I have a perfect attendance record in elementary/middle/high school. I'll write an entry about that later. This entry is about an e-mail I sent to Cal Ripken Jr. (my inspiration for the streak) and his reply. Ok, well, kinda. It's impossible to find Cal's e-mail address on the internet, because putting it there would be stupid. Sooooo, I had to work may up to him. I e-mailed one of the co-owners of a corporation (the other co-owner happens to be Cal) and had him forward an e-mail to Cal. Essentially, I asked if Cal could write a college recommendation for me. Bear in mind, it's impossible to get responses to these things, all you end up with are pre-fabbed stock e-mails, but I didn't get one of those! Here's a copy/paste of what I got:
Michael,
Jeff Eiseman recently received your email and passed it along to me. I shared it with Cal and he wanted me to thank you for the kind words and congratulate you on your impressive run in school...far more impressive than any attendance run Cal had at school!
As for the letter of recommendation we will have to respectfully decline. Letters such as that are not something that we or Cal take lightly and due to the fact that we don't personally know you we would be uncomfortable submitting such a letter.
I truly hope you understand our position and on behalf of Mr. Ripken I wish you all the best with your pending collegiate career.
Happy Holidays!
John Maroon
Vice-President, Communications & Branding
Ripken Baseball
Cal knows I exist! He is impressed with me! YAY! Ok, that's my happy of the day! Ciao!
July 31, 2006
July 29, 2006
MIT's Application
Yep, I was right, MIT's application is now online. Here's the mystery though. . . . McGann said that the downloadable paper application would be online before the online application. It's backwards, the online one is on first. Don't know why, don't really care, just a curiosity. Yeah, so. . . .I'll be applying now, ciao!
July 28, 2006
MIT DOWN?!?!?
OMG! Could it be? Could it??? Huh huh huh?!?!?!? (note the use of the triple interabang). MIT's website is being worked on until 5 pm Eastern (2 pm Pacific). My deduction? THEY'RE UPLOADING THE APPLICATION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It is my solemn quest to be the first one to download it! I'll wait here with baited breath, refreshing my screen more and more as 2 pm approaches, probably in a normal distribution, but that would mean that an hour after 2 I would hardly check at all any more. . . . how about a backwards Chi-squared distribution, that's more fitting! Check more and more and more and more! (I'm excited). Ok, that's all, click the pic, you'll see! 
July 27, 2006
Boooooo diversity. . . .Hooooooray Beer, erm, I mean, pie chart!
A1 Steak Sauce and The Rock
So, there's an A1 steak sauce commercial where a bit of steak sauce falls onto the grill of the bbq. The guy, being stupid, licks it off. . .cue ambulance. Fairly stupid commercial, but the cool part is the music in the background. It's the beginning to "The Chase" from "The Rock" soundtrack. Yep, I've listened to that soundtrack a lot because the movie is THAT good! I'm not sure if they were hoping nobody would notice or if they got permission, but either way I CAUGHT YOU! good music choice though!
July 25, 2006
My Senior Pictures
Yay! I just had my senior pictures taken and I want to share them with you! They were exciting enough to break the blog hiatus. Keep in mind, technically these pictures are copyrighted and shouldn't appear here, but sshhhhhh, nobody has to know. Just please don't save them or reproduce them and we should be ok. For the originals or to order some, go to haugensgalleri.com. Enjoy me!
May 08, 2006
Warning, Geeky Post
Soooo, I'm sitting in Stats and my friend is flipping frantically through his physics book.
[ME] "What's up? Looking for something?"
[HIM] "I can't find this conversion rate!"
[3RD PERSON] "What are you trying to convert?"
[HIM] "I'm trying to convert Joules to feet"
. . . .
I apologize to any of you who may not be as unit savvy as I, but the laughter that erupted from this particular conversation was quite amazing. To this day we tease him about his conversion mishap. If you don't understand this and don't think it's funny, um, allow me to explain. A Joule is a measure of work, energy, that kind of thing. Feet is, well, a distance. Converting Joules to feet is like physics class alchemy, or squaring the circle, or getting an A in english, it just doesn't work! So yes, that's the geeky post of the day, hope you enjoyed it!
