Ben's info

Recap

2008-01-26T16:32:00.000-08:00

Wow, I haven't posted anything here for almost 5 months.

Anyway, here's what's happened

August: Did absolutely nothing
September 1-16: Did absolutely nothing
September 17: Packed to go to college
September 18: Moved in to diminutive Stanford dorm room
September 19: Ate at Quizno's for birthday
September 20-29: Why do people at Stanford suck so much?
September 30: Obtained Nintendo DS
October 1-31: I can't hear you, I'm playing Phoenix Wright (october 10: NOOOOOOOOOOOO, you can't delay my Smash Bros!)
November 1-30: 96 on midterm (yes, only one)
December 1-18: Instead of studying for finals, more Phoenix Wright
December 19-31: Home is somehow better than college despite the fact that I'm alone for 50% of the time. Maybe it's because 75% of my family aren't jerks and the ones who aren't jerks I see more than 2 times a week, as opposed to Stanford, where 75% of the undergraduate population are massive unintellectual grade-mongering partiers who will all go on to make more money than me as MDs as well as gain more respect from the community due to their sensitive work, while I struggle to feed myself while working on electronics or something whilst being criticized for selling out to industry, and the majority of the other 25% don't live on West Campus.
Jan 1-7: Dreading going back.
Jan 8-26: More of the same. (Jan 15: NOOOOOOOOOOO, stop delaying SSBB!)

So as you can see, I've been pretty busy over the last 5 months forming biased opinions about people, getting angry over nothing, and playing video games.

A funny web development story

2007-08-28T02:32:00.000-07:00

I had a page with IE, FF and Opera open, and IE showed the page wrong. I guessed that IE was stupid and FF and Opera were right (it was IE6, afterall), but upon further inspection of the code, IE was actually right! I had put in a div tag with a center align, but expected the upcoming element to be aligned to the left... To think that Opera and Firefox both rendered the page incorrectly (but still the way I wanted it) ... I won't be using IE anytime soon, but thankfully there are multiple web browsers out there (at least for debugging purposes)

update

2007-08-26T00:53:00.000-07:00

Wow it's been forever. Anyway Ubuntu + Xampp is pretty much the best thing ever. Beryl, Avant Window Navigator, OS X icons = Mac OS (except for support for mac apps).

More randomness

2007-05-15T12:32:00.000-07:00

MIT sucks

2007-04-27T16:43:00.000-07:00

I usually try to avoid getting angry at stuff, but the fact that the dean of admissions at MIT lied to get her job (she pretended to have a college degree), and then goes on to finalize the rejection of my application which I worked on for weeks kind of makes me feel strange. Oh well. Now I can finally question the legitimacy of the large envelopes some people who I know received

somebody CAN stop the worm

2007-04-18T11:54:00.000-07:00

Worm 2: Revenge of Stick Man

another one

2007-04-18T11:32:00.000-07:00

don't make no sense

College

2007-03-30T15:32:00.000-07:00

Here is my final list of colleges:

University of Chicago - Accepted, not sure of scholarships
UC Davis - Accepted, Regents scholarship
MIT - Rejected
Caltech - Rejected
UC San Diego - Accepted, Regents scholarship
Harvey Mudd College - Accepted, Harvey S. Mudd Scholarship
Haverford College - Accepted
UCLA - Accepted, Regents Scholarship
UC Berkeley - Accepted
Stanford - accepted

Tiny people doing stupid things part one

2007-02-16T11:39:00.000-08:00

No comment

Crime Film

2007-02-09T20:47:00.000-08:00

The perfect crime. Boy, these animations have taken over my life - 2 in the same day.

Bisecting a plane

2007-02-09T11:44:00.000-08:00

I've made 3 of these animations over the last 4 days. It's so boring in school these days.

Da werm

2007-02-08T15:33:00.000-08:00

It's unstoppable!!!! OMG !1! Click to animate.

I missed a deadline, this happened

2007-02-06T12:45:00.000-08:00

My most epic animation to date (click to animate if not already so)

Accepted!

2007-01-16T16:47:00.000-08:00

It cost that guy some cash, though. This pic only had one part edited, the first part of the sentence, for obvious reasons.
This is not intended as an attack on any institution and is certainly not true

done with college applications

2007-01-15T21:59:00.000-08:00

The never-ending cycle of applications (pictured below, click to animate if not already animated) has finally ended at approximately 10:00 PM, January 15, 2007

I got in

2006-12-18T23:00:00.000-08:00

I got in to some random Chicago University. They spy on their students.

gif 2

2006-12-18T11:35:00.000-08:00

Another piece of animated googdness (Click to animate if it is not moving)

gif

2006-12-15T11:38:00.000-08:00

I made this (click to animate)

Another random music post

2006-11-12T23:28:00.000-08:00

About a week ago, I was listening to Drone Zone (from SomaFM) on my PPC and heard an interesting song. I was half asleep at the time and didn't remember what it was.
Just now, I turned on Drone Zone, and voila! I remembered how it sounded enough to realize it was the same song - "Stone in focus" by Aphex Twin! I'm now sure that I can remember any sound - just not any word - I can NEVER remember the word "Surrogate".

11/19: It's only on the LP for SAW II. So much for that.

the failure

2006-09-05T19:46:00.000-07:00

I totally failed at this thing. I almost got through the easy problem, but didn't realize you had to do both in the allotted hour. I probably can attribute this failure to my computer science teacher (although I self-taught myself everything...)

writely rules

2006-08-22T21:37:00.000-07:00

Writely is just the tool I have been looking for. Instead of downloading a paper during a class, changing it up, and emailing it back to myself, only to repeat the same process during the next class, now I can edit online and instantly save thanks to WEB 2.0 (and AJAX). Basically you can edit stuff online and save it, kind of like other free web hosts, except it is designed for editing documents. Only problems: Only spell-checks in english, and formatting options are a bit sparse.

Obligatory monthly post

2006-08-14T16:40:00.000-07:00

After visiting 4 ivy league schools (well, 3 ivies and 1 MIT) I can safely say that I've had enough jokes about AP classes and Antarctica to last me the next year. I think every year the admissions people at every college come together to make more stupid jokes.

context:
The weather was really bad (warm, humid) everywhere, so every info session made mention of their foreign study program that "goes to every continent except Antarctica, which doesn't seem like such a bad idea after last week's weather". Another humorless comment was that you should take AP classes instead of regular ones and get A's anyway. Sorry, Harvard, I'm still not subjecting myself to AP lit.

Berkeley Math PhD

2006-07-12T16:40:00.000-07:00

It's kind of surprising that you have to know Russian, French, or German (two of them) in order to get a math PhD at UCB

Please

2006-07-05T18:28:00.000-07:00

Dear Associated Press
Please fire Darlene Superville.
Have a nice day
Ben Olson

Just doing my part

2006-06-14T23:37:00.000-07:00