Kalen Lu

Last week I mentioned how a few weeks ago my family and I got a kitten before the New Years and now I’m going to share what I think about the cat. The type of cat we got is a Balinese cat which is supposed to be a hypoallergenic type of cat. We had to get a hypoallergenic cat because our dad is allergic to most animal fur.

The idea to get a cat was my mom and brothers idea since they both really like cats, while my dad and I weren’t so fond of the idea of having a cat around the house. My main worries were the cat going into my room when I’m not inside, unplugging cables, or distracting me when I’m playing games. So far I haven’t had to worry too much about the cat going into my room because she doesn’t seem to stay in there for too long if nobody’s inside. However, a few weeks ago she unplugged a cable from behind our TV in the basement causing the internet to go out. Since then it hasn’t happened a second time but it hasn’t even been a month yet. As for my last concern, she’s not too distracting when I play games, but it feels weird having something brush against my legs as I play. After a while though, I’ve had another concern which is that our cat really likes to jump onto tables and chairs. When I first started to notice, she just liked to jump on chairs when nobody’s sitting on them to get onto the tables. Now though, she even jumps on anyone that’s sitting on a chair just to get onto a table. Especially when we eat dinner it’s really annoying, so now I just try to eat a bit quicker before she tries to jump on me. Sometimes I can guess when she is about to jump and move my chair a bit farther away and it works, but other times I’m not paying attention and she just jumps anyway.

So far, it hasn’t been too bad but then again it’s only been three or four weeks, so there’s still plenty of other things that can happen.

A few weeks ago over the holidays, my family and I went over to Montreal to visit some family that lives there. We usually do this every year and have a Christmas dinner with a lot of people. This year, we stayed for only three nights compared to the other years where we usually stay for longer. The reason why we didn’t stay that long, was that we were going to get a kitten before new years, so we had to go back to make it in time. I might make another blog about the cat, but I haven’t decided yet. On the first night we got there, there weren’t too many people at the house we were staying at, but there were still quite a bit of people there. The same Uncle’s that had the Sony PlayStation VR headset from last year also had three Nintendo Switches, so a few people including myself were able to play six player MarioKart.

We didn’t have anything for special for dinner, but we stayed up late playing MarioKart until people started leaving. The next day was the night of the big Christmas dinner we have every year. Until dinner, I mostly watched YouTube or anime until dinner. As usual, the food was really good and there were a lot of people there. It was most likely the highlight of the trip besides being able to try the Nintendo Switch. For the rest of the days we were there we didn’t do much else besides playing video games and watching videos. We didn’t even go outside since it was pretty cold at the time.

When we eventually went back there was a lot of snow on our driveway that took a while to get rid of, but eventually, we were able to go back inside. We didn’t have anything planned for dinner, so we just had some leftovers from when we had a Christmas dinner at our own house. Overall, I had a lot of fun in Montreal being able to have good food and play games all day.

This week I was supposed to research how much it would cost to “live”. Therefore, I spent time looking at things like electricity, water, clothing, food, and some other things. I will be basing the costs of all this for one weekend day.

I first calculated the cost for my most used electronics, for example, my PC and my phone. To calculate the cost of electricity I had to divide the wattage used by 1000 to get the kilowatts and then multiply the kilowatts by the number of hours a certain item was used for which gives us the kWh (kilowatts hour). After that, I multiplied the kWh by 6.5¢ because that’s how much it cost’s per kWh during off-peak periods in Ontario. In Ontario, during the weekends and on statutory holidays it is off-peak hours for the whole day. So using my PC as an example, it uses 500W of power and let’s say I use it for 10 hours. I would divide 500 by 1000 to get 0.5 and then multiply 0.5 by ten giving us 5 kWh’s. If we take the off-peak rate which is 6.5¢ per kWh then we get a total of 32.5¢ to power the PC for ten hours.

