Oh wait! It’s the light at the end of the tunnel they told me would come one day! I’m not talking about the light at the end of the tunnel in Third Day’s song (even though that’s a good light!), but I’m talking about the light that equals High School graduation!

Today was the first day of my senior year! I’m officially a senior at Lansing High School and going to be a graduate of the Class of 2011! This year isn’t going to be near as hard as the other years I’ve had because I’m only taking a couple more serious classes and all the other classes aren’t hard. I’m praying and hoping it goes by pretty fast so that I can graduate and start going to college and then start my career… Not sure why I want to get my teen age years over so quickly, but I do.

Shout out to all Class of 2011!!!!

God Bless,
Bradley

One hour till I leave for prayer at church and tonight I’m playing the bass during church.
One Lord, One Faith, and One baptism – Ephesians 4:5
One more day of school!!!
One more day of school food
One way to Heaven
One more year of high school for me left!
One year till I graduate from High School
One more month till I leave for Camp Niangua 2010!!
First year of going to Camp Niangua! And yes i’m 100% excited for it!!!

This list could do on and on, but since I’m leaving in about an hour (1 hour) for before service prayer, I had better start getting ready. I’m thinking of wearing one of my new shirts that I just bought, but can’t decide which one to wear… Guess we’ll see since they are actually going to be taking pictures tonight and I was told I have to put them up online. So, I’ll make a blog post about it after I get them uploaded to my church’s website.

I have three main beliefs in life and many other secondary beliefs. The very first and foremost belief in my life is that there is One God and His name is Jesus. In the Bible it says “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD” and it also says “Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble.” I’m an Apostolic and I believe without a shadow of a doubt that what the Bible says is correct and it is to not be doubted. Another main belief in my life is honesty. Once a person tells a “little white lie” they eventually have to expand that “little white lie” into a big one because people start asking questions about it. There is a saying that goes something like this, “if you tell the truth then you don’t have to remember what you said.” That saying is a statement and belief that I’ve built how I live my life on. The last main belief that I have in my life is love. Living life without love to me would be boring. I love my family, my one and only God (Jesus), my church, and I love my friends. Someone has to have love in their life or there will be something else in love’s place. Usually if someone does not have love in their life then they have hatred or strife. I view life as this little saying I have, “You only have one life to live, why hate and be depressed?”

Don’t know what credo means? The simple definition is: any system of principles or beliefs.

God Bless,
Bradley

Another thing that has been keeping me busy is work, which if you’ve read my blog that’s working for my school district. Well, I just got my check in the mail today and it’s way more than I expected! I’m excited about that, but I think half of it is going to be gone cause of paying my mom and dad off.

Recently I’ve been spending a lot of time working on getting new features for my school’s websites. There are two main features that I’ve added, and you can see them from the picture on the left. The main feature is what I call “highlighted articles”. This is a scrollable list of articles that have been posted to the website, and it also can have pictures of the subject. I’ve ran into a ton of problems with this! I’ve over came a couple of them, but I’m still running into a couple of them. Another feature is the search bar at the top right of the menu. The positioning of this took more work than I had originally thought it would have, but hey I love a good coding challenge every so often! I also had to edit one of the Joomla! files to make the search appear in a different page than the front page. I’ve made a good amount more of changes to the site, but those are all little details that a majority of people will never know… Haha

I hopefully will be posting an article this week or weekend that has some good meaning behind it, and might get you thinking.. Who knows.

