day three

well here we are, it is currently 5 minutes till 1 AM. Um, where to start...

Before my first class of the day, math, my electricity went out again, can you believe that? AGAIN. Luckily the battery actually functioned and served its purpose until my parents made it back to start up the generator. So thankfully because of that, I didn't miss anything during math class. 

But, I take back what I said two days ago about how the business class was going to be the most chill class. No, I was severely mistaken, math class is now the most chill class of them all. I literally have to carry in every single problem but I'm perfectly fine with that, I mean it certainly wouldn't hurt to have a person around to lend me a hand or two but besides that, I'm actually quite comfortable working independently in a zoom meeting with 7 other students watching me do all the work. 

Plus, the homework of the class was to just write down two of the proofs of the questions that we did, cough cough scratch that, that I did in class. So I had a pretty easy homework assignment for math, only took me about 25-30 min. 

Now then, moving on to business class. Today's main focus was on the whole procedure of negotiating a price to buy/sell a house. There are 4 teams in total with 7 people each as I have said before, and the teacher made groups of four taking one person from each team to make each group. 

And of these four people, two of them form the buyers and the other two, sellers. I am a buyer, unfortunately, my partner is traveling all over the US because his brother needs to tour the university campuses before choosing one as a final choice so my partner attempted to join the negotiation, but failed since the connection from a moving car isn't very good. 

Due to this unforeseen circumstance, I went into the negotiation all by myself and had to do the job that was originally meant for two people. One person did the talking and negotiating while the other wrote down the progress of the negotiation itself. Since I was going solo I had to record everything down on my notebook as we were negotiating which might've clouded my judgment a little in retrospect(membean word, even though I haven't done membean in quite some time). 

However, I brought the price down to 405k when originally the offer was 408,888. So I'd say it's not bad for a first negotiation. Then, after class, the teacher told us that each team needed to meet in the study hall which is a two hour period of time between the business class and my USACO class. 

This time was meant for students to go into the zoom meeting of the class they need guidance on and there will be TA's there waiting to answer their questions. So basically each team needed to take this time and settle on a business plan for their company of which I am the CEO, (alluding to day 1 or 2 of the camp I forgot), <- also that's another membean word. 

I have said yesterday that I missed the discussion time with my team and apparently during that time my team did nothing else than to discuss how to run a drug cartel. I'm sorry did I say that way too casually? 

yea probably because I've been hearing about it all day, one member of my team suggested that we use homeless people as the sellers of our drugs so that if they get caught we can easily break off all connections with them but I mean, this is a class bro, not a qualification test to get into the mafia. So, I was busy with some other stuff too at the time so I was kinda just nodding along but I came to my senses after my USACO class. 

Oh right, my USACO class, so once again the teacher started going to ludicrous speed(membean word), and well I just couldn't keep up with his pace anymore. So I private messaged the teacher through the zoom chat and told him that he was going way too fast. 

He probably didn't even realize before I told him because at first he just responded oh, I will explain it a bit more thoroughly next time. But then when he told the class to write a code for a problem the class stayed silent for like 7 minutes except for the teacher telling everyone to send him their code and he'll check it and that's when I sent him another message saying that I bet over 20 people in this class don't even know where to start with this problem so they can't possibly send him code they haven't written. 

That's when he sorta came to his senses and starting explaining that problem from the start. Ofc there were a couple tryhards in the class who have taken C++ online classes before so they were the only ones really answering any of the questions. I also explained this to the teacher, so finally, he decided that the homework today was just to review what every line of code in a program he wrote did, and tomorrow he will not be introducing new concepts but instead explain in detail all of the ones he quickly went through in the past three days. 

Boom, I basically just helped the whole class get a breather because at this speed, eventually they were gonna suffocate from the amount of knowledge they were taking in. It's like when you eat way too much food and can't digest it properly because your stomach needs to take time to break down all the food using it's acid. Your brain needs to break down all the information using thoughts and logic similar to your stomach breaking down food using acid. So yea, I saved almost the entire class from their brains being destroyed.

Ok, so after we said the drug cartel with the homeless wasn't gonna work they switched to homeless real estate, which is giving the homeless a home and taking rent from them from the money they make at the jobs which we also give them. that was definitely not a run-on sentence. 

I wrote this super long email to the teacher asking if we could change our business plan from the completely unfeasible homeless real estate and his answer was yes, but why not? He said, our customer doesn't have to be the homeless, but instead the government. And now that I think about it, it kinda sorta makes sense in a weird way. 

But I doubt the government would purchase our solution because it's badly planned out and has just too many flaws. I had another idea that I will tell you tomorrow and I also told my executive team that I was going to archive the homeless idea and in turn replace it with my other idea. It is now 1:45 AM so I'm going to shower and go to sleep. good night. 

day two

so how do I say this.

Today was a sad day.

