Sunday, January 31, 2010

Bluejays

While waiting for the bus to go run some errands, a bluejay happily buried an acorn in the ground behind the bench I was sitting at. It was quite engaging to watch it. First the bluejay hopped a few paces, surveyed the ground, and finally in one fell swoop speared the acorn into the soil. Tap, tap, tap with the beak, and the acorn was securely underground. As the finishing touch, Mr. Bluejay (or perhaps Ms.) delicately placed a few other pebbles on top of the spot.

It would have been fun to catch the action on camera, but my little point and shoot would probably not have been able to easily separate the bluejay from the highly textured background.

So instead, I went on the internet in search of the bluejay.

What's interesting is that the photos I saw didn't match our local bluejays:

Found on zazzle.ca


Found on www.markbeeson.com

Our bluejays here are a lot lankier, have a lot more solid blue, and simply look less fluffy, for lack of a better word. There's not so much of the frill and trill of white specks on the feathers.

Even more interesting were the various other things I found that were also named bluejay.

 
Found on www.firstandtensportsden.com

Of course, the Toronto Blue Jays. Not that I know anything about sports.

 

Um, yeah... A super hero, presumably. Named Blue Jay.

 
Found on www.blogto.com/sports_play/2008/04/blue_jays_open_a_promising_season/

Allegedly for the previously mentioned Blue Jay team.

And let's not forget Nike's merchandise.


The so-called Nike Air Force One Low Bluejay White Varsity Red. Imagine saying that to your mom. ("Mom, I want the Nike Air Force One Low Bluejay White Varsity Red, not the Nike Air Force One Low CB34 - Charles Barkley Series White Black Pine Green!") Of course, that is possibly what the website called it, and not the official name. Still.

They don't look too bad, although I would have preferred there to be no red, instead of the awkwardly placed splotch at the heel. 


Well, that's all for now folks. Wish I had a better camera... :D


Saturday, January 30, 2010

Computer Science, 106A

Coding is rather hilarious. For some reason, I enjoy listening to music while I do it. It's really wonderful when things flow nicely, and you solve your problems and find your little syntax errors that have been killing your program.

What sucks is when something goes wrong and you simply cannot find the problem. Or, rather, your program isn't experiencing bugs, but instead is missing some component that will make it work.

The class CS106A is intended to be doable for anyone who has never coded in anything. It revolves around Java, a language I've never used before.  Similar to C++, something I did years ago in the summer before high school, it's proving to be an interesting vocabulary to learn. (I'm also happy to have taught myself some HTML and CSS, but that's irrelevant to this blog post.)

In any case, our current assignment is to recreate the game Breakout. I've got the bricks colored and showing up on the screen, the paddle moving and following the mouse around, and even the ball making an appearance and move down the screen toward the paddle.

Unfortunately, my dear little ball has gotten very personally attached to the bottom window and refuses to budge from its comfortable position:


Yes, such is life. Hopefully sometime tonight I can convince it to form lasting relationships with the other three walls as well.

Friday, January 29, 2010

And did I mention

That the sky here is beautiful?

 

 

The view from my room... I am so thankful for my location and the gorgeous weather.

Lately Crafted

Over winter break (which was... four weeks ago), I had some time to experiment with something I'd been wanting to do for a while.

From scratch, I made a mini Lolita hat accessory.

An earlier photograph, from after I had already made the base shape and covered it with black cloth:


I had leftover lace in my closet, which I excitedly used to embellish my hat.



Playing around with my materials, I found I really liked the soft, pink beads, and happened to have a nice light pink fabric (originally from a cake-wrapping, actually). You can sort of see a size reference; compare the hat to the spool of ribbon at the right of the photograph. I could hold the hat in the palm of my hand.



A top view of the finished result:



And finally the full frontal finish.

Many to follow...

... Hopefully.

I've had so much to do and so much on my mind that I wanted to post, but I've been rather ambivalent lately. I've been considering getting a new blog because I wanted to change the format from the rather rigid single column that is currently going on.

That being said, as I have not spent the time obtaining a new one and am in serious blog-debt (there is a whole load of stuff backed up in my idea log of things I've wanted to post about), I've decided to simply continue posting here until my school load lets up and gives me the luxury of finding a new layout.

In other news, it has been raining so much lately that many parts of our school have turned into lakes. (Sadly, though, this rare phenomenon has already disappeared, and our lawns and volleyball courts are back to normal.)