I actually have a by-the-minutes journal of my Arcadia experience on my PDA, but I'm having issues with the computer, so I'll just show you the product:

Parade - Washington Grey's 1
It's got better quality then video 2, but didn't get the whole song. In case you're curious, I'm 3rd rank from the back, closest to the camera, not counting tall flags.

Parade 2
This one has the whole parade, but focuses on the guard more visually and is takes from the other side of the street.

Field Show - Legend of the 5th Sun
It's best if you close your eyes... because the music is GLORIOUS and the visual part was... not so much. I have proof, too, since we won the award for high music score but came in 3rd overall, and music is the heaviest weighted score.

The Drum Major's Final Salute
I didn't realize anyone videoed this. Yeah, our drum major always has a lot of fun with the color guard captains at the final salute.

I know I updated more last marching season, but that's because I was excited. After losing 2 more tournaments after the one previously mentioned, not getting to host our tournament due to the fires, and then loosing ANOTHER tournament (by FIVE FREAKING POINTS) I haven't been in the mood.

Combine that with the death of a student at school at a football game on Friday, and some rather depressing news relating to my extended family... and I haven't been up much to blogging. Maybe we'll win the big end of the year tournament at Arcadia in 2ish weeks. We'll see.

So, Marching Season has officially started. Before I get on my rant, I got Phantom Hourglass. It's awesome. Multi player's a ton of fun, too. Now, for bando ranting.

So our first tournament of the season was yesterday. It was a good performance. No video on youtube yet. Got to give it a few days. I've watched the performance of both us and our one competitor, and I have no idea how they beat us. None whatsoever.

I don't like the way SCSBOA does awards ceremonies. It always apparent who won 10 minutes before they announce it, since it's the one band not called in their division takes all the fun out of it when you have something awesome happen, like this:

1st Place 6A: Mt. Carmel - 74
Music Sweepstakes: Rancho Bernardo - 320ish
Effect Sweepstakes: Mt. Carmel - 230ish
Visual Sweepstakes: Rancho Bernardo - 120ish
Overall Sweepstakes: Rancho Bernardo - 74!

Now here's where all the fun got lost. Look at the scores for MC and RB. IT'S THE SAME! We TIED. But, of course, we already knew we had lost when they called us 5 awards earlier. Noe, they won because Tiebreaker goes to the music scores, but still, that's pretty good. I can't wait until our show is complete. Just imagine: 1 more file covered down, and we'd have won. One less wrong note. One less person on the wrong foot... we should win next week with just a little bit more work.

Though, honestly, how do they win when there's an entire MINUTE of silence in their show where they're moving SLOWLY. Excitement factor of that = 0, and no music should mean, you know, LOWER MUSIC SCORE. Blah. I want it to be Monday so I can get to school and look at our official score sheets and listen to judges tapes.

GLOSSARY OF BANDO TERMS USED IN THIS BLOG:

Sweepstakes - Award given to best score in category and overall in all divisions... in theory. Always goes to a division 6 band anyhow.

Music Judging Category - 400pts possible. Musical Phrasing, Articulation, Note accuracy, etc.

General Effect Judging Category - 350pts possible. How exciting and impressive the show is as a whole.

Visual Judging Category - 250pts possible. How straight the lines are, how smooth the curves are, people are all on the correct foot, etc.

(All are added to get a total of 1000, and then it's divided by 10 to get a score out of 100)

Covering Down: Making sure you're directly behind the person in front you.

http://www.sega.com/cgi-bin/sra/leaderboard.cgi?zone=13&t=us

Yep, there's me. #7.

Actually, #6 as of about a minute ago, but the internet leaderboard only shows updates daily, so tomorrow it will show I'm #6.

On another note, I need ppl to play online against. The matching doesn't do a great job of picking players.

Best Sonic game ever. No joke. It is superior to any Sonic game you've ever played, hands down.

I got myself a DS Lite and Sonic Rush. It is awesome.

On a side note, we're almost done with the first movement of out field show in band! It's exciting!

Oblivious band director + Dirty minded band = Hilarity.

So, we're at band camp, and the director keeps reminding us to keep our weight forward on the balls of our feet. Fine, that's alright.

Then, later, when we're sliding (moving to the left/right while facing the front) he reminds us that we should be like a screw, moving up as we twist to maintain good posture. Fine, that's alright.

Then he tells us later, as a reminder during an exercise, "keep your weight on your balls and screw to visitors."

