Eragon by Christopher Paolini

Image from http://librarianinblack.net

Eragon is the first book in the Inheritance Cycle written by the young author Christopher Paolini. In this book, we're introduced to the main character, Eragon, and the world that he lives in—a magical world with many different races (e.g., dwarfs and elves) and magical creatures (eg., dragons).We learn about Eragon's role as a dragon rider as well as what he can accomplish as a dragon rider (e.g., using magic). We also learn about the evil Empire and Eragon's interactions with it.

Overall, I really liked this book. Every page was full of excitement because I really didn't know what could happen next during Eragon's adventure. Also, it was very interesting to learn about all the magic stuff that existed in the world. I especially liked how Paolini made such sophisticated rules for magic. For example, I liked how in the story, using magic to accomplish a task would require as much as energy as if one were to complete the task without magic. Furthermore, I really looked forward to the end of the book because of some prophecies made during the middle of it—I really liked to know how they would turn out to be true.

Well, to my disappointment, it turned out that the prophecies would only come true in the successive books, as nothing else about the prophecies were mentioned during the rest of the book. Also, I found it hard to follow the story of the book, as new concepts, characters and locations were constantly introduced (and often in Elven language). Furthermore, the story became repetitive at the end—each time Eragon would be brutally attacked, and then rescued by someone else.

Despite these flaws, I still liked this book a lot. I am currently reading the second book in the series, and am probably going to read the other two as well.

University Open Courses

About two or three years ago, I heard about how many American universities were videotaping their lectures and putting the videos online for people in the whole world to see. At the time, however, I was too young and never bothered to check out these videos.

Recently, my parents mentioned these videos to me. They told me that the website http://academicearth.org/ had a huge collection of such videos, and that I should try watching some of them. So I decided to check them out. Specifically, I decided to watch the videos of the game theory and computer methodology courses.

Quite surprisingly, I actually enjoyed watching these videos. The lectures were interesting and understandable, and of course educational. And since I have got plenty of time now, I really should finish watching the videos for theses two courses. Also, I am planning on watching the lectures of other courses in the future as well.

So for anyone who just stumbled across this page by accident, I highly recommend you to check out the university open lectures at http://academicearth.org/. It's a extremely great way of self-learning, and you should definitely try it!

My Summer (August) Plan

It has been more than one month since summer vacation started, yet due to summer school and many family affairs, I haven't really been able to do the things that I want to do for summer. Therefore, I now have to squish everything into August, for once school starts I will probably be too busy to do these things.

So here are the things that I want to accomplish before school starts:

• Read at least 12 novels
• Finish watching all the videos of the computer methodology course and complete all the assignments
• Finish watching all the videos of the game theory course
• Pre-read my grade 11 and grade 12 math text books
• Study at least 20 vocabularies per day
• Read the book Algorithms 
• Practice for the seniors computers contest
• Practice for the various math contests
• Gain some general knowledge about Western history

As you can see, this is a very long list. So I must not slack off during the remaining days of summer.

A Reading Log

(Check out my  new Reading Log!)

I have been wanting to have a reading log for a long time now, for it'd be nice if I could keep track of all the books that I have read. However, I have always been reluctant to actually start one because of the enormous energy that I would need to spend to come up with the list of books that I have already read.

Yesterday, however, I finally made up my mind and spent 4-6 hours working on my reading log, which  I made a page for accessibility reasons. So how come it took me so long? Well, the hardest part was definitely the part where I had to come up with all the books I have read. I had to search for their titles, and try to remember the approximate time when I have finished reading them. Also, besides coming up with all the books that I have read, making the actual table was also a difficult task. At first I coded the table manually using HTML. However, at the end it didn't look very nice because the table looked very squished together. I then transferred the table to Google Docs, and magically the layout looked much nicer.

That wasn't the end of the problem, however. I then had to spend about one hour fixing the HTML code of the table from Google Docs. At first it was simply too long (300,000 characters), and it kept causing my browser to lag. Then after I turned it into CSS, it started changing the layout of my whole blog. I had to look through the code and debug it myself.