In my calculations, I didn’t include property tax, recycling/garbage, or sewage since those were difficult to calculate. The electricity was the only thing I could “accurately” calculate, with the water and gas prices being rough averages. I also, however, include food and clothing to the price in addition to the other factors. The price of the home also wasn’t included nor was a car or gas since these are just the items that I use during the weekends including the realistic amount hours spent using them.

Adding up the cost of everything is difficult because I couldn’t find the exact models of certain appliances so the price may range from hundreds to maybe even thousands of dollars. For one day (theoretically) it would cost $1,008,612 and that’s not even including things like utensils, furniture, decorations, and things like that. I priced questionable appliances such as fridges and washing machines at $1000 and stoves and dishwashers at around $500. Things included were 12W wall outlet charger, an iPhone 7, a gaming PC, lights around the house, heating, a fridge, a dishwasher, a stove, a washing machine, a dryer, a water heater, hydro bills, gas bills, food, clothing, a home, and all the appropriate things needed to run certain appliances.

Technically after the first day, you’d only have to pay $19.14 since you have already bought certain items and most of them can be used more than once saving quite a lot of money. Therefore if you already have all of the appliances and a home then $19.14 would be more accurate for how much it would cost to live for one day give or take a ten or few dollars. This all isn’t including different taxes and there are probably other things I’ve forgotten. This isn’t reliable information and is just a fun thing to do some research on as a little project.

Overall it was interesting finding out how much electricity, water, and other things cost and I got to realize how much money was spent for me to be able to live a day the way I do.

Sleep is something that pretty much every human does and needs. This week, I’ll be writing about sleep, the amount of time you sleep, and the advantages and disadvantages of doing certain things. The average young adult or adult is around seven to nine hours of sleep and for the average age of school students are eight and a half hours to ten and a half hours.

Generally, it is better to sleep more than less, however, there are downsides to both. Sleeping for short periods of time have been connected to higher risks of obesity, lack of energy, less effective immune system, and other symptoms. Getting too much sleep has also been connected to obesity, heart disease, and higher chances of stroke. When you get the right amount of sleep each night you reduce your levels of stress and give you more energy throughout your day. As an average adult, sleeping more than eight hours a night reduces your chances of getting a cold by three times compared to people who sleep less than seven hours. Sleeping the correct amount can also help improve your reaction time and reduce the amount of food that you consume in a day. I believe that you can sleep in one or two times on the weekends or stay up late for one day if you need to finish a project for school, but generally, I think you should get the recommended amount of sleep for most nights each week.

In the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to get into a better sleep schedule with a few more hours of sleep than before. It hasn’t been that much harder, but I have noticed that now I tend to have a harder time waking up to alarm clocks and I want to sleep longer. Overall, there is proof that the amount of sleep you get does affect your help and that you should monitor your sleep schedule.

Rainbow Six Siege is a game that was released a couple of years ago as tactical shooter video game. I actually got Rainbow Six Siege last year, but kind of stopped playing for a bit after a few months. Recently in the past few weeks, I’ve been getting back into the game. Rainbow Six Siege is a multiplayer game with different game modes including Bomb, Hostage, and Secure Area. In each game, there’s a defending team and an attacking team and five players on each team with each team having a different objective. For all game modes, the defender’s goal is to either eliminate all of the attackers or wait until the attacker’s time is up. However, in the Bomb game mode, the defender’s could also have to destroy a defuser after it has started defusing a bomb.

In the Bomb game mode, attackers have to locate one of two bombs inside of a building and defuse it. However, the attackers only have one defuser, so they have to be careful and protect it after it has started defusing until it has finished disarming the bomb.

In the Hostage game mode, attackers have to locate a hostage inside of a building and rescue the hostage by taking them to an extraction point somewhere outside the building.

In the Secure Area game mode, attackers have to locate a room with a biohazard container in it and stay in that room for ten seconds to secure it. In each of these game modes, the attackers can also win by eliminating all of the defenders.

