Know thy audience. Any good speaker will follow this fundamental rule of speech presentation. When the rule is broken, members of the audience may become disgruntled. Friday one attended the graduation ceremony for Chaska High School’s class of 2008–the little brother graduated. The second student speaker broke this fundamental rule. This student claimed a fellow graduating student made electronic devices which no one in the audience could figure out.
“I beg to differ,” slipped from my lips. Not in cockiness, but in confidence that I could reverse engineer any of the student’s gadgets within a few hours. With over 600 students graduating, there is a good chance I was not the only one capable of this ‘impossible’ feat. Turns out, according to a graduate, the gadgets were not so amazing.
Funny enough, other speakers reminisced on the football victory over a local rival in the fall of 2005. This happened to be when they were all sophomores, and few—if any—were actually on the team that played. The team comprised mostly of seniors, class of 2006, and juniors, class of 2007. Ever since that win, Chaska has yet to come close to beating that rival. One would guess they are too busy living in the past. No worries though, starting in the fall of 2009, Chaska can share its bottom position in the conference with Chanhassen which is getting its own high school for the sole purpose of sports (one voted against it, as any responsible person would).
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
Been out of town for the last six days, and now I’m trying to catch back up with every day things. Two weeks ago I received a postcard from the U explaining that they still hadn’t received my final High School transcript. Since I was out of town, I had to have someone call the school on my behalf to find out why the U hadn’t received my transcript yet. As of last Monday, Chaska High School was just beginning to send out final transcripts. Nothing like waiting until the last minute.
Up at the camp that I was at, I had to wear a name tag since I am now a troop leader. Somehow the person making the tags misspelled my last name, replacing the ‘v’ with a ‘u’. Making appropriate changes to the tag, my new name read ‘Ale K. Haulik’. Upon returning home and inspecting my diploma, which arrived in the mail, I noticed that they misspelled my last name; they reversed the ‘l’ and ‘v’. I’ll have to call up the district to get that fixed.
Hopefully in the next two weeks I can make some real headway in getting the new Weblogs.us website implemented in the new online test bed. This comes as the second most important thing to get done other than the endless pile of thank you cards that I have to finish.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
As with school tradition, today being the last day of school, many seniors partook in multiple ‘pranks’ on the school and other students. Driving into the parking lot seemed as if one were driving into a prison, police all over the place and ‘hall monitors’ everywhere. Holding a pair of binoculars was the parking lot attendant as if she was expecting someone to commit a deviant act. School preceded as usual, between first and second block someone, once again, thought that stink bombs in school are a great prank.
During first block I learned that one of the plots a friend of mine had concocted was foiled by his own stupidity. The original plan involved 1,500 marbles; he put them in a shoe box and expected to be able to just walk right into school. This may have worked any other day, but not today, the extra security demanded to know what the box contained. Being a little slow on his feet, he claimed they were cupcakes. Long story short they confiscated his marbles.
Rumors of a ‘planned’ food fight during first lunch spread like wild fire through the hallways. The fight took place, and word has it that the entire cafeteria was arranged with the teachers in the middle, a non-typical arrangement of monitoring. Supposedly an alt school kid started it by throwing food at a teacher. Aftermath of the fight was the entire inside cafeteria area was closed for the other lunches, and our lunch period was shortened by ten minutes. Eating lunch outside seemed as if we were in a prison with at least twenty personal constantly monitoring us.
For AP Physics, during fourth block, we went outside to perform the mentos and diet coke experiment. Several other fun flying objects that related to what we studied last week were brought along. At approximately 2:45pm several students exited the building, visible to us in the nearby lacrosse field. Apparently the administration decided to shutdown the main hallway due to a suspicion of a prank involving marbles being dropped off of the second story on to the first floor. It was interesting getting back into the school to get our backpacks.
To top this all off, there were at least three pigeons released inside the school today.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
You’d think that 1,048,576 unique IP addresses would be good for a school district that has less than 50,000 students. What am I talking about? A certain IT staff at a particular school district decided that the entire district would run under a Class A IP addressing scheme. 16,777,215 is the number of IP addresses that are able to be on a Class A network. A Class B addressing scheme would better suit the school’s network as on a single IP network in this scheme can support 65,534 hosts, and using routers to route between multiple networks up to 1,048,576 IP addresses are available. Network security comes to mind, along with overkill as one looks at the addressing scheme this particular district uses. Security threats come from the shear number of IP addresses that aren’t used and could be assigned, inadvertently to a network intruder.
So what does this tell about this school district’s IT staff? Shouting,”We are unqualified!” doesn’t quite satisfy the blatant acts of stupidity that they commit. They place Websense in a transparent proxy setup to hamper most attempts around it and then step up the number of categories that Websense blocks. They install bloat ware, real-time virus scanners (they are justifiable since we are talking about computer access for idiots that click on everything they see.), and monitoring software so that they can spy and mess around with our sessions as they wish. I’m ecstatic that only three days remain in which I will have to use their pitiful network.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
As the summer approaches many talk of their major plans for the summer. One particular individual, who will remain unnamed, openly expresses her plans for the summer. These involve having a relationship with some kid from a neighboring city to the west. This particular individual happens to have set himself ablaze in a rather strange set of events. According to her, somehow his pants and legs became soaked with kerosene while preparing a fire. After staying too close to the fire for some time the kerosene soaked pants caught fire.
She has tried several times to arrange a date between herself and this individual but his friends won’t let them get together. This guy definitely sounds like a winner due to his past and the fact that his friends don’t think this girl should be with him. While someone else in my class attempts to convince her that she shouldn’t be with this loser, she explains that what she really wants is a summer fling. We all laughed at her for this remark. Naturally, this was a junior telling us this, and we are seniors.
Entering the end of our High School careers, most will be disbanding their current serious relationships as they head off to college. This is what happened last year with the majority of relationships, some decided to ride it out and achieved positive outcomes. What I don’t understand is why would someone openly admit that they are only looking for a summer fling instead of a healthy, long-term relationship? A fling seems very selfish in nature, while I’d assume most that prefer a fling tend to dread commitment, which may be the entire cause of troubles in their lives.
Fearing commitment probably steams from a lack of direction or the inability to make decisions. So this week go out, make decisions, plot courses of action and follow through with them.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
WordCamp NYC