[ME] "What's up? Looking for something?"
[HIM] "I can't find this conversion rate!"
[3RD PERSON] "What are you trying to convert?"
[HIM] "I'm trying to convert Joules to feet"
. . . .
I apologize to any of you who may not be as unit savvy as I, but the laughter that erupted from this particular conversation was quite amazing. To this day we tease him about his conversion mishap. If you don't understand this and don't think it's funny, um, allow me to explain. A Joule is a measure of work, energy, that kind of thing. Feet is, well, a distance. Converting Joules to feet is like physics class alchemy, or squaring the circle, or getting an A in english, it just doesn't work! So yes, that's the geeky post of the day, hope you enjoyed it!
May 05, 2006
Bird
Sorry, no posts for a while, but this is worth it. I came home from school today and I went up to the garage. I noticed a bird hopping around my dog's food bowl, so I walked up to it to check it out. I know not all of you out their are aspiring ornithologists like myself, but the bird is known as an Oregon Junco. It's basically a brown bird with a black head. Well, it was hop-hop-hopping and I approached it. It eyed me and ran into the garage. I followed it and then it jumped through the door into our second garage. Again, I followed, and then it made it's final escape outside. I continured to follow and sure enough, it was back at the bowl. I went inside and chatted with my dad. He said that it had been attacking the bowl all day because it could see his reflection in it. I found this entertaining. I went outside to check it out and the bird was gone. . . or so I thought. It turns out that he had actually just moved on to bigger and greater things, the jeep! He was attacking the windshield and the review mirror with fervor. This was just too much, a bird attacking his reflection in shiny objects for the entire day!? So, photo op! I ran inside and got the camera and took his picture a couple of times. Here ya go, this is the Junco and his attempt at his reflection's life.
Also, I uploaded a movie of his attack so that it can be viewed by everybody on the internet. Here's the link: http://jzzsxm.googlepages.com/BirdReflection.MOV Please enjoy! Thanks for reading!
Also, I uploaded a movie of his attack so that it can be viewed by everybody on the internet. Here's the link: http://jzzsxm.googlepages.com/BirdReflection.MOV Please enjoy! Thanks for reading!
April 28, 2006
Regional Math Tournament
Aloha mis amigos. Long time no habla. Well, I'm sorry about that, I've been busy with homework and such and this is the first time I've been awake enough to blog. I'll try to be more regular. I want to talk about. . . . MATH! (what a shocker) Thursday, April 13, 2006 was the Regional Math Tournament. Essentially, two people from each math level comepete from each school against other schools. I represented half of my school's precalc team. I think a total of about 8 of us went, all geeks. I was one of the geekier ones, but we'll look past that.
There are several events at the tournament, namely "The Qualifier", "25-Minus", "Group Problem Solving", "Estimation", and "THE RELAY" (caps for emphasis (if you didn't know that then leave (seriously (go)))). Let me walk you through it. First off was the State Qualifying exam. 15 questions, 1 hour. It wasn't hard at all, but due to several ridiculously stupid errors, I didn't score so hot. I got a 12 I think, they never told us, but I think it was a 12. After that was 25-minus. Basically, all the teams in a particular level sit in a room together, but you sit separately from your teammate. You are shown a problem on an overhead and a time limit. You have that amount of time to solve the problem and write it down. Times range from 45 seconds to a minute and a half. You are then shown the answers and the people that got them right raise their hands. They subtract the number of people who answered correctly from 25 and then give that many points to the teams that answered. In other words, being the only person to answer a question is good. We were all ready, psyched, ready to win it for the team, when the first problem came up. Now, what you are about to see is not the actual problem, but it will give you a rough idea. . . .
