Monthly Archives: March 2014

My Five Favorite Apps

Posted on by Standard 3

1. Giant Boulder of Death:—: Wouldn’t you love to become a huge chunk of rock and roll through a never ending alpine village? Of course you would. With this thought in mind, the creators of the game whipped up an application for doing just that. But beware! Avoid the deadly spikes or else!

2. Desmos:—: Anything you have the math skills to conceive, Desmos can make. This graphing calculator takes your equations, your functions, whatever, and makes the graph. You can have many graphs on top of each other, so if you make each graph in the right shape, eventually you’ll make a picture. Also, you can just use it as a graphing calculator.

3. DudePerfect:—: The basic premise behind this game is to make the ball go into the basket whichever way you like. Wanna go for a straight shot? Fine. Wanna bounce it off seven different walls before arcing high in the air, the plummeting down straight to the basket? Cool. The more indirect and unlikely your shot, the more points you get:

4. Merriam Webster:—: If the word exists, it’s in there. The purpose of the Merriam Webster dictionary is pretty straightforward: it’s a dictionary. It’s still very useful though. If I’m in a hurry, and I need the definition of a word, I just grab my iPad. A couple of taps later, I know the word, and I can be at peace.

5. MetroTimer:—: As a musician, I know the importance of keeping time. Unfortunately, I can’t always trust myself to keep a steady tempo. That’s where MetroTimer comes in. It clicks steadily at whatever speed the piece is supposed to be at. You can change the type of click to whatever you prefer. One of the options is a person counting over and over. “One. Two. Three. Four. One. Two. Three. Four.”

Those are my favorite apps, how about you?

Week II : P. F. Chang’s

Posted on by Standard Respond

A giant stone horse stares down at you. It’s easily fifteen feet tall. Welcome to P.F Chang’s, my favorite restaurant in Austin, Texas.

The food is amazing. I get the same thing every time. As an appetizer, I order the Salt and Pepper Calamari. Some calamari is hard to chew, but not this one. It’s just perfect. As a main course, I order pan fried pork dumplings. Those dumpling are to die for. The outside is just as delicious as the pork inside. One bite, and the flavors flood your mouth. It’s beautiful.

Also, it’s the place where my family always meets after my dad flies his plane, since it’s halfway between our house and the airport. My dad loves to fly gliders- these huge planes with no engines. He uses updrafts alone to stay in the air for hours at a time. He’s always happy at P. F. Chang’s since he’s just retuned from a long gliding trip.

So, it’s no wonder that I love P. F. Chang’s so much. After all, I’m always happy with my family, and I’m always happy with my food.

The Phantom’s Lair

Posted on by Standard Respond

Apple Smoking In The Darkness
Photo Credit: A Guy Taking Pictures via Compfight

It’s not exactly a friendly sort of place. You know, the nice, cozy little homes with a crackling fire and a sweet old grandmother passing out hot chocolate and cookies. It makes sense, of course, the Phantom is as far away from that grandmother as I think a living thing can be. Even that’s an understatement as we’re not quite sure he is a living thing.
Honestly, it’s not really a cave— it’s a cavern. If you were to look up, you wouldn’t see the top. A huge lake leaves almost no space to walk. The water is unnervingly still, disrupted only by the occasional drip from the unseen ceiling. The atmosphere is as cold as the creature who inhabits this void.

Oh— and there’s the organ. The monstrous mountain of pipes, some big enough to swallow a person. It towers over everything else, an ostentatious reminder of who’s in charge here. You can almost feel its power. It would be a good idea never to forget that…