Archive - January 2004

Tomorrow in Houston, Texas, is the Super Bowl, America's pro football championship game. The New England Patriots and the Carolina Panthers are the competitors in this year's event. It's traditionally a time to get together to eat, drink, and watch the game on TV (complete with the hilarious commercials that are often talked about more than the game). Some football fans even treat Super Bowl Sunday like a holiday. But what most people don't remember is that the Super Bowl is held by a corporate entity out to make a profit, and that's the National Football League.

The NFL owns a great many trademarks and, with the help of their law firm, tries to protect them like heck. The firm has put out a notice (in PDF format) regarding the use of their money's, er, client's trademarks. According to the notice, you cannot say or print the following:

• "Super Bowl"
• "Super Sunday"
• The Super Bowl logo
• "NFL" or "National Football League"
• "AFC" or "American Football Conference"
• "NFC" or "National Football Conference"
• Any team name (Patriots or Panthers for example) or nickname (Pats and Cats? "No way, José," they say).

However, the Thought Police will not come to get you if you say or print the following:

• "The Big Game in Houston" (which sounds amazingly stupid)
• "The Professional Football Championship Game in Houston" (would anyone want to say this?)
• The date of the game, February 1, 2004
• The cities of teams (New England vs. The Carolinas in this case, neither of which is a city)
• You can also make fun of the fact that you can't say their trademarks (such as bleeping out the phrase "Super Bowl").

Sheesh, what a bunch of wimps. But who needs the NFL anyway? Of course you can mention the Patriots playing the Panthers in the Super Bowl without any ridiculous stuff like being censored.

A sort-of-recently-discovered vulnerability in Microsoft Internet Explorer allows just about anyone with a little HTML knowledge to lead you into thinking you're somewhere you're not. A link you click on could display a particular URL in the address bar and a totally different page on the screen. It could quite easily be used by credit card scammers to fool you into giving them your information. For a live example of the exploit, click the following link: www.cbs.com.

If you get taken to a different web site, then you're in trouble, because Microsoft doesn't have a fix for this yet.

One of my new classes this semester is Spanish. I've had some bad experiences with Spanish in the past; from second grade to eighth grade, I learned absolutely nothing from three (count 'em) Spanish teachers. Well, maybe not nothing, but very very little, especially for taking the class (which was required, by the way) weekly for six to seven years. One teacher even claimed to be a native speaker, and yet my friend who speaks Spanish was constantly correcting her. The teachers taught nothing but words, except for a few years when we were spoonfed sentences and phrases that we would never use in real life. The fact that we never had Spanish textbooks might have had something to do with it as well. All of our "learning" was from handouts, bad computer programs, or the teacher just talking.

I summed this up whilst introducing myself in my semester's first Spanish class by saying something to the effect of "Well, I took it for six or seven years, but I never really learned anything," which drew the usual astonishment and reactions like "Seven years?" and "Never learned anything?" "Yes," I wish I could say. "It was required at my school from second to eighth grade, and the teachers were really bad." But instead I let myself come off as some kind of idiot. I did, however, confide in writing to my teacher the lousy situation at my old school. Since we had to write about ourselves for the teacher to read, I figured it would be good. I also mentioned that I studied some Esperanto outside school last year. But I digress.

Anyway, it's only been three days of my first "real" Spanish class, and I feel as if I've learned more than I ever possibly could have in three days at my old school - mostly because three days at my high school would be the equivalent of three weeks there, seeing as it was a weekly class. I've always wanted to make people resentful of me by carrying on a conversation with someone else in another language. That's how I feel when I see the seemingly Spanish and God-Knows-What speakers going on and on in rapid-fire I-Think-It's-Spanish-But-They're-Talking-Too-Fast. (Well, maybe "envious" is a better word than "resentful.") I tried learning Esperanto to fill this need, but I was too - dare I say - lazy to get past the words for "here," "there," "this," "that," etc. I had learned so much in so little time that I was having trouble keeping it all in. Besides, what's the use in learning a language that virtually nobody speaks - no matter how well its intentions are? Spanish, on the other hand, is very big here in South Florida. To get around Miami you have to know at least some. Luckily, I live far enough from Miami that no one ever goes there, but still, the Hispanic population is significant.

