The semester is officially done
After taking the final for my single Physics class (Sound and Wave motion) at BCC yesterday I was extremely happy, feeling that I had done very well. Well, as they say, hard work pays off. Or something like that. I ended up with an A- on the final and a B+ in the class. I am now officially finished with BCC, and can relax for a few weeks.
Happy Chanukah
Happy Chanukah my friends, even though most of you aren’t Jewish, that’s ok. Just enjoy the lights. 
A lot of people in America spell Chanukah in English in different ways. Here to clean that up from yours truly, a little lesson:
In Hebrew, the holiday is spelled as such: חנוכה (Het Nun Vav Kaf He, right-to-left folks, get with the program)
Alright, got that out of the way. So, here’s how I see it. First up, we have Het. Normally I would spell this Chet, but Charmap is silly stupid, I’ll go with it for ease. This letter is pronounced like you have a furball in your throat basically. Back of throat rolling sounded along with an H. The proper way to spell this in English? Ch
Nun is just N.
Vav here is silent but what you can’t see in the spelling above is the vowels, called Nikudot. This particular vowel here is under the Vav and has the OO sound like pool. Of course, U can also be pronounced like this, so we use that in the spelling.
Next up is Kaf, this is basically a K, unless it’s a Chaf, but this one isn’t. 
Finally, there is He. The letter name is actually pronounced Hey or Hay, but Charmap spells it He. Meh. It’s silent at the end of a word, which this one is at. Normally, it’s just your regular H sounding letter though.
Put all those letters together and what do you get? Chanukah. End of story.
Here’s a list of annoying spellings I found on the web:
Chanuka
Chanukkah
Channukah
Hanukah
Hannukah
Hanukkah
Hanuka
Hanukka
Hanaka
Haneka
Hanika
Khanukkah
All of those are wrong for one reason or another. I’ll let you figure it out.
A little note on vowels since I mentioned them above. They’re rarely ever written out except for a few cases. Children’s books, prayer books, and the Torah. There might be a few other special cases too, but mostly you won’t ever see a vowel (which aren’t actually letters in the Hebrew alphabet anyway.)
New name
My friend Theo over at the Well of Mimir (who is apparently out of the blogosphere for the time being, how sad) came up with a great tagline for my blog, so I used it. <3.
The end cometh
Only 3 class days to go until the end of the quarter, woohoo! The bad part of those 3 days? They are all exam days. Tomorrow is the last quiz and review, then next week is finals week, lab exam on Monday and conceptual exam on Wednesday. I think it’ll go well though judging from past scores.
On a side note, I read a great book last night entitled Who Moved My Cheese? It’s a book on dealing with change and life’s simple truths. A quick read at about 45 minutes, and quite deep. I highly recommend it to everybody.
First snow of the season
Today it snowed. It snowed a lot. The only bad thing about snow is that it made me miss Microvision’s holiday party which I’m not even sure if it still happened. I did spend some time today going over financial aid stuff for DigiPen, and that’s all squared away now, so I’m happy. Hopefully there will be less snow at the most inopportune moments in the future.
Piano
Practiced piano today and since I haven’t played much in the past 6 years it turns out that I suck. C’est la vie.
I’m going to make it a point to practice at least a few times a week for starters so I can get back to being good.
Site style done
I just finished fixing every little glitch and thing I didn’t like with the theme of the site. I think it looks good now.
Spring 2008 schedule
My schedule for the Spring 2008 semester:
| Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 9:00 | Work MVIS |
||||
| 9:30 | |||||
| 10:00 | |||||
| 10:30 | |||||
| 11:00 | MAT 300 Van Gogh |
MAT 300 Van Gogh |
|||
| 11:30 | |||||
| 12:00 | |||||
| 12:30 | |||||
| 1:00 | |||||
| 1:30 | |||||
| 2:00 | |||||
| 2:30 | CS 250 A Al-Kwarismi |
CS 250 A Al-Kwarismi |
|||
| 3:00 | |||||
| 3:30 | |||||
| 4:00 | CS 381 Euclid |
CS 381 Euclid |
|||
| 4:30 | |||||
| 5:00 |
Back to school
I reapplied to DigiPen a few weeks back and a few days ago I was supposed to get this:
“Dear Shai Oren,
Thank you for your readmission application to our school. Based on a review of your current application material and previous coursework and academic progress, we are pleased to inform you that you have been approved to continue the Bachelor of Science in Real Time Interactive Simulation degree program.”
What with the holidays coming up the mail seems to be really slow, so instead, I got handed it in person today when I paid a visit to DigiPen. I then agreed to enrollment by signing many pages of legalese, talked to my adviser (who came up with the exact same schedule as I did approximately 1 year ago), and registered for next semester.
My graduation plan is posted on a page of its own for easy reference.
Hello, World!
It’s traditional for firsts in the technology world to begin with Hello, World! So in keeping with that tradition, “Hello, World!”
« Previous Page