Pause. Rewind. Fast Forward. Play.

A lot has happened since I last blogged, stuff about which I could have blogged but didn‘t, simply because I’ve been lazy. I shall try to skim over it now just to refresh my mind.

First semester is over. That means I have one more semester of high school left. The true significance of this did not strike me until last Wednesday, which was our last day of regular classes before exams. Drama was my last period class, and I realised that it would be the last time I would ever be in that classroom as a drama student. I‘m going to miss drama because some of my fondest high school memories come from that class.

Speaking of drama, though, the play that my class produced, Man of the House, was a smashing success. The plot concerns a burglar who breaks into a couple’s house while they are away on vacation. As the play progresses, however, the burglar has a hard time robbing the house, simply because numerous wacky personalities show up at the door. I contributed to props and set design, mainly, so I got to sit back stage during the performance and watch (and solve problems that came up, of which there were few).

School started to wind down as exams approached. Review was easy. My first two exams were all right. Geometry was as difficult as I expected—I think I did fine though. Physics is really easy; it’s all math and we got all the formulae on a nice sheet. However, I have an enormous propensity for making silly calculation errors that will cost me marks here and there.

Monday is calculus, and then I’m done. In a way it’ll be the hardest of my exams, but probably the one that I’ll enjoy most. After calculus is done I‘m going to go play DDR and hang out with some friends for the rest of the day!

I also plan to paint my room this week, so that’ll be interesting. More on that as the week develops.

I‘m working on and off on Vanilla Guestbook. Ever the perfectionist, I’m overhauling the design again, focusing on usability. But there’s been plenty of work to the backend and some feature tweaks that should overall make it a better system. Interestingly enough, I had someone email me concerning translation of Vanilla Guestbook—turns out they were using it on a Dutch website. I never designed Vanilla Guestbook with translation in mind. My abstraction layers are nonexistent and my organisation skills would make a spaghetti programmer look good. However, I‘ve been looking into gettext implementation and it looks simple, so I’m trying it out with Vanilla Guestbook. I don’t know how many people would bother trying to translate it, but if they want to, the framework will now be there.

Sundays have become my new TV night: Smallville, Stargate Atlantis, The Dresden Files, and Battlestar Galactica all back to back. I’m not too big on the first two (I find Smallville to be getting increasingly soap opera-ish, and I’ve seen the episodes of Stargate Atlantis already). But the other two are awesome. Both are being aired at the same time in Canada (on Space) and the U.S. (on the Sci-Fi Channel), meaning that I get to see the new BSG episodes at the same time as my American friends. The Dresden Files is a brand new series based off the novel series of the same name, focusing on Harry Dresden, the last professional “wizard” in Chicago and his work as a private investigator. It has potential.

That’s about it.