My sister decided to take French, and I say that's tres bien for her, but I chose Spanish because 1) it seems easier, b) it's more useful in Florida than French is, and III) I wanted to actually learn the darn language after seven years of not learning anything! I'm looking forward to the point where I can read and understand Spanish-language media or carry on a conversation with my Spanish-speaking friend. Learning a new language is so cool! (Well, I think it is; I've never done it before.) Okay, rant over.

Instead of scouring the web for cool sites, do you want lots of cool links delivered to right you? I Like is a fast, free, ad-free, service that intends to do just that. All you have to do is create a very simple registration (they don't ask for any of your personal information, even your e-mail address) and you will be presented with a link that you can drag to your browser's Links bar. Whenever you visit a site that you like, click the "I Like" link. Then when you go back to the I Like site, it will present you with a list of sites liked by people who like the site you like. Apparently you can "like" as many sites as you want; I have quite a few on my list. To make a long story short, I Like assumes that people like the same sorts of web sites. It recommends pages to you that people with similar interests have liked. It's not as complicated as it sounds, really.

So... do I like I Like? Well, I can't really say as of yet. The site has apparently just been launched, so there aren't a whole lot of users and there aren't too many liked sites. That means that their recommendations aren't too accurate. But I expect that I Like will explode in the next few weeks, easily accumulating thousands, maybe tens of thousands of users. If you like the idea of cool sites being recommended to you, sign up at I Like.

Yesterday was my first day with all-new classes. I was really nervous at first, but after this, my second day, I'm starting to get comfortable with them. My English teacher is pretty cool. He says things like "freshpersons," "hotter than a 'tater," "That's how you put your ducks in a row," "Whooo, doggie!" and "Good form, Peter." One interesting exchange with a student took place while he was explaining that reading is like sports (that is, when you practice, you get better).

I think that's become my new catchphrase. Anyway, I think his class is going to help me become a better writer. He's taught us that linking verbs are boring and that the passive voice should be avoided. I'll try to keep that in mind when I'm writing.

Global Studies, Mr. Firestone's class, is not as bad as I thought it would be. He hasn't started picking on me yet, but that's because I've largely been keeping my mouth shut. Yesterday each student introduced himself to the class. As I stood up for my turn, Mr. Firestone exclaimed "Blog!" He's one of the few teachers that knows about my web site, the one you see here. I think I was on to his plan: he wanted me to talk about the site so he could visit it during class and share it with everyone via the overhead projector that his computer is connected to. He would then read what was my latest entry, which happens to be the one in which I introduce him to you, the reader. It would have opened a window of opportunity for him to drive me insane.

Oh, I hope he doesn't go to this site.

Sunday was a first for my band. All four of us got together to practice! We decided at this meeting to pick a band name from one of the 334 (!) names we had suggested since we decided to choose a new name in November. Out of those 334 names, not a single one was approved by all of us. Not one. We decided to learn a new song (The Beatles' "The Night Before," from the movie/album Help!), which means we now have four songs in our set. The clock is ticking toward our next gig on February 7th, and we're still nameless. Something must be done, and soon! But what?

This is a cool site. I've posted amusing or diverting links before, but this is cool. I know you've dreamed of making a font out of your handwriting, for use in documents and such. Believe it or not, you can make that dream a reality with a minimum of effort using Fontifier. It's quite simple, really:

1. Print the Fontifier template sheet.
2. Write the characters in the appropriate spaces on the template.
3. Scan the template and save it as a GIF.
4. Upload the GIF to Fontifier.
5. Download your instantly created font.
6. Install the font, and you're ready to use it!

