HAHAHA get it get it? The red condiment, you know. It's ketchup. Ketch... up... aha... ha... haaaaaaaathat wasn't very funny was it?

So anyway it's catch-up time since I haven't had time to blog in weeks.

So what's happened? Well, let's go about this in no particular order:

PSATs still haven't arrived. BLAAAAARGH. WHY. THE SUSPENSE ARE KILLING ME.

My parents, uh...

>>

If you believe in Santa, skip please.

This has been a buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuusy week... >~< I've had to seriously ration my time.

I'm waiting for another page to load right now but while I'm waiting, does anyone at all remember (or did I even mention this before?) that I used to do ambigrams? I read Angels & Demons sometime, ninth grade, before ninth grade? (Keep your opinions on the book to yourself, please, I'm not here to discuss the book itself) Anyway I thought the ambigrams in the book were really cool, how you could have a word read the same way (or at least be able to be read) rightside-up and upside-down. So I started trying to design them myself.

First for some older ones...

This one I'm pretty proud of, it really works well, and it's a good opposites-ambigram.

This one also worked surprisingly well, though the vector is kinda shoddy now that I look at it.

Now, I plan to do 6 ambigrams for my 6 classes this year (health/gym doesn't count, and AP Chem takes up 2 blocks, so that accounts for all 8 blocks) and looking back, I think I've gotten a lot better at this stuff...

And I've even learned how to use ImageReady!

Click for the non-animated version

I have designs for all of them, and Psych (above), English, Calculus, and Chemistry have been vectored. Latin is one that works very well (as you can tell the g-y issue was tricky on "Psychology," it was either that or an ugly double h) and Chem I'm quite proud of. I didn't do "programming" but I did do "pascal" which worked out very nice and neat, it's going to be easy since it's all clean lines and curves.

I only posted a very low-res version because, of course, these are going to be gifts I'm giving my teachers for the holidays, so... no print-res (or even close) images.

Oh yeah, and this Thursday we got out of school early! I missed Chem 4th block because, due to inclement weather, we left at 1:00. What's more, it counts as a full school day since we had more than 4 hours! YIPPEE!

On that note, how I made use of my time...

My Short Stories Contest 4 Entry...

Hah, man, that took me FOREVER and I still cut it kinda close.

Also, BOOKS! I've been reading one called Evil Genius and on the advice of a fellow BZP member I checked out Dune and, well, the one book, Stranger something... well it wasn't there, but I did check out The Moon is a Harsh Mistress which ought to be on my list of "I should have read it by now."

Oh and Columbia! This semester's SHP just ended, no more classes 'till next year. Since it was the last class today we went on a lab tour... oh man, I got to see a SCANNING ELECTRON MICROSCOPE in action, and it was so freakin' awesome! A real live SEM taking real time electron microscopy images of these little diatoms, kind of prehistoric microscopic sea creatures, and I was just surprised at how FAST it worked. I was always under the impression that an SEM image would take at least a few minutes to fully scan-- not so! It was like a camcorder! You only noticed the bit of lag when you changed where you're focused or move around and stuff. Otherwise, it's practically an instantaneous image, which I find just so awesome.

On that note, one of the grad students who's teaching us for the SHP told us that they once coated a cockroach in silver (since organic substances don't conduct well, it's hard to get an SEM image without just electrically charging the entire area of focus) and put it in the evacuated chamber of the SEM and imaged it, and afterwards it was still alive. After being sprayed in metal and put in a vacuum.

Those things really are unkillable aren't they?

I took a practice SAT on Tuesday night... got a 2190 >> stupid mistakes, I can't believe I got any problems at all wrong on the math section... one of them I kinda just didn't know (never encountered a problem like that before, didn't understand it) but the other two... stupid stupid stupid mistakes, I just didn't read the problem properly... then again I'm taking this from like 5:30-9:30 PM, so I wasn't exactly at the top of my game...

Oh yeah, as for WHY whe got out early on Thursday, so I can segue into something cool from Friday morning...

Well, basically snow, but also freezing rain and sleet and stuff. And on Friday morning... the trees were FROZEN. It was SO DARNED COOL. Like, all the leaves that are still on the trees coated in this layer of ice, with dripping icicles frozen hanging from them... aw man, you had to see it. Just those little things, you know? So awesome.

Well that's about it. I gotta go grab something to eat...