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Illusions of Serenity

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So Close...

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It's almost done...

But now I've got something coming up.

I'm going to be busy all of tomorrow. I've got to spend my Tuesday evening packing for a trip. Wednesday is gone too. And Thursday I'll be on a bus travelling to a Jazz Festival with my Jazz Band. I won't be back until Sunday night. Shoot. And I was almost done. :frown:

What? No prompt?

Aww, so I learned that prompts and alerts aren't supported in widgets, so I just made my own prompt box with its different states and all, complete with a semi-transparent blackout behind it to make it stand out and also make it non-modal (of course, I'm going to need feedback on performance later on).

Weekend...Gone

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So Saturday morning I arrived at school for winter drumline practice at 10:00am. At about 3:00pm, we left for a competition and didn't get back until 1:30am. Long day. Good news, though. I got a letter of acceptance from UCSB. Sweet.

I spent today a hundred or so miles from home at a reception for UCSB because I was one of their top applicants. I met another guy there who won a merit scholarship because he scored a 2300 on his SATs (out of a possible 2400). I got an 1880. Yikes. Anyway, I had an interesting time, and I'm now especially convinced that it's the school for me.

On another note, I managed to make more progress on my widget. I fixed a lot of design problems I created, and now I've just got my last tab to do (for about information and importing/exporting) before making it interactive. I hope you all can enjoy it soon!

Weekend At Last!

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...Too bad I'll be out for 13 hours tomorrow with Winter Drumline (I have rehearsal, followed by a competition). Eh.

In my tiny bit of spare time, I've made a ton of progress on my new widget. I've resisted using any JavaScript (except a simple resize) until I have completed everything else (design-wise). That's right, I'm trying a design first, function later approach; of course, I'm doing this with function in mind. I'd post screenshots, but they wouldn't do it justice, and I'd have to make a lot of them to give you a view of each of the different aspects.

Specifically, I have only two more small design elements to include before I will tie it all together with JavaScript. I hope to have it all done and posted by next week, and I hope even more that it will be as useful to all of you as I intend it to be.

And now, time for bed, so that I can stay awake tomorrow. :D

Too Much to Explain

I can't even remember all that's happened since I last posted, and I'm too tired to try. Anyway, right now I'm working on a really neat little widget, which I will actually be able to complete at my current level. Hopefully it'll be widely accepted and useful. I've made lots of progress on it in the past couple of days. I think the reason that it's working so well is that despite giving it lots of features, they're within the same bounds and I'm still keeping it simple.

A Loooooooong Day

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Last night my jerk of a brother kept me up late into the night and my mom akwake throughout the night. This morning I woke up early for my new 7:00am morning class. After the hour was over, I proceeded to school for morning Jazz Band practice. Once we were released from that, I was finally able to begin my actual school day. That went by pretty slowly, and once school ended, I was able to go home for about an hour and a half before having to leave for my evening English class at 6:00pm.

Being only my second day in the English class, I actually learned quite a few things. I discovered that I don't need one of the textbooks for it (although I'm still interested in using it for reference anyway), for one. Also, the teacher put the logical and structural purposes of essays and theses into a new perspective for me, which I greatly appreciate. I'm finding him to be a firm but very easygoing and funny person.

I got my first assignment tonight, which is a five-page free-write journal assignment. I also potentially got myself into another unnecessary class for the benefit of my friend. That is, I'd be taking a recreditation class for Economics, which I passed with an A, so that I can spend time guiding my friend, who needs it to graduate. This, of course, is on top of the English class that I'm taking with her for the same purpose. I just hope that she is responsible and completes the economics course (the English is going to be a breeze for both of us), and that she is grateful of my time and effort.

Rewidgetation

, ,

Okay, I guess I jumped into widgets a bit too fast. I completely destroyed the two that I was working on... So I'm going to find a much simpler widget to start on, and once I'm sure I can create a final one, then I'll rebuild my complex ones (and make backups to fall back on).

