Chemistry, cleaning, logo issues

I took my final exam in Chemistry today. In the beginning of the school year, I thought I'd struggle through Chemistry, but as the semester progressed, I found very little to be tough about it. So as the weeks wound down in the course, and we got our nine-page review packet two weeks ago, despite a few problems, I sailed through it. But I was still concerned about the final. I thought I was unprepaired, as I thought I was for my Office XP exam (more on that later).

I started off slow on the Chemistry final, as the first few pages were more involved questions. For example balancing combustion equasions and then finding out the moles or grams produced from the reaction. I was on page four of seven when I looked at the clock, and noticed twenty minuted left in the period. I thought 'I'd better hurry!' thankfully I completed the remaining questions of the test with five minutes left.

After the period 1 final, we returned to homeroom, then left to eat lunch d-wave. After that, I went to the gym. I have PE period 4, but sonce there's no PE final, we got to sit in the bleachers and talk (or in my case, play DS).

When we were disimissed early (1:30), I came home and checked Lettergrade, and to my suprise, the Chemistry final was graded, along with the Office XP final from Friday. I was suprised for both tests. I got an 87% on the Chemistry exam, and even more suprising (to me) a 92% on the Office XP final. Currently, my American Cultures final has not yet been graded, but I don't expact that to be entered until Wednesday.

Eariler this evening, my mom and I started to clean out our downstairs spare room (or den or "play room"). The room's closet, is were we started. The closet was literally covered by old toys and junk piled about three feet high. So we started, piece by piece, to remove or throw ayay things we didn't want any longer in the room. After two hours, a large trash bag was full, and ripping at the botton, full of junk and trash from the closet. Along with that, alot of old toys are plied on the foor in the main room.

The most interesting thing I found in the mess was an old wind-up alarm clock that my mom said she had when she was growing up. I'm interested in it because the glow on the hands and face of the clock. It is possible that they're painted on with radioactive radium paint, as was the case with many old portable alarm clocks and watches many years ago. The glow from the hands is very dim, which would indicate that any radium may be decaying. But of course without a Geiger counter I have no way of telling if the clock is indeed radioactive, but I'll still take caution; I don't want to be exposed to large amounts of radioactive beta particles.

After that, I tried to do some work on my K-Meleon build. One of the effects of updating K-Meleon to use a newer Gecko from Mozilla is that your about:logo will be changed to Mozilla's star logo. I tried to fix that by editing toolkit.jar, and chaiging the Mozilla star with the K-Meleon logo. I tried swapping out the logos; replacing thee Mozilla logo with a K-Meleon one. That did not work. It showed a blank about:logo, and no logo in about:.

Then I saw that K-Meleon's logo was 150x200, while Mozilla's is 200x200. I figured I'd try to make K-Meleon's logo into a 200x200 GIF by adding 25 blank pixels to each side of the logo. I inserted the new GIF image into toolkit.jar, and it worked. But there's one issue I've run into. The logo looks great in about:logo, but it is distorted in about:. It looke like about: resizes logo.gif to 150x200. So the 200x200 logo looks streached. But none-the-less, it's still the K-Meleon logo, and not the Mozilla logo. On my day off school tomorrow, I may release a new version with the updated toolkit.jar and logo.gif, the most recent Mozilla 1.7.xx nightly, and possibly a new K-Meleon theme I created.

Friday's final exams

Today I took two final exams. One I was prepared for, and one I was not.

First thing in the morning, after homeroom, I went to Amreican Clutures. Period 2 was first. We reviewed in class for twenty minutes, then our text books and course projects were collected. The test itself was very easy. 200 questions total: 115 multiple choice, 10 ranking, and 75 matching.

Then I went to first preiod for an hour of Chemistry. The whole time was spent finishing our review packets. I still have a few Stoichiometry-related questions to finish on the packet. I'll do those Sunday night.

Then onto fourth period: Health. Our class took the final Wednesday, so today we got our final grades, which I already knew. Pretty much a boring waste of 80 minutes, so I played Mario Kart DS. :-)

Then we had third preiod. Pretty much I was expecting the final in Office XP to be today (Period 2 and 3 finals always fall on the same day). But I was so unprepaired for the exam. We were given no information about the finals, so I didn't study anything. Probably a mistake. The first 45 questions on Word weren't too bad. But once the Excel and Access questions appeared, I took wild guesses on some, while others were so obvious, I sailed right through them. Then there were three bonus questions at the end of the test, which were easy, but had nothing to do with Microsoft Office, but on the history of computers: One was about Xerox PARC, one on Steve Jobs visiting PARC and "creating" a GUI for the Macintosh, and finally one about Bill Gates "borrowing" (yes "borrowed" was in quotes on the test) Apple's GUI to create Windows.

