Balsa Bridge Contest!

Every year, for the last 26 years, Notre Dame has hosted a bridge building contest. While the main entries are from Physics 11 and 12 students, the contest is open to other Notre Dame students, as well as people in the community who wish to participate (on a case-by-case basis). The bridge must only consist of balsa wood, and glue. Also, the bridge must weigh under 100 grams. There are many sponsors for the contest, some of them are BCIT, SFU Engeneering, UBC Engeneering Physics, and APEG.

Contest Website: http://www.balsabridge.com/

Pictures: http://www.myndrs.com/bridge07/index.html

Interesting Balsa Wood Facts: http://www.mat.uc.pt/~pedro/ncientificos/artigos/techbal.html

Vancouver is a city of many interesting bridges. My Favorite is the Burrard Street Bridge.

Visual Basic Digital Clock

I have just completed our latest project, a digital clock program coded in Visual Basic.



This program does the simple task of displaying the system time in a box that you can drag around, and place anywhere on your screen. For this project we learned about the "Timer" control, how to remove the Minimise/Maximise buttons, and also how to place down menus. In this program I placed two menus, a "File" menu (which contains the option to quit the program) and a "Help" menu (which contains the option to view the about screen). When the "Help>About" option is clicked, a window appears which displays the company name, and a copyright notice. Closing this window brings you back to the program. Allthough this program is simple and might be useless for most people, it has tought me about some key tools for programing in Visual Basic.

Firetruck Photo

The "Life at Notre Dame" section of the NRDS site has been updated with new photos! Of these is the yearly grade 12 firetruck photo. It was a sunny day and most people we're being blinded by the sun glare, me probably being the worst affected.

Google Analytics

Around 2 weeks ago, I added a Google Analytics tracking code to my ICT 12 blog. This allowed me to view my blogs traffic and locate where my blog visitors are comming from. As of today, I have had 62 visits, 43 of those from unique computers. Currently the bulk lof my visits come from Canada, with Italy in second place, and United States and India last with one visit each. Cool, eh? The best part? It's completly free! Check it out here. Im watching you.... ;-)

OLPC

OLPC: One Laptop Per Child, is a project started by former MIT Media Lab head Nicholas Negroponte, which gets inexpensive laptops sent to developing countries around the world. These fully functional laptops are outtfitted for use in third world countires. For instance, to power these laptops you turn a crank that charges the 10 hour battery, yes 10 hours! To read more about this check out Mr. Vogel's article in the B.C Catholic.


http://bcc.rcav.org/07-01-29/columns.htm


For a two week time period these laptops are available to North America on a "Buy two, get one" basis. Mr. Vogel made a proposal to our ICT 12 class, he will use funds from the previous years yearbook cd sales to buy one laptop to be sent to a developing country. Each student in the class can then contribute money to pay for the second laptop, which will belong to the whole class for learning purposes.

$235/24 people comes out to under $10 per person!

Thats not including Mr. Vogels generous donation of $25.

C'mon guys, what's ten bucks?

Class Mates

Here is a list of my classmates blogs.

Amanda Alberti

Lester Aquilario

Laura Bordignon

Jason Cadacio

Jaime Dy Tioco

Joey Ficetola

Eliza Labrador

Ysabel Lago

Micaela Monk

Sarah Navarro

Julian Sales

Julienne Serrano

Tomasz Sowa

Stephanie Tan

Adrianna Wong

Greg Ziarek

Hello world, welcome to my blog for ICT 12!

(This is now the third time I have typed 'Hello Word' for this class!)