The reason why I didn’t take the time to make a post yesterday was due to the fact that I was busy working on our church’s website. I was adding in a comment script, which will be used to easily add news/information to any page. Now they also wanted me to find an image uploader script we can use. I find out that the server I am currently running the website on does not have the latest version of PHP, so I cannot find any script without the function ImageCreateTrueColor(). Until my host updates PHP, I am kinda stuck. He doesn’t feel it would be safe to update until Ubuntu 8.04 comes out with the new PHP version installed, so I guess we can wait for two weeks.
I have been starting to work on a bash script (what ubuntu reads in the command line) that creates those race courses you saw from my last post. If I get it to work, it can randomly generate courses and make it better and fun. The hard part is coming up with the smart part of the script. I want it to choose from a list of obstacles randomly, and implement them based on what level you tell the script to make. (Like 1=easy 2=medium 3=hard) I will post progress on it later.
At our school, one of our other “nerd” friends now sits with us. I am so glad. I don’t really care if others think I am a geek, I actually like to say, “Yep, I am a nerd if that’s what you call me.” I tend to not care what people think of me as long as that’s the normal way I act. If someone says “You suck.” Then I’ll say “Ok, I suck then, if that’s what you consider sucking.” I find it to be a nice way to prevent people from degrading me, and even when they keep bothering me, you just ignore them. Oh yeah, we had to take the experimental Science AIMS (Arizona Instrument to Measure Standards) which is basically a test, and they now require you to pass a science portion to graduate, well…not yet at least. We’re like the guinea pigs and we’re determining what they have to fix for the test. I found it really easy. We also took a test called the TerraNova, which is a general knowledge test involving math and reading questions.
I want to finish this post with a little thought about Time Travel. I’ve always been fascinated about time traveling and always wondered if it really was possible. Usually when I look at things, I look and think about things alot differently than everyone else. I tend to expand on thoughts that are never thought of. I was thinking about this during class today. I’ve always thought, why would we need a time machine? Well, to get through the fabric of time and space, you need to be able to warp ‘through’ it. Now it’s just a matter of figuring it out. A black hole was always a thought, but how would you survive through that? I just wish our body’s didn’t combust once we reached the speed of light. Maybe we can send something, that’s tough enough to survive traveling faster than the speed of light. Or maybe we could send something through a black hole. But then there’s the fact of figuring out how we can communicate with the data. If it’s in the past, it would be in record, wouldn’t it? If it’s in the future, will we even know what the object tells us until we reach that point in time? It’s just all too crazy to figure out. We are far out from time travel now.
Pumped Day
Today was a fun and crazy day. I had to prepare for today’s spirit day, so last night I went outside and spray-painted a few wax paper sheets with blue spray paint. That was my main goal for the spirit day, so I made a few of those so we can put them on the school roof lights to show blue light through it. We had two fog machines, music, a guitar, the band (I play E flat Alto Sax), balloons, our school’s mascot, streamers, glow sticks and much more to make it all so glamorous. I did get my face painted half blue because our school colors are blue and white. So after the judges scored our stuff, we visited some of the other classes to see what they did. We seemed like we had not much competition, but the judges said there was a three way tie! My best friend was in a different class and he was competing against our class for the tiebreaker, but it was cheap because we didn’t know at our pep rally we were gonna do a 30-second moment on the gym in front of all the students in our school to show them how much school spirit we got! So we just sung a lame song that didn’t work too well. Unfortunately we lost, so we did all that work for nothing, and we didn’t get the pizza party as a reward for winning! Ah well. The face paint took about 10 minutes to wash off completely, and then I went to our “Smash League” group to play some Super Smash Brothers Brawl. I like that game and my character I use on that game is Pikachu. I do not use any other characters though. Why not? Everybody thinks it’s strange I always use the same character, and they say it gets boring to use one character. For me, it’s actually much more fun to use one character instead of many different ones. All the players I verse in there, I’m about in the middle. A decent player, but nothing to be shocked about. I go by the name of “Pino”
I am now continuing work on our game Z-Tower Defense if you want to see http://zgamers.selfip.com on what that is about.
In BZFlag news, I became the co-owner of Cruelmania. A group that hosts BZFlag servers and has a nice staff. Nothing too big, but I got plans to change Cruelmania’s current server to something possibly better. I am glad to help. Today the BZSoccer League got a few matches going. The BZSoccer league is basically a place where you compete against other players on a soccer field on BZFlag, and capture the green flag on your base. It is very challenging and competitive and if you ever play BZFlag you should come watch sometime. I added in a BZFlag video of me playing if you care to watch how I do on it.
I can’t wait for Ubuntu 8, it looks great and will improve on the already great system. If you haven’t seen any of the updates yet, check it out at http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/hardy/beta#head-e55186d5d312cfd6b8d74a407dbef271a1edfc46. I am especially fond of Wubi, which will allow users to install Ubuntu as an application in Windows! No need for a new partition, and you still have Windows XP, so people worried about problems with dual-booting won’t need to worry anymore. All this is to improve on the easy user interface for casual users.
Today I went to my friend’s house after school and went stumbling on http://stumbleupon.com again. StumbleUpon is great! It allows you to select topics of your choice, and then start stumbling websites. You can go to http://sigonasr2.stumbleupon.com to see my profile on there and click Pages I liked to see stuff I recently stumbled upon and liked.
I recently set up a comment system for the Z-Gamers site so people are going to be able to post comments on the games we create. It is a PHP script and I will be adding it to the site tonight.