Bradley

This week has been an interesting one all things considered. Monday at school my P.E. teacher wouldn’t accept the letter that my mom wrote to excuse me from working out since my hands weren’t healed yet. He told me that I had to have a doctors note to fully excuse me from working out. This then caused me to have to go to see a doctor, so that Monday night I did go. The doctor said that I bruised my bone and that my wound(s) were infected. She gave me some medication to take to get rid of my infection and then wrote a note to excuse me from working out until the 21^st. Tuesday another day of school and long one at that, posted a blog post, and then that night I went to puppet practice and meet up with my friend. Yeah that’s him pictured to the left, me and him are really good buddies, we’ve done I think too puppet shows together and we’re really good together! Ha-ha. Wednesday night was a another day of school, but it kind of went pretty fast which felt good. That night I got surprised because there was a visiting preacher, Elder Eldon Eckles. His preaching was AWESOME, but he had a young apostolic lady with him. I was wondering who she was because honestly she was pretty good looking. So, service went on and Pastor Chalfant introduced the preacher and then said that it was Elder Eldon Eckles’ grand daughter. Knowing me, I haven’t got the guts to talk to her because I’m too shy when it comes to talking to girls and meeting new Apostolic people in person… I’m determined to do it though! (I’ll tell you my plan here shortly.) Thursday was a pretty good day because it went by pretty fast, and I learned that I will be paid $600 for working 60 hours, working for USD469 doing technical work and things related to that. Also, Thursday night I worked on converting a website layout and design that I had done a while back into a Joomla! template, I got a good amount done, just got a whole bunch more to do. Friday (today) wasn’t the best for the first half of the day, but after school things got a ton better! Got home and worked on the Joomla! template some more (fixed some bugs here and there), then left for prayer meeting. After prayer meeting was over I stayed to practice a song for the youth service that is coming up the 23^rd at Truth Tabernacle. As we was practicing, they asked me if I could lead song service. What could I say, besides yes? So, I’m leading youth service song service on Wednesday night. That’s been this week. What about this weekend and my plan of me trying to talk to Elder Eckles’ grand daughter?

My answer is as follows. Tomorrow there is a Youth Rally at New Life in Olathe, KS. I’m excited because it’s the first one in a long time and I’m ready to be in a service with other young people that is directed to young people. I’ll try to post some pictures of it if I take any… As for my plan to talk to Elder Eckles’ grand daughter, I’m planning on getting or making myself talk to her tomorrow since they are going (my dad asked Elder Eckles). If any of you read this and are going tomorrow, want to maybe help me out or give me any pointers? Ha-ha

That’s it, except the picture to the right is the starting of what I hope is my second to next blog post. And if you’re wondering, yes I do actually write down some of blog post because I get ideas at school and can’t really type them up on a computer or on my phone. If you click on the picture you might be able to read what my title might be, in case you can’t I plan to title it “Me, Myself, and You?”. Thanks for taking the time out of YOUR day to read my blog!!!

God Bless,
Bradley Hilton

So, you know how I have done my school’s website (http://usd469.net/lhs/)? I have also done the Lansing PTA’s website (http://usd469.net/pta). Both of those sites are based off the CMS called Joomla. I love using Joomla for websites because all that I have to do is create (code) the template and then install it and make it the default theme. Then train the people on how to update their website by creating articles and stuff. After I’ve done that it means that I don’t have to worry about updating their content myself, or I don’t have to worry about teaching them the HTML they would need to know to update the website.

You may also know that my 7^th hour is dedicated to updating the High School’s website, Twitter, and other websites we’re doing. I’m not the only one in that class, but I am one of the four. Mr. Wessel is the technology coordinator for USD 469 (my school’s district). I’ve helped him a lot with some server, website, and computer things. Well I decided to ask him one day if there was any chance that I could get a job helping him out or something of that sorts. That was before school started, so about four or five weeks ago.

As time has went on, things have went slowly but surely. First it started off with he didn’t know if it was actually possible since a couple of things. Then after he found out it was possible, we had to create a list of things that I could do or things that I would do with some quick training. So, after we had that done another problem arose – he didn’t know how they would be able to pay me if this went through. He finally figured it out with the help of some other people. Now after 5 weeks (or more), I see the light at the end of the long torturous tunnel! (Got that from a song lol).

This Tuesday (September 15th) I have a meeting with Dr. Bagby, Mr. Wessel, and myself. I was told that we would discuss my pay, the things that I would be doing and/or helping with, and hours. I think that I will be getting $10.50 an hour starting off with, but probably will only be doing a couple of hours a week (like maybe 6-8 hours a week or less or more). That’s not a lot compared to normal jobs, but hey I think the pay is good for a first job.