Before each round, there is a preparation phase when the defenders can prepare by placing different reinforcements on walls or floors around the objective or make other defenses. The attackers can use this time to use drones to scout locate the objective and see what they’re up against.

Rainbow Six Siege has different operators that have special abilities; for example, the operator Thermite is one of the only two operators that can breach through reinforced walls and floors making him a very useful attacker. The operator Jäger has three ADS (Active Defense Systems) that can be placed around a room and will destroy most projectiles that attackers might use like grenades.

You can also kill or be killed very easily in this game with most of the time only one shot with any weapon to the head will result in a kill. Therefore, it is very important to be able to hold clever angles or play on certain positions so that you have the jump on your enemy.

As you can tell, Rainbow Six Siege is a very complicated game to pick up and play, but once you get the basics down it can become a very fun game to play with friends.

Tonight, my family and I went out to a teppanyaki place in Markham called Akasaka for our cousin’s birthday. Teppanyaki is a type of Japanese way of cooking when the chef cooks in front of the guests on a large griddle while also putting on a performance while cooking. For example, stacking sliced onions and creating a fire in the middle to make an onion volcano. Akasaka had many different courses, but the one I chose had lots of meat including lamb chops, beef wraps, kobe beef, and other items like soup.

I usually enjoy teppanyaki-style restaurants since most of them have nice performances and food. This time was no different; the food was very good with the meats containing lots of fat which makes it almost melt in your mouth. The performance was also nice with the most exciting part being a large fire used to partially cook some beef. For me, the best part’s of the meal were the meats; the miso soup tasted kind of weird and the bean sprouts were slightly bland in my opinion. We also got fried rice which was good and had lots of egg mixed into it.

I would definitely go back again if I get the chance to. I do recommend Akasaka to anyone going to try teppanyaki for the first time although their prices are pretty high for single person course is around $30-$40. However, it’s definitely worth it if you asked me. Overall Akasaka was a nice place and I would recommend to someone and go again if I could.

Each school year, my school has students create a way to present what they have learned so far in the school year, until around the last few months until winter break to their parents. This year, we are having our student led-conferences this week, and different classes have been preparing different presentations for their parents. The student led-conferences take place after school and over the weekend so that they don’t interfere with normal school schedule.

My class’ teacher gave us a Google Slide with different topics to discuss with our parents. As the students, we worked over the previous week to change the Google Slide so that it would personally cater to ourselves. Once we believed that we had completed the slide, our teacher would check it over with as and maybe help us change a few things or give advice on what to talk about with the parents. I had my student led-conference after school today, so I’ve already gotten it finished. As a student in the intermediate division of our school, I had to do my student led-conference inside the gym as opposed to in the classroom where most other classes do theirs. Most of the Google Slide was talking about high school, what we want to do in the future, what we can do to help ourselves to improve, and things like that.

Overall, I think that the student led-conference went alright since I was able to get it over with after school, so it wasn’t that bad. I think the worst part of it was, the preparation for the presentation which took a lot of time and the fact that we have to go to the school for the conference but otherwise, it wasn’t too bad.

Today my school had an event called Educamp for the junior division of the school. Educamp was a group of activities organized by some teachers and taught by some of the Grade Sevens. Some of the activities at Educamp were coding, robotics, 3D printing, and stop-motion animation. A few of my friends and I got to participate in Educamp by being in charge of one of the coding classes. A few weeks before today, we had prepared a Google Slide on how to use a program called Scratch to learn basic code.

The way the day worked was that the junior students were divided into groups designated by colours, and the different colours went to different classrooms that taught different things. The students and teachers split up into whatever subject they would be apart of and then go to a designated classroom. There were either one or two teachers in each classroom, but most of the teaching was done by the Grade Seven students. Since my friends and I were teaching coding we had to set up a lot of laptops for the students to use before the classes actually started. The actual hard part of teaching the classes to code was starting off and explaining the very basics, so for the rest of the time it was pretty easy because most kids are off doing things on their own while experimenting. Of course, there were some times where we would help some students who didn’t quite understand, but generally it was pretty easy. Most kids were well behaved, but occasionally there would be some students who went and played other peoples games that weren’t created by them, and they don’t even understand how it works.

