Deantastic!

The past few weeks have been very hectic for me, and as a result this blog has gathered some dust. My bad. I had suddenly become preoccupied with the Science Fair—I had two choices: work on a study or get a failing grade in Chemistry—and other goings-on in life.

The Science Fair’s finally over with, and things have generally settled down, which means that I can now finally start writing blog posts again! *banana dance* So, here we go with one of those lengthy write-ups aggregating the entirety of my life and thoughts since my last posting. Brace yourselves.

Science Fair

Copy of our manuscript with our ribbon

Every year, our school holds a Science Fair in celebration of Science Month. In the aforementioned fair, brainiacs and tinkerers from all four year levels come together in a battle of wits and brains, resulting in a nerdazzling day of epistaxis-inducing projects about biofuels, magnets, and (as my classmate would say) sh*t like that.

In short, I never really cared for it. Not. At. All. I’m not particularly fond of Science and its related branches (except for technology), and I didn’t plan on joining this year’s festivities (festivities?) either. However, I recently found out that if I didn’t join in on the (dare I say it) fun, I’d have a pretty crappy grade in Chemistry.

So I teamed up with my classmates Xavier and Angel and, after a bit of brainstorming, we decided we’d go Physics-nutty with magnetic levitation. I could very well bore you with the details of our project, but I know your time’s precious and all so I won’t. In essence, we made the upper (passenger) compartment of a toy car levitate over the bottom (engine) compartment to lessen the load the engine would need to carry, making the vehicle more fuel-efficient and *blah blah blah*. Let’s end it at that.

The day of the Science Fair (read: today) dawned, and I arrived in school jittery and jumpy. It’s hard not to when you have to defend an ambitious project in front of three major geniuses, one of which has a degree in Physics.

One of the judges came to our booth (tarpaulin banner would be a better term), examined our study and temporarily wrecked our finished product before nonchalantly nodding as she left, leaving behind her three students (namely me and my two group mates) with palpitating hearts and dizzy heads. Fast forward to two or three hours later. The aforementioned students’ hearts are still palpitating, and their heads are dizzier than ever, but because of a different reason—the improbability of all improbabilities has occurred! Their project, something about playing with magnets to get a piece of cardboard to hover precariously over another magnet-laden piece of cardboard, has been picked for defense in the Science Congress.

The Science Congress. Five minutes of hell is what we called it. When our group number was called, we walked with heavy feet towards the table in front of us and sat down in front of the judges. I picked up the microphone sitting innocently on the table and said, “Good afternoon, judges. The title of our study is…” and then read our abstract with a voice that, according to my classmate, sounded like Microsoft Sam’s. After I finished reading the page-long summary of our study, we then submitted ourselves to intellectual beating by the judges. “The proponents are now ready for pain, anguish and suffering.”

They scrutinized our mansucript and the concept of our project like the Sun would never rise again. “You copy-pasted your review of related literature, didn’t you?” (D’oh. Wikipedia phail.) “Your framework could use a little tweaking.” (I didn’t know what I was doing, ma’am.) And then, after the questioning, they let us off with a confusing “congratulations”.

I spent the rest of the afternoon with my classmates in the hall, chatting and Rubik’s-cubing and whatnot, and left school at half past five not knowing whether or not our project had made the final cut. Feh. We’ll find out when we find out.

Nano-chromatic!

Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced to the world the fourth generation of Apple at their “Let’s Rock!” event on September 9^th. The new Nano, available in 8GiB and 16GiB variations and in more colors than ever before, also features a new playback screen and a curved body (which they say feels better in your hand). Apple also incorporated an accelerometer into the nano. Shake the device to shuffle your playlist and turn it sideways to activate Cover Flow. Pretty sweet. Did it make me regret my iPod nano purchase? Not really. My black fatty’s served me pretty well, and has offered more than everything I need to quench my taste for music. I’m a happy camper. (Which is not to say that I won’t accept an iPod nano 4G as a birthday gift, hint hint. )

We’re still alive

The geeks over at the European Organization for Nuclear Research or CERN has switched on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for the first time in many years, and, contrary to what many feared, it didn’t create a big, Earth-eating. life-ending black hole.

But that’s because they didn’t smash any particles in the collider. At least, not yet. What they did was fire the first beam all around the 27-kilometer undeground tunnel. They’re not going to smart smashing things together until October. Maybe Doomsday then?

Nine Zero Point Nine Five

All the calculations have been finished and the results are in. For my first quarter, my average grade’s 90.95. It isn’t measly (by my standards, at least), but it isn’t stellar, either. I will try—and I say this earnestly—to do better in the Second Quarter.

WordCamp Philippines=WIN

Blogie Robillo et. al. successfully organized and held the first WordCamp ever in the Philippines (and in Southeast Asia, correct me if I’m wrong) on September 6 in the College of Saint Benilde. The Father of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, was in attendance. The Philippine blogosphere’s been buzzing about the event before, during, and after it was held, and there has been a flurry of posts from bloggers nationwide describing the event in detail. See the entire list of posts (and old media coverage) on this blog post.

In related news, the Philippine Blog Awards season is now in full swing, with the voting for the Bloggers Choice Awards now open. This blog post explains everything you need to know.

Well, I guess that’s about it. Talk to you soon. (There are a lot of stuff on my mind—about Palin and her obvious incapability for the vice presidency, let alone the presidency; about poverty in the Philippines, and how it has become so bad that suicide has become an option for many people; and about other things. Stay tuned. Subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed to keep yourself updated.) Laterz!