November 2nd, 2008
(You might want to skip this if you don’t like unorganized ramblings.)
After school on Tuesday nine debaters, two coaches, and I headed to a suburb of Wichita for a novice debate tournament. Why was I at a novice tournament? They wanted me to judge for some reason.
I personally am not a fan of watching novices debate, but it’s wonderful when you see ones with great potential. First round made me want to strangle a kitten… second round, there was one kid who really knew what he was doing. And in the third round, two freshmen won on their aff case for increasing incentives on solar-paneled satellites that beam energy back to earth. I told the last team — heck, both teams, for they did a great job and left me there deciding for fifteen minutes — that they should most definitely stay in the program.
The best part about judging: you don’t need to wear a suit.
The next day, I helped the local access station shoot a candidates forum for local political candidates — a county commission race where I didn’t trust anyone, a sheriff race against the incumbent and a former CEO of a company (guess who’ll win!) and not-really-contested senate and house races, for Congress and the state legislature.
I learned that the next Tuesday, Election Day, we would not be having a live results show as we normally do. The normal community producer for that was out of town, and the programming block was left with something that wouldn’t get a single view amongst the race-watchers of Salina.
An idea hit me — hey! I’ll do a live, one-hour mock debate between some other high schoolers acting as Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John McCain, and Sarah Palin. We’ll see how that goes, especially since the deadline for submitting live shows was two weeks ago, and I just made up this idea and have no guarantees of getting the actors or the crew necessary to do it. Then, I got organized… and the show will go on, Tuesday, live at 8:00 PM CST. I’ve even set up an Internet stream through the station (although I think it’s in WMV. eew). So that should be interesting!
Oh. And, this morning, I auditioned for district and state honor choir. That was annoying, as always. On the ride home, I discussed life and stuff at length with my ex-girlfriend, which for some reason always leaves me depressed for a few hours afterwards. Can’t help the heart sinking…
So that’s the summarized non-Fedora part of my week.
Tags: access tv, debate, love, politics, rambling, school | 1 Comment »
October 15th, 2008
Note the tags. :P
By the way, the 2008 Creative Commons fundraising campaign is going on now. Go support a great cause, and tell others to do the same.
On a completely unrelated note, my colleague and I received first place at a debate tournament Tuesday night.
Tags: creative commons, debate, marketing | Comments Off
October 12th, 2008
Thanks to random school scheduling, I have a four day weekend. Woo!
Of course… two of the days were shot out for debate tournaments. Yesterday my colleague and I got third at the Manhattan HS tourney, out of 22 teams, which we were extremely happy about. Another tournament on Tuesday afternoon…
Tags: debate, school | 1 Comment »
August 22nd, 2008
This week was quite an interesting one. Twas my first full week of school, with about 35 more to come… from just this year.
Tuesday, in English, we had tests over our summer reading (which I got about half done). Still got about an 80% on those, so I was ecstatic. Or maybe they were just simple. Whatever.
Physics on Wednesdays and Fridays is just tiring, because it’s 90 minutes of sitting in a classroom, not taking down notes about things I’ve learned four years ago, and watching it be reexplained forty or fifty times because each individual student has a specific way of having no clue what they’re doing. I wish I could sleep, I wish I could use my laptop… I wish I could ignore the world around me there. Something needs to give me the strength to sleep through not only the unwillingness to learn of the students, but the unwillingness of the teachers to teach us well. If I knew nothing about Physics, I wouldn’t get it either.
Speaking of science four years ago, the science teacher I had then is an assistant principal at my school now. Not sure how that happened, especially since I didn’t think she was even in the district for the last three years. Can’t remember.
Today, my colleague in debate and I taught the novices, because our coach apparently wanted to see our perspective on debate before he taught the next class, so he knew he was teaching us right. Uh?
And, we watched a movie in APAH today over a Native American tribe, and I found it somewhat boring since I was half asleep. Of course, it was interesting, just… not.
Oh well. An interesting week, nonetheless.
Props to the Fedora Infrastructure team for rebuilding a multitude of servers in about a week and catching an intruder before anything bad happened. We couldn’t have this great distro without you guys.
This weekend, I plan to work on the websites I need to get finished/fixed and work on fixing random wiki pages. Or perhaps I might work on adding some more random functions to my Pascal’s triangle generator in the ianweller-misc repository. Or, perhaps, I want to catch up on sleep. Maybe I’ll do all three. Or, I can quite possibly do none of these things. Instant gratification is what I absurdly rely on, and it’ll push me through this weekend and many more weeks to come.
Tags: apah, boredom, debate, english, fedora, physics, school, websites, wiki | 3 Comments »
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