PSAT again

I took the PSAT again this year, thus making it (probably) my last practice step before taking the SAT, which could very well be the most important thing I ever do in my entire life. The PSAT (Preliminary SAT) is the practice test for the SAT. Your SAT score is used by colleges to determine whether they’ll let you in. (Of course, they do look at other things, such as grade-point average, extracurricular activities, race, sex…)

The only things it tests are the two subjects that are deemed most important: reading and math. English has recently been given the upper hand, because writing now constitutes an additional portion of the SAT. But not the PSAT, whose goal is to prepare you for the PSAT. It does have some writing-related things, like finding errors in sentences, but there is no actual writing to be done. Likewise, in English class, we learn big words and do multiple-choice questions in preparation for the SAT, but we do very little extemporized writing (hey, there’s an SAT prep word right there). I like (not really) how everyone seems to be ignoring this new section of the test because they don’t know what to make of it.

When I took the PSAT last year, I did well, but I found the math to be more challenging than the English parts. I could do the latter with time to spare, but I ran out of time doing one of the math sections and filled in random answers hoping that they would be right (note to self for when I get my test results: they were questions 31 and 38). When I think about it, I’ve always done better in English than in math, so when I decide to take the big SAT, I’ll have to have to study my PSAT results and get my the mathematical side of my brain running again with the help of pre-calculus class, which I’m taking next semester.

My test was administered by two teachers for some reason. One was Mrs. Hill, my old Spanish teacher who once thought I was a foreign exchange student (no, I’ll never forget that). The other was the new teacher who now shares her room. It was kind of strange going back into Mrs. Hill’s room. It wasn’t exactly how I remembered it. I remembered it being darker and scarier (and with yellow walls, for some reason). She seemed weird as usual because she didn’t go over the parts of the answer sheet where we had to fill in our sex, age, social security number, or birthdate, or the part where we had to sign indicating that we were ourselves. When the test was over, I managed to fill in some of those. My sister had asked her if we had to, and she said no, it wasn’t important.

Toward the end of the day I got a slip from the Guidance Department. This was really weird because I had no idea what they could have been calling me down for. Since whoever wrote it wrote “See Ms. Cardoso in [illegible] room,” I just headed down to the Guidance office and was guided into the back hallway by a senior. She stopped me when we reached a window with a woman writing on the other side and said this was where I needed to be. I went into the woman’s room through an open side door and asked if this was where I had to be. Ms. Cardoso then spoke up from the room than was now in front of me: the Record Vault (that’s what the sign outside said). She had a pile of PSAT answer sheets and told me that I needed to sign mine as I had failed to do. She wasn’t mean about it or anything, but when I kept trying to say it was the teacher’s fault, she kept saying that there was nothing to worry about regarding my little mistake. According to her, they won’t grade the test if you don’t sign it, and some of the people who hadn’t done so (probably all from Hill’s room) had already left for the day, so I guess they’re screwed.

Listen to the eerie sounds of Saturn’s radio emissions. Saturn doesn’t really make those strange sounds, of course. The site has them greatly sped up and lowered in pitch (to the levels of human hearing) for convenient listening. Only then do they sound eerie.

These are some crazy optical illusions that you’ve probably never seen (no, they weren’t made by that Japanese guy). They involve color perception and are truly amazing. It’s interesting to see how our brain sorts out things that seem different depending on the context but actually aren’t. You’ll understand this as you see them.

Tornado waste of time

During my freshman and sophomore years, we had a thing called “Tornado Time Out For Reading,” where we Tornadoes (the school’s mascot) would take 20 minutes a day out of class time to read. It had to be a novel or at least some kind of fiction, and some teachers enforced this. Sometimes we had to write about what we read. What a way to make reading boring!

The first quarter of this school year was great in one respect. They told us at the beginning of the year that Tornado Time Out would be axed because the school finally realized that no one was reading, and so it wasn’t doing anybody any good. And indeed, we’ve been Tornado-Time-Out-free… until today.

It had been announced that they were bringing it back, and they were right. In Tuesday we have to read in third block, and my third block (chemistry), the teacher always wastes class time doing Instructional Focus activities (basically reinforcing state standards). So we wasted double the class time today and will continue to do so on Tuesdays in her class. (At least she’s doing Instructional Focus things that relate to chemistry now. The first semester we spent a significant amount of time in chemistry learning about plate tectonics.)

In English class we’ve been studying the Gothic writers like Edgar Allan Poe and the rest. Today we got an assignment to write such a short story in 2-3 pages, double-spaced. When you think about it, that’s hardly any amount of writing at all. And in those 2-3 pages, you have to have these short story elements:

• Protagonist
• Antagonist
• Plot
• Conflict
• Resolution

Well, all short stories should have those, but we also have to include these Gothic elements:

• Exotic or unusual setting
• Set in the past
• Atmosphere of mystery, eeriness, dread/menace
• Symbolism
• Psychological elements (guilt/sin, intuition, moral conscience, etc.)
• Suspense

I’ve developed a pretty good story idea, except I don’t know how I could throw symbolism in there. Symbolism and I don’t get along very well. Anyway, my story will be one of those stories where science goes wrong. It might actually be more like science fiction than a Gothic story, but we’ll call it Gothic science fiction (or, somebody please tell me what it’s really called).