Please pray that God helps me and He gives me the correct words to say when I’m talking to them. I really want this job because it’ll be a good one and I’ll enjoy it. Sorry for such a long post, thanks for bearing with me through it!

God Bless,
Bradley

1. Strength and Conditioning
2. Spreadsheet/Database/PowerPoint
3. Earth Science G
4. Marketing
5. Pre-Calc
6. HTML
7. Working at USD469 District Office on the websites

My first hour is just going to the weight room on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Then on Tuesdays and Thursdays we do some conditioning workouts (basically running for a while). I’ve set a couple of goals for myself, one of them is by the end of September I will be doing 45 pound dumbbell flys. I’ve set a couple other goals for myself, but I can’t really remember them right now.

Second hour for me is pretty easy, except we are just reading a book and the teacher does nothing. I’ve learned a little bit so far, but not very much since it’s a computer class. Right now we are just ”learning” the spreadsheet part, which is we are actually learning Microsoft Excel 2003. I think it’s kind of pointless because I’ve got Microsoft Excel 2010 on my personal computer. I’m sure the techniques are about the same, but getting to all the options isn’t very close. The image above is a screenshot I just took of Excel 2010.

Earth Science G is easy right? Correct. Except the only problem is with my teacher and the way that he approaches teaching. My class is overfilled (which means that there’s not enough seats [desks] for all the students) and my teacher acts like he has a small class. He doesn’t teach much, yet when he trys to he spends time with one table and by the end of class he hasn’t gotten around to everyone which means a table (usually my table) doesn’t get taught. He also raises his hands whenever he wants everyone quiet. Well, that doesn’t work our too good because usually everyone isn’t looking at him, they are either talking to someone and/or looking else where. Also, his appearance isn’t the best and I don’t think he acts like a great teacher. His beard is very non-kept and doesn’t look like it’s been trimmed very much (or at all for all it matters). Overall I think that I’m not going to like that class… Sadly I have it all year.

I took marketing as a filler class and wish that I wouldn’t have because it’s hard and all we do is read and take quizzes. I’m not a fast reader so I don’t get the whole chapter completed before we have a quiz. Which means I haven’t been doing very good in that class. Tonight, for example, we had 6 worksheets to do. He only gave us a couple of minutes to do it in class. Thankfully I can do it before that class so I didn’t really have homework.)

Probably my hardest class of this whole year, is my 5^th hour. I went into this class knowing that Pre-Calc would be hard and that I would have a lot of homework from it. That has turned out to be true and we have our first test tomorrow. So, we will see how I feel about how I did. I honestly hope that I do good since it is our first test and if you get a low grade to start with it’s kind of hard to get it back up. Please pray for me!!! Lol

Sixth hour is the EASIEST class that I have had and probably will have. It’s also the most boringest class that I have taken because the whole class is like a review for me. Want to know what’s funny/sad? It’s the fact that the teacher looks to me for help when a student doesn’t do something correct. A couple of people in that class told me that I would be a better teacher than the one we have now. I don’t know how true that would be, since I’m not a very good teacher. Mr. Wessel would tell me to shut up because he thinks other wise since I showed him and three other people how to update a website using Joomla!.

You’re probably wondering what in the world my 7^th hour class is. Well, do you remember me posting a while back about doing a website for my school? If you don’t then you can read the blog post here. My seventh hour class is devoted to managing and updating the High School’s website (http://www.usd469.net/lhs/). It’s also a time period where I can learn more about Joomla! and other web applications. It’s a fun class (if you could even call it that), there’s only four people (excluding the teacher/leader). So far I’ve done the High School’s website and the Lansing PTA‘s website. Both are using Joomla!, thus I don’t have to worry about updating them myself. All I have to do is train someone on how to use Joomla! to post articles and such. Very useful web application for people who know ZERO HTML!!!

After reading this long blog entry, what do you think of my first semester or my junior year? Leave me a comment or if you want, do a @b_hilton on twitter.com with a comment. Thanks for reading!

Bradley Hilton