Refraction

Recently, we were assigned a project for Biology. We needed to be in groups of four, five or six, and my group was only a trio. I read the message board, hoping to find someone desperate for a group to join. Naturally, I did–my section is at 8am in the morning and a lot of people miss/skip class occasionally because of public transit or sleeping in.

So we had a meeting on Sunday (only three out of five showed up, but that’s another story.) Two of us have met before, but the other member was unknown to both of us, so we started chatting about nice, neutral things–courses, for one. So the topic of English class comes up, and we learn that our new friend is not taking an English course! Why not? He didn’t pass the language proficency test.

It actually wasn’t too surprising. He didn’t say much of anything throughout our meeting. When he did, it was quite evident that English was a language he struggled with. (We could have all spoken Cantonese, but a biology discussion in Cantonese is not my idea of a good time.)

Yet, the test is written, not oral. Even though a person may struggle with speaking, it’s very possible for them to be a decent writer (eg, my French.) From his emails, I deduced that the one part of English that he does have down pat is Internet slang. Naturally, that won’t help you write an essay. It just strikes me that he might have a better chance of passing the test if he tried to use standard English in his communication. The only way to become fluent in a language is to use it. Properly. Not in some chopped-up, abbreviated fashion.

-_-;;

</end pointless rant about the degradation of the English language>

Nothing even slighty witty or insightful today; I won’t even make the attempt.

Except that I’d like to share the dullest blog in the world with you all. Isn’t it nice to know that there is someone out there who’s more boring than you? Actually, on second thought, I could probably take a few lessons from this guy…

Oh, and Jess, I hope my choice of music this time doesn’t offend your musical taste too much :tongue:

Headed downtown (again) to check out the library’s book sale.

Notes for next time: steal a box or bring a bigger bag.

The first book I seized upon was Elementary Cantonese. Okay, so when I took it home I realized it was a bit too elementary. But they have the Chinese characters (some of which are specific to Cantonese), I’m quite glad I bought it.

Continuing to prowl through the stacks, I then snatched a copy of Teach Yourself German as well as The Penguin Russian Course. I’ll probably never read them, but that’s beyond the point. There was a Russian-English dictionary and a Greek-English dictionary as well, but the former was really ratty and the latter… well, as I can’t even read Greek I thought it’d be best to leave it alone.

I hopped over to the multilingual pile in hopes of finding a good French novel or some Asian comics. I picked up random French books, but sadly, none of them appealed to me (mais il y avait un roman intitulA~(c) Le petit prince cannibale… malheureusement, la personnage principale n’A~(c)tait pas le petit prince de Saint-Exupery mais un garA~��on autiste. Je ne l’ai achetA~(c) pas car je pensais que ce roman serait un peu difficile A~ lire…) I did happen upon an ancient issue of Nakayoshi, which I bought because it had the Sailormoon all-character poster in it (I cannot tell you how long I have been trying to find one of those at the library’s book sale.)

Finally, I decided to have a go at the paperback novels. I found a copy of Fugitive Pieces: it was the same edition that we’d used for our IB English class and well….. for 25 cents it was a very, very good deal. I bet someone from our class decided to donate it to the book sale, since it wasn’t even part of the library’s collection. I also happened across a copy of July’s People (which had been part of the library’s collection). To cap off the round of random books from IB English I saw, I caught a glimpse of Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits (I borrowed it for my presentation on magic realism) and a National Geographic magazine with a picture of a bog person.

I saw a copy of Translated Accounts by James Kelman sitting around and after reading the synopsis (military state in the future, seemingly hastily translated first-hand accounts), I had to buy it. Playing with language and a dystopic future? Geez, that sounds kind of familiar. You’d think I’d be sick of it, wouldn’t you?

Had to put down a few things that I decided I could do without, though: a Pinter play and Hayakawa’s Language in Thought and Action. If I see those again, I’m definitely going to get them. You see, the girl at the checkout decided that the French textbook I wanted counted as a multilingual book, so I saved a dollar or so. :cheerful:

Wah, and keep reading for signs of lemming behaviour.

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So I open up my email and I see a flood of new messages. At first glance, they all seem to be emails letting me know I’ve gotten comments. I like comments :happy: But then I looked closer–and these comments were all “awaiting moderation.” Hmm. Suspicious.

Seems I got 20 emails telling me about these comments. Gee, it seems this could be serious. And oh, it is.

