12/03:

    Today I learned how to create websites from pbwiki. I thought that that was pretty cool. I also set up the Homepage and its links, the timeline page and its links, my journal page (this page) and its links and Sam's journal page and its link. I also wrote the timeline of what will (hopefully) happen in the next two weeks considering this project. The timeline is pretty ambitious though, I’m not sure if I can complete all of these tasks on time with my timeline. The timeline could always change though so it’s not a huge deal if I don't get the tasks done on time, as long as the project is ready to turn in by next Sunday.

    Another thing that I did was I read over the project and found out about all of the things that I needed to do. At first I was really stressed out about all that had to be done. After a while though, it seemed a lot easier than it actually seemed in the first place. I went from, "Ohh my gosh, there is sooo much stuff that I have to do in this project!!", to "Hey, after writing it all out on a timeline, there is so much time to do all of these things that it doesn't seem very hard at all".

12/04:

    So today I got to school and realized that Sam sent me an e-mail about the timeline that he created but he did not know how to link it to the homepage and put it on the sidebar, so I did not see that he had done it last night. We decided to use my timeline since it was already on the website and Sam had not completed his. After sorting out the timeline issues I began to try to find the specific information that I put on the timeline to research for tonight about Leuconostoc mesenteroides but I could not find anything about it on Encyclopedia Britannica, so I looked on Nettrecker and I could not find any information there either. Finally I looked on SIRS and I found one article about it.

    At first, I thought that the article that I found had nothing to do with Leuconostoc mesenteroides because the article was about sugar cane and I had done some earlier research and found that Leuconostoc mesenteroides only had to do with pickles and sauerkraut. Then I clicked on the link to take me to the full article and I skimmed through it thinking "hey maybe it has something to do with bacteria in the genus Leuconostoc, even then I could get some information,". About a third of the way through the article, it began to talk about Leuconostoc mesenteroides and there affect on sugar cane. I then read on and I learned that Leuconostoc mesenteroides actually hurt the production of sugar cane because it turns its simple sugars into large clunky compounds that are far different from sucrose.

12/05:

    Today in Biology class I learned how to evaluate the websites that I find on the free web apart from Nettrecker. I was really happy to learn that I could actually use websites that I found on the free web because I had done some preliminary research on Leuconostoc mesenteroides before this week on the free web, and I had found a lot of really good information. Now all that I have to do is make sure that the information is valid by going through the evaluation for the websites I used. I was also happy to hear that I did not need to do an evaluation on websites for museums and that are governmental because one of the websites that I found was the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and since it’s for the United Nations, I hope that it is valid enough to not have to do an evolution on it.

    Then I began research on the beneficial properties of Leuconostoc mesenteroides. Well after yesterday's amazing research results, I started with just researching Leuconostoc mesenteroides instead of just researching their beneficial properties. I looked on Proquest which is the last subscription database left to look on and I found a lot of articles. After taking about 20 minutes to look over each of the 10 or so articles I found that all but about three mentioned Leuconostoc mesenteroides more than once. So I took those three websites that mentioned Leuconostoc mesenteroides more that once and read them more in depth and took notes on those. I learned that Leuconostoc mesenteroides is a lactic acid bacteria that helps to create many foods from milk to the Korean kimchi.

12/06

    Today instead of going to school, I had to get on a bus to go to a basketball tournament at 8am. We lost our first game, but won our second game so that we could go home and come back and play on Saturday. I got home from the tournament at about 5pm which made me happy because I still had a lot of time to do homework. I looked on the timeline and I began to research about any recent medical or scientific work has been done with Leuconostoc mesenteroides on the free web, since I had exhausted all of the databases. In a few minutes I was able to find a long, detailed report on Leuconostoc mesenteroides.

    I copy and pasted the information into a word document and began highlighting the important parts. It did not have much to do with medical things but it did talk about the shape of Leuconostoc mesenteroides and where it was found. It also told a lot about what it does and that in its chemical reactions with fruits and sugars, it produces dextrans that are used in the manufacture of blood plasma extenders, heparin substitutes for anticoagulant therapy, cosmetics, and other products. All in all, I was very pleased with the site and all the information that it had, I also found a picture of Leuconostoc mesenteroides. I looked at the website with an evaluation sheet in hand and it looked very promising, there were many references/ citations on the bottom, and it was copywrited by the Regents of the University of California. I hope I can use this.