The first class was easier than yesterday. We just did a bunch of proofs for theorems that are commonly used for finding angles in circles. Again we did the splitting groups thing and this time my group actually had a kid who was pretty good at math and he helped with like the first problem but then idk what happened, he kinda fell silent later on so once again, I had to carry my team to victory. In the end, I even solved two problems in the time allotted for one. boom. ez dubs

Then for the saddest part of them all, my favorite class, business, started. At first, all was going swell, and then guess what the electricity went out. wow. I then proceeded to plug in our wifi router to a big battery that we have which happens to be located in my room and I got back into the zoom meeting. Then the wifi went out, apparently, according to my parents, the electrical current coming from the battery wasn't enough to supply the router. So now my wifi was also dead. Then since the group discussions were coming up I decided to use my very very limited data. And then my phone's data died because my phone's plan runs on money per amount of data I use and not like unlimited so I just lost all the money that I had in my plan. So then I couldn't even call my parents to inform them because I had no money in my balance. Right there, I was like wow, I just lost all connection to the outside world. 

After that, as soon as the class ended, after like two minutes the electricity came back. and I'm speechless. So I eat dinner and today USACO still hasn't slowed down their speed. They just keep on going sonic speed but I think we may have calmed down just a tiny bit when compared to yesterday. My homework for USACO is to make a program that prints a reverse triangle composed of hashtags and so that the user can input the number of rows the reverse triangle will be composed of. 

like this, if n = 5:

#########

 #######

  #####

   ###

    #

I'm still not entirely sure how to do this but I guess ill have to figure it out one way or another. 

However, my math homework today was surprisingly simple because it was just to write down the proof for one of the problems we already proved in class today. I finished that in a jiffy, so I'm only missing the dumb triangle. cya

day one

well

here we are

we survived the first day of camp

yay? nay.

So in math, tbh I was expecting more from the students here. In my class, there are like 50-60 people in total so they split the big room into 6 smaller rooms comprised of 8-9 students each. I had to introduce myself three times today lol. 

What the coordinators resorted to was to have the teacher give the whole class a problem when we're all in the big room, then split us into these small groups and we work as a team to solve it. 

The sad thing is my group doesn't have any geniuses to do all the work so literally, I'm the only one talking in the zoom meeting and explaining to a kid that the two circles in the problem arent the same circle. I mean there was this one other kid that was actually kinda decent, he saw two isosceles triangles that I missed but after he solved that he acted all high and mighty and didn't help with the rest of the problems. ugh. 

The problems weren't thaaaaat hard but it was enough to make me not want to do them if this whole thing weren't for a grade. And yes, we are being graded on our performance in class. We even receive a report card that carefully writes to the detail about how we do in every single class every single day. So yea gotta work hard. 

Ok now moving on to my favorite class of the day and probably the favorite class of the entire camp (even though there are only three classes in total cough cough), BUSINESS! yay! We did our introductions again, of course, and the teacher gave a rough outline of how the class would be functioning for the next two weeks. 

So basically the class is made up of 28 people exactly, and that's how the developers designed it to be. There can't be a person more or a person less. This is because they need to split the class into groups of 7, which means there are four teams. 

The teacher then explained some roles that will be in the team, each member will have a C-Suite role. What are C-Suite roles you ask? Well, very simple, CEO, CFO, COO, CMO, CSO, CTO, CHRO, and there are a bunch more of em. I belong to team one, and apparently, no one in my team cares what position they get so I get to be CEO, boom, score, and I also assigned all the rest of the roles in my group. 

We haven't really come up with what we want our company to do yet so we don't have a name for it either, hmm, maybe I'll think of something tomorrow. 

Oh right, and then comes the final, most torturous class of them all, USACO introductory. Now the name may sound a bit softer than it actually is because of the "introductory" part but I'm telling you this course ain't meant for kids who have absolutely no knowledge of the topic. 

I mean, today our homework is to write a program that will sort three numbers in order from least to greatest. Yea sounds easy right, hahahah you don't know how wrong you are. I wrote a program for that in python but that was after like at least three weeks or a month or learning it. And this is the first day!!!!! 

So yea, I haven't even started the homework yet and I also have math homework. two proof problems still yet to be cracked so I gotta go to bed and get up early cuz I still have homework left to do. wish me luck

AOS camp

So today was the opening ceremony or seminar of the Art of Sciences camp. 

The first day of camp starts tomorrow so I'm still a little spooked by the people I think are gonna be there. The seminar was pretty interesting, it was mostly about the blood and the circulation system with a bunch of mathematics to solve for stuff like how many red blood cells are in your body, and what's the volume of those blood cells. 

It was pretty simple but there were some dumb calculations that I didn't do and left it for other people. Pretty surprisingly, I think only 10 people in total typed in the main chat, and there were nearly 100 people in the zoom meeting so I think some people already remembered my name. This way maybe I don't need to be THAT scared of tomorrow. 

Oh well, I also made a discord server for my team in my business class. The teacher sent out an email to 7 people, and we are team one. 

Until now, only 3 have joined the server, I'm still missing three other people. The thing is, I haven't even sent out the invite to one person since I don't know their discord. I sent them an email but they haven't responded yet, I guess I'll just ask them tomorrow in the class lol cyaaaa

day at the shop

Today I went with my mom to her store and stayed there until like 5-6. 

Well, overall there aren't nearly as many people in comparison to when there are ships are the dock and also without the whole COVID situation going on. 