That's it. There are no hidden fees or costs. Heck, there aren't even any ads on the site! I made a font out of my handwriting, and it's pretty cool. The spacing between the letters can be really wide, but that's not something that can't be fixed with Photoshop's type tools. The font generally looks best at medium sizes and with anti-aliasing. Anyway, go and check out Fontifier at fontifier.com. You know you want to!

Exams are done, the semester is over, and it's official: I have blown away 12.5% of my high school career. I feel as if I've accomplished nothing during these months, and that when I walk into a new semester on Monday, it'll be just like starting over (that's your cue to sing to yourself a particular old song that you don't think I'll know). I'll have to meet new people and get used to new teachers and do homework for new classes. I think my classes will be Science, English, Spanish, and Global Studies. The reason I only think that is because the office wouldn't give me my schedule in advance, even though they did for everybody else who asked.

Actually, I know I'll have Global Studies, Mr. Firestone (sound warning), one of the Global Studies teachers, told me I was going to be in his class... in December. And last week I passed by him in a hallway, he said, "Hey Kalilich! In just two weeks, you'll be in my class! Muhahahaha!" He knows me because my sister had him for a teacher this past semester. And yes, he actually muhahaed. Loudly. Expect me to write more about this guy in the coming weeks. A lot more.

Note: It really would not surprise me if he reads this site regularly and is going to mention this post to me on Monday, complete with some witty, caustic remark. Just watch...

Oh, and I just wanted to point out that today's date, written in mm-dd-yy format, is 1-23-04. Neat, huh?

Last October I noted that there was a posterboard outside my first-period classroom with September's Sun-Sentinel article featuring me and The World of Stuff taped to it. The poster was titled "Pompano's Finest" (a reference to my school, Pompano Beach High), and it also featured someone's drawing of the entire world being engulfed by a yellow tornado - our mascot. The poster was eventually taken down and put inside the classroom where I would look at it on my way out and joke, "Who's that guy?" Today I took my final exam in that class, and on my way out of the room for the last time, I stuffed the poster in my backpack and took it with me.

It really made me think about the article, which I have just reread. I hadn't been blogging (regularly, at least) for even a month when I got a post on the then-new WoS comments board by a reporter named Liz Doup (pronounced "DOWP" - not "DOOP"). How she stumbled across this site I may never know. I don't even think I had submitted it to any blog directories at that time, save for one. In any case, the site received virtually no visitors from the article, the fact that the newspaper it was printed in has a readership in the hundreds of thousands notwithstanding. As I determined with much scrutiny the day after the article ran, ten hits or fewer could be attributed to people seeing the URL in print. But still, it was pretty cool for to have my very own fifteen minutes.

Like I said, I'll never know how Ms. Doup found the site. But what matters is that she did, and she did it at the right time. The WoS blog was going through a crucial phase that would test my ability to... well... I don't know... do something, I guess. I was just starting high school, and the blog was filled with all kinds of rich, emotional, bloggy stuff that would make old people say, "I felt just like that when I was his age, except..." It was just a really good time for a reporter to find the site, I guess. A flukey thing like that may never happen again.

Do you like to play Scrabble®? Sometimes when we're bored, me and the guys will pull out the old Scrabble board and get a game going, complete with all the classic questions like "Do proper nouns count?", "Anyone have any e's?", and "Is 'qtizic' a word?" Anyway, Pholph, whoever that is, created a cool Scrabble Score Generator. You can enter any word or phrase, even proper nouns, and see how it would score in Scrabble (without the letter and word scores, unfortunately). It can be insanely entertaining to find that the name of your web site scores 31 points.

It's been a whole week since I last posted. I can't remember the last time I've gone that long without blogging. Actually, I can. It was last summer, before I started blogging regularly. Anyway, I just haven't really had much to say. Happenings at school that were once blogworthy are becoming commonplace and ordinary - for the most part, that is. Anyway, final exams are coming up tomorrow (or mid-terms for some of you folk), and I'm going to be busy not studying.

