Seth Kinast’s Blog

I present you with my schedule for the Spring 2008 semester:
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If you look on my single post pages (such as this post’s) you’ll notice a new little bonus Easter Egg: “Dewdles by Sam”. I got Sam to draw a bunch of little stick figures of scenarios represented by IdioQuote or just random inside jokes. Now, they rotate randomly whenever you’re reading full posts. Just another incentive to leave a comment! Thanks Sam; you’re the bestest!

Mmm, I’m making more use of dynamic scripts on the new blog than ever before. Not only am I using jQuery, thanks to all I learned about it while writing ZB’s scripts, but I even rewrote some of my old scripts like my Headline Image Replacement with jQuery. In HIR’s case, the script went from 8 kilobytes to about 400 bytes. Yay jQuery! In addition, I serve a pre-compressed version of jQuery to browsers that can handle it (not IE), which makes jQuery + all my scripts + new scripts smaller than the old stuff!

There are four main scripts that I’m using to make things nice. My Where’s Seth script is back, but now instead of just pulling from my Google Calendar, it also works off Jabber away messages that my Trillian client sends. I need to make it more robust, so we’ll see what other ways I can pull information, such as Twitter feeds. For my linkblog, I rolled a little bit of jQuery to fetch JSON data from Ma.gnolia (which is like del.icio.us but nicer), so I don’t have to maintain links in two separate places.

On the WordPress plugins side, I’ve added OpenID and Gravatar support. WP-OpenID allows commenters to use their OpenID, both to verify their identity and to obviate having to type all that commenter info every time. Gravatar was acquired by WordPress, which makes me finally comfortable enough to use it on a blog. Before, it was just too unstable– the service was unavailable all the time and I didn’t feel like it was “official” enough to make it widespread and worth using. With official adoption by WordPress, it should become more of a de facto standard, one that I feel comfortable supporting.

Javascript is fun :O

I came back to OU today after church. When I got to Tulsa to pick Adam up, my dad called and told me that my car had leaked giant puddles of oil in the driveway (I had just got an oil change the day before.) Uh oh– that means that the crew didn’t tighten something and I was hemorrhaging my oil down the freeway! I drove to the nearest auto store and got an extra quart to dump in, because the dipstick was reading practically empty. We got to OU without much issue (I had a bike tied to the roof of the car so my gas mileage was poor, making us stop for gas along the way) and I nursed my car to Wal-Mart. Turned out that the Joplin Wal-Mart had failed to clean out the old dirty oil after they drained it, so it was pooling up in the innards of my car and making it look like there was a leak, but nothing was really the matter. Phew!

It’s nice to be back. My room is nice and clean, I can adjust the thermostat to 75° if I want to, and there are no loud noises because the residents aren’t back yet. We have two days of training but most of it is for the new RAs, so it won’t be a big deal. I’m looking forward to cafeteria food, nom ^_^

I didn’t get as much done this break as I’d hoped, but I still made good headway on studying for my MCAT that’s coming up at the end of January. The MCAT is the test you take that serves as a standard measure of how qualified you are to enter medical school; schools look at your scores as well as your GPA and application when determining whether to offer you a spot. The MCAT is divided into three sections: Biological Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Verbal Reasoning; there are also two short essay questions. Chemistry can be found in both of the science sections (organic chem vs. physical chem), and everything is very passage-based so critical reading skills are a must. A perfect score is 45 (15 on each of the three sections), and I’d like to shoot for the high 30s at least to present a competitive application to med school. I got a 30 as a freshman when I took a practice MCAT, so I think that I’ll do much better with 4 years of college behind me.

I leave for OU tomorrow morning, right after church. It’s always nice going back when I have people riding with me, and Andrew Whiteside and Adam Junk are both coming. I certainly won’t lack for entertainment as they talk more than most anyone else I know. I have no clue how I’m going to fit all of Adam’s stuff in the car tomorrow, but we’ll see what happens. My laptop gets to ride in style in my new messenger bag I got for Christmas, which I’ll have to blog about sometime because it’s kind of a big deal

I’m ready for a new semester to start.