We didn't really start making any sales until 3-5, that's when most of the sales we made today took place. When there was no customers I was working on some math problems my dad gave me before we left for the store. 

It was some number theory problems that were from previous competitions and well some of them were kinda hard but there was like one or two that I could solve with ease. I had to read the solution for one of them and well I was glad I did because otherwise, I would've never have thought up the method that the solution used. 

So yea, there were some interesting people who came in, there was this one guy who had dyed his hair a very interesting color, it was like a greenish-yellow and it looked weird but it certainly did stand out. There was another guy who didn't come in since he didn't have a mask and he was signaling and gesturing to us asking if we had any for sale. 

Unfortunately for him, we don't so he had to leave in despair. That must've sucked, having left for some shopping and not being able to go into any stores because you don't have a mask. But that's on him, should've gotten them earlier. 

yea, so my mom was thinking about selling masks but I'm not sure it's such a great idea, what do you think? comment down below

french history in spanish

So tbh the Spanish reading this year isn't half-bad.

 First of all, it wasn't the one from the trilogy that I was expecting, instead, it's about a French revolutionist called Voltaire. Maybe you've heard of him cuz he's pretty famous, in France anyway. 

So basically the book is written in the form of emails, within the emails the main character, a professor called Roland de Luziers tries to see if the supposed "heart of Voltaire" that is kept in the national library is the real one.

 I'm about halfway through the book but until now Roland has looked for the descendants of Voltaire and tested their DNA with the one from the heart but unfortunately (and expectedly) they didn't match. Otherwise, the book would be over in the first like 60 pages. 

Then he remembered this guy he used to work with called Claude and Claude always had a theory that in Voltaire's final years, he wasn't Voltaire. And at the time Roland and a lot of others thought he was crazy for thinking that, but since he was out of options, he opted to go look for Claude and talk to him. However, when he got Claude's email from a friend he was responded by a guy called Frederic. Apparently, Frederic was a friend of Claude for 2-3 years, and they lived together for that time, but then Claude died for some reason and Frederic has been keeping an eye on his email in case any friends or family came looking for him. 

So Roland was surprised but he still flew over to where Frederic lived and looked at Claude's huge manuscript full of notes he had taken that bolstered and corroborated with his theory. So, when Claude first proposed his theory he was lacking in evidence so everyone treated him as a maniac but now Roland thinks that his theory could actually be the reality and he saw that Claude left off that the supposed "real" Voltaire was giving large sums of money to this guy called Gustave de Tamerville but no records ever mention this name. 

Therefore, Roland set off on a journey to look for this guy and find out his history and connection to Voltaire, eventually, he found his grave and that's where I stopped. well, that's basically a summary of the first one-hundred something pages. so have fun reading

too intricate

So the poll for the shirts came out, and there are suddenly 13 options, wow. There were like 2 a week ago and probably everyone thought that there was absolutely no way they were going to wear those designs so they decided to just grind and draw designs.

 Now there is this super ornate origami one, and tbh it looks good just like that but on a shirt? well I dont know, it's a little too bedecked with colors, maybe even a bit garish.

Apparently in a group chat im in people like this design that is literally stolen off google, just a volcano with 2024 smack right in the center. I mean it's not bad, but not creative and well overall isn't good enough to be on our class shirts. 

I also took my algebra class on aops, talking about graphs and functions, inverse functions, one-to-one functions, vertical and horizontal line tests, and bunch of other stuff. I was picked a bunch of times cuz I reviewed beforehand so it was all pretty ez and yea, that's about it, I'll update you when the results come out for the winning shirt.

designs

So a few days back our class board sent out this survey for a vote on which design we will use on our class shirt.

 Sadly, the only two designs the board came up with was one that looks like the Supreme logo and another with a close up of the coronavirus on it.

 So, it kinda sucked and no one was too happy about it so Psi asked the class president if they would accept more designs. At first, the president said no, but about two days later the president said yes, probably realizing that no one really liked any of their previous designs, well, maybe he himself didn't like them either.

So I made 4 designs, the first three are pretty similar but there is one where I put a hurricane and also a palm tree that overlaps just the top of the hurricane which makes it look like there is a tree growing out of the hurricane and that one I think is the one I personally would vote for. The last one I made was one with three overlapping colors, but also with the words Freshmen because after all next year WILL be our first year in high school. One step closer to being independent. 

Psi made two designs too, one with a quote that he apparently quoted from our class and another one that said Leaders of Tomorrow and with a picture that looks pretty good if you ask me. 

My overlapping colors one was not really original but I think people would like it so either that will win, or Psi's leader one, or maybe my hurricane tree one. Who knows? 

guess we'll see when the poll comes out.

good morning class

Today I took my Number Theory class and well as expected it wasn't too bad, first, we talked about primitive Pythagorean triples and how to generate them, basically, it's

a = p^2 - q^2

b = 2pq

c = p^2 + q^2

And for any positive integers p and q, the integers a, b, and c will form a Pythagorean triple. 

We also talked about quadratic residues, like when a square is mod 3 or 4, the only residues are 0 and 1, and when it's mod 8 the only resides are 0, 1, and 4. 

