paul habeeb. blog.

Today, in the United States at least, is Thanksgiving. This, of course, means that I should be spending time with my family, but right now all of the adults are talking and the older kids are watching football. Neither of these things interest me, so soon my sister and I are going to watch Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

Anywho, today’s food was good. I do not really look forward to Thanksgiving food, but it is good food. I feel bad for my Korean friends who cannot be with their families for Thanksgiving and Christmas. They do not even get gifts for Christmas. I will have to get them all something.

My family does not have any big traditions for Thanksgiving, just getting together and eating. We switch off and on each year: one we go for Thanksgiving, the other for Christmas. I think that is the closest to a tradition we have. I do not enjoy getting together with my family much, because if we go to my mom’s parent’s house, then everyone there is a hick, and my family is the complete opposite of that. They do not even have internet, but thankfully my dad bought wireless cards for the laptops. Before now, we just had to read or do things like that. If we go to my dad’s brother’s house, then everyone there is obsessed with sports, and I hate sports. And anywhere we go, everyone thinks that they have to entertain me. They obviously do not know me. I can entertain myself plenty.

Oh well. At least we leave tomorrow morning.

Wow. Long time, no see guys. Heh. More like no write. I have just been really busy as of late and haven’t had time to post an entry, or have just not felt like it. Let’s see what has happened since my last entry:

On Saturday night, my sister and I saw The Starting Line, Fall Out Boy, Motion City Soundtrack, Panic! At the Disco, and Boys Night Out on the Nintendo Fusion Tour. The show started at 6.30PM and lasted until about 10.45PM. I had never really listened to Panic!, but I thought they did a pretty good job. Not good enough for me to buy their cd, but good enough to be entertaining. I wasn’t terribly impressed with BNO. The singing/screaming just did not do it for me. Motion City was amazing, just as the last time I saw them. They actually cussed a lot less this time, which surprised me a lot. After Motion City was The Starting Line, who were the best band of the evening. During the summer I had a giant obsession with them, but it had waned when school began. This was my third time seeing them, and I have to say it was the best of the three. Fall Out Boy split their set into two Acts. For the first act they played mainly new songs, and the second act was mainly old songs. They were pretty good, but I don’t like them as much as MCS or TSL, so I wasn’t as excited about them. Overall the show was awesome.

The rest of the time I’ve just been working and studying. I work every Sunday, Monday, and Thursday, and it is nice to have a regular schedule instead of something new every week.

Right now I’m on my way down to my grandparent’s house for Thanksgiving. My dad bought two wireless cards for the laptops from Verizon so my sister and I could have internet access on the way down and while we are there. It cuts out every once in a while, but for the most part it is great. Slower than usual, but faster than dialup.

Yesterday some of my Korean friends gave me Korean music, so I have been listening to that all the way down. It’s pretty good. They gave me mostly rap, with a little rock. Just enough to expose me to a good amount of artists.

I go to a rather small private school that goes from preschool to 12th grade. In recent years it has seemed that the Asian population there has increased significantly. In nearly every class you can hear two Asians talking together in their native tongue. Since we are a small school, each year a directory of all the names, addresses, names of parents, and telephone numbers of everyone is put out. The one for this year came out today and I decided to count the total number of Asians in the entire school; I also calculated the percentage of Asians in Elementary, Junior High, Senior High, and the Junior and Senior Highs combined. My results follow, but take note that they may bay inaccurate, as I counted by hand. Also, to be considered Asian, the name must have been Asian - adopted kids were not counted, as I do not know everyone in the school:

School Total

• 40 Asians out of 555 kids
• Approx. 7.207%

Elementary (Pre-K and Kindergarten Included)

• 17 Asians out of 364 kids
• Approx. 4.670%

Junior High

• 9 Asians out of 91 kids
• Approx. 9.890%

Senior High

• 14 Asians out of 100 kids
• Precisely 14.000%

Junior and Senior Highs Combined

• 23 Asians out of 191 kids
• Approx. 12.042%

More Information

• In grades 3 and under, there are only 7 Asians out of a possible 253; this is approx. 2.767%.
• There are no Asians in 5th grade.
• In grades 6 and up, 27 Asians out of a possible 231; this is approx. 11.688%.
• There are the most Asians in 7th grade, with a grand total of 5 in the class.

My Conclusions

These percentages tell me that Asian parents, like any sensible parents, are more likely to send their kids to America once they have hit age 11 or 12. The Asian children younger than this are probably here with their parents, who are most likely teaching at the university in town.

Well, I’ve downloaded the new browser Flock, and I have to say I am enjoying it. If you’ve never heard of Flock, here’s a quick description:

We started Flock to build tools that empower people and smooth out some of the more hairy parts of living and working online. As it is, we live and breathe this stuff everyday and wanted better tools to do the things that we love doing online.

Basically, it’s Firefox on steroids.

I really like the way that the favourites sync with del.icio.us is cool, and the blogging feature is handy. I am actually using it right now. The fact that you can add fav’s to your del.icio.us by clicking the star is very cool, too.

