Xatal

So as of today, I’m back in Santa Cruz for another action-packed quarter. Winter break was pretty fun, but it went by far too fast. It feels weird being back.

Classes start tomorrow, but my schedule for this quarter is pretty easy on Tuesdays, so it’s going to be a gradual start for me. Here goes nothing!

Oh God.

You've got mail!

So I have several e-mail accounts for xatal.com, most of which forward e-mails right to my Gmail account, where I handle all of my e-mail.

Recently, I noticed that for some reason my disk space usage for e-mail was incredibly high when compared to everything else. I couldn’t figure out why until I took a look.

I realized that all of the e-mail that’s sent to a nonexistent account is still kept around. I also realized that I had a cron job (basically, a scheduled task) that was designed to run every ten minutes still set to on, and it’s been going for the last couple of years. Whoops.

Cleaning it out took quite a while.

So I’ve finally managed to make a few beta designs for Xatal. I’m definitely not a designer — and the designs definitely reflect this — but I am still semi-proud of them.

Like anything else that a person works on for a long time, I have a hard time seeing fundamental flaws with things, since I’m so accustomed to seeing it. That’s why I’d love to have some opinions from readers and other bloggers about the designs.

All of these are beta designs. I just want a general idea of which one to focus on. For whichever design is chosen, I would definitely spruce it up more than it is — adding better graphics, better logos, and so forth. I just don’t want to pour a lot of time into something that might not even go through. I just want a starting point. The content is all sample content, things would change on a real design of course.

Also worth considering is the option of keeping the current design, or modifying it in some way.

Personally, I don’t have any preference to anything at this point. So without further ado…

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It’s amazing how fast it passes by. It seems like just five days ago I was coming home with three weeks off. Now I’m down to my last five days.

It’s been a great vacation though. I’ve managed to see almost all of my friends back home, and have spent plenty of time with everybody. I’ve been out and about enough, going to the Emerald Bowl, Sonoma State, and a Guitar Center in a nearby store. I have plans to go to a large mall a couple of hours away, and I may go to the snow over the weekend.

I’m still working on the redesign for the site. I’ve got two “beta” designs ready, and I’m working on a third. I’m going to post them in a day or two to get some feedback from everybody, and then go with whichever one is most popular. I’m not a designer, but I’m still trying to make something that I can be a bit proud of. I wish I knew how to use Adobe Illustrator better (read: at all)…

Anyway, I hope everybody has a wonderful New Years Eve! Don’t forget to add a leap second!

Last Sunday, I took my girlfriend to see Sonoma State University. She’s unsure of where she wants to go to school next year, so I figured I’d take her to a few schools so she can have a quality tour to remember them by.

Right now, Sonoma is her top choice for a CSU, and since I’m always curious about schools I’ve never been to nor heard much about, I decided to take her to see it.

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When I was coming back from Santa Cruz, my family pulled a fast one on me and told me that they’d bought four tickets to this year’s Emerald Bowl in San Francisco.

I’m not a big fan of college football, since UCSC doesn’t have its own team, but since Cal (UC Berkeley) was in it, I took some interest. My brother goes to Berkeley, which is the main reason why my family decided to go.

The game was against the Miami Hurricanes. At first I was a bit unsure of whether or not to root for Cal, considering that I don’t go there and they turned down my application, but in the end I decided to support them a little bit.

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Carol of the Bells would have to be my favorite Christmas song

Yeah yeah yeah so I didn’t post yesterday. I’m sorry, the holiday festivities have been keeping me rather busier than I thought they would. :(

But since I do have a second to post tonight, I thought I’d take some time to wish everybody a merry Christmas (or whatever holiday you choose to celebrate)!

I’ll have more posts coming over the next few days, as well as some info about the possible redesign.

So, how has your holiday season been going?

Now that your college applications are (hopefully) submitted, it’s a good idea to start applying to scholarships. Many kids put them off until March or so, so by applying now you gain a few more opportunities to  win than you would otherwise have if you procrastinate.

Occasionally in high school, we would have opportunities to work on scholarship applications during classtime in a computer lab. Wherever I looked in the classroom, people were working on online scholarship applications, most found on the website FastWeb.

Although online scholarships are worth applying to, in actuality, they are not as effective uses of your time as a local scholarship.

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In an effort to both increase my design skills and (hopefully) make this site look better, I’m aiming for a new look to the site.

I’m not exactly unhappy with the current style, but I would like a layout that grants me more space and is a little more flexible than the current layout.

I can’t say for sure if a new design is going to definitely come soon — I still have to come up with something — but it may be in the works.

If you have any suggestions or tips, I’d love to hear them.

This is something I’ve actually been wondering lately.

Although every year of high school came with its own great teachers and bad teachers, when it came to my senior year, more of my teachers were laid-back when it came to students, yet still quality teachers.

By senior year, most of my teachers had the philosophy that we were adults, and therefore could do what we wanted provided we don’t disturb the class. This meant we were allowed to do several things that typically aren’t allowed in a high school setting:

• Use the bathroom when we needed to. We could just get up, grab the pass, and leave.
• Arrive late to class now and then. With an open campus lunch, this was a big deal. As long as it didn’t become a habit and didn’t disturb the class, there was no problem with it.
• We could readily negotiate tests, essays, and so forth. As long as we had good reasons, teachers were very flexible.

Teachers also began to talk to us like adults, making some classes more of a conversation than a lecture, which I actually found to be more educational than mindlessly copying notes from the overhead projector. The teachers were also typically some of the best the school had to offer.

Although I’m sure a lot of this comes from seniors being more mature, I’m wondering if some of it may also come from just the teachers I have. That’s why I ask for your opinion!

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If you have any other comments about your teachers and freedoms in high school, I’m very interested in hearing from you!