And of course, we also did some problems, for example how to prove there are infinitely many numbers that cannot be represented as a sum of two squares. 

Firstly we use modulo 4, so the original equation x^2 + y^2 can be congruent to 0, 1, or 2 mod 4 but, it cannot be congruent to 3 mod 4, thus there are infinitely many numbers that cannot be expressed as a sum of two squares because there are infinitely many numbers that can be expressed as 3 mod 4. 

and boom, we proved it. 

that was a lot of math and u deserve a break, cya

math and typing

Well, I did quite a lot of math yesterday and today, umm apparently my dad said that now from what I learned I can solve a few international olympic problems which is pretty cool if you ask me. I checked a few out and they honestly weren't as hard as I thought they would be. I have my AoPS class tomorrow on number theory so I'm guessing it won't be too hard now that I've basically covered just about everything they are gonna teach us.

 Also, today I've kinda been grinding Nitrotype which is this website where basically you need to type fast and accurately to win a race, and you can own lots of cars that require money to acquire, but if you win you can get money so yea.

 My all-time record on nitrotype is 98 words per minute, but I've never surpassed it after I reached it. I mean come on, it's soooo close to 100, the final stretch. Oh well, maybe by the time school starts I will have reached 100 words per minute.

 One of the people I know from ninja said that she also played nitrotype and we raced each other and wow, I got completely destroyed. She typed 119 words per minute on our first race and 109 on the second, and I did only 70s and 80s. Oof. maybe I'll challenge her again when I pass the 100-word mark. 

lots of mountains

So today I got the official solutions for the test I took yesterday and except for that one problem that I made that dumb mistake wrong I had the rest right. So, yea, im gonna pass but not gonna get gold, sadddd. Also, I took my Chinese class today with my cousin and well. since we do it in zoom and I'm the host I have powers that they don't have. So, heh heh, I muted my cousin a lot at the end lol, and I kept asking her questions while she was muted hahaha. We also memorized two poems today, one was about a mountain, and another one was about a lake in between two mountains. They were relatively easy to memorize since it was only about 24 words each and some phrases assisted me in remembering the next ones. I also took 3 hours of math today with my dad, mostly just looking at stuff from this book that my dad got his hands on. It's on most diophantine equations and apparently, there's more than one kind?? I think we gotta be halfway or more thru the book, we've been at it for half a month and it's not that thick a book so it should be finished by the time school starts. Also the Art of Science camp is gonna start soon, in about a week so I'll be quite busy then. cya

Silver? or GOLD?

ok so the test was well, how do I put this, it was relatively easy. The last question was kinda hard but other than that the questions were not that hard. However, on one question we literally had to multiply out 9 to the ninth power. And well, I did the multiplication right but when I copied the answer from my process I missed a digit. DANG IT. So if they look at my process then I probably got it right but if they look at the answer and check it then, damn it, I got it wrong. I got the other 9 questions right though, there was this one question were all we had to do was count the tiles in a drawing they provided but believe it or not I counted it wrong two times, first I got 3/7, then 5/12, and at last the RIGHT answer, 4/9. But whatever the case, I'm 100% certain I passed to the next round, and that's basically all that matters because that's where we take the Team Selection test and that one really counts. This was just a preliminary. I hope that they can hold the test on-site instead of online because if it were online that would really suck, plus someone could cheat their way onto the team and that would be terrible. Oh well, that's basically it, I'm pretty sure Beam got the full score, but maybe there was a flaw in his process somewhere, there is also this seventh grader, we'll call him umm Wack, and Wack got 8 right so I'm pretty sure he'll pass too. Sadly Psi didn't get the best score and neither did Rama, but there's still a tiny chance for them to pass, it all depends on how other people did.

preparation

I'll keep it short today. Tomorrow is the third phase exam of OMPR and the results of that exam dictate whether or not I'll make it to the team selection round. Last year I made it to the team selection round with 8 problems right on the third phase, this year I'm aiming for the full score. If you do good on the team selection then you could get picked to represent Puerto Rico and go to international competitions, like IBERO and central american olympics, and if you do really really good then you could go to the IMO and almost everyone that makes it to the IMO receives an invitation to go to MIT so that's great. I did two old exams today, and did good on both of them so I hope the same can happen tomorrow. I gotta go to sleep a bit earlier today to be energized for tomorrow so, wish me luck

chatting strategies

Hmm, you know what? Today I feel like discussing how I talk to people online.

 Now, texting someone online is way different than face to face conversation, first of all, you can't tell their tone or inflection, their facial reaction, and they might not even respond.

 What I usually do is first introduce myself, just a simple "Hi, I'm jerry" will suffice, and then some small talk to break the ice a little. Then comes a crucial question, "Do you play an instrument? sport? second lang?". 

Now if they answer "no" to all three of these, well then it might be some trouble in finding a common interest. But as long as the other person says yes to one of them, then I can follow up by asking them what it is that they know or play and then say what I play. Following that up with some more small questions related to the general topic at hand, (whatever they said yes to), and maybe branch out a little to ask about their past history or something current like for example I sometimes ask what it is they do during their time at home.