Return of the Eye-Twitching
I've got stress building up on me once again. I am expected once again to have something to show for my work on the site, and though I've finally got a great plan for the layout now, a lot of fundamental things are keeping me from setting anything in stone. I'm trying to work on it, but my time this weekend has unfortunately been heavily consumed by an event after school on Friday (I worked from 5:00pm to 1:00am) and Winter Drumline practice yesterday (10:00am to after 6:00pm). I also dealt with relationship problems throughout the event on Friday as well as for about an hour after I got home and through most of yesterday's practice. Although I was able to mend those problems a bit, and able to rest for a while last night, now I have a bunch of homework to manage, and need to friend out with a lot of schoolwork as well. :faint:

[Update] Not So Bad After All!
Okay, so I couldn't get in touch with my friend until an hour ago (9:30pm) so that didn't work out, but we're going to work tomorrow morning, which is better anyway, since we'll both be able to look at the same thing (she has my book and the work, but I have nothing).

Also, after spending a lot of time wondering what widget to make (I was seriously considering Connect 4 until I realized that anything with AI was going to be a pain), I decided I would make a weather widget. I tried one of the existing ones and it didn't work for me, plus like many others, I'd like to have some sort of forecast. I researched different weather sources heavily and finally came upon a site that would offer the most flexibility (at the expense of having sloppy code). About an hour later, I now conveniently pull all of the data I need from the page for a given location. Next I'll be working on error checking for locations that aren't found, then it'll be saving/loading/updating the data, then other configuration such as displaying in Celsius or Kelvin (why not? :wink:), and finally, to making it a flashy, presentable widget (I've got some pretty sweet ideas). Yeah!

Alright, time for sleep now. :zzz:

Love vs. Hate?

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Okay, time for more relationship drama.

So, I said that my girlfriend and I broke up, right? And that we were still fine and doing things like we were still together? Well, last night she called me and spent over an hour telling me how much she hated me, mainly because I could not fufill certain expectations... I wouldn't offer to take her out or do things with her after school. Apparently most of the things that I'd done hadn't counted because it was during school (I guess it's too convenient). Anywho, I was often turned down before I even had a chance to propose my ideas because she would have plans or be sick, etc. There were times that this didn't apply, but for some reason I kept thinking about how she'd told me that it's important for her to eat dinner with her parents (she explained last night that she was only talking about weekends), and so I could've asked her to tell her parents that she was doing something else. Anyway, apparently I was too late to do anything about it (as usual).

I came to school expecting this to linger over, but after a small fit of her ignoring me, she seemed perfectly fine. I inquired and she said that I was fine during school, I just wasn't to talk to her outside of school. I can't understand how she could even consider doing that. I mean, that's pretty close to having a split personality. So, later in the day she tells me to come hang out with her. A friend comes too, but she makes up an obvious lie as to why we were leaving class. So we go to work on taking apart a huge metal thing. I know, real descriptive, right? But if you saw it, you wouldn't know either. P: I hit my head at least 20 times and was on the floor assuming the fetal position in pain several times.

After we'd gotten all dirty, they decided to go get coffee and sandwiches, but I refused. We returned and I planned to hang out some more after school. They disappeared for a while, though, and getting curious, I went to the auditorium to see if they were there. I was right, and after a short while we were kicked out. I was getting ready to see of my love and my friend when they tried to get me to come with them. I was hesitant because I had instructed my mom to pick me up soon, and I didn't know where they could be going. Of course, after a few angry faces and a "you said you wanted to change, so here's your chance" type thing, I agreed to go. I went back to get my stuff and update my mom. Thankfully she hadn't left yet, and was fine with it, so I rushed back out to the car.

And there I sat, with my love and the same friend, as we tried to figure out what to do. The former joked by saying "Let's play miniature golf in the rain!" I didn't understand, but miniature golf sounded like fun, and I'd never done it before. After several other ideas, I brought it up again, and everyone got pretty excited. They then got concerned because they had spent their money on food and coffee. Well, to my fortune and their surprise, I had $20 in my pocket (I NEVER have money... I'm pretty much broke). I had collected a $5 debt from someone earlier that day and earned $15 dollars working on taking apart the unnamed monster mentioned earlier. That was just enough for us to go mini-golfing, and so away we went!