Welcome, my friends, to the world of comment spam. Where bots come and deface perfectly fine blogs (even if they be trendy anime blogs) with legions upon legions of absolutely useless SPAM, advertising cheap prescription drugs, free online gambling, and various unsavoury sites of the Internet. So, to sunny of the domain moonlightshadow.us and lilo of the domain suddenenlightenment.us–go find yourselves a new hobby. Really.

I’m wondering how in the world they got my blog address, though. Considering that there are only a few sites that link to mine and that the majority of sites still link to the old address…. Hmm. Kinda weird. :confused:

Of course, if they found my blog, that means they’ve been posting all over the Internet. I haven’t found any references to Lilo yet, but Sunny here is quite a prolific poster, it seems: Nathan’s had to deal with her, and so have others… And thanks to him for pointing out a WordPress blacklist plugin!

Oh, and Reina, I really apologize for any spikes in your bandwidth that may have been caused by this idiot. 🙁

Number of spam comments deleted: 624 653 930

Hands up those among you who remember the Tamagotchi craze. Heh. I do. As a matter of fact, I had several. Those things were just too cute! Then again, I got bored of them rather quickly and left them to er…. expire. So, it was with some trepidation that I clicked on the link for Tamaboy.

Tamaboy has the same basic premise as a Tamagotchi, except for the fact that it’s online. It’s not really what you’d call a faithful porting of the Tamagotchi, although it stays true to the concept. There are three things you can do with your Tamaboy: feed him, talk with him, and let him relax. And… that’s pretty much it. I guess he’s a low-maintenance guy.

It’s definitely not as involved as Neopets. The site itself suggests that you visit your Tamaboy once a day; I think I can handle that. :kawaii: That, and you’ll get reminder emails if you abandon your Tamaboy…

So the highly anticipated (well, among her fans, anyway) North American debut album of Japan’s Hikaru Utada is here…. and so’s my review. Like the devoted fan I am, I got it today, on its -er- ninth day of release. :biggrin:

I got my grubby little hands on a copy of UTADA’s Exodus Thursday. That was satisfying. I called several music stores, only to be told that “we don’t have any copies in stock, sorry… you might try phoning our other branches.” Oh well. I double checked the store I’d visited last week, and they had plenty in stock. Unfortunately, they were all at a listening post, which I didn’t see until I was about to ask an employee for help. Heh. I haven’t listened to it all the way through yet. Some of the songs are good, a few make me cringe, and others just aren’t memorable at all.

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More school stuff! Yay! :dorkygrin:

Yesterday, we got back our math midterms. :tensed: When our instructor went over it, you could tell she was really disappointed with how her class had performed… “And this is a high-school level question. You don’t even need to know any calculus to do it! But some people still didn’t get it.” Sixty-seven people wrote the exam. Forty-four failed. Twenty-three passed. The average mark was 40%. Yikes. Despite all that, however, she’s not scaling the marks. I was quite satisfied with my own performance, since I was given close to full marks for a question which I answered incorrectly.

This morning, Bio midterms were waiting for us. “I think for some of you, this–writing a biology midterm–was a new experience.” Well, thank you for stating the obvious. This remark made me extremely nervous about my mark, so I got my friend to look at it in Chem. I did much better than I thought :tongue: Then again, I had knowledge from my grade ten Science class to back me up, so… how could I ever doubt Dr. G?

Right after Chem, I had to write a Physics midterm. I was panicking about this last night–the questions from the textbook wre extremely difficult and I couldn’t get through half of them. I planned to study in the morning/on the bus/during my other classes. Needless to say, this never happened. Luckily for me, the questions on the midterm were not as difficult as those in the textbook 😯

Finally, I also got my English midterm back today. I did better than I expected but not as well as I could have done (does that even make any sense?) I suppose I’m not really satisfied with my mark, especially considering the fact that I really feel my first response was much stronger than my second and yet I scored higher on the second, which was, for lack of a better term, “rambly.” And for heaven’s sake, who gives out marks in increments of 0.25?! Oh well. Time to actually read Paradise Lost.

Look, it’s an in-your-face pun! XD

Today just seemed like an endless string of failures.

So I walk out the door this morning and the bus is 15 minutes late. Oh, and it’s raining.

I mean, I start with Bio… which only reminded me of the midterm, which I don’t feel I did particularly well on. Besides, I’d completely forgotten everything I ever learned about glycolysis and sat there in the class, yawning my face off. That was bad. Oh, did I mention it was raining and that there are HUGE puddles around the Ag Sci building? No?

Okay, off to Chem, which was pretty bleh, but in any case, I remembered that I probably only marginally passed the last pre-reading quiz.