Read that out loud a few times. Yeah. You can see why we were laughing so hard. (Remember, to and TWO are pronounced the same way)

Of course, McPherson then told us we're referring to them as our PLATFORMS (not balls) from now on, upon realizing his mistake, and he hasn't used the term "screw up" since.

But it doesn't end there. Today he was excited to tell us about some new drill he got that we will learn tonight. The set has to blocks at an angle to the judges with a small bridge of students on top. He draws it on the board. The entire Wind Ensemble period instantly responds with:

"Pants!"

He pauses. "Okay, my drawing looks like pants. Whatever." He then goes to talk about a group of students who will do a cool visual as they move forwards and back to go to the next, "diamond" set. He circles that area. Giggling ensues.

He's circled the crotch of the pants.

This is especially funny because every year there's one set, even though it's a passing set instead of a hold set (hold meaning you stop there, passing meaning you immediately move to another set) that always looks like an... interesting piece of clothing.

Freshman year we had the "bra" set, Sophomore year it was the "thong" set, Junior year we had an "underwear" set, and now we have the "pants with a fun visual" set.

Oh how I love band. XD.

Today: Practice Clarinet alot, because I haven't recently.
Tomorrow: Band Camp
Thursday: Band Camp
Friday: Band Camp
Saturday: Band Camp
Sunday: Sleep
Monday: Band Camp
Tuesday: Band Camp
Wednesday: School Starts (with a rehearsal that night from 6-9:15 PM for band, too)

Had a party with all my friends. It was fun. It is late, now, however, and I don't feel like giving details. Look forward, however, to the most awesome stories you have ever read in the near future, all a product of the party.

New banner. Made with GIMP.

Photoshop, but for free!

It's not a hack. It's perfectly legal. Heck, I found it promoted on gamespot's parent site, C-NET.

It's really awesome. Go google it and try it yourself! It does ALMOST everything photoshop can! Heck, it even opens and saves PHOTOSHOP .psd files! Really nice if you had a trial version of Photoshop that ran out and you can't access those images!

Seriously, I'm so happy I found this!

GIMP: GNU Image Manipulation Program.

GOOGLE IT!

That is all.

Woo! Off to the beach and to do college visitations! Yeah!

Will be back on Monday!

Woo. Had first "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" performance at church. It was fun. 1 down, 4 to go...

Think you know your Sonic? Think again...

The Trivia Challenge is run by my union, SonicSpot, and is open to anybody everywhere. Please be sure to read all of the rules before you begin. For your username, use your GameSpot ID.

http://home.san.rr.com/scase/SonicSpot/SonicSpot_Trivia_Challenge.htm

Just got my SAT Subject Test score in Math Level II back...

I got a perfect 800.

I am overjoyed and a half. Okay, maybe even overjoyed and 3/4.

Very happy. Very, very happy.

And the funny thing is, I left the last 2 problems blank because I ran out of time.

Still, I'm happy.

Did I mention I'm happy?

Oh I did? Okay. I'm happy.

That is all.

School's out for summer! Yeah! You know what that means...

ONLY 8 MORE WEEKS UNTIL BAND CAMP!

Speaking of band, I'm a littl bummed that I didn't get picked for section leader, but I suppose it's not too bad. The extra work of that combined with 4 AP classes (the most I can take) next year would kill me. Blargh.

So... I'm probably going to spend most of my free time either:
A. Programming my game
B. Programming my club's language-education game
C. Learning how to program in C and Java
D. Playing wii

I have a life, I SWEAR... It just only exists from late August to late November (Marching Band Season)

Check them out under my "Video's" tab.

The Evil Foundry one has no sound, the Dinosaur Jungle has sound, but it begins to fall off by about a half second of delay about half-way through, and by the third one I got smart, gave up on sound, and just made a Sand Oasis speed run with SUPER AWESOME FIELDSHOW TECHNO REMIX MUSIC!

Enjoy!

Click Here to see the most seriously #$%^*& up thing ever...

Seriously, do YOU have any idea what this is?

This is what we do in physics while the graduating Seniors are taking their final and we're supposed to "study"

If you can figure out what it is, you deserve a cookie.

Know what it is yet?

Hmmm?

Still working on it?

Think faster!

In 5 more lines you'll find out

4...

3...

2...

If you don't know what it is you should stop reading and figure it out!

1...

wait... this is 6.

Oh well.

ITS A GAME OF DOTS! Yeah, I know. P2, TIFF!, and I got bored and played dots, except when we made our lines we drew funky shapes. If you look closely, you can find an atwood's machine, fish eating eachother, two lines that, when read in order, read "Your mom," and all sorts of random junk. The red letters are where I claimed squares. I won, as you can see by the long stream of "LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL" in red. Oh, there's also a gun shooting a bananna.

