Jeff Chan

I Am Still Alive

So I realize I’ve been inactive for around six months now. My last post was in May?
So basically, it’s Junior year and I’m more busy than ever. Over the summer, I took Precalculus and Trigonometry and that took up majority of my time. I traveled to Oklahoma for the 2008 International Botball Tournament and we earned third place overall. I was in Taiwan for three weeks in August.

So now, school has been tedious and time consuming. But I really like my classes this year. All my teachers are enjoyable (in different ways). I’m taking:

• AP Calculus AB
• AP Computer Science AB
• AP United States History
• English 3 (aka Counseling 101)
• Biology
• Spanish 3

and then… I have the usual stuff with robotics, client work (still), and some programming… Oh yeah, did I mention I need to study for SAT and SAT II’s as well?

I really hope I will be able to keep posting here though.

 Topics: robotics, schedule, school, update

The Herd of Sheep

On my last post, I shared some pictures showing student protests against the proposed 10% budget cut to education. I never shared my thoughts on this subject though.

Some background information before I start rambling. Back in January in face of a 17 billion deficit, California Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, proposed a 10% budget cut all across the board, including education. In California, K-14 public education is completely free, so 39% of the state budget goes into education, with a law that requires additional money to go into education every year.

I’m not sure why, but only until March did this start to become an issue in our school. Suddenly one day, all the teachers are panicking and brainwashing us that there will be a terrible budget cut and we’ll have less teachers, less staff, no athletics, no fun events, blah blah blah. Obviously, their jobs were at risk. The school staff started to tell students to write letters to the Governor. Heck, they even organized a protest that didn’t happen.

When I first heard of this issue, I already knew what these teachers were up to. Our teachers are hiding the facts from us. All they care about is their job, which is understandably fine. But as teachers, they should be informing us both sides to the issue. People thought that it was all “Arnold’s fault.” Clearly they were misinformed.

If anyone recalls, back in around 2001-2003, because of the dot-com bubble burst, California’s economy went into a short recession. The Governor at that time, Gray David, was recalled in 2003 because people were dissatisfied the way he managed the budget. That was the issue of the recall election, when Schwarzenegger was elected. California spends its money like how most Americans spend their money. If California makes $100,000 this year, it’ll spend $100,000 this year. For most occasions, it has been fine because California is growing at a rapid pace. But when you go into a recession, you have a huge problem because it’s not that easy to cut your budget once you already expand it. So in 2003, Schwarzenegger promised budget reform.

Ironically, his budget reforms never passed the legislature and here again he is faced with the same issue. Students don’t know that California’s budget system is fubar. We have no emergency funds that we can draw from when we have a budget crisis. We look at our budget on a year-to-year basis which obviously tells us that our state legislators are idiots!

So here we are five months later, the Governor is smart. He proposes a revised budget plan that gives NO cuts to education and actually gives additional funding, on the SAME day, my teachers were protesting against the cut. I still can’t stop laughing…

What’s even more pathetic is that NO ONE were informed about the revise the next day. I don’t even know if the teachers themselves know about this. A Facebook group that was protesting against the cut has no updated news about the revise.

What do we have left? Bunch of teachers who are happy they can keep their jobs and a bunch of students who are left believing “everything is Arnold’s fault.” Isn’t the whole purpose of school to teach people independent thinking?

P.S. Three political posts in a row? Something must be wrong with me.. At least the quality is getting better

 Topics: Arnold Schwarzenegger, budget, California, opinion, politics, school, sheep

Terminate Arnold?

The sign was up on the school quad on Tuesday. The whole school district was supposed to have a rally against the “supposed” budget cut, on that day at Sacramento, the state capital, but it was “canceled.”

 Topics: Arnold Schwarzenegger, budget, politics, school

Things I’m Working On

I must admit I’ve been very busy since the beginning of this year, and I’ve overlooked this blog. I guess part of it has to do with my lack of ideas on what to write about, so during this time of inactivity, I’ve come up with some great topics that I’ll be writing about these upcoming months.

So what have I been working on lately?

