I was really looking forward to an escape room event this month, I saw a flyer about it near the end of September, and it said the sign-ups started on October 1st. Unfortunately, I already forgot about the sign-ups by the time October 1st came around, and I didn't write a reminder on my calendar. I only just remembered the sign-ups today, but when I checked, the sign-ups were full! It's a shame...
Today I got my first YubiKey! I only got one, so I don't have a backup key. I will have to take extensive care of this one. I find it really helpful since the information stays on the key, so I could keep my keys away from the filesystem. I also find its authenticator more convenient than using a smartphone authenticator.
I think my classmates in physed poured sand on me today. It's OK though.
Today my math class was in the library instead of the classroom because we were taking a test. I feel pretty good about the test, but I wasn't able to check all my answers, so I'm expecting that I forgot about a negative or something silly like that.
I updated my ttbp web viewer to display double newlines as a break, since I like to split my ttbp entries into different parts which I seperate into double newlines. The double newlines wind up invisible in HTML but look good in the terminal, so I replace double newlines with breaks. Right now I only put one break, but it doesn't seem visually seperate from other "sections," so it might be better if I use double breaks rather than single breaks.
Lately I've been getting distracted a lot. It's much easier to stay on track when I'm at school, but at most other places my attention and will fail me. It's the same thing that's happened to me for some years already, but I've been noticing it more and more, and trying to fight against it more and more. I feel hopeful that I'll be able to become a more responsible person this school year. I've already been performing better compared to this time last year, in many aspects of my life such as taking care of my health and keeping track of what I need to get done.
Today my English teacher introduced me to turnitin.com. I struggled to make an account since the password requirements were so strict, but I was able to make the account and submit my draft in the end. Oh, and I didn't mention the draft. I felt triumphant when I finished it right on time yesterday! I've noticed many places I could improve it, but I'm proud of myself nonetheless. If the version of me from last year had to write this draft, it would not have been finished, which would make it much harder for me on the later steps in writing the paper. I'm also nervous about using turnitin.com. In addition to being software I have not used before, tools like plagarism checkers and especially the AI checker scare me. I'm unable to tell the different between AI generated text and human written text, and I'm afraid that the checker might believe that the text I write is generated by an AI. Everything seems okay for now, though.
I'm also continuing my antics with php. I added pagination to my web ttbp viewer with the help of Pagerfanta. I also cleaned up some of my code. I'm surprised at how well it ended up working!
I've been messing around with php for the past week. I've been using it in my tilde.club pages for server-side rendering. It's my first "real" time using php, so it's a learning experience. It's actually been really fun working on it every day! I managed to make my index page in php, and make the tilde.club badge and webring banner into classes in seperate files for reusability and cleanliness. I called them "components". I'm also trying to make some kind of web viewer for my ttbp entries in php. I know that ttbp already has the option to publish html pages, but I think this way I could give myself some more customizability, since I can change the structure of the html and the way the entries are presented, such as presenting the date in a different format than YYYYMMDD*. Besides, it's letting me get more practice with php. It's still a work in progress, but it can be accessed at: https://tilde.club/~jomarm/ttbp/ I also learned about Composer. I've heard it's name before, but I didn't really know what it was, since I haven't dabbled in php before. It seems it's a dependency manager, so you can make and use libraries in php. The installation was pretty simple. I installed it using shell commands rather than php code since I wanted to learn how to use sha384sum to verify the installer's integrity. I learned that you can just write the hash and the filename to a file formatted like it would output, described in its manual page. I did run into an issue where Composer required proc_open, which was disabled, but I found out that by passing '-d "disable-functions="' to php when executing the composer phar, you can enable proc_open. I made this into an alias in my .zshenv so that I can use Composer normally. It's really fun messing around with this!
The last few days have been really eventful, but I haven't gotten around to writing about what was notable. I guess this is me doing so now. It's been some time so I won't remember everything, but it's OK. I can just write about what really stood out to me.