Fortunately, it's all done now. Not only does it look nice, it is also very easy for me to edit. So in the future, whenever I come up with a new item for the log, I will edit the page. I am sure it will be useful at some time in the future

Looking Back at Grade 10 Careers

Out of all my grade ten classes, careers class was my least favourite. I learned practically nothing from the class, and it had extremely meaningless assignments with incredibly stupid marking schemes. I was so irritated by the assignments that I made the post I Hate Career Studies!

 So what exactly was irritating about the assignments? Well, for each assignment there were requirements that were not relevant to the assignment at all.  For example, we were asked to include cover pages, graphics and page borders for almost all of the assignments. Even more ridiculous, I would lose about 2% on each assignment because "my border wasn't creative enough!"

I really want to talk about the issue with the page borders, for it was simply unacceptable. For the creativity component of the assignments, we had to "include creative things such as page borders and graphics in our work." And that was exactly what I did. For each assignment, I would draw straight, green lines to outline the page(s), and I would include a picture or two. However, each time I would still get only one out of two marks for the creativity section of the rubric. The reason? My page border wasn't creative enough! This was just plain stupid, because the requirement in the section clearly stated "include page border." It never mentioned that our page borders had to be creative! Also, I included a comparison between my page border and one of the creative page borders, just to show how the creative page borders weren't really aesthetically pleasing...

Is the creative border really better?

Now, setting the assignments aside, there were still many things that were dissatisfying about careers class. For example, we watched a bunch of boring movies that weren't related to the class! Also, the teacher really didn't teach us anything, and most of the time we were just wasting time in class.

Fortunately, not all my memories about careers class are negative, for I liked the final project of the class. The final project was basically to research an occupation that we were interested in, and to write a report about it. True, there were still a lot of stupid requirements. However, I really enjoyed learning more about economists and their work. 

Overall, I am just glad that I finished this stupid course with a good mark.

Next up: Looking Back at Grade 10 Civics

Looking Back at Summer School

Note: In case you didn't read my previous posts, I took the course Sociology, Anthropology and Psychology for summer school.

It's ironic that I am writing this post even though I haven't finished writing the Looking Back at Grade Ten series, which I was supposed to finish a week or two ago. However, I just want to write this post as soon as possible, before my memory of summer school starts fading.

Also, I actually have quite a lot of things to say about summer school. Therefore, in this post I will have many sections,  with each section including a major aspect of summer school that I want to talk about.

Teacher's Misunderstandings
At times I was very irritated because of the teacher's own lack of understanding of the subject matter. She often gave out examples or explanations that clearly didn't apply, and at times it seemed that she really didn't understand the material herself.

As a result, it was very difficult for me to write the tests. I couldn't answer a question based on what I knew, but instead I had to answer it based on what I thought she knew. For example, she once misunderstood the meaning of "quota sampling," so on a test when we were given cases to see whether the sampling method was quota sampling or not, I had to circle the options that she would have circled (which were wrong).

This task could sometimes become even harder

Summer School Final Exam: Done!

Update (Thurs): I got a 96% on the exam, which is acceptable. However, I thought that three of the marks were taken off quite unfairly...

Today afternoon I wrote my summer school exam, which marked the end of summer school! I mean, I still have to go to summer school until Friday, but there is nothing about summer school that I can worry about, except the marks that I will get in the course. This basically means that starting today (or tomorrow, since it's pretty late already), I will finally have my first taste of summer!

But for this post, I want to focus on the exam. Overall, the exam was not difficult. However, many questions were phrased very vaguely and were often ambiguous. As a result, I might have lost some marks in the multiple choice section. Also, for the long answer question, I feel that I should have chosen the other side of the debate simply because it had more strong arguments. So I probably lost some marks in the long-answer question as well (for me weak arguments). Combining all the possible mistakes, I think it's more likely that my mark will stay the same or drop by 1-2% after the exam. It's very scary because one single mistake could mean a decrease in the final mark! Nevertheless, I am still getting my finger crossed that my mark will actually increase by one percent. The chance is slim, but I don't think that it is a flat zero.

I'll get my exam bark tomorrow, and I hope I did well! I'll update the blog again once I get back from school.