• Botball Robotics: The season started off in end of February and ends with a competition on April 19th. We’ve went through the whole brainstorming and building process and now we’re focusing on the programming. As I’ve mentioned before, we’re using a language derived from C to program. The language itself is considerably powerful in our case but I must say robotics programming is like no other software programming. When we do web development or software development on the computer, we just compile/save and refresh the application to see if it works. However, the most redundant part and annoying part about robotics programming is that you have to constantly reset the 10′ by 8′ game board, running all over the room, only after one trial. Imagine doing this hundred or probably thousands of times. But this year is different than last year. I’m come to enjoy working with other programmers. It’s so much easier to split up the tasks, rather than having one-man-do-it-all.
  I’m keeping my hopes high for first place, but regardless of what place we get, I’ll still post the results here .
• Google Lunar X Prize R&D Challenge: The whole team worked very hard on this and I think our hard work payed off! We earned second place. We were asked to design a rover that would travel the moon. The challenge is indeed inspired from the Google Lunar X Prize Challenge, except in this case, we’re just designing the robot, not building them.
• Work: I’ve had a chance to continue developing products with a startup in New York. We’re working with the MyBB platform, so I had made several enhancements to the software that I may release in the future.
• USACO: Mgccl’s blog post led me to this competition. I thought since the training course was free and quite interesting, I’d give it a shot. I’ve completed two assignments in C but it’s been a real pain, especially dealing with pointers and strings. Everytime something compiles wrong, it makes me want to use Java more… Supposedly, if you do well in the compeitions held by USACO, you can move on to the International Olympiad in Informatics which is considered the field goal for high school students in computer science… I don’t see myself there any time soon though.
• Course Selection: Speaking of Java, it was course selection week a few weeks ago at my school. I’ve decided on what I want to take next year. The AP classes I’ll be taking are AP Computer Science, AP US History, and AP Calculus AB. It’s really two AP classes for me because APCS isn’t that much of a challenge for me. The other three regular classes will be English 3, Biology, and Spanish 3. They’re basically required by colleges as must-take courses. There is no way in the world I’ll be taking an AP English class, and don’t even mention biological sciences — I hate them.
• WordPress: I’ve been back on track, working closely with WordPress, especially after the 2.5 release. I’ve reworked our robotics team website. Everything is now powered by WordPress. In the summer, I’ll be enhancing this site with some custom WordPress plugin ideas I have.

 Topics: advance placement, AP, apcs, botball, C, google, java, MyBB, programming, robotics, school, USACO, web development

Homework Sucks

Within the first week of school, I’ve been flooded with homework, especially AP homework. Stupid teacher had me up at four doing homework… None of my classes are interesting at all.

However, school stuff aside, I actually had fun playing poker last night. I also got a chance to play the Wii. It’s awesome.

And just a little update on the new version of my blog I’m working on. I have the design coded and everything. Right now I’m waiting for the release of Wordpress 2.3 (sometime in Sepetember), so I can take advantage of the new tagging system. It’ll be fun!

 Topics: advance placement, AP, Blog Updates, homework, school, tagging, wordpress 2.3

School Starts

First day of school today! It was actually a disaster this morning when I went to get my schedule. Because I didn’t get my ID and my schedule over the summer, I had to do it on the first day of school. The school staff didn’t even come out until the first period went on. About 200 students just stood there in front of the school bank doing nothing for an hour.

Anyways… got my schedule:

1. English 2 Honors … Indian teacher with accent
2. PE 2
3. Algebra 2 … bad teacher
4. AP World History
5. Spanish 2
6. Chemistry

Not exactly the best arrangement of order, but I’ll see how that go later on.

 Topics: advance placement, algebra, AP, chemistry, english, physical education, school, spanish, world history

Another Update

I just got back from this one award ceremony and Shane forced me to update my blog.

It’s getting down to the countdown until the end of the school! So excited! For school work, I finished my mousetrap car. It goes 6 meters. I’ve also finished a presentation on Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. Very fun. Final exams are just around the corner so I have to spend extra time studying

Besides those stuff, I’m trying to start a reading habit again. I’ve been reading Fast Food Nation, great book. If you want to gross yourself out, this is the perfect book to find out about the dark side of the All-American meal. Next up on the list is The Broker by John Grisham. It’s a legal suspense novel. I usually don’t read fiction books but legal suspense novels really interest me.

As for my web life, I plan on working on a few ideas I have and putting them into action over the summer. I really want to get things done this time.

 Topics: book, Life, mousetrap car, presentation, school, update

Finals Officially Over

What better feeling is there when you finally get over with something? I just finished my finals for all six of my classes: Geometry, Computer App, English, Physics, Spanish, and PE. The physics final was not so easy, but I think I got most of the problems. I got an A+ on my geometry final, so that’s good . The only one I’m worried about it English. Anyways, I could’ve studied harder. At the beginning of the week, I made my devotion to only use the computer for not over 2 hours a day. I actually managed to do that all the way to Wednesday. On Thursday, since Spanish was my only final left and I master it pretty well (:P), I kind of slacked off.

 Topics: exam, Life, school