The year without a Halloween?

Last night I got together for dinner at Bonefish Mac’s (an Irish/sports grille, but with the emphasis on sports — I’ve only ever seen and been to one Irish restaurant: The Harp in Cleveland, Ohio) with my old friends Reid and Casey. My sister went along too. My sister and Casey had fallen out, but surprisingly, they got along just fine. Reid, whom I hardly get to see anymore, has always been into acting, and now he’s in his third year at a distant artsy school where he studies it. He’s even been to L.A., and next year his family is moving either to California or Australia (for his dad’s job). California would be more conducive to building an acting career. While the four of us were chatting, my sister said that mentioning Hitler was a great conversation stopper. Reid answered, “Yeah, you can’t laugh about Hitler. It’s against the rules.”

Today is Halloween. The effects of Hurricane Wilma have sure dampened Halloween spirits (har har) around here. The storm canceled two parties (a week apart!) that I wanted to go to. And since many people are more concerned about getting electricity and ice than candy, trick-or-treating seems to be down from previous years.

So I exaggerate a little by calling this “the year without a Halloween.” But truth be told, I don’t really feel like trick-or-treating this year for several reasons. First, I never eat all the candy I get, and I just started the No S Diet. Second, it’s not going to be too exciting anyway, especially because it looks like a ghost town (har har) outside. Third, I would be spending it with my friends, and right now I’d rather be alone. Introverts need to “recharge” alone after spending time with other people. Extroverts do not understand this, and I cannot explain it to you.

So here I am waiting for more kids to come for candy. Only a handful have showed up, but it’s still early, I guess. Daylight Saving Time ended yesterday, and so we’re spending our precious daylight by making it get dark earlier (actually, this is how it’s supposed to be). Maybe now that it’s dark, people will be in the mood for trick-or-treating… or, considering the circumstances of this unfortunate Halloween, they won’t.

High-speed photography + liquids + a lot of spare time = Liquid Sculpture.

Wikipedia is full of pages linked to each other. So you know that this had to come up eventually: Six Degrees of Wikipedia. For example, how many links to you have to follow to get from “Michelangelo” to “lima bean“? In this case, precisely six.

No more S’s

In June I tried to go for the simple “No S Diet” — and failed. But I still have the official site of the No S Diet in my bookmarks, and when I checked it out today, I was reinspired. Now let’s face facts:

1. I weigh a lot, even for my height.
2. I eat a lot.
3. Exercising is good for you.
4. I don’t exercise.
5. Heart problems run in the family.
6. This is list item number 6.

I believe that a simple diet like the No S Diet is half of the solution for staying in shape. The full text of the No S Diet is as follows: “No snacks, no sweets, no seconds, except (sometimes) on days that start with ‘S.’” The “S-days” are Saturday, Sunday, and special days.

Once again, I’ve started the No S Diet on an S-day. As my first meal in my second attempt at the No S diet, I decided to follow the “no seconds” rule by putting all my Sunday brunch onto one plate. I wasn’t able to eat as much as I normally do, but I feel fairly full, and that’s good. As for “no sweets,” I didn’t douse my waffle in syrup (as much). And to follow “no snacks,” I obviously won’t eat until dinner.

Of course, the other half of being healthy is exercising. I’ve had just as much trouble with this. I’m not known for my athletic abilities. The creator of the No S Diet writes about two solutions: walking and using a thing he calls a shovelglove. That shovelglove thing might just be crazy enough to work… check out the link.

I guess I can’t let myself get beaten down like last time. But the No S Diet site does say that it can take 10 to 12 attempts to change one’s eating habits. And I know how hard it is to start exercising. But it’s for the best; it’s something I must do. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to ride my bike.

:nodroJ ksA

heather: What famous outher helped to make the typewriter more popular?

I seem to remember Mark Twain being associated with early typewriters.

Stacci: Will i ever get a bf???

Will i ever get a gf??? Seriously, I didn’t know that girls had that problem. But to answer your question, probably yes. I think every girl has been asked out, so there’s no excuse for you. By the way, wear a bikini.

Here’s a site with everything you could possibly want to know about Vermeer’s painting Girl with a Pearl Earring (that is, a scary amount of information).