Overall being one of the “instructors” at the Educamp was pretty fun and it was actually not too bad. We even got to play around with the program ourselves when making examples for the class. This was my experience being an instructor for my school’s Educamp.

Last week, I was playing CS:GO (one of my favourite video games) with one of my friends and ranked up for the first time in a long time. In CS:GO, there are many different ranks but there three main groups and two ranks on their own. From lowest to highest they are, Silver ranks, Gold Nova ranks, Master Guardian ranks, Legendary Eagle ranks, Supreme Master First Class, and The Global Elite. In order to rank up, you have to actually get better at the game and win your matches. For a few months until now I was Silver Elite Master which is the highest Silver rank, the next rank after that is Gold Nova 1 which is what rank I have right now.

I usually play with some of my friends because it’s generally easier to communicate and more fun to play with rather than playing with random people. Over the past few days I’ve been playing with two friends, one is Gold Nova 3 and the other is Silver 4. Since we are playing with each other and we all have different ranks we usually get matched up against people with ranks between Gold Nova 2 and Gold Nova 1. This means that if we win our games my Silver 4 friend and I rank up faster because we are playing against more skilled players, but if we lose then my Gold Nova 3 friend will start to derank because he’s losing against lower skilled players. The game I actually ranked up in was when I was just playing with my Gold Nova 3 friend and our game wasn’t going too well, we began with losing 0-6 until we won our first round. Each game ends when either team gets to 16 rounds won. The enemy team was about to win, with 12 rounds won and we were still far behind. Eventually, we made a comeback and ended up winning the game 16-13. Although it was a close game, I still ranked up and my Gold Nova 3 friend and I were both really happy because I wasn’t in Silver anymore and he wouldn’t derank as easily anymore if we played together.

Overall, CS:GO can be really frustrating at times like when you derank which happened to me after I ranked up to Gold Nova 2 the next day. Although I’m still only Gold Nova 1 I still strive to get better at the game and have fun playing it.

Last weekend, my friend bought me a game on Steam called Castle Crashers. Castle Crashers is a game where you start as one of four knights and have to finish a campaign by defeating enemies and bosses. My brother and I already had the game on the Xbox 360, but since we mostly use our PC’s it would be better to just have it on the PC rather than having to go downstairs to the basement to play. Castle Crashers has a leveling system for each of your characters, but even though after one or two years of having the game on the Xbox, our main characters were only around levels 20-30. However, after only having the game on PC for less than a day my brother, friend and I were all already around the same level as on the Xbox. This made me slightly curious, but it doesn’t really affect me too much.

To me, Castle Crashers is one of those games where I can just play and not care too much if I lose or if I have to leave mid game since it’s kind of easy to just return to the same point. If you die in the game you don’t lose too much besides a few minutes of your time. Castle Crashers is also one of my favourite games to play with friends since it’s really easy to get friends together using Steam. However, the game’s multiplayer system is limited to four players which kind of sucks. The game doesn’t take too long to beat if you play regularly or if you play for a few hours a day, so after you beat the game there’s not much to do. Fortunately, in Castle Crashers there are different characters to unlock, so after you beat the game you could try and beat it again with different characters or try and unlock new ones. You could also try to maximize a specific character’s level to level 99 which is the highest level a player can achieve, or alternatively you could try beating the game on insane mode which you unlock after beating the game. Insane mode makes the game more difficult by giving your enemies more health and make your enemies do more damage.

Overall the game is really fun to play with friends, but if you play alone there’s not much to do besides completing repetitive actions to level up your numerous amount of different characters you possess.