I do have a few beefs, however. The del.icio.us integration isn’t perfect by any means. Only some of your fav’s sync, so when you come across a site you added to del.icio.us before you had Flock, Flock won’t recognize it as already added. The blogging feature allows tags, but they are just technorati tags, so I can’t use it to tag my posts - I have to do that after the fact in WordPress.

Also, when I upgraded from one version of Flock to the next, a lot of my favourites were removed from the collections they were in. The fact that you can’t middle click on the links in the collections to open the link in a new tab really, really bugs me. That is a feature that I use all the time in Firefox. Thankfully you can still middle click when browsing a page.

I think that Flock has potential, but could also go very wrong if not taken care of. Hopefully the people there will listen to the input of the people, as I emailed them earlier today.

If you haven’t tried out Flock yet, go download it. It’s still in beta, but it’s fun.

Tonight I went to a Korean restaurant with my friend ??. I had ?? ??, and while I was eating it I found this tentacle. At first I didn’t know what to think, but I eventually ate it. It was actually decent tasting, too.

After we ate we went to Moonstruck Cafe. It was a fun night.

Hillsdale, Michigan has a new mayor. Why is this important, you ask? He’s 18.

Michael Sessions, who turned 18 on September 22, ran as a write-in because he was too young to get on the ballot in the spring. Preliminary results have him leading incumbent mayor Doug Ingles, 51, by 64 votes. To fund him campaign he used $700 from his summer job, posting flyers around town and going door to door. Apparently the job comes with only a paycheck. Sessions doesn’t get an office, a desk, or even a computer - just $250 a month.

Yesterday was a good day at school. I found out that I got an 80 on that Calculus test, which is great. Everyone did better than they thought they did. The rest of the day went off without a hitch, too. In the evening there was small group at church, which is always awesome. Almost everyone was there, which made the group seem a little big, but it was still a good time.

Today we had a day off of school. It was a nice break. I slept in until 10 or 11, I can’t remember which. After that my mom had parent teacher conferences, and since I had work immediately after her last one ended I had to drop her off and then go do stuff for a while and then pick her up. I bought Relient K’s Apathetic EP. It is a great EP, all the songs sound awesome. I ventured to the mall afterwards, and then to some Chinese restaurant where I used my chopstick sillz. It was then time to pick up my mom, so I went back to the school and did so. She took me to work where I was for 3.5 hours. It was my first day working totally by myself and it was a pretty good day. I pretty much did childrens, cds, and audiobooks.

Tomorrow I am going to a Korean restaurant with David and Song-Yi. I don’t think David knows where we are going, so I hope he doesn’t mind. Song-Yi didn’t want to tell him, but I don’t know how he’ll take it. I know I’ll like it though.

Today I had a killer Caculus test. I think that everyone in the class got different answers for all of the problems. I don’t think any of us knew how to do the majority of the problems. What does that say about our teacher?

In other news, I have been busy lately. My new job has given me something to do with my spare time. I haven’t been watching as many movies as I was earlier in the school year. Tonight I started to watch Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance, but I’m still less than halfway through it.

Today when I got home from school I took a much needed nap. For the past few days I’ve been getting to bed too late. I keep meaning to go to bed earlier, but I just never do.

Yesterday I posted and I never followed up on that post.

Last night I saw So Long Forgotten play. It was sort of weird because my friend David asked me to go, just saying that his friend had a show. I didn’t know it was going to be SLF, or that I’d know the majority of the people there. There weren’t very many people there at all, maybe 15. It was a cool show, though. They played five songs, one of which was Memphis Will Be Laid to Waste. That song is probably the best hardcore song in the world. I love it so much.

After the show we went out to Best Buy where I bought the special edition of Vheissu by Thrice. The album is amazing. I am so glad I got a copy of the special edition. There is so much cool information in it.

Once I got home I watched the movie Feathers In the Wind. It was a Korean film, and it was great. No, everything yesterday was not great; just a lot of it was. Back to the movie: I had been meaning to watch it for a week, but just had not got around to it. It was only an hour and twenty minutes long, so it short, but it the film was just beautiful. Watch it for yourself if you don’t believe me.

Today I had work. I was planning for it to be a stress-fest like Thursday, but it turned out to be a lot better. I sort of knew what I was doing, compared to not knowing anything on Thursday. I was also paired up with a nice lady who explained things a lot better than who I had been with before. I hope I’m with her tomorrow, as well.

Tomorrow I’ll have the Monday update. Heh.

Today I found out that I have been admitted to Illinois State University. That makes two places I can choose from: Illinois State and Olivet Nazarene. If I could only pick from the two, I have no clue where I would go. Hopefully the University of Illinois will admit me because they are my number one choice right now.

I still haven’t heard from DePaul and it has been a while. I probably need to send an email their way soon. I guess I haven’t done anything about them sooner because I dont’ really want to go there. They were my first application and I think I was just antsy and wanting to fill out an application. Oh well.