Saturday, March 15, 2014

Great Tutorial but Crummy First Impression...

This morning at exactly 8:30 AM was the ILC's first major milestone event--the all important tutorial on just about everything that one would go through while participating in the ILC. Therefore it would be ideal to be arrive there at a reasonably early time. At around 6:00 AM my six or so cellphone alarms woke me up from my much needed end of the week slumber and then I realized that I didn't even need to wake up that early since the meeting place, DeAnza High School was just two towns over. Either way, since I was already wide awake I decided to get ready. The ideal plan for me was to leave the house at exactly 8:10, but as fate would have it my father thought it was the perfect time to brew some last minute coffee and at the same time make me take out the trash--even though I had already told him about a million times how serious it is being on time to events like these is. On the way there, I repetitively told my dad how being exactly on time is being late, as opposed to being a few minutes early which is actually being on time--which I learned from Don in his numerous emails and presentation at my school quite a few months ago. The anxiety was driving me nuts as the impending doom of confronting Evil Don was becoming more and more of a definite reality, especially when my watch hit 8:29:59. Once I arrived there, I scurried out of the car, down the corridor and into DeAnza's computer lab where all eyes turned to me. The scene was that of a dejected-faced teenager given a stern warning about the importance of being on time. Judging from how much that reasonably minor yet at the same time high offense affected me, I believe its safe to say that I will make sure not be late to any future events of any sort. 



Cool looking biker helmet in the DeAnza High Computer Lab
Switching to a much more positive note, the tutorial was very informative to say the least. Don began with the basics and ironically the first matter of the agenda was Evil Don--basically Good Don's complete opposite, which the adjectives of antagonistic, serious and truly pitiless easily pertain to. Aside from that, the basics included how to set up a Blogger account and specifically realizing how a blogger account is much more effective in representing a person than a lame Google+ profile can do--for more can be placed on one's profile page in a Blogger account as compared to the links for a person's information you have to click on in Google+. We briefly went over some examples of good blogs and bad blogs, amongst the sad errors that the bad blogs contained were very obvious capitalization, punctuation and content errors(maybe I shouldn't be so critical right now because I may be committing the same errors). Moving along, we got to learn about how to use a digital camera and how to upload photos to blogs, so we just essentially wandered about for a while and just flittered away with an entropy the snapshots in and out of the room.
SNACK TIME! Don provided some snacks and water at halftime
Later on into the tutorial Don explained how the school board meeting would be the moment we would all be on live television representing our district as literal ambassadors for our school in our respective cohorts, basically the way we comport ourselves from now on will be the image of our district to people all over the world--maturity is an integral part of this. Don then began talking about what to expect of the plane ride and to definitely get a seat with a total stranger because more than likely that would make for an interesting conversation which would make for an interesting blog--pretty good reasoning, no lie. We also learned about how our dorm rooms would vary greatly depending on which school is attended. For example a UPENN ILCer would have the benefit of having a sizable room with air-conditioning, where as a Cornell ILCer would have no air-conditioning except scorching humidity accompanied by a "pool of sweat" oozing from the pores. So I know, what to expect at Ithaca this very near Summer.

Since I forgot to mention the scenery of DeAnza, it was the type of dream school you see in the movies. For it was all rebuilt with the latest technology installed in nearly every room(like the up-to-date computers) along with modern interior architecture.
Thao looking goofy--in the good way
It's basically the school which all students that attend West Contra Costa Unified envy at the moment. Well I believe I've written more than enough than is needed to be said for today in this blog.To conclude, with all this information being poured before my fellow ILCers and I, holding in my excitement I only hope for the best for all us this Summer and that we all do our best and have fun at the same time.

1 comment:

  1. Great blog, Kevin. Sorry the subject matter wasn't so pleasant.

    I'm betting that things will be better from this point forward.

    ReplyDelete