Summer countdown: 3…2…1… June 28, 2009
Posted by Astrid in Musings and Rants.4 comments
This is probably my last post until August or so. IB Year 1 officially ended Thursday and Shad awaits tomorrow.
I’m just stunned by how fast it all went, and yet I never thought Wednesday night (the night before Group 4 was due) would end. All those hours of work trying to make sense of impossible data produced 10 minutes of a boring presentation, and that’s it. IB Year 1 is done.
My first thought was – boy, that was anticlimatic. I’d foolishly expected some kind of countdown and throwing books into the air (see: Recess xD). Nope, just sleep-deprived, report-carded, and hectic about trying to finish EE when I come back in August.
I’m terribly thankful that I won’t have to dream about jellyfish anymore from the Group 4 Project, or typing “Casmurro” for the nth time, or juggling a laptop and an armful of textbooks, but I want one more day of school! One more June session, a boring session where we doodle stick figures, struggle to look interested, rant about EEs, sign heartfelt comments in yeabooks and collectively get excited for planned events coming up in July. It’s only been a year but it’s amazing how much everything has changed.
Bizarre.
Shad in four hours. Wake-up call at 4:00 AM, flight at 6, arrival at 2:30. MacShad, here I come!
Or here I come tiptoeing. Fact: I’m really scared of long going-away programs where I don’t know anyone.
I went to one going-away-program-where-I-didn’t-know-anyone in my entire life, and it didn’t go so well. It was Encounters with Canada, and if you know it, you would know that everyone who has gone there has raved about how amazing and fun and what a life-changing program it was. Not for me, no siree. I was hopelessly homesick as soon as the plane reached the Ottawa airport. Sometimes I seriously considered hiding in the washroom. Sleep was my only comfort. We had to sleep 10 hours every day, which was like heaven to me (I went in the middle of IB Hell Month; I got all of my month’s sleep from Encounters.) I was so glad to come back after a week even the make-up Chem test was preferable. Sad, I know.
Technological quote of the day:
Me [sees the list of Must-Have Items to bring to Shad and sees: "DO NOT BRING LAPTOPS". Later on: "Bring Notebooks".]
Me: “Hey, we can bring laptops!”
Idiot me.
I would write more but my mom’s yelling at me right now. Reasonable, considering how I have to wake up in four hours =/ Procrastination never ends. Gotta finish packing.
Oh and please email me your addresses! It would be nice to send postcards :) Don’t know how much computer time I get so long emails are probably out. They won’t let us bring laptops. I’m separated from my laptop for a month… *shudder*
Anyways, I hope you have an AMAZING summer! Don’t study too hard!
~Astrid
P.S. Tipho – somehow Internet’s failed on me but my blog lives on (who knows why) so I just wanted to say HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH THANKS YOU’RE AWESOME! I changed my mind about frying a certain Sims character =D Though I can’t see my ears.
Taking Over Our Lives June 16, 2009
Posted by Astrid in Musings and Rants.2 comments
I got sick of putting all the IB resources on my blog so I dumped it all into a new page, called “IB! Resources“. It’s bad enough that IB takes over our time, but I think it crosses the line if it starts taking over our blogs. I’m going to try to stop ranting about IB in this blog, or I’m going to turn into one of those robots.
-Astrid 8D
Wordle Yourself. June 15, 2009
Posted by Astrid in Surprises in Every Corner.4 comments
I discovered a treasure, this Javascript thingy, called Wordle, by Jonathan Feinberg and I absolutely adore it. Basically, you dump in a whole lot of text and it creates word clouds for you. The more a word is used, the bigger it is.
For example, as a thank-you card cover to all my group members in Global Families, I made wordles of ALL our emails, notes, speeches, presentations, rants, and research about Guatemala and Global Families. The result?
Pretty neat, right? Though I found it really amusing how words like “style”, “money”, “print” and “go” are part of the top 150 words used.
Wordle is commonly used for analyzing political speeches; you can see that in Obama’s Inaugration Speech, he used the words “nation“, “new“, and “America” the most, whereas George Bush’s speech was just barreling with the word “freedom“. Bill Clinton’s speech used “new” and “century” the most – I guess the “century” is fitting – whereas Ronald Regan overused the word “government“.
So I tried using Wordle on other stuff. Pretty interesting results. For example -
The wordle for my absolutely horrendous World Lit essay on Dom Casmurro (by Machado de Assis) and Chronicle of a Death Foretold (by Garcia Marquez):
My topic was on the signficance of names in Chronicle and Dom Casmurro, so I guess the humongous “Names” is okay. But I pity the examiner reading my essay.
So I tried blogs next (because blogs rule).
This is Justin’s blog:
I love how “disturbing” is on there. Very fitting.
Laura’s blog, as well:
I adore how “love” and “Archie” are the most common. Very cute 8D
Lots of “tired” and “just”.
Bonyoung’s wordle:
‘Warren’, ‘history’ and ‘first’ are the winners.
Kerri’s awesome giraffe’s belly:
Karajan! LEAVE! Obsessed! lol :D
Tiphanie’s awesome (but short D8) clog:
My favourite is ”Michofosho” on the right corner 8D
and lastly, my blog:
My wordle. ‘Astrid’ and ‘IB’ are predictable. Pretty funny how “ZOMG” is one of the top 150 words.
Well, there you have it! Wordles of all kinds! ^__^