For Business Systems and Technology my exam was to write some essays and do a PowerPoint presentation summarizing them. I thought I wasn't going to be able to finish them in class, but luckily, I did. In Algebra, I'm pretty sure the many assignments the teacher has been giving us lately are the exam, with an actual test topping it off tomorrow. The next two exams will be on Thursday. For Drawing (yes, it's one of my classes), I have to answer some art questions and draw something and make it look realistic. I have no idea what I should draw, but I have time to think about that one. And for Personal Fitness/Team Sports, I have to know a lot of rules of some sports we've played but never learned the proper rules of until a few days ago.

Last week I noticed a poster on the wall that said "Name Our Mascot (students write in)." There were some really silly proposed names for our Golden Tornado mascot, including Señor Spinner, Ted, Twista, ad nauseam. So I borrowed a Sharpie, went up to the poster, and wrote the coolest name of all: Bob. Hey, there's a chance it could get picked. A small chance it is, but a chance still.

Speaking of having people come up with names for stuff, my band and I are at a gridlock trying to pick a Name the Band winner. No, that wasn't phrased well. We can't think of a name at all (there were only a handful of Name the Band entries anyway). I've set up a page where the other guys e-mail me with their name ideas and I post them. Then they e-mail me to tell me if they like everyone else's names, and I mark who likes which names. Sounds great, right? Yeah, I know, it could be done better. The process isn't working as well as I'd hoped, but the idea is still in its early stages.

That's quite unfortunate, really, because this idea needs to get in its more advanced stages before we get on stage ourselves. We've been asked to play at our school's Spring Festival for the third year in a row, even though we don't go to the school anymore. (The administrative folks refer to us as "The Yellow Submarine Band" because they don't know remember our real name, The Atomics, and "Yellow Submarine" the only song anyone knows us for.) "A reunion concert?" the lady in charge of arranging the musical acts asked jokingly. Of course, it couldn't be a reunion concert since we had never broken up in the first place! Yes, on February 7 we will play our first gig in almost a whole year. I just hope we can come to a name by then. Wish us luck!

As I said earlier, I planned on writing to U.S. Secretary of the Treasury John W. Snow asking him to autograph a dollar bill for my currency collection. I sent the letter yesterday, along with a crisp dollar bill bearing his printed signature. In the letter I tried to suck up as much as possible, using a formal style and addressing the recipient as the Honorable John W. Snow. (Hey, I've seen other letters addressed to him thus.) I also played the "make a child happy" card by mentioning that I'm 14. On an interesting but irrelevant note, I couldn't find any 37¢ (the current rate for a letter) stamps, so I had to make do with old 34¢ and 21¢ stamps. Maybe he'll consider me a good citizen for paying extra money to the government? Oh well; I just hope I can see that bill with John Snow's John Hancock on it soon.

In other news, today's my half-birthday. That's right, I'm 14½ today. Yay for me! Okay, anyway...

With news about the Mars lander Whatever and its sister probe I Don't Know spreading across the seas of blogging, the last place you'd like to see even more Mars stuff is here. But I couldn't resist this opportunity to show you a high-quality full-color 360° interactive view from the surface of the planet (QuickTime required). Oh, and here's a cool one from Times Square ringing in the new year (sound warning). These really cool panoramas and others can be found at panoramas.dk.

U.S. paper money carries the printed signatures of the Treasurer and the Secretary of the Treasury. These two officials will customarily autograph bills that bear their printed signature if you ask them to. Bills that are autographed in this way are usually called courtesy autographs, and recently I've become interested in them. I managed to buy three such bills relatively inexpensively (two for $25 and one for $20) from Don C. Kelly, a paper money dealer. One bill was autographed by Ivy Baker Priest (Treasurer, 1953-1961), another by Robert B. Anderson (Secretary of the Treasury, 1957-1961), and the third by Kathryn O'Hay Granahan (Treasurer, 1963-1969). Needless to say, these people served a long time ago. What about courtesy autographs by today's Treasurer and Secretary?