Paragraph is a workspace for writers. It occupies the whole top story of a three-story building in New York. There’s cubicle-type things for writers to do their writing, plus a fireplace, a kitchen, a lounge, lockers, and a library. Oh, and there’s Wi-Fi all over the place. One month part-time membership: $100, plus a $75 one-time initiation fee. I should start one of these things; I’d make a ton of money.

Wilma in photographs

The topic of Hurricane Wilma may be old hat to some of you who are tired of hearing about it, but imagine us here who got hit by it and now have to see it on the front page of the newspaper every day and on every channel that we can get. I hope this doesn’t bore you.

While the storm was retreating on Monday, I went around with my camera to survey the destruction. I’ve selected eight of the most poignant (I love that word) images to be shown here. Without further ado, here are some of the things I saw.

Remember when I had to write a Gothic story? Just in time for Halloween, I guess, I’ve posted it among the Other Stuff. It’s called “The Prisoners.”

Read some extremely short synopses of Shakespeare: Shakespeare for Illiterates. Then broaden your literary savvy with Classics for Illiterates.

Maybe someone can set these up for me: making strange sounds from steel wire and aluminum. I don’t get those electronic diagram thingies.

After Wilma

The world shut down before Hurricane Wilma hit on Monday morning. I woke up on Monday to the sound of fierce winds and some things that sounded like The Geddup Noise. According to my clock, the power had gone out at 6:05.

We all huddled around a battery-powered black-and-white TV for a while, but then my dad and my sister went back to sleep. According to the various TV stations we could get (about 4), the eye of the hurricane was about to pass over us. At about 9:45, my mom and I couldn’t hear any wind, and the dog had to do its business, so we went out (as they tell you not to do during or after a hurricane).

I’d always wanted to be in the clear, calm eye of a hurricane, but this eye was large and cloudy. Outside there wasn’t evidence that a lot of rain had fallen. The sky was still gray, and light drops were swirling around in the diminished wind. We went back in a few minutes later, and things started to get ugly again. The lowest pressure we recorded was about 969.5 hPa (1 hPa = 1 mb). It was bothering my ears.

Eventually, the worst of the storm passed, and we went outside to set up the generator. Then we cleaned the yard — it was full of tree branches and shingles from the neighbor’s roof. That took all afternoon. We still haven’t gotten all of the junk out of the pool.

My sister, I, and our friend Kevin went around the neighborhood, and we’ve continued to travel around (mainly by bike) over the past few days, socializing with our neighbors and friends the Bourgaults, with whom we enjoyed s’mores last night. The three of us have played four games of Monopoly, including two today (although got bored and gave up on the second one). We watched TV a lot. On the color TV (powered by the generator) we got good reception for about 2 stations, and they played mostly hurricane coverage (as they still are doing, I’m sure).

On TV they had said that restoring power to everyone might take till November 15 — then November 22. But last night, we saw that some buildings nearby had some electricity. This morning some houses in the neighborhood had electricity also. For us, the electricity finally came on this morning, after 3 days, 4 hours, and 42 minutes. It’s good to be connected to the world again. The only bad thing now is that there’s no school this week, and so we might have to make up the days later.

The IBM Model M keyboard is supposed to be the finest computer keyboard ever made. I don’t see what’s so great about it, though.

I normally don’t link to pages full of ads, but here’s an exception: The Million Dollar Homepage. It’s a pretty ingenious idea: a page filled with a total of 1,000,000 “pixels” (actually small blocks consisting of several pixels) for sale at a rate of $1 each. Unbelievably, over 500,000 have been sold. But the sites that are buying them seem to be the same sleazy ones that subscribe to other advertising gimmicks: the online gambling sites and stuff.

Where’s my trailer again?

Way back in May I got invited by one Michelle, my friend Lisa’s friend, to be in a video she was making for cinematography class. It was a Sherlock Holmes parody — a murder-mystery/comedy — and I was asked to play Dr. Watson. After a productive afternoon and night, we were supposed to do a little more shooting a few days later, but that didn’t happen. Finally last week I got the call to be in it again. I thought that the coming hurricane would ruin the weather, but we went ahead with it anyway and the weather cooperated nicely.