The next obstacle was getting to the miniature golf park. It was in a completely different city, and we'd gone the wrong direction on the freeway. Looking at a map, we found a route that was actually shorter to get to our destination than the way they had gone a different time, and so we continued. We managed to hit traffic though, which turned a 20 minute drive or so into upwards of an hour. We made it there after 5:30pm and it was a bit chilly out. We went and bought a round of golf each (I used my $20 dollars with 50 cents to spare). To my dismay, their long clubs are still too short for me because I'm so tall. I attempted to adjust by crouching a bit or spreading my legs and did alright, though.

When we got to the end of the first course, it was completely dark out and we moved onto another course instead of playing the last hole and losing our ball. A security guard noticed and warned us that we weren't supposed to do that (we'd normally have to pay $3.00 for every new game), but he let it slide because no one else was there (we encountered only two other groups the entire time we were there). The thing that annoyed me most was the scorecard, and how they stopped putting the raised surfaces that you can write on your card with on most of the holes in the second half of each course. I'd have to find rocks or fences to write on my scorecard (and sometimes my leg or belly). We also "fished" out several balls from the water while we were there (I got a green one for myself :yes:). So, I got home and thanked her for the good time and all, and that night she called me several times with love in mind, not hate.

President's Day

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I certainly hope this day doesn't also honor Bush...

Some Progress
Erhm, I mean, today is another Monday I don't have to go to school (yay). Anyway, this weekend I made some progress on the design of my school website. I'm actually going to be using the school colors, which is nice, but it isn't going to look all crappy like all the alumni sites I've seen (the colors are blue and gold--kind of hard to work with). It actually has a bit of a classic look, which is cool too. I'm trying to work out what major categories my content is going to fall under (e.g. Academics, Athletics, etc.), now, which is pretty tough since it's a public school and I'm still not exactly sure what's going to be on the site. P:

I also was able to make lots of progress on a widget. Unfortunately, I'm putting of my chess widget for now so that I can practice my widget-making in a more comfortable department--date and time, in this case. So, you guessed it. I'm making a clock. It's been done, you say. Boring. Right? Well, not so much for me. I'm not cheating and just making it in Flash, and I'm not being lame and making it do only one thing. This widget is going to have three modes, three functions, and support for time zones and multiple skins. So far I've basically got the analog clock done (for the basic time function). I need to add the day of the week and date and improve the hands a bit, but I'm going to start working on my digital mode first.

Hopefully I can get the rest of my widget to appear as clean and professional as that. :up:

[EDIT] Added red skin

A Day Late

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Hey, I never said I would be posting daily, right? Well, yesterday was quite interesting

Valentine's Day - All mixed up
So here's a tiny bit of the "long story" that I mentioned before... My ex-girlfriend told me recently that she'd never had a boyfriend on Valentine's day, and that she wanted to break up temporarily so that it would stay that way... but she never explained further. Well, yesterday was Valentine's day, and although I'd been trying to talk to her for a couple days, we never got about to arranging it, and so we were still together.

So how did that go? Well, I sent her a flash Valentine card at 1:30am (it took me four days to complete), which she saw in the morning. She called me and thanked me for it, but didn't sound too enthusiastic. I didn't see her, though, until All-District Band practice. There, she was talking to someone else and I couldn't really get her attention. When people were settling in, she suprised me by coming up behind me and giving me a hug. We were then separately occupied until after school when we had Marching Band practice for the upcoming Black History parade. She seemed mad at me and wouldn't talk to me. Confused, I waited patiently. Then, while we were warming up outside, she walked up to me and said "This is probably the meanest thing anyone will do to you, but I'm breaking up with you." Then she walked away.

After that extremely long practice, I managed to get her to speak with me. It turns out that I had completely screwed her Valentine's day up, because she had big expectations for gifts, etc. (which was a shock to me because she hated the holiday) and all I'd given her was an electronic card. So most of the other people around school were seen with big balloons and things and she had nothing. Her parents only made it worse when she talked to them, so her day was completely miserable.

After we talked it out, we decided that we would still be friends and that we could still kiss and hold eachother whenever we wanted. The real kicker is when I walked her to her car and before she left we were kissing and talking happily despite having just become separated. The casual commentator would probably be thinking that we're nuts (and might be right), but I'm happy. I get to be with her as I wanted, without worrying about all of the relationship issues, or deal with her parents constantly bickering about it. And so there you know a bit about my mixed up Valentine's day.
May 2008
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