Yeah, scary. The atmosphere in the room was almost laughable. Here we were, brightest and best, and we just sat there. Some laughed. Most just sat. I tried my hardest, reducing and reducing, reducing and reducing, and ended up with some random equation with about 5 terms on top and 4 terms on the bottom. Then she showed the answer. It looked something like
There was definitely some laughter when THAT showed up on the board. Everybody that had tried sheepishly crumpled up their papers and looked around to make sure nobody had seen what they had gotten for an answer. The lady asked how many people got it right. Nobody raised their hands. Total Failure -1, Best and Brightest -0. Next problem. Imagine the last problem, but with another term added to the top and bottom. again, laughter and failure. The answer was just as stupid and the emberassment mounted. Nowe we're desparate, we want points!!! The proctor is shocked, can't believe that we haven't answered a question yet. Finally, answerable questions started appearing. My partner was smoking everybody. I answered I think 4 of them, but she definitely stole the show. So yeah, 25-minus was ok. Third event, group problem solving. This was kind of entertaining. 3 problems, 30 minutes. We looked at them and found that the las problem would be easy. We quickly knocked out the last problem and started working on the second one. The question?
Simple enough. Solve for x in terms of a, substitute it in for x in the second equation, and bingo, problem solved. Well, it got ugly. Solving for a resulted in
Ok, not so bad, quadratic equation. Until, you plug it into the second part of the equation. Then you get . Then we had a debate. Plus. . . .or minus? Such a simple question that could result in much more work than necessary if the wrong choice is chosen. We decided to do both. My partner did plus, I did minus. So, here's the equation we worked:
We just kept multiplying it out and eventually we got to, um, well, it was big. Like, really big. We decided that was the wrong route to take, so we looked at the question again. "Well, couldn't we just leave it? Use this last equation we had?" The problem didn't say to expand it all the way out, just write it in terms of A. So, we left it. On to the first problem. It said to imagine a parallelogram and gave the lengths of the sides. "Solve for the diagonals". Um, uh-oh. We couldn't, and it said that the answers were integers, so we improvised. We drew a parallelogram to scale and measured the angles. Ta-da! 9 and 15. We were done, and not confident. We knew that we had the last one right, but that was it.
The next event was the relay. Basically, teams lined up on one side of the gym, math problems on the other. One at a time members from each team would run over, solve a problem and run back. I'll avoid the gory details and suffice it to say, our school dominated. uber winning-ness. Now, lets talk about estimation. Throughout the day there was a big bowl of marshmallows (big and small). The challenge was to guess the amount of marshmallows. The winner gets a graphing calculator. Well, ha! I failed that one. I guessed 900. My partner wrote, on the little paper you write your guess one, "Let a = my guess. Define "a" such that it equals the amount of marshmallows in the bowl. QED". Personally, I think that should have won, but no.
The awards were next. I got third in the qualifying exam, enough for a ribbon but not enough for state. The first shocker was team problem solving. My partner and I had given up, but all of a sudden WHOA! We won! haha, kurazy! Either we guessed really well, or other people had no idea what was going on! w00t, that was exciting. My partner won 25-minus. Then, estimation. I was wrong, oh so wrong. The answer was 1,438. The winner, however, went to our school. Her guess? (You won't believe this. . . ) 1,444. She was off by 6! Amazing, she won a TI-84 silver. Then she won another TI-84 silver in another category! TWO CALCULATORS! She'll be selling them to wal-mart. Our school ended up winning overall, so that was good. I ended up with a bunch of ribbons and all was good. Hope you enjoyed the story! Ciao!
There are several events at the tournament, namely "The Qualifier", "25-Minus", "Group Problem Solving", "Estimation", and "THE RELAY" (caps for emphasis (if you didn't know that then leave (seriously (go)))). Let me walk you through it. First off was the State Qualifying exam. 15 questions, 1 hour. It wasn't hard at all, but due to several ridiculously stupid errors, I didn't score so hot. I got a 12 I think, they never told us, but I think it was a 12. After that was 25-minus. Basically, all the teams in a particular level sit in a room together, but you sit separately from your teammate. You are shown a problem on an overhead and a time limit. You have that amount of time to solve the problem and write it down. Times range from 45 seconds to a minute and a half. You are then shown the answers and the people that got them right raise their hands. They subtract the number of people who answered correctly from 25 and then give that many points to the teams that answered. In other words, being the only person to answer a question is good. We were all ready, psyched, ready to win it for the team, when the first problem came up. Now, what you are about to see is not the actual problem, but it will give you a rough idea. . . .
