hours in Spain until our next flight so we took the metro from the airport into the center of the capital. I don't remember much but I do remember one funny story. When we went to go get lunch I took my and my dad's food to bring to a table while my dad went to go pay. On the way to bring the food I accidentally dropped my dad's food. I'm kind of a clumsy person at times.
When I was just 5 years old I went on my very first airplane trip ever. It was also my first trip to Israel. Since then I have been to Israel many times, usually once per year for summer break. I only remember a few things from my very first trip to Israel. The first thing is that when I was on the plane, I became friends with one of the kids also on it. I got to play with his Hot Wheels on the floor of the plane while we were flying to Israel. I also remember that flight being the only one where I got to celebrate my birthday. The reason is that my birthday is before summer break and I wasn't in school yet when I had the flight so I was able to go earlier to Israel than I can now. I celebrated my fifth birthday in Israel and among the things I got I remember a toy scooter and a plastic guitar.
Today's Sunday. My sisters left to go to one of their math extracurricular programs in the morning. I used to do it but I disliked the program so I left last year. I have been on many trips already and I realized that I would like to talk about them in this online journal so that I don't ever forget my experiences in those countries.
______________________________________________________________________
I had an elective in school called Video Game Design last semester but I switched it to a different one called Finance Management. The reason is that I disliked the teacher that taught the subject. Speaking of bad teachers, one of my classes in school is U.S. History and the teacher of that class has missed 75% of the whole semester. I know that this semester will be a repeat of the last one because of the four days that we had school she's been absent for half of them. 50% is not a great chance. I wouldn't want to bet on something if the chances were only 50%. Also when she's here she makes us do some assignments that I hate called Do Nows. It's pretty much just us writing about our day or reacting to some quotes. Whenever she's here we watch a video and answer a worksheet. When she isn't then we read a piece of text and answer questions. A robot could do the same job and the school would save money. Scratch that. At least the robot would be at school all the time.
I got my idea for the name of these journal entries from Mark Zuckerberg. I don't agree with a lot of his ideas or thoughts but I thought that his blog name, Zuckonit, sounded cool and so I decided to use it with my spin on it.
I started watching a new show on Netflix a few days ago called Designated Survivor. It's very good and it's about this guy who's an unknown senator and he's chosen as the Designated Survivor during the president's end-of-year address which is happening in the Capitol. The Capitol is bombed and everyone in it dies. The man quickly becomes the new president and the show continues from there. I suggest that you guys check it out.
After watching "The Social Network" for the first time, I tried to research and understand some of the words that they used in the hacking scenes. Words like Vim, Emacs, and Wget. Thankfully, I now understand a little bit more about the topic and I'm able to get what they're doing in the movie. For example, Wget is a way to get different documents that are featured on a website. So Mark used Wget in the movie to get the different photos that he needed to make facemash.com
I like this website format. It's very clean and simple compared to other websites that I tried to use. I tried sites like Tumblr, Dreamwidth, and others but this one just seems perfect. It's easy to use and doesn't have a lot of different styles so I'm not given a lot of customization options. Instead, I'm just made to focus on the most important part. The writing.
I procrastinate, in my opinion, a lot as a person. Whenever there's a new assignment in school or homework at home I don't feel like doing it. I don't know why but instead of doing something complicated, confusing, and long like the assignment, I'd rather just watch some Youtube videos or scroll through my phone. Deadlines keep me grounded and stop me from not doing my tasks but when there's a task with no deadline in sight like a personal project or a long-term goal I usually don't finish them. For example, I have a huge collection in my room of barely written journals that I have started and ended just as quickly over the years. Maybe that's one reason why I decided to start my journal online. It's cheaper and less wasteful. But I digress. I saw a really good Ted Talk on procrastination by Tim Urban. He also has an awesome blog called "Wait But Why" which I've read a few times. I'm going to leave a link to the Ted Talk and his blog article on procrastination.
I am currently at my house having a nice dinner with my family. My grandparents came over and everyone was having a lot of fun. The adults are drinking champagne while the kids are drinking juice. I have a dog whose name is Pretzel and he's currently 7 months old. He's a mini poodle who drives me nuts. Right now he's doing this thing that he likes to do which is going to my room, grabbing a sock, and having me chase him all over the house trying to get it back. Here's a photo that I took of him when he was 4 months old:
My ultimate dream school would be Stanford University because I just think it's so cool. I have many different reasons for wanting to go there but I'm going to list a few. I think that it looks cool. The weather doesn't suck, unlike other universities. *cough* Harvard *cough*. It's near Silicon Valley in Palo Alto and I want to be a programmer so it's my Promised Land.
There are so many different types of programmers that exist. From the ones that make websites to the ones that make apps. But I would like to be the type that makes video games. Why? I don't know. I just think that making video games would be a more fun job than say making some websites or servers.
For the past hour and a half, I was shredding some paper in the paper shredder for my dad. I do it just to earn a little bit of pocket money because a little more money couldn't hurt. In a few minutes, I'm going to go and solve a few problems on HackerRank. For those of you who don't know, HackerRank is a website created for people learning to code to solve some programming problems on a few topics. It's useful and some questions are even very complicated for senior engineers (professional programmers).
I love the movie called "The Social Network". It's so good and I think that it was a great mix of screenwriting and directing. Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher did a great job. The reason why I love this movie is not just because of the drama but also because of the realism. Not the realism of the events that happen throughout the movie but the coding parts. I'm a programmer and I love to see the realistic programming that happens such as when Mark is making facemash.com or when the coding interview was happening it was all real things that any person who knows programming can do. Also, the conversations people have in the movie flow easily and sound amazing. Props to Aaron Sorkin. Know that I started talking about the movie, but now I kind of want to rewatch it again. So I know what I'm going to do today.
I have my very first karate tournament coming up. It's on March 5 and it will be happening in San Francisco. I can't wait! I heard that during the time that we won't be doing the tournament, we could even go see some sights. Maybe I could see the Golden Gate Bridge or San Francisco's famous Chinatown.
I scheduled the appointment but I ran into some issues. The latest that I can choose an appointment is 3:40 on a weekday but my school ends at 3:45 so the only I can do is leave school and rush to the DMV hoping for the best. Now I'm going to practice a little more since I haven't practiced in a few weeks. Hopefully, I'll be ready enough to pass the test on the first try because I don't feel like doing this test multiple times.
It's a Saturday today. I just finished my Algebra 2 homework and I'm currently relaxing at my computer. Right now I also have to set up an appointment at the DMV because I finally got my transcript at school. The reason for the transcript is that I need it as one of the documents to show that I live at my current address. I'm very nervous about the upcoming written test and I hope I'm prepared. I practiced for a whole month for this single test which will probably only take me a couple of minutes
Hello and welcome to my very first journal entry. This file is the place where I will journal and collect all my thoughts. Every time that I update the journal, I'll put another entry in this file with the date and timestamp.