Are kids going to school too many days out of the year?
Every year the school year feels like it is getting longer. I especially look at year length during this semester time when we are halfway through the school year. At first I thought I was imagining it, but then I found it to be true. School districts (at least the ones in my area) are increasing the length of the school year! Of course, they have their reasons; one of them is snow days. They need to have some leeway to allow for school cancellations but still meet the state mandate of the number of days the kids are in school. However, throughout the years, snow days have decreased from about 4 per school year down to 1 or none. So why increase school length if the snow days are becoming more rare? While talking to an older person I discovered that 40 years ago, the school year began at about mid September and ended at the first of June. Now, the year starts at the first of September and goes until about June 10th. That is about 10-15 more days of school! What is going on and how can we change it? Complaints about school year length from students are always weak and aren’t really listened to. Also, parents don’t really mind if their kids are in school an extra week or two; they figure it can’t hurt. For now I guess my friends and I will just have to live with it. Comments and/or suggestions about this topic are welcome by E-Mail. Use the contact page to send mail.
Do you need help in advanced or beginner programming techniques? Or do you have a tutorial that you would like publicized? dotcomma.org is an excellent and growing site updated almost daily. Its creators and contributors are some of the best web people out there like Adam Berlinsky-Schine creator of Dimension TI and Nick Disabato major contributor to ticalc.org. These are some big names and if you don’t believe me, check out the sites that they started at. Dotcomma stands for the dot and the comma that make up a semi-colon; the semi-colon is very important in almost all programming languages. This site offers tutorials under the following programming languages; C/C++, CGI, ASM, Perl, Java, JavaScript, HTML, Visual Anything, PHP, ASP, databases, and source code. This site was started in September of 1999 and has grown quite steadily since then, I am impressed both with the design and with the tools available that allow the user to search for keywords and specific tutorials. The site organization was well thought out and gives plenty of room for expansion. I think a little more publicity combined with a steady increase in tutorial count will cause dotcomma’s traffic to skyrocket.
GoZilla is worthy of its download of the year title
Recently, I read an article in the paper that said GoZilla was rated number one download of the year by various websites. What is this program you ask? Well, it manages your downloads. You can resume downloads after you have disconnected and even set the program to turn off your computer when a download has been completed. This is useful if you have a large file but do not want to stay up late and wait for it to finish. I don’t download files much, so I don’t know about this from personal experience, but if this is the number one download of the year I suggest you check it out. Goto GoZilla.com and get this program today. You won’t be sorry and you won’t be tired from staying up and waiting for files to download; that is if you aren’t chatting ‘til one in the morning!
Despite the drawback for FP shooters, zone.com is great for gaming
Not long ago I decided to take up playing hearts on the zone occasionally. I had come to the conclusion that the zone was way to slow to keep up with the 40,000+ users that are usually online. Granted, it does have trouble dealing with the highly graphical first person shooters. But, within 10 minutes I was playing hearts with essentially no lag. People are friendly at the hearts section of the site and I didn’t see any swearing. Other parts of the zone are more rowdy; like the first person shooter rooms, but my experience was one of a relaxed environment and no worrys about modem speed; just a friendly game. The zone also give you room to get better; there are competitive rooms and there is always, always somebody that is better than you are. The zone gives me a friendly environment to get better at hearts in; that is when I am not chatting or writing these updates. =-)
Hope all of you had a safe and happy new millennium! I had a good time at home with family. Watching the ball drop in New York was really boring. It was the first time I had actually seen it drop and I was under the assumption that it was a free fall drop. I thought that they would release the ball and let gravity take over. Oh well; the Thames fireworks were incredible. Officials wanted the river to look like it was on fire with red, and I think they succeeded. In addition to that there was France with the 10 huge decorative ferris wheels and the Eiffel tower thing was incredible. It took a group of mountain climbers three months to get all the fireworks up there. The Eiffel tower looked like it was going to blow up. Pretty cool. Just a little FYI for those of you who don’t know; it isn’t really the new millenium. There was no year 0 so the real new millennium occurs on New Years 2001. One year to go. Overall we had a calm millenium (no Y2K problems) and I think Europe beat us out on the festivities.
Well it has happened again. I’ve made another website. This being the seventh design, I have now added a history section. Actually, I don’t really spend that much time developing websites; when I have time to be on the computer I make or update the sites. I don’t play online games really at all. Think about all the time you spend online chatting or playing games, then take that time and channel it into learning HTML or creating graphics; it yields some pretty good results! If you are new to this, go to the Help section of the site, otherwise just start clicking on the sections listed above; there is enough stuff here to keep you occupied for hours! Have fun!
I have discontinued work on my TI calculator site called TI Chip. I don’t have the time; and even if I did, it wouldn’t be enough. I have one major reason and it is this. That link leads to all of the archived calculator files on a site called ticalc.org. That file list takes about 5 minutes to load on a 24000 modem!! Translation: it is impossible to compete with that sheer number of files. So I have given up TI Chip and now I have time to work on this site and make my little niche of the web look nice. Wish me luck.
Plans Laid
Today I began working on the rough draft for the new design for TI Chip; my largest site. Currently, TI Chip has way too many ads, so I will be overhauling not only the apperance, but the archive system and file management system. All files will be moved to this server so TI Chip will be fast and ad free. I need to get access to a cable connection, though, to get the 20+ total megabytes of files re-uploaded to this server. When completed, the new address will be “http://www.ti.amicek.com”. It should take about a month to complete this total overhaul.
Texas Instruments makes a line of graphing calculators that are very well made and are used for intermediate to advanced math classes. But, many people have found the value of using these calcs for games to keep oneself occupied when math gets dull. Some games are quite good, and I encourage you to follow the links at right to see some really good games.
I used to program in BASIC on the TI-86, but now I don’t have the time or ambition to do that. I also tried Assembly on the 86, but only succeeded in making one program. In addition, I did a little BASIC programming on the TI-89. Now, I don’t code in any language and only use my calculator for an occasional game and a lot of math. For a while I did a fair amount of BASIC, so feel free to E-Mail me any questions, as I should be able to provide an answer. Take a look at the links, they are good informational sites that should give you plenty of games if that is what you want.
Hey all you surfers out there. My name is Alex. I am a Freshman in High School. My current interests include playing basketball, tennis, playing piano (7 years on an instrument sure goes quick!). On the computer side I have done a little programming in BASIC, and very little Assembly.
I am outside and playing sports a lot. I play basketball and tennis in the summer when it isn’t too hot. I like tennis more than basketball so I am going to play tennis on the team this school year. In the fall, I play pick up games of football and when it snows my friends and I snowboard.
Programming in BASIC on the TI-86 has been fun. I say has because I don’t do it much anymore, I have some new ideas, but I can’t implement them because I don’t have the time or the knowledge. I have gathered the software necessary to program in Assembly (a low level machine language) for the TI-86. The problem is, there is no book written that tells you how to program in 86 Assembly. There are general ASM books, but none specific to the 86. With ASM, you can make programs like Mario, but I have neither the time nor interest anymore. The time I spend on the computer (not much anymore) is spent developing web pages (like the one you are reading now), which is pretty fun. For this reason, I don’t have much time to code ASM or BASIC.
If you want to get to know me better, you can contact me over the internet. My addresses are on the Contact page.