 Oh and then if you like talking to this person, and you think they appreciate talking to you too, then you could ask for their number. Since most of the time the conversations I have are on instagram then I usually say, "can i ask you a question?", and then the feature that instagram has is that it tells you when the other person has read your text, and when they respond, you ask them for their number. This way they're bound to see it and not just leave you hanging if you straight up ask them for it at the start. Trust me, this trick has yet to fail me. 

You could also apply some variations to this tactic, but you can figure those out yourself to suit you with your conversations. Oh and sometimes if the language they know is also one that you know, then you could just start talking to them in that other language, it makes them feel closer to you since you have one more way of talking to each other. 

Now, never let the conversation turn into a one-way lane of you asking the questions and then them answering. You also need to answer the questions that you are asking, otherwise, they might make the impression that they're under interrogation and we don't want that. 

And try not to be overly formal or overly casual, be formal at the beginning and then slowly lower the amount of formality and you begin to get used to talking to each other, then you can start joking about stuff that you would usually talk about with your friends. 

Also strangers are really good if you want to just tell them what's on your mind because you probably won't see them ever so sometimes it helps just to tell someone. And maybe if they feel the same way then you have yourself another common topic to talk about, win-win situation, boom. 

Read it for yourself

Today was a pretty normal day. I had my math class with my dad, my mom was out getting some food from the oriental store, but the thing with my dad is that we set up a time for him. for his class and his class only, 90 minutes, all his to use.

 But when that time finishes I'm a free man, I'm supposed to be able to do whatever to my heart's content, ok that may be exaggerating it a little but you get what I mean. I did my daily membean, checked out the stocks, read a little, oh right I bought to cover on all the Tesla stocks I shorted before, I lost 250k on the trade but oh well, I'll gain it back sooner or later.

 Then I called up Psi and we played for a little while, maybe 45 min because the call lasted an hour and 10 min but I was doing membean for 30 minutes of it so yea around 45 min of play time. Then abruptly, my dad came in shouting at me, saying that I've been playing for way too long, I mean COME ON, it was only 45 MINUTES!! I was forced to end the call with Psi not wanting him to hear my dad's screaming and I haven't called him back yet but I will soon.

My dad stayed mad at me until an hour after dinner, and I made a dish for dinner too. I'm pretty good at cooking this one dish now so there's that. My dad called me into his room and showed me a 10 minute video of a guy explaining how to limit your kid's screen time, really?? I had to watch it all the way through and it sucked, the guy was clearly abusing his power, "YOU ARE THE PARENT!" he says, "YOU MAKE THE RULES!" he adds, yea RiGhT, you DO make the rules but it's MY job to make sure the rules aren't favoring one side over the other. The guy said make sure your child finished all their schoolwork before playing on their game system, otherwise don't let the hook it up to the TV, well guess what, I DONT EVEN HAVE A GAME SYSTEM, also theres NO SCHOOLWORK, ITS SUMMER VACATION!!! 

This is supposed to be my relaxation time, and now you're threatening to cut it off? what a killjoy, my dad even reprimands me for going on Nitrotype, this typing website where you are a little car and you need to type to go faster, that is supposed to help me improve my skills so why are you punishing me for it?? 

So basically three points:

1. I don't have schoolwork and I already do a lot more work than others

2. I don't have a game system, and I don't even play that much games

3. ITS SUMMER VACATION, so show me some clemency (membean word) if I decide to indulge myself every once in a while.

Thank you, I rest my case.

wild pet

Ok so my dad likes plants a lot so he bought some plants and put them on our balcony, he waters them and stuff so that's just like his area. The other day my mom found that some birds were building a nest on one of my dad's trees, it's not a big tree, it's quite small, but the nest is tiny too so I guess it's fitting.

Anyways, I was thinking maybe I could make this bird my pet, and train it so when I whistle or clap my hands twice it would come flying from the skies and perch itself on my shoulder. Now wouldn't that be cool? Yea ik sounds pretty awesome to me at least.

 I also went to Costco today, before Costco didn't let anyone in that didn't have a membership card so that means I couldn't get in, I mean I could probably figure out a way to sneak in but I'm too lazy to do that, it is still summer vacation after all. 

However, now Costco lets an entire family in as long as one person in the group has the membership so my parents brought me along today. and wow, the store was more crowded than usual, even before quarantine and corona. The line to pay extended all the way to the back of the store and it took like a good 45 min to get to the front. We bought tons of stuff so we don't have the need to go back for a good while. 

We also dropped by the pet store to see if there were any small cages for the bird but sadly all the bird cages they had were ginormous so we didn't take any. My mom said that we could order one online but by the time it got here the birds could very well have already flown away. oh well....

Process

So remember that OMPR third phase exam I was talking about before? well today there was a person that sent out an email regarding the matter.

 He claimed to be the proctor for our exam and gave us the google meet link and the time we will be taking the test. Five days from now, July 18th, from 1 to 5 o clock.

 We must have our cameras on and microphones off, no calculators allowed, only paper, pencil, eraser, ruler, blah blah blah. It was all in Spanish and there was this one part that google translate didn't translate correctly, should I write my process? Or is it not needed?