In Physics, the review session never quite materialized, and our prof just gave up and said, “Enjoy your Thanksgiving.” Thank you, I think I will. Or I’ll try, since I have a midterm next Wednesday….

Math. AHHHHHH MATH. 😡 Of course, I had my midterm today. My ultra-horrible midterm. Five questions doesn’t sound that hard, right…? In theory, no. In practice? YES. I barely had enough time to finish; mostly this was due to some stupidity on my part (unable to get over a mental block of not differentiating anything with two variables), but…. ARRRRGHHHHHHHHHH. It was very, very frustrating.

And then I finished off with English, and I am now absolutely convinced that I failed the quiz. Absolutely convinced. :depressed:

After school, I headed downtown to try and find Utada’s album. I went through three stores. Finally, I discovered that what is probably the largest CD store in the city was sold out. “Oh, everyone’s asking about Utada!” I can’t believe this. The album came out on Tuesday and it’s already sold out? Granted, they only had 90 copies, but…. still…. she can’t be that popular here, can she? “I had never heard of her before and then on Tuesday I rang up eight of them in a row.” Arrrgh. Obviously I hadn’t counted on what I assume is the relatively high concentration of Japanese people downtown. The good news is, he said I should check back Tuesday, as that’s when their next shipment comes in; the bad news is, I have my Physics midterm on Wednesday. Maybe I’ll go next Thursday.

Then, when I tried to take public transit home… I walked down to the station and I saw a huge line of people at the escalator. I assumed this meant the escalator was broken and people were just walking down really slowly. I hate broken escalators, so I headed back outside to catch a bus. My bus never came. It’s supposed to be on “frequent service”–that is, every ten minutes or less. In fact, at that time of day, it should have been coming every five minutes or so. I waited twenty minutes, and saw several buses that should have been less frequent than mine drive by. Once, I thought I saw my bus, but when it reached the stop the sign had changed. That was weird. I decided instead to head back down to the station and head down that escalator. It turned out that the escalator was working just fine; the reason no one was on it was because there was a bomb threat at some station down the line. I suppose this had the effect of screwing up my bus’ route. I walked a couple of blocks to another stop where I could take one of three buses. ARGGGGGHHHHHHHH.

:devil:

I suppose my school instincts are finally kicking in.

Today was the day of my Chem lab, where I was to find the amount of lead in a given sample. What I love about having a lab in the afternoon is that it leaves the morning free to write the procedure. Nothing much of note happened, although I got to leave about fifteen minutes before the end of the period because I finished er… relatively late. My side of the lab was almost empty.

I pride myself on the theory side of things, though. Dimensional analysis is still serving me very well :love: When comparing quiz results with my neighbour, she looked at my quiz and said, “You do it backwards.” Yes, so everyone tells me. But better to do it backwards and have it work than try to do it forwards and not understand it at all. “Oh,” she said, “when you do it backwards everything just kind of falls into place…” Yep. And that’s why I love dimensional analysis. Everything falls into place. Starting with the factor you want to find is much easier than starting with the information given–no thinking required!

I love Chem labs, although I don’t really like the “research modules” we have assigned as homework. They’re a little too patronizing. Even in a walkthrough, I think it’s pretty clear that when directed to a site with an “Enter” button, one needs to click “Enter” to access the content of the site. :tensed:

Another Wednesday post. Whee!!

I had two midterms today–Biology and English.

For Bio I was to prepare a concept map (mindmap) and summary sheet. The summary sheet could have absolutely anything on it. In my panic, I forgot about it, and ended up scribbling random things on it before class, prompted by the sight of other people’s summary sheets, which were probably course notes reduced to font size -1. I think I might have overdone my concept map though. It had a lot of lines. And it was more colourful than most people’s.

English was bad. I knew what I was writing for the commentary, but I didn’t do a particularly good job on it; Still, I feeel much better about that than about my answer for the question on The General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales. That was just plain… bad. It didn’t strike me as a particularly literary topic, I suppose. Not after 2 years of the IB program. 😡

Chem lab tomorrow. Does anyone know how to cool a glass crucible quickly? Using an ice bath? You can’t just stick it in since I assume the ice will melt and seep into the crucible, thereby defeating the purpose of drying the thing for 30 minutes….

Oh, this is interesting. I got one of Hotmail’s “service e-mails,” telling me to download their toolbar to stop pop-up ads. Funny thing is… I started getting random pop-ups a few days ago. Merely coincidence…? Perhaps not :tongue: I’ve run Ad-Aware three times now, and HijackThis twice… I haven’t had any in the past hour or so. So…. you can forget about it, Microsoft.