12/07

    Today I got back to school after my basketball tournament yesterday, after missing an entire day of school; I was awake and ready for school. I had biology last period so I was a little tired during it. When I got to biology I learned that the rest of the class didn't do the lab that was scheduled for yesterday. That made me happy because I didn't have to make it up at a different time. The lab was fast, so I had plenty of time to work on the analysis questions. I got those done and started to work on the website. I had just found a really good website with a lot of information on it when the bell rang and I was out of school.

    So I went home, got something to eat, and went upstairs to finish researching from the website that I had found earlier. I highlighted something's but then when I saw a football game on, I watched it for an hour or so. Then it was time for me to go out and eat dinner at Tokyo. I got back around 9:00 and watched some TV. Then I had to go to bed because I had to get up at 5:30 the next morning for yet another Basketball game in the Burnet Tournament. I really hope that I can win that game and go onto the consolation championship because I really don’t want to wake up for nothing.

12/08

    Today I woke up at 5:30am to get ready and get on a bus at 6:30 to go to Burnet for the basketball game that I talked about in yesterday's journal. It was a tough game and we ended up losing to a very good team called Liberty Hill by 10 points or so. I was really angry because I had to get up early for nothing. I got home around 11:00 and decided to eat lunch. After that I took a nap because I was SOOO TIRED. I woke up around 3:00 and I remembered that Sam was going to come over at around 3 to work on our website. He decided to spend the night.

    We formatted our homepage and made up a couple of more pages to put our information on. We also made a quiz that has ten questions on it and we couldn't figure out how to attach it to our homepage. It took a few minutes of looking at the editing capabilities to figure it out. Finally I saw that it had a thing called source and I clicked on it. The page transformed into html and I just copied and pasted the code of the quiz onto the page and hit save. The quiz was there!!! I was so happy.

12/09

    Sam spent the night last night and he was still over at my house so we worked on the website a little. Then we ate breakfast and came back upstairs to work on the website. We worked on the homepage and some other parts together. We would read through our notes and one of us would be on dictionary.com because a lot of the words that they said in our notes, we didn’t know what they meant. Dictionary.com really helped because we learned that non-motile means that Leuconostoc mesenteroides cannot move on its own, and asporogenous means that L. mesenteroides does not produce spores.

    Sam left soon after that. Before he left though, we thought of the things that we should have done by today. We decided to give each other work for the rest of the day. This work included finishing up all of the mandatory information and putting it on the website. We were pretty much done with all the mandatory stuff besides the problems if L. mesenteroides did not exist, recent medical research done on it, and nutrition requirements. We need to find more interesting information though so that will probably take a while. I hope that I can get my part done by today and I hope that Sam does his part.

12/10

    Mondays are always hard for me. First it’s the first day of the week that I have to wake up early for. Second I have basketball until 6:15. Last I have piano from 7 to 8, then I have to go home, eat dinner, and finish my homework. It was not a productive day for the website. We had to finish the lab in class, which took up all of class time. Then my hectic Monday schedule that I described earlier destroyed my time at home, so I pretty much have nothing to talk about because I did nothing on the website today. I am just looking forward to tomorrow because there is no basketball practice tomorrow so I will have some quality time to work on the project. I will hopefully make up for the work that I did not do today.

    The one thing that I did do was research a little bit. I found a very helpful website that had a table of all of the foods that Leuconostoc Mesenteroides helps to ferment. I added that to the website and I thought about adding a page just about the fermentation process, but I held back because it was getting really late. So I went to bed really late hoping that I could get a lot of stuff done on the website tomorrow.

12/11

    Yesterday was really hectic so I did not get around to doing much work on the website. I made up for that today though. We had the entire class period to do work on just the website and boy did I get some quality work done. I pretty much finished the homepage except for a little bit of work on the font and making it look good. I added a little hook paragraph that I hope gives everyone a laugh. I also tracked down the websites that I used for research and stuff and put the URLs on the bibliography page so I know where to look when doing all of the evaluations.

    After a productive day of work at school, I had to go to the mall with my mom because she needed some platters from William Sonoma. We baked our first chicken in the pizza oven tonight. I did not have anything after school so after I got home from the mall I got to work on my Latin homework. An hour or so later, I was done with everything except for working on this website. So I started by searching the web for pictures of Leuconostoc Mesenteroides. I found a couple of good ones. One had a picture of Leuconostoc mesenteroides on a petri dish. Another had a picture of Leuconostoc mesenteroides with a scale next to it so you can figure out how large each cell is. The last one was a picture of Leuconostoc mesenteroides going to work on some cream, turning it into yogurt. I got the URLs of all those sites and put them on the bibliography page so I can easily do an evaluation.