Lisa, however, was not invited back. Her three roles were filled (reluctantly) by Michelle’s sister. So we had to reshoot many scenes, but not all of them. Under my costume, I wore the same outfit as last time in case that was going to happen. We did some of the daytime scenes, and for lunch we decided to go to Subway. I had the idea of going there in character and filming it. So we did. In the car we sang along to “Bohemian Rhapsody” on the radio. It might be the intermission. After eating lunch we filmed the final scene, where the culprit is revealed. We also filmed two alternate endings with different people as the killer. Eventually we finished all of the daytime scenes we needed to do. So we had to wait hours for it to get dark so we could do the nighttime scenes that remained. The day’s shooting took 10 hours to complete, but we finished the whole movie.

During the day I found out that Michelle had made a trailer for the movie out of the original (May) footage. Apparently everyone had seen it but me (I go to a different school from the rest of them). So we watched it. It looked pretty good, especially because it was presented as a darker, more dramatic film. The title is The Killer That Kills. Actually, it’s something like Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of the Killer That Kills. I’m going to get a copy when she’s done with it. I’ll try to put in available online if I get permission and figure out how. Michelle said she’s going to submit it to a film festival (obviously not one of those real ones, but an amateur/teenage one).

Well, because of the Hurricane, we’re not going to have school tomorrow or Tuesday. I hope the hurricane isn’t really bad. I don’t want to lose electricity!

Slow motion video clips of all sorts of things.

List of films that have been considered the worst ever. I hope The Killer That Kills doesn’t make the list.

The world shuts down

A hurricane is coming. And when a hurricane comes, people need time to prepare or evacuate. Everything closes — schools, businesses, government agencies. The world shuts down as people sit in their homes and restlessly await the end of the storm. Evacuations have begun in the Florida Keys, and although by coincidence there was no school today, the teachers, who had to go to work, got released early. Nothing has really closed yet, but since the hurricane is so slow, everything is going to close at some point.

The hurricane is only slowing down. Before, they were saying that the hurricane was going to hit on Sunday and that we might have Monday off school. Now it seems that the hurricane will hit Monday or Tuesday, and since the school board has already sent teachers home early, no one’s going to expect them to be back on Monday unless the hurricane turns in the opposite direction. But forget about having fun, because technically the hurricane’s already here. A large plume extending from the storm is over us now, and so the weather is miserable. I guess it can only get worse. So what are we to do until it comes? Pretty much nothing.

Hey, remember that Ask Jordon thingy?

Daniel: Do you have a del.icio.us account that I can subscribe to? I have one if you would like to swap. I’m sure many others here would be interested.

No, sorry, I don’t. But if any of you readers does, contact Daniel somehow.

You must be wondering why I haven’t posted a good Ask Jordon for a while. Well, here’s why. These are just a small sampling of the ones I’ve received lately:

buddy255: triede the music symbol on my word pad and it works (alt 13) but when trying in chat it doesn,t work — why?????
james: where is the middle east
dale: how was it palying basketball
gordon.mounce: where is www.almsoftwear.co.uk

I could swear that they’re all from the same person, but I don’t check IP addresses when an Ask Jordon is sent, even though I should. After all, it is believable that the Internet has more than one complete idiot who can’t type.

NASA has a QuickTime video showing satellite images of “all 21 named storms during the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season,” as if there aren’t going to be any more hurricanes because they ran out of names on the list. And several hurricanes don’t appear because they didn’t get within the area shown in the video. Still, it’s cool to watch.

And here’s a gallery of metro arts and architecture. Metro means subway.

Wilma!

It started innocently enough for a late-season tropical system. But then it strengthened unprecedentedly rapidly, and now it’s the strongest hurricane ever recorded this side of the Americas. Hurricane Wilma is headed our way.

Everybody seemed to think that we were off the hook after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita did some minor damage in the area. Now Wilma, which has the last name on this year’s list of hurricane names, is expected to take a turn toward our direction, but from the west. I can’t remember a hurricane hitting us from that direction, because we’re on the east coast of Florida. You might think that all the land between here and the future point of landfall would be enough to weaken the hurricane. It will do so, but probably not too much because it is expected to make landfall in the Everglades, a bunch of grass in water. Hurricanes love water.

