The Ubiquitous Ten Things Meme, and Boskone Report

[ckd]

Yes, I have finally succumbed to the lure of the Ten Things list meme.

This is really hard when your long-time SO/spouse is on your friends list....

Ten things I've done that I don't think anyone on my friends list has done:
1. Visited the cockpit of Concorde, in flight, at Mach 2.
2. Been quoted on the front page of the Wall Street Journal (above the fold).
3. Repeated a grade in school, then six years later skipped two grades (in the same school district).
4. Spent a year and a half commuting to a different school district that wasn't even adjacent to the one I lived in (in between the repeat and skipping incidents).
5. Graduated high school with an official class rank of "0".
6. Taken 4 AP tests in 3 days, scoring two 4s and two 5s. (This is the one I consider most likely to be matched or beaten.)
7. Broken three bones in my foot jumping off a 4' high chain-link fence.
8. Lived in the same town for 10 years while in an active-duty military family.
9. Ridden in a Boeing 929 Jetfoil.
10. Been a co-author on a paper in Nature.

In other news, my Boskone reports are up over at dirac_angestun: Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Nifty list!

And I enjoyed the con report.

(Would love to hear some of my fellow Travis Teas reading their golden r/a/i/n prose...)

[dariaphoebe.livejournal.com]

Hm. Active duty family. I'm guessing it's some specialized skill that tied the officer to a particular base?

[ckd]

Sort of. In this case, a set of two skills, neither too specialized; helicopter pilot & social worker. Y'see, Ft. Lewis and Madigan Army Medical Center are technically two different postings, so switching between them is a PCS. (When that didn't work, it was time for a one-year tour in Korea, since that's a "leave the family" posting.)

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. Not sure if I would qualify for your number 4. I attended an exam high school, which required me to take the subway from Queens to Manhattan for six years. Definitely a different school district, but perhaps these were special circumstances?

[barbarakitten-t.livejournal.com]

you forgot: started a usenet newsgroup that has had lifechanging consequences for thousands (maybe 10's of thousands) of people.

(alt.callahans...you are directly responsible for changing MY life, at least)

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

*nod* on number 6. (Five tests; I think I got a three on one of them. FORGOT, who the heck knows why?, to sign up for French, oops!)

[keyne.livejournal.com]

I want to hear the story behind #5.

(And you started alt.callahans? I don't think I knew that...)

[ckd]

I want to hear the story behind #5.

#5 is actually a side effect of #3 combined with #6.

I went to a 4-year high school (grades 9 through 12). I entered as a member of the class of '88, but graduated with the class of '86.

At the time, the school graded on a 4.0 scale, with AP classes weighted with a 10% bonus when calculating GPA. This meant that an A in an AP class counted for a 4.4 on the 4.0 scale.

You can see where this is going, can't you?

Since I had taken the same number of AP classes in two years (four: US History, European history, Calculus [AB], English Lit; the Comp Sci test I took without a class) as anyone else could have taken in four, and a proportionately lower number of "regular" classes that only counted for 4.0s, the weighting left me with an otherwise unreachable GPA (4.1-something, I think), while the next best GPAs were 4.012. (Oh, did I mention that it was a tie...between the co-captains of the football team?)

It wouldn't have been fair to give me a class rank of 1 (I suppose they could have declared it a three-way tie), but they had to put down something as a class rank for college applications.

So I graduated 0th in a class of 120 or so, the co-captains of the football team tied for valedictorian, and there was no salutatorian.

(And you started alt.callahans? I don't think I knew that...)

Well, I sent the newgroup control message. The people posting to it created it.