 Now, this is a very big difference for me, writing my process is long and boring and it sucks. Before we never needed to write process for the third phase exam, it was only answers so it was pretty cool. I replied to the guy in the email but he just wrote the same thing back and the wording is weird so I can't understand what I need to know. ugh. Then I wrote the same thing in English and he has yet to reply so I guess we'll just wait and see. 

Also I'm looking to start a new piece on the piano so if you have any suggestions feel free to comment below this post and I'll be sure to check them out!

classes

Today I took my chinese class with my grandma, but since it's Sunday today my cousin who lives in Germany also joined in. Usually my cousin takes classes with my grandma almost every day but her school has already started so I think they changed up the schedule a bit. I'm not completely sure though, anyways she's around 10 I think and well I'm just a tiny bit more advanced than her in terms of knowledge on the language.

 I take one lesson on Friday individually and we focus on pronunciation and articulation while the Sunday class is for learning poems, tongue-twisters, and stories. In today's class my grandma took out all of the tongue-twisters that we have looked at for the past month or so and made us review every single one of them and recite them verbatim of course by memory. My short term memory can handle that of course, no sweat! *smirks

I also took my math class with my dad, we learned some more about Diophantine Linear Equations today, it isn't all that hard tbh but my dad seems to think that they test people on it an awful lot in the math olympics so we've been grinding it for the past two days. We started 3 variable equations today, and it's not too bad, you only need to add one extra step in solving it and then just do the rest like the normal two-variable one. 

Oh well, I just finished exercising now and today we don't have water so I'm gonna need to shower in super cold water, oof. Ok then, cya!

confession

So um how do I say this, I started playing games again. There, plain and simple.

 You remember that one blog I wrote about how life is too short and quitting games? well, after that day I quit games for about 2-3 weeks. 

At first it wasn't that bad, but then later on the thought of death just kept coming to mind. Interspersed throughout my day, the thought would just turn off my interest for so many things, there was a point where I thought that if it kept happening maybe I would get depressed. I persevered for about two more days but I just couldn't take it anymore. 

So I got in the game, and well after all i'm still really good at it and basically destroyed everyone that went against me. Surprisingly, the thought just didn't appear anymore, not out of the blue anyways. I would need to actually think about it for it to pop into my head. 

However, now I realize, that I'm kind of running away from it, so I need to overcome it. I think I'm going to limit myself to a certain amount of time where I can play, but not shut it off completely. Then, maybe slowly I can reduce the time limit until I stop playing completely. 

Games are fun and all but it's just, I don't feel full when I'm going to bed when all I've done in the day was play. So there you have it, I'll leave you here. 

New Mattress

So the mattress on my parent's bed was a little old, I mean it is 12 years old after all so my parents decided that they will buy a new one. Today was the day that we disposed of the old one, and we brought down the other mattress from upstairs. Trust me, it's a whole lot easier said than done. First off the mattress we needed to throw out is a queen or king-size so it's huge and weighs a ton.

 And my apartment is three floors so it doesn't have an elevator, not that a mattress of that size would fit but just saying. The stairwell is quite narrow so we need to squish the mattress through the sides of the wall, good thing it's filled with sponge and is somewhat flexible, if it were something solid I doubt we would have been able to accomplish the feat.

 After we got it outside the apartment we hoisted it on top of the roof of our Toyota Highlander and we strapped it with a long rope with me and my dad hold the end of them through the car windows. It was only about a 5-minute ride to the place we were gonna dump it, and there was already another mattress there lol.

 I also took my Chinese and math classes today, in Chinese my grandma had me label out some words and read this pretty long and hard tongue-twister. In math, I beat my dad at most of the problems and the thing was that he was trying to have me solve the problem using his "traditional" and "effective" method but guess what, my brutal force solves them much more easily and cuts through them like butter. Boom. 

Age Restrictions for Occupations are Adjustable...

Today I had my final AoPS class on Algebra B, the title of the class was to solve challenging problems but to be honest, most of the problems we solved were just easy ones if you knew the trick. Meaning that as long as you know the little smarts behind the problem you can easily use basic arithmetic for the rest and ta-da! you solved it. Not gonna lie, the class was pretty fun though.

And I also had my Writing Pros class today, we were supposed to write a thesis statement but I was short on ideas so I decided to look for one of my old works. This argumentative essay that I wrote in English class about one or two years back and change up the thesis statement to incorporate what we learned in class. This way I enhance my original literature using my newly acquired knowledge. Pretty cool huh? 

The essay was on whether or not students should work part-time jobs. My opinion was that yes, they should, and my statement is bolstered (membean word) or buttressed (another membean word) by the following three points:

1. It helps students understand the value of money.

2. By working students can learn important skills.

3. Those who work tend to have a higher GPA than those who don't.

And of course, these points were supported by evidence, evidence that I looked for all over the big wide web. The title of today's blog is the title I used for my essay. Maybe I'll show you the essay another day. bye!

Simply Sublime (membean word)

Today my grandma had me take an additional chinese class, she said we were mostly going to be working on talking and speaking loudly and well, articulation but I feel like we spent most of the class fixing a little paragraph I wrote the night before for her homework.