Well, right now there is no Treasurer. Rosario Marin, the last Treasurer, resigned in June 2003, and a replacement has not yet been chosen. In any case, there is a Secretary of the Treasury: John W. Snow has held the post since February 2003. It may in fact be easier than I thought to obtain a courtesy autograph from the current Secretary. Several courtesy autographs for sale on eBay come with a Department of the Treasury letterhead implying that someone had mailed the bill to be autographed. (Here's one of the auctions.) So I figure, why not send a dollar bill to John Snow to see if he'll sign it? I guess it's worth a shot. Even if the Treasury Department snubs my request in some governmental way, what do I have to lose (besides $1.37)?

In desperate need of a pointless yet entertaining game? Trevor van Meter's Fly Guy is worth a shot.

Recently I wrote about how I tried to contact someone whom I believe is a distant relative. Her name was Dunja Kalilić, and she is an author in Croatia. The other day my dad told me that Dunja is married to a doctor. As it happens, I had found a Dr. Joško Kalilić in an online telephone and address directory. To my even greater surprise he was also listed in a Croatia e-mail address directory! I quickly wrote him an e-mail, but he hasn't replied yet. My dad says of Dr. Kalilić that he speaks English and served as a doctor in the US Army in Key West. This fits perfectly with Dunja, who, I have found, lived in Key West at one time. This could be interesting...

If you've been following the news during the past few days, you'll certainly have found that Britney Spears married a childhood friend in Las Vegas on Saturday and had the marriage annulled yesterday. Upon hearing this, I wrote a humorous little song called "Britney Spears Got Married." Truth be told, it was written for the garbage bin, but I sent the lyrics to my friend and fellow band member Sean, hoping he would get a laugh out of it. To my surprise, he replied that he had been trying to write a "punk/rock, old school Sum 41 type song" and my lyrics fit perfectly to what he had in mind. I then sent him the chords of my bouncy ditty and used them to translate "Britney Spears Got Married" into punk rock style, adding a new verse as well. He's right when he said that this song could kick up our repertoire a notch.

What's remarkable about this is that it's our first successful attempt to write a song together. We had tried in the past but would run into writer's block. Hopefully this will be the beginning of a great songwriting team.

Many of the most popular web sites, such as Amazon, Yahoo!, eBay, and MSN have so much fancy fluff on them that you don't realize there's very little actual content. Adrian Holovaty's GetContentSize tool tells you exactly how much readable content is on a page and compares it to the total size of the page, HTML and all. Of all the fancy markup on Amazon, only 11.72% is actual text. Yahoo! (16.03%), eBay (9.81%), and MSN (14.24%) also have alarming percentages. In fact, the average content size for the ten most popular English-language sites is 11.41%. Compare with The World of Stuff's content size, which is 53.21%. Food for thought.

The World of Stuff blog entries are now available via an RSS feed. The link is also on the sidebar; just look for the familiar orange XML button. A few days ago, as you may recall, I swatted down the notion of keeping an RSS feed, citing it as being too difficult. But after actually reading about RSS, I decided to try it out. The feed will display brief summaries (usually the first two sentences) of the ten most recent posts. As of late, the feed is still experimental (read: I'm still playing with the stuff it can do). I might get rid of it at any time, but that's not likely right now.

Today I downloaded Awasu, an excellent (and free) news aggregator. I can't begin to describe how amazingly cool aggregators are. The very idea of having periodically updated content delivered directly to you is just dripping with coolness. I immediately subscribed to all of the RSS feeds of the blogs I frequent (including The World of Stuff, just for kicks).