12/12

    Today I had to wake up really early so I was not very awake all day. It was not even close to as productive as it was yesterday. We had to work on a lab today in class so I did not have time in class to work on it. I had to go to basketball practice right after school until 6:15 and then I stayed at school and I had Latin certamin from 7-8. So I got home around 8:30 and still had to do all of my other homework. I had a lot of other homework especially math and Latin.

    So it was 9:30 until I finally got around to working on the website. I looked over it and saw that we had almost all of the information that we needed. I looked at my notes and noticed the URL's and thought "Well I might as well start on citing the pages that I used from the Databases." So I began to cite the pages on Citation Builder and it was a matter of time until all of the citations from the Internet Databases were done. I just hope I can be that productive and fast tomorrow.

12/13

    Today I woke up at the regular time and it was a regular day. All that I had in the afternoon was basketball practice after school until 6:30. So I went to biology class and I had to work on the lab. We did the Gram's test today which took the entire class period. I also got the results of the other tests that we ran on the bacteria yesterday. So during my free period that was after Biology class I e-mailed Sam for the results that we got from class today. He sent them to me really fast and I began to work on the lab write up. So after school and basketball, I went home and finished the lab report which did not take long and began work on the website.

    First I looked over it a little bit; especially the homepage, for mistakes and anything to add that would make the information any clearer. After that I realized, hey I should probably make a new page about the fermentation process since L. mesenteroides is such an intricate part. So I began the new page and got more information from my notes about the fermentation. So I copied a list of foods that use L. mesenteroides in their fermentation process. I also wrote a couple of paragraphs about the fermentation process and how L. mesenteroides is involved. I also wrote about what all of the things that L. mesenteroides creates as byproducts (lactic acid, carbon dioxide, etc.) had to do with the fermentation process. I feel good about the project; I just hope that Sam and I can finish it up easily Saturday.

12/14

    Today was a long day at school. I got time to work on the website though in class because I had finished my Lab report during my free period. So I got a little bit done on the website. Now we have all the information on it, we just need to make the site look presentable. Tomorrow Sam is going to come over to my house and were going to hopefully finish up the website, but for today I worked on the homepage and making it presentable. I added a little hook sentence on the top of the page. I hope that the sentence will get a couple of laughs out of the audience while we present the project.

    So I got home and I was sooo tired, all I wanted to do was go to bed. Instead I worked on the website a little more. I worked on the bibliography and finished getting all of the internet databases cited in citation builder. I then looked at the websites that I got off of the free web and I started to cite those. They were a lot harder to cite because of the fact that the citation was not already done for me. It was really hard to find a lot of the stuff for the citation, like the editor and the author of one cite and stuff like that. I did learn something though; I learned that one of the websites that I was using was actually a book that was put on the internet.

12/15

    Today Sam came over and today is the day to finish the project. So we worked on the project for an hour or so and made some of it look pretty. Then we got sidetracked and started to play games on the internet. It’s really hard to work on projects on the internet and look up information for prolonged periods of time without getting sidetracked and start playing internet games. So we played games and watched TV for a couple of hours. Then I said, "We have to get this project done. We can play once it’s over." So we buckled down and started, again to work on the project and make it look nice.

    I worked on the five major pages that have to look nice for the presentation besides the homepage. These pages include the history page, habitat page, image page, fermentation page, and the recent scientific research page. When I went to work on the recent research page, I found that I had not done anything about the recent research. So I scanned through my notes and I found a great article about some agricultural research and the effect of L. mesenteroides on sugar cane. I summarized it and put that in as the recent research. So with that I was pretty much done with my work on this website.

12/16

    Today is the last day that I have to work on this project. Luckily I am pretty much done. I discussed with Sam last night about the website evaluations, and personal evaluations and the ending of this project. I just hope that Sam does his part. I woke up and started to work on the project because I want to get it done. So I had to do the bibliography and import it from citation builder. That took me around an hour to finish citing everything. Then I had to do the website evaluations and that was sort of annoying but it was very easy to do after I sat down and did it. It took me around thirty minutes to do two evaluations.