 According to her, when I write, I'm thinking "in English" and then translating it into Chinese, so my sentences don't flow as well in chinese. We ended up making it longer than what my original draft was and it sure sounds a lot better. Actually, why don't I write it up for you, you may google translate it if you like, it might sound funny though.

深秋的一天，我们上山游玩。在一条用石头砌成的蜿蜒曲折伸向山顶的小路上，我们的车，缓缓而行。

车窗外云雾缭绕，我远远望去，透过层层云雾，隐隐约约可以看出一些住宅，几户人家。

车行至山顶，天色已近黄昏。道路两旁，红色的枫树林深深的吸引了我，不由得停下车来观赏享受优美的景色。

眼前一大片被秋霜打过的红色枫树叶，是那么的艳丽。与江南二月的鲜花相比，它的红艳，更胜于二月花。

Also, in 10 days from now, July 18th, the third round of OMPR will be held. OMPR is short for the Olympic Mathematics of Puerto Rico. This is from the cycle of 2019-2020 so that means I will be competing as the identity of an 8th grader. Shouldn't be too hard. I also looked up and did one exam from a previous year, and got a pretty good score. Well, I'll do some more in the following days. cya

broken

A terrible, tragic event happened today, my computer broke. One second it was just fine and the next it just shut down and well it happens sometimes when it overheats so I let it cool down a little before restarting it again but it just wouldn't let me go in no matter what I tried. It kept bringing me to the troubleshoot blue screen and I tried out every single one of the options, from restarting to removing every single file that's on my computer. But nothing works. NOTHING!

 Right now I am writing this blog on my laptop, I connected it to a larger screen but my laptop is really slow, it's only Core i3 so the storage must be really small. Even watching a youtube video or netflix episode doesn't work correctly. wow. So now I barely have any device that works to write my blog, I mean I still have my phone but I prefer typing on an actual keyboard than on my phone. It's faster and plus autocorrect sucks, it misinterprets what I type 30% of the time which is awfully high for a smartphone. 

I wonder what we're gonna do about this, maybe they'll replace it with another one since I'm pretty sure we have a warranty on it but still before the new one arrives, if it ever does, I would have to figure out another way. Wish me luck

C++

So for the camp that I had talked about before, the one online, turns out that my dad enrolled me in the USACO beginner class which is programming and the language that they chose was C++, they said that it was going to be between that and Python and turns out they chose to go with the former. My mom actually learned C++ in college but she had never used it since but she figured that she could at least give me some sort of orientation so that I don't need to head in the class blindly. They needed to go check on the beach apartment today so they left me in the house and my mom told me to watch two videos and also to find and install a C++ compiler that's simple yet has all the capabilities. Trust me finding and installing one is a lot harder than it sounds, I know a friend that codes in C++ but she said that she hadn't coded in a while but when she did she used two, C Lion and Eclipse. Took me a while to find C Lion but after installing it I found out that you actually needed a license to use it and that cost money. oof. So I moved on and installed eclipse but after I did the setup thing kept telling me that it couldn't fully install it because there was something missing on my computer. I had to install the missing component but to find that what I had installed was actually used for java and not C++. dang it. In the end, I found the right one and installed it, it's free but from the looks of it, C++ is a lot more complex at writing than Python, uh oh.

Water Python

Today our water came back late. Oh, i forgot to explain the water shortage, basically right now since there's little rain where I live, since it's a tropical island the government and people rely way too much on rainfall on so when there is a drought or not enough rain they don't have any alternatives to access other water sources. At the moment, they have resorted to rationing water from the relatively poorer areas of the island, and I live in one of them so every other day they shut off our water for 24h, 9 AM to 9 AM.

However, today the water was supposed to come back in the morning but it took a while for it to actually work. My morning routine needed to use the water that we had in store in this box. The thing is, I don't see how this is supposed to save that much water. The day before they shut off the water my mom loads up an entire trash can full of water along with two boxes and one bucket. That's a ton of water, so we just use that the next day, so not that much water is actually saved. Fortunately, last night and today there were some storms and a lot of rain so hopefully, the rationing will stop soon and they'll get enough water for everyone. 

I also rewrote a Python program today, the problem was to sort a given list of numbers from least to greatest, the user also gets to choose how many numbers will be in the list and which ones they will be. I spent like an hour on that but another half-hour because although my program worked, there were some unnecessary actions, if the program were to be used on a larger scale it would slow down the machine. So that the other 30 minutes were spent on figuring out the fastest and most efficient way of running the program. The main problem was that I wasn't really sure how to work two for sentences as a loop themselves.

 That probably doesn't make much sense to you if you haven't learned the basics of programming but I'm sure they will teach it in school soon enough because well machines are getting more and more sophisticated and it won't be long before they will be replacing tons of jobs that require repetitive actions. And programmers are the ones that tell those machines what to do, so that's why it's so important. To be perfectly honest, I don't find programming that fun, maybe it's because I'm not that good yet but I know it's absolutely a must in the future and it's crucial that I learn it. 

bookstore

Today we went to the bookstore to buy the books that I will be needing for next year in ninth grade. Usually, we order them online but we think that well with the pandemic and everything the books would probably take a long time to arrive and one of those books is my Spanish summer reading. And I need that ASAP so i can finish it without any pressure in terms of time. The good thing is that this year the school said that they were going to be providing us with our math and science textbooks and those are usually the ones that cost the most.