If I lost you after "food for thought," check out a brief RSS FAQ to find out what the heck I'm talking about.

This is my friend Amanda. It seems she's always happy and full of energy. She's short (150 cm) and proud of it. I met her in my church's youth group and we've become pretty good friends. She just insisted I write about her. Not that we're going out, mind you, although I personally wouldn't mind if we did. :)

This has been a public service announcement from I Can't Believe I Actually Did That Just Because She Asked Me To.

I'm constantly on the lookout when it comes to promoting The World of Stuff. Just recently, I e-mailed the owners of three blogs I like to ask if they could link to me. After what seemed like forever, I got a reply from one of them. He linked to The Bill Factor Project, calling it "Goofy. Pointless. But it could be something to pass those long, cold nights." Not a bad review, if you ask me. But in return, he asked that I set up an RSS feed. I kindly explained that since I do all my blogging by hand, I didn't feel like going through the trouble of setting up and maintaining an RSS feed, and that he could take me off his blogroll if he wanted to. But in return for linking to TBFP, I promised I would keep a link to his site. And so it is over there on the left: idly.org.

What is an RSS feed, anyway? From what I understand, it's some kinda thing that brings headlines (sometimes blog headlines) directly to one program for you to read. In other words, following blogs for the lazy. Me, I keep a folder of bookmarked blogs that I like, and I run through them at least once a day. So I don't use the latest, bleeding edge blog technology. And look, I'm not dead yet!

I'm starving to get any sort of publicity for this site. Apparently asking other bloggers to trade links doesn't work. I guess they need to actually like your blog before they link to you. It's a vicious circle, really. Think of it this way: People need to come to this site in order to link to it on their own sites. On the other hand, people need to link to this site on their sites in order to get people to come here. Whew, my head hurts.

New Year's Day is typically a slow news day, so one news story usually stands out: the List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-Use, Over-Use and General Uselessness. Every New Year's Day since 1976, Lake Superior State University has published this list of words and phrases that have been misused, overused, and deemed useless during the previous year. Often accompanying the words are caustic remarks from the people who submitted them. Included on this year's list are "bling bling" ("Yes, your mom might say it. Nothing could kill the mystique of a word faster."), "LOL" ("I wonder if anyone really laughs out loud when they use this short-hand Instant Messenger slang?"), "smoking gun" ("Remember the television show 'Gunsmoke'? Now THERE were smoking guns!"), "companion animals" ("They're called PETS."), and "in harm's way" ("Who is Harm, and why would you want to get in his way?"). Take some time to read previous years' lists if you'd like.

If you're an experienced Google searcher, you probably know all the neat stuff Google has to offer. But if you don't, a relatively recent addition to the Google family of everything is the Google calculator. Simply enter an equation into Google's search box, for example, "2 + 2," and watch it magically spit out the answer. But it doesn't just add, subtract, multiply, and divide. This baby has conversion factors (15 feet in meters, milliliters in a teaspoon) and constants (radius of the earth, pi) as well - not to mention an amazing comprehension of obscure or not-too-commonly-used-outside-the-scientific-community units like bushels, parsecs, fortnights, and stones. Obviously, there's a lot of fun potential with this. Try entering stuff like 35 miles per gallon in yards per megaliter, 17.4 stone hectares per week, 1.21 gigawatts / 88 mph, answer to life, the universe, and everything in roman numerals, and 1 knot in angstroms per century. It's a great way to vent if you're feeling decidedly weird.

These immortal words were sung across the land as we all changed the channel to ABC for ten minutes to help Dick Clark celebrate his 200th New Year's Eve. But seriously, I had a good New Year's Eve, and I hope you did too.

The Bill Factor Project is finally here! If you're a math geek, you're going to love it. But no matter who or what you are, I hope you enjoy the site more than I enjoyed fretting over the legal consequences of running it. I also want to take this opportunity to wish you and yours a very happy new year and all that stuff.