On Friday in math class our teacher let us play a game called Grudgeball. The class was split into four teams and there were four subteams in each team, which were composed of students that sat next to each other. Each team had six hearts, and our teacher displayed problems on the screen. If most of the subteams in a team were able to find the answer, the team could take an action. They could either punch a team to remove one of their hearts, or choose one of the teams' members to shoot a ball into a box. If the ball landed in the box then the team would be able to punch two times, and they would lose their turn if the ball missed. If a team lost all of their hearts, they "died". I'm not sure what happens if a team dies, though; a team did die when we played, but the period ended shortly after. After school, I attended the annual color run. There were some games of musical chairs, and I heard they "got physical". It reminds me of the musical chair games from my previous music teacher.. the last two people would grab the chair and brawl over it. One of the staff also brought a fire extinguisher which expelled colors. It was really fun to see people being covered in purple by it. There was also snow cones/shaved ice being served from a truck. You could put flavoring on it with dispensers on the side of the truck. I think you're usually supposed to pay for it, but they just gave me it for free. I was really surprised to see that even after a few hours, even though it felt like so much color got on me, there was only a trace amount of color on my clothes.
Me and my family went to a birthday party today (Saturday). Of course, I only found out about it today because nobody tells me anything, but it's OK because it all worked out. We left home in the afternoon, around 3 pm, and came back home a few minutes past 9 pm. It was nice there. The house was very large and it looked very fancy. There were stairs, and there were two staircases that merged into one halfway through, so you could get on the stairs from two different sides of the house. I also noticed many paintings on the wall. My sister said that they are old paintings. The party really took place outside, however. It's where all the food and activities were. The food and desserts were organized into different sections at the back yard, and there was a bouncy castle set up in the front yard. In particular, I really liked the strawberry juice that was at the party. It was really tasty and I couldn't get enough of it! I think I developed an addiction to it in just a few hours... Its color was some kind of light pink and there were strawberries in it. There was also ice put inside to cool it down, and when I was drinking some more later in the day I noticed that it had melted by then.
At home I expected the day to be more or less over. Nothing really interesting happens at home, especially at night. Today was different, though. When I unlocked my door after arriving home, I noticed that my doorknob was hard to turn. It was stuck at a different rotation than it usually was, and it felt like it refused to turn past a certain threshold, even though it was working fine earlier in the day. My mom tried the knob and didn't notice anything was wrong, so I just ignored it. Later, when I went to change my clothes. I closed my door for privacy. However, when I tried opening my door again, the knob wouldn't budge, and neither would the door. I panicked and called for help. My mom and my sister tried to open the door, but it wouldn't work for them, either. Eventually, my dad came, and he asked me if I could open the door or unlock it. I tried again but it still wouldn't budge. I think he started tinkering with the doorknob, and he kept trying to open it. Later, he asked me to try opening the door again, and with a little strength, I was finally able to open the door. When I finally got out I noticed that the doorknob from the outside of my room was removed. There was some kind of sticky green substance in the doorknob. I think it was causing the trouble with the knob. My mom came to the conclusion that the substance was a melted rubber band, since my family often stores rubber bands in doorknobs. We promptly removed the rubber bands from the other doorknobs in our rooms, and discovered another rubber band that was seeping into the a doorknob. I don't know what we're going to do next, but for now I'm keeping my door open.
There's so many events and stuff scheduled for today, and they also happen to be scheduled for the exact same time. I just have to choose which one I want to go to since I won't be able to go to them all.
I usually write my ttbp entries the day after the day I'm writing for. By this time I've usually forgotten the small details of what happened on that day, but I still try to write about what I think is notable.
My choir teacher wasn't at school again today. For about half of the school period we just stood outside of the classroom in the heat until another teacher called us into their classroom.
I think the parts I struggle the most in when writing is writing the beginning/introduction of something and the ending/conclusion. When I write I usually end up having to write those parts last because I put them off for later.