Leave it to Wikipedia to have a list of obsolete scientific theories. It’s pretty interesting to see how our perception of things has changed over the centuries (or decades).

Dr Pepper is a popular soft drink. And just about every soda brand has to make its own ripoff of it, each with not only that peculiar sweet taste but also dark red packaging and a name beginning with “Dr.” so you know it’s a cheap ripoff of Dr Pepper when you see it on the shelves. Not Quite What the Doctor Ordered documents and reviews these Dr Pepper fakes.

Free candy

Oh, right, I had exams on Thursday. I already know what I got on them: an A in chemistry and an A in English. English was very easy (as I expected) and chemistry was too (surprisingly). I’m not sure what I got on Monday’s exams, though. Anyway, this week is short because of Yom Kippur, so we have a four-day weekend. Our next days off are for Thanksgiving at the end of next month. Ay.

Yesterday I went to a surprise birthday party for my friend Mike. We met at an Italian restaurant and then went across the street to see The Greatest Game Ever Played at the movies. Although it was good, it’s hard to make a 2-hour movie about golf without running into slow and boring bits. Happy 17th birthday (once again), Mike.

I seem to be hanging out at a site called Esperanto Radio Arkivo (Esperanto Radio Archive) quite a bit. Believe it or not, Esperanto radio programs are broadcast from China, Poland, Vatican City, Cuba, Italy, Australia, and (if you count Internet broadcasts) many more countries. I think my listening skills are getting better; I could understand everything pretty well, depending on the quality of the MP3s. On the site I listened to a few broadcasts from Radio Havano Kubo — Radio Havana Cuba (broadcast from “a free territory in America,” they remind us). One anchor typically mentions that you can listen to their shows online at the Esperanto Radio Archive and gave a tip of the hat to the site’s webmaster who, ironically, is an American.

I haven’t listened a whole lot, but apparently they take calls from people and talk about Cuba, generally. I get bored listening to it online, but I think it would be more exciting to hear it coming in on the old shortwave radio. I think their Esperanto shows are the only such programs broadcast in the Western hemisphere, and since they’re coming from so close by, it should make for some good reception (although I guess shortwave signals can travel around the world). Cuba has always been mysterious to me (and other Americans, I’m sure). Because we’re not allowed to go there, it only makes the place more alluring, like how you always want what you can’t have. In any case, Esperanto allows for cultural exchanges to take place by means of a neutral common language.

Anyway, they broadcast from Cuba three times on Sundays, and all of those times yesterday I happened to be out of the house (or asleep). So next week I’ll have to catch the half-hour program. That should be fun for my family because they get to hear me listening jibber-jabber that they can’t understand.

If you’re like me, you (a) like Esperanto and (b) can’t remember people’s names. If only (b) applies, maybe these tricks to remembering names will help. I’ll have to try them.

The Jowler is a photo that makes anyone look unflattering. To make one, have someone take a picture of you (with the flash) while you shake your jowls really fast. Have a look at the gallery.

I couldn’t think of a good title for this post, so I thought I’d call it “Free Candy.”

Interview: Christian Shelton and Scott Atwood

In my 500th post last month, I brainstormed ideas to improve The World of Stuff. One of them was interviews. Now, I present to you the first monthly interview. Hopefully it should appear the first Friday of each month. Easy to remember, right?

If you haven’t heard of Christian and Scott’s Interactive Top Ten List, you’re missing out on a semiweekly source of humor remniscent of the good old days of the web. On this site, which has been run by Christian Shelton and Scott Atwood for ten years, users submit suggestions for humorous top ten lists, and then C & S sort through the users’ funniest list entries. There were some things I wanted to know about the web site, so they set the record straight.

The World of Stuff: What was your motivation for starting the site?

Christian Shelton: We were roommates at college and both CS majors, so as a fun project, we decided to set up one of our computers as a linux machine. In 1995, it wasn’t quite as simple as now. (It involved a cart-load of floppy disks and a number of kernel recompilations.) We felt pretty pleased when it booted and we could run a stable web server from it. We then started to brainstorm about websites we could create that would generate hits. We figured that the content had to change, otherwise people wouldn’t return and the idea of user submissions to top ten lists popped into our heads.

Scott Atwood: We began our Top Ten list in the early days of the World Wide Web. We wanted to create a site that would be entertaining and with ever changing content to keep users coming back for more. We didn’t have the time as students to come up with all new material ourselves every week, so we came up with the concept of the interactive top ten list.

TWoS: Why are you still doing it?

SA: People are still reading it! It doesn’t take much time and effort on our part to keep it up and running and it brings a smile to my face every week.

CS: There is certainly some inertia behind it; it would be sad to stop at this point. But mainly, I think we enjoy the humor it provides. It adds to the web the kind of content we feel should be there.

When we started, Yahoo had only just begun and search engines like Google did not exist. The web was “deep” and not “broad:” people’s web pages linked to other things they liked and there were no real “directories” or “one stop surfing” sites. “Surfing the web” was done by following one interesting link to another until you found yourself at information or entertainment you hadn’t even known you were looking for.

I think this website is a bit of a throw-back to those days. The page is straight-forward. It doesn’t have a monetary agenda. It has