It’s not everyday that the president of the United States actually makes fun of himself purposefully. But that’s exactly what President W. Bush did on Saturday at the White House Correspondents’ Association annual dinner. He brought along Steve Bridges, a guy who impersonates Bush on television to make fun of himself. It’s all just some good fun humor which is probably needed even more when the president’s approval ratings are at an all time low. I dunno if this will help those ratings though. By the way, this whole correspondents’ dinner has been going on for ages. Check out a longer article on the BBC. I wasn’t able to find a video anywhere yet because I just saw it on TV and there may not have been any videos uploaded yet.
Archive for April, 2006
I’ve been in the new high school building for 3 days now and have checked out all the facilities. Here I will tell you the pros and cons of the new building as compared to the old one.
Pros:
- The rooms have new air-conditioners which are great (mainly because they actually work) and they’re very quiet.
- The chemistry and biology labs are much bigger and have new working surfaces
- Most of the rooms have new electronic (interactive) white boards which are hooked up to the teacher’s computer. They might come in handy.
- Obviously the cabinets are all new and that’s nice
- There is now an elevator (currently not allowed to be used by students although some friends and I have taken a ride with a teacher a few times).
- There is a handicapped toilet just in case some handicapped students are introduced to my school in the future. For now it’s just a nice big (luxurious might be too strong) toilet that anyone can use.
- The whole bottom floor is a parking lot although the spaciousness is good for playing sports and sitting around for now.
Cons:
- The classrooms are generally much smaller except for the science labs but this is fine.
- There is only one boys’ and girls’ bathroom in the whole new building and the boys’ bathroom has only 6 stalls (I think) and no urinals and no changing room.
- There are currently no water fountains or drink vending machines in the new building.
- There is only one usable staircase going from the ground floor (that’s first floor for American readers) to the top floor. There is a staircase going from the first floor (second floor for American readers) to the roof but it doesn’t go all the way down to the ground floor. These staircases get quite cramped when it’s class changeover time but I can live with it.
- The art room is significantly smaller and there is very little space to move around. The teacher’s area is probably a 4 by 4 foot square in that room.
- The science labs don’t have any electrical outlets to plug in computers except next to the teacher’s area. We are supposed to have a computer on the side of every bench and they even made keyboard pullout things but there are no outlets (how interestingly built).
- Not a big problem but some of the classrooms are still a bit dusty (the construction dust you know)
Bottom Line:
Although the majority of the classrooms are smaller and the building is quite cramped this is as good as it could ever get because of certain building regulations in the area (in fact the building was built to the maximum square footage and height allowed by the government regulations). I’m sure everyone will become used to the traffic on the staircases and for those that will still be in the school when the old high school building is demolished and rebuilt there will be a significant increase in the amount of space in the school. Some of the small problems mentioned above e.g. dust and water fountains will be fixed in the future. The new school’s not all that bad if you really think about it but more space would definitely be greatly appreciated by both staff and students.
If you feel anything has been left out of this list please or if you have any ideas or views to share please comment on this article. Thank you.
Yep, you can now access my site from ilapko.com. I still have to ask Elliot, the guy that hosts my site to change some stuff in Apache. I found out myself what I was doing wrong (DNS and ns1 and ns2 crap) and it’s all fixed now. Oh, it’s great to have a first-level domain name.
As can be clearly seen, the design here has changed quite a lot. There are a lot more images to make the site prettier and sleeker rather than just square edges which are boring. The top ‘box’ is where the navigation will go. The middle box is for ‘features’ where anything new and important will be shown. The next box is the content area where all my entries and asides are shown and at the bottom is the footer which has been simplified to just have links to the K2 and WordPress pages. Other than that and a few minor things I have to implement (like where the searchform should go) the new design is basically done. Hope you guys like it. It still looks a bit messed up in IE but much better than before. It looks as good in IE as it does in Firefox. Way to go.
So uh, use less water and maybe take a cold shower or something. Or maybe take a hint from the Earth Day Network’s website and…
Volunteer. Go to a festival. Install solar panels on your roof. Organize an event where you live. Change a habit. Help launch a community garden. Communicate your priorities to your elected representatives. The possibilities are endless! Do something nice for the earth, have fun, meet new people, and make a difference.
I was exploring my ancient website files from back when I just started and found this joke which is supposed to be the funniest in Canada.
When NASA first started sending up astronauts, they quickly discovered that ballpoint pens would not work in zero gravity. To combat the problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and $12 billion to develop a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside down, underwater, on almost any surface including glass and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to 300 C. The Russians used a pencil.