Finals

Well, it's that exciting time again: final exams. This time we are to end the first semester of classes. The way finals break down is each marking period is 40% of the course grade, then the final is the remaining 20%.

Yesterday, I took my Health final, which I spent a grand total of zero minutes studying for. The test was 150 questions on a Scantron form, and broke down to 80 multiple choice questions and 70 matching questions. I just checked Lettergrade, and I got an 89.3% on the final, but I'm disaponited I didn't get an A; I missed it by seven-tenths of a point. But I did get a 92 in the course, so I'm happy.

I also took a test in Amreican Cultures, but it was not the final, only a test for chapter 24. I got a 96% on that test, I wish I'd of done better, though.

Here was my day today:

In Chemistry we spent the preiod doing our 9-page review packet, as we spent Tuesday and Wednesday. Tomorrow, we're getting an answer key for for the odd(or even, I forget) answers. The final will be Monday.

In Amreican Cultures, we went over our semester grades, then breifly covered topics in chapter 20, 21, 22, and 23, all of which we didn't cover in the class. It kind of bothers me that we spent 20 minutes on lessons that should have taken two to three weeks to cover, but we just ran out of time in the class. Last night and tonight, I looked over the 7-page worksheet/study guide that recived for the test.

In third period, Office XP, the past few days everyone in the class had to present their PowerPoint presentations. The students had to grade the presenters. But I still think the teacher's grade will be entered in the gradebook. I think it was to keep us busy, and to get us to not fall asleep during the presentations. I presented on Tuesday. My topic: Access - Reports. Basically, I had a 14-page presentation about how to create a report in Access, and then add a calculated formula in design view. What fun . . . We were told nothing of the final in the class, except I remember hearing somthing about it being 100 questons. I think I have the exam Monday, but I'd not be suprised if it were Friday.

In fifth preiod study hall, I played Mario Kart DS against Rob and Mark. I seem to be getting worse, or they're getting better. Oh well.

Then I stayed after school because today was the day that the band fund-raiser pizza, funnel cakes, and pretzels arrived. I didn't want to ride the bus, so I stayed at school, roaming the halls with Brandon until my mom came from work and picked me up.

Tomorrow I have my Amreican Cultures final for sure, but I don't know of any more. Then Monday I know I have my Chemistry final. We also get out of school at 12:30 Monday, Tuesday we have off, then Wednesday we go to our new classes, and have another half-day.

My MP3 player is broken

Yesterday I was sitting on the school bus after school, as the busses idled in front of the middle school, before they left. I had my Creative Zen Micro MP3 player in my coat pocket, and all of the sudden, the music stopped. At first I had thought I bumped the play/puse button, but then I realized thet the hold switched was on. I looked at the screen on the player, everything was frozen. I tried pressing all the buttons, nothing responded. I even tried switching the player off, nothing happened. At that point, I knew somthing was badly wrong. Then I slid off the back cover and removed the battery. I put it back in, and the plalyer booted, but it hung on the "Creative" screen. So I thought, what now? I arrived home, and plugged it into my computer with the USB cable. No responce from the player or computer. The "Creative" logo screen remained on for hours until the battery finally ran dead.

Today, at school, I talked to Rob, who also has a Zen Micro, and he told me that that happened to his once. He told me to remove the battery for a few hours, put it back in, and that will reset the player. I tried that, but guess what, it didn't work. Probably because the dead or drained battery. For kicks, I put thte battery back in, and plugged the USB back into my PC, and the player turned on. But, all that was on the screen was the tiny battery charging logo. The battery was charging. I let this happen for an hour and removed the plug. Then I found on Creative's support site a way to access a recovery mode. I tried a Disk Cleanup, but that went on for some 30 minutes before before I quit.

A little later, we called Creative's tech support. First, they had me on hold for 15 or so minutes, then got to speak to an operator. I was instrucred to go through the recovery mode again, but I told the tech suppory gut that I'd already tried that. He said that the issue is most likely a bad or broken hard drive. So they gave me some "RMA" number. I will be returning the MP3 player back to Creative so that they could repair or replace the player. Since I bought the palyer in September, it was out of a free 90-day warrantym but I still did qualify for the 0ne-year warranty, so I'm paing $25 for the return/fix/replacement of the player.