I was winning and the got frustrated and wrote "hate l33t!" See where the "HAXZORS," "N00B," and "BLIND" are all pointing? Yep, I was sitting there. TIFF! kindly told both P1 and I go "GTFO N00B!"

And if you look where all the squigglies are, you can see in red pen an upside down letter of some sort and an infinity. Yeah, that's my score. I rox.

So... um... enjoy?

OMG BOATS! Such fun!

You probably have no idea what I'm talking about. Okay, here's the explanation. For AP Physics, we have to build a boat out of a limited amount of paper and 75 linear feet of wood. You have to have a theme, a skit, music, and have to get the boat accross the pool with somebody in it.

Our theme: The K.M. Bismarck. KM stands for "Kreigs Marine" (Sounds like that. It's German, no idea how to spell it) which is like HMS (Her Majesties Service) but for German boats instead of British boats. Histoically, the Bismarck is the greatest battleship in the history of the world. Took the enitre British Navy and then some of their airforce to sink it. We decided to reconstruct it... in paper and wood form. Our music was Wagner's "Flight of the Valkyries" (again, no idea on spelling). Our skit was "The Emperor" reading some of Otto Von Bismarck's "Blood and Iron" speech.

Our design was brilliant. A perfect trapezoid from the side, and it had the "box" type boat frame INSIDE as part of the structure. That was very important when it came to pool time on wednesday...

So our pilot, "P1", barely made it accross the pool, but that's because her boyfriend "P2," "TIFF!!!!," The Emperor, and I loaded her in a bit far back, making the boat wobbly from the start. The entire AP physics class claered the pool, earning us all full credit on the boat part. The reg. phys. class was not so lucky. "Power Rangers" had such high walls that the polit could barely paddle. "S(n)akes on a boat" (they forgot to paint on the "n") was huge, but had little structure due to limited wood with such a huge boat, and the pilot fell through the bottom of the boat.

But everyone that comes to watch wants to see more sinkage, so it all ends with the BATTLE ROYALE! where everyone tries to fill eachother's boats with water by splashing. Winner is supposed to be the last one left, but nobody likes that because the last one left is the one person who breaks the rules and avoids fighting (you must fight according to battle rules).

So history repeated itself in the battle. You see, everyone feared out boat because our boat was SO sturdy thanks to how much time we had to load it with coats of paint and our final layer of industrial grade spray paint. So 2 teams switched pilots from the light-girl to the male swimmers to try and crush us. It didn't work. "n00b" came after us with "Rat-hair" in "The Godfather" and "The Love Boat." P1 panicked and began running. Rat-hair broke off and n00b came powerig after. P1 runs and runs, but she can't see that she's backing into a wall, and by the time she hears out screams, it's too late. n00b rams her into the wall. With a loud snap, the frame breaks. P1 fuitlly paddles away...

AND THE BISMARCK STILL FLOATS! Seriously. They snapped the OUTER frame, so we still had the box shape on the inside holding it up structurally. n00b was PISSED and came powering after... and capsized himself, taking him out of the game. Everyone pointed and laughed at him. So P1 and The Bismarck limped along towards the others to try and obtain another kill. Suddenly, Peteron1 looks behind her and begins paddling faster in panic. n00b HAD GOTTEN BACK IN HIS BOAT! A bunch of people booed him, but he still came. P1 splashed him more, and n00b splashed her, but was putting more water in his boat than in ours, and ended up filling his boat and sinking it, where the water pressure cracked the frame. So he ended up losing to a boat with a snapped frame TWICE.

Then "The Love Boat" came back after us. Rat-hair got the point of his boat lodged in our side by accident, snapping our inner frame and dooming us. But as the Bismarck went down, it pulled The Love Boat down too! And Rat-hair went underwater first, so we TECHNICALLY beat him. Yeah, we're awesome.

The winner was one of two girls who just sat and watched from the safety of their own boats. When they realized they had to come after eachother, one capsized itself trying to move. It was lame.

Everyone says we really won. We had the best boat design and got 3 kills, after all. It was THE MOST EPIC boat day ever in all 3 years I've been at my school.

P1's mom got video of the whole thing. If I can get it and edit out the face of our pilot and the cheering of her actual name on the video I will try to upload it.

It took more than one to sink the Bismarck, and it took them down with it, going down fighting. History repeats itself...