 The bookstore was a bit different than I had expected. I thought that we got to look for the books ourselves and bring to the checkout the ones that we wanted but instead, it was like um a fast food restaurant and we tell them which books we want and they just get them for us. In the end it cost like $300 which is quite a lot, after that we also went to Marshall's and my mom started her shopping. ugh. Anyways, I got so bored I searched up "How to get your parents so stop shopping" but surprisingly there wasn't a match and instead the ones that showed up were how to stop your kids from throwing tantrums in the grocery store. wow. They need to update Google and add that to their data.

 Also, the school sent out an email today informing us that when school starts the kids from grades 9-12, including yours truly will only go to school 2 days per week and take online classes for the rest of the days. They also said that we would have to wear a mask every single day when we do go to school but I wonder how they are going to solve the problem of lunch. I guess my interest is piqued (membean word) at how they overcome this. 

Articulating Properly

Today I had my Chinese class with my grandma, she used to teach Chinese to teachers so you could say she's like a pro at it. A couple weeks ago we were just learning some poems and tongue twisters but now she and my mom think that I don't speak very clearly, like not articulate properly, I probably don't pay much attention to it so they might be right about it. And like that my grandma is teaching me every single way of pronouncing a word.

 Apparently, after I'm done training with her then I'll talk super clearly and perhaps more people will understand me? I guess there's no harm in that. Also, my parents went to Best Buy today to buy a dryer since our old one broke. Well, actually it's been broken for about two years now but it still functioned, today the machine finally gave in and so we need a new one.

 They went there and waited in line for like 2 hours to get into the store and to find an employee to buy it. I was surprised because they said they bought the dryer that the store out on display and got a discount for it, the store took like $150 off from the original price and with that money, they bought a 5-year warranty in case it breaks again lol. 

sorry elon

So you see, a couple days ago I sold all of my stocks on my Elon Musk account since that day the stocks were all super volatile and mostly trending down so I decided to just take out the risk since I have all three of my accounts on the top 5 spots anyways.

 However, I never bought those stocks back and today, well today my friend, um, let's call him Zoan, passed my Elon Musk account, and is right behind my Jerry account by only 100k. Tesla, Amazon, all the big timers went crazy today, they just skyrocketed and although they stabilized a little bit by market close Tesla still went up by a total of 89 dollars today.

 Since Zoan has most of his portfolio in Tesla, then he must've had such a good day, however, if Zoan forgot to check his account today, I really think that tomorrow the whole market will be in decline and that's when I will regain and secure my position since I shorted Tesla before market close. Now, all that I can do is hope that my conjecture will prove to be accurate. 

I also forgot to mention that my fourth account, that I named Benjamin Graham after a super good investor who also wrote a really amazing book called The Intelligent Investor, also made the leaderboard. He is now in 10th place, which means that I have taken up almost half of the whole leaderboard. BOOM!!

Classes

Today after dinner we watched The Grinch, and yeah i know that it's not Christmas, but for some reason, my mom loves watching animated movies, she thinks it's light-hearted i guess and that movie was the first one that came up so that's what we watched. tbh it really wasn't bad, the animation was good and oof the gadgets of the grinch were super cool, like all these cool contraptions and stuff that move at the touch of a button.

 Also, today my classes came out, and guess what. THEY CANCELED ECONOMICS!!! I mean come ON, i was really looking forward to it because all my friends also chose the same class and we all love to learn about economics so win-win, there isn't a single person in the right mind that doesn't love a win-win. Instead, I got my second option and idk, i don't think it was the best idea in hindsight(membean word) or retrospect(another membean word) to choose it.

 My second option was something that they gave a fancy long name to, Individual Musical Instrument Instruction. By this time, you all should know that I love to play the piano so I thought that since now I don't take piano lessons so much I could have some teacher in school also help me out and plus music relaxes me on a very intense school day.

 However, when the classes came out the teachers that teach them also did, and the person who I thought was going to be teaching me piano was the recorder teacher from seventh grade. THE RECORDER TEACHER, i mean I'm sure she's very good at what she teaches because well you need a degree for that but I just don't think that she knows any piano whatsoever, so what am i gonna do.

 I wrote an email to her asking about what we were going to be doing in class and maybe ill be learning music theory or something unrelated to the actual playing itself but the class is called, "Musical Instrument Instruction" so then again, I am confounded (boom another membean word) at what we are going to do. I doubt she'll even open her inbox and see the email until school is like 2 weeks away from starting and by that point, it'll be far too late to change my schedule. 

The good thing is i have some classes with Psi, Rama, and another good friend of mine that we shall call, umm, Katson, sure, maybe that name will change in the future who knows. I don't have as many classes I had last year with them but at least I have some, oh right I have 3 with Beam too so that's good at least.