Yeah, scary. The atmosphere in the room was almost laughable. Here we were, brightest and best, and we just sat there. Some laughed. Most just sat. I tried my hardest, reducing and reducing, reducing and reducing, and ended up with some random equation with about 5 terms on top and 4 terms on the bottom. Then she showed the answer. It looked something like
There was definitely some laughter when THAT showed up on the board. Everybody that had tried sheepishly crumpled up their papers and looked around to make sure nobody had seen what they had gotten for an answer. The lady asked how many people got it right. Nobody raised their hands. Total Failure -1, Best and Brightest -0. Next problem. Imagine the last problem, but with another term added to the top and bottom. again, laughter and failure. The answer was just as stupid and the emberassment mounted. Nowe we're desparate, we want points!!! The proctor is shocked, can't believe that we haven't answered a question yet. Finally, answerable questions started appearing. My partner was smoking everybody. I answered I think 4 of them, but she definitely stole the show. So yeah, 25-minus was ok. Third event, group problem solving. This was kind of entertaining. 3 problems, 30 minutes. We looked at them and found that the las problem would be easy. We quickly knocked out the last problem and started working on the second one. The question?
Simple enough. Solve for x in terms of a, substitute it in for x in the second equation, and bingo, problem solved. Well, it got ugly. Solving for a resulted in
Ok, not so bad, quadratic equation. Until, you plug it into the second part of the equation. Then you get . Then we had a debate. Plus. . . .or minus? Such a simple question that could result in much more work than necessary if the wrong choice is chosen. We decided to do both. My partner did plus, I did minus. So, here's the equation we worked:
We just kept multiplying it out and eventually we got to, um, well, it was big. Like, really big. We decided that was the wrong route to take, so we looked at the question again. "Well, couldn't we just leave it? Use this last equation we had?" The problem didn't say to expand it all the way out, just write it in terms of A. So, we left it. On to the first problem. It said to imagine a parallelogram and gave the lengths of the sides. "Solve for the diagonals". Um, uh-oh. We couldn't, and it said that the answers were integers, so we improvised. We drew a parallelogram to scale and measured the angles. Ta-da! 9 and 15. We were done, and not confident. We knew that we had the last one right, but that was it.
The next event was the relay. Basically, teams lined up on one side of the gym, math problems on the other. One at a time members from each team would run over, solve a problem and run back. I'll avoid the gory details and suffice it to say, our school dominated. uber winning-ness. Now, lets talk about estimation. Throughout the day there was a big bowl of marshmallows (big and small). The challenge was to guess the amount of marshmallows. The winner gets a graphing calculator. Well, ha! I failed that one. I guessed 900. My partner wrote, on the little paper you write your guess one, "Let a = my guess. Define "a" such that it equals the amount of marshmallows in the bowl. QED". Personally, I think that should have won, but no.
The awards were next. I got third in the qualifying exam, enough for a ribbon but not enough for state. The first shocker was team problem solving. My partner and I had given up, but all of a sudden WHOA! We won! haha, kurazy! Either we guessed really well, or other people had no idea what was going on! w00t, that was exciting. My partner won 25-minus. Then, estimation. I was wrong, oh so wrong. The answer was 1,438. The winner, however, went to our school. Her guess? (You won't believe this. . . ) 1,444. She was off by 6! Amazing, she won a TI-84 silver. Then she won another TI-84 silver in another category! TWO CALCULATORS! She'll be selling them to wal-mart. Our school ended up winning overall, so that was good. I ended up with a bunch of ribbons and all was good. Hope you enjoyed the story! Ciao!
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