This hurricane is going to ruin my plans for the weekend. I just got invited to finish filming the Sherlock Holmes spoof that my sister’s friend’s friend had started in May. We were going to spend all Sunday working on it. Apparently that’s not going to happen. I hope we at least get Monday off from school. The hurricane should be gone by then, but the damage might not.

Time Magazine has a list of All-Time 100 Novels. By “all-time,” they mean all-”Time”: in other words, the 100 greatest novels since Time was first published in 1923. Of the 100, I’ve read only five: “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “The Catcher in the Rye,” “Things Fall Apart,” “Neuromancer,” and “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” all of which I had to read for school and wouldn’t have read otherwise. (Actually, I chose to read “Neuromancer” for a book report thing last year.) I’m currently reading “The Great Gatsby” (also for school), but I’ve just started, so it doesn’t really count.

How much of your favorite caffeinated drink would kill you? Luckily, a lot more than you think, but find out anyway. I’m not a fan of Red Bull, but it’s good to know that I’ll never in one sitting drink the 174.89 cans required to kill me.

Online classes don’t work

Today was picture day. They gave a notice of one school day, so if you weren’t at school on Wednesday (the last day we had school), oh well for you. Hope your grandparents didn’t want to buy your pictures. (Well, there are always retakes.) I, being a stupid idiot, forgot my money to order said pictures (because my parents and grandparents have to have them). I realized it right when I got to school, so I had my dad arrive with the money. He would come fairly early on his way to work.

It just so happened that I had to have my picture taken first thing in the morning. So we went down to the auditorium and I realized that they would still take my picture even if I wasn’t ordering prints. But I wasn’t sure what to do. My friend Jarian was in the same situation: his money was on the way and couldn’t get there fast enough. I thought I could have my picture taken then and give them the money within an hour, but the photographer people said that they had to take the order at the same time as taking the picture. On top of that, the teacher overseeing everything said that we had to have our pictures taken while the rest of our class was there. So the only solution seemed to be having our picture taken twice. I got a notice to go to the office shortly after returning from having my picture taken. They had my money there, so I went back and had my picture taken again.

Normally the title of the post has to do with what I write about first, but since I thought that what I will write about now is also important, and that it’s a point that needs to be stressed to anyone that can read bold print, I made it the title.

I had been warming up to my European history class and basically getting a handle on the work involved. But lately the trend has been for classes to embrace “technology” by going online. And that’s exactly what Mrs. Vazquez is doing with this class of mine. All lectures will be online, assignments will be given online, and those assignments will be collected online. That old sickening feeling is coming back to me because online classes don’t work.

She created a sort of virtual classroom thing at this site, but the design is so dull that it’s hard to tell what is what. You need to jump through hoops to send in a message — and I don’t think they take attachments, so you just have to copy and paste your nice essay into a textarea. Plus, Mrs. Vazquez’s writing style is too close to that of some students. She ignores capitalization and punctuation and apparently doesn’t check what she writes, as she often makes flagrant typos and factual errors that simply confuse everyone. (Maybe that’s why she’s no longer qualified to teach English.)

As for online classes in general: I’ve taken one, and so I know that they are nothing like the classroom experience. To truly learn, you have to have a teacher speak to you and answer your questions using helpful hints like… tone of voice… to get her message across. In an online class, you’re trying to learn by reading pixels, and if you don’t know something, a teacher can’t answer you right away. Your homework and notes aren’t tangible. Your teacher isn’t tangible either; she’s just represented by her words (however well-punctuated they may be). In fact, she doesn’t even need to be there, as Mrs. Vazquez has stated many times when talking about this new system. She doesn’t need to be there at all. And she wonders why she gets paid like it…

This move to the Internet is supposed to be a time saver. The logic is this: instead of doing our classwork (taking notes and other stuff) during class and doing our homework (reading stuff and answering questions) at home, we’ll do our homework during class and our classwork at home. Tell me how this saves time. I think it actually wastes time, because we won’t have access to computers during class every day (today, for example). In those cases we’ll have to write our homework during class in order to type it later. In other words, time is lost. I certainly don’t want to turn things upside-down, doing the reinforcing during the day when I should be learning and learning new material when I’m tired from a long day and want nothing more in the world than to relax.

Personally, I believe that due to the poor design and questionable usability of the web site, I am going to miss notifications of upcoming assignments, which is going to bring my grade down from the A that I’ve busted my ass for. More importantly, by ceasing to learn things in this class, I’m going to do worse on the final exam that determines whether you get college credit for the class. I’m ashamed of Mrs. Vazquez for making this decision that really only makes things easier for her and harder for the students she’s trying to have succeed.

Look, up in the sky! It’s the Floating Logos Project, one of those weird art projects you more than occasionally find on the web.

New York Changing: photos of New York City from then and now. It’s amazing to see how some things have changed so much and how others have stayed the same.

Scandal!

In August the news broke that Mrs. O’Leary, the principal of my old school (a Catholic school), quit due to allegations that she stole money. Controversy started buzzing and eventually it seemed that people sided with either Mrs. O’Leary, or the pastor of the adjoining church, Father Gabriel, who allegedly had a hand in getting rid of her. Many people never liked Mrs. O’Leary and many others never liked Fr. Gabriel, so you can imagine how this broke out. Some people said that Fr. Gabriel (a Cuban-American) got rid of Mrs. O’Leary and replaced her with a Hispanic so that he could turn the church into a Hispanic parish. Others really do believe that Mrs. O’Leary stole money. The tension seems to have been building, even though things were never directly addressed, but rather whispered.

Today there was a huge crowd of people at church like it was Christmas Eve or Easter or something. It turned out that a representative of the Archdiocese of Miami was going to talk about what had happened. Just before the final blessing, but after all the other announcements, he went up and read a statement to the crowd from the Archdiocese supporting Fr. Gabriel and telling him to set up some financial committee to oversee things or something like that. Then this other guy came up from the crowd and started attacking Fr. Gabriel’s policies. The representative, himself a pastor of another church, went up to the man to try to get him to stop, but some people shouted, “Let him speak!” But then people started getting up and going to leave, including my parents. I was shocked at this completely rude thing. I said to my parents, who are always nagging at me to be polite, “Well, I think that was an extremely impolite thing to do, don’t you?” My mom said, “Well, you don’t want to hear him, do you?” It seemed that about half the people in the church simply walked out — before the final blessing in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

As we were going out, the man kept speaking, and I had never felt so angry in my entire life. Pure rage seemed to run through my veins, just over the stupidity of it all. I had to restrain myself from shouting about what I felt. What do I feel about this? I feel it’s stupid. The whole thing. Everyone’s a hypocrite: the Gabriel people and the O’Leary people alike. It’s all so political. The thing they should be focusing on is worship, but apparently that gets lost in all the pomp and politics of church affairs. I’m still angry that things came to this — the adrenaline hasn’t gone away — and I don’t support either side.

Here’s a bullet piercing a bubble.

A visit to Adobe, the people who bring you software such as Photoshop. It’s interesting to see faces being put to those names on the Photoshop splash screens.

The dangers of boredom

It’s been a long Yom Kippur weekend. Even though I have a lot of homework to do, I haven’t really done it. Instead I’ve been doing this:

I’d been meaning to do this for a long time. It took about an hour from setting up the camera to saving the final JPG. Trivia: I’m playing Tredici, and I’m holding the same hand in each picture. Note: I did not actually play a four-player game of cards by myself.

Last night, because I had nothing better to do, I went with my sister and our friends to a practice for the youth group fashion show. It got really boring so we decided to wander around the campus of the school where I had gone for nine years. Surprisingly, several gates that should have been locked were wide open. For the first time since the end of eighth grade, we walked the hallway (not hallways, but hallway) where we spent much of our junior high years. We peered into the four classrooms; all have changed. They seem to have more desks. Other things should have been locked also, most notably the doors into the school office. We went in for a bit and saw their new(?) teachers’ lounge, complete with comfortable(-looking) sofas and a nice new TV. Even though many things have changed, it was still nostalgic.

What do you get when you combine a cloudless mosaic of the earth during the day, a similar mosaic of the earth at night, and a composite satellite image highlighting cloud cover over the whole world? You get a portrait of the earth as it really looks right now: World Sunlight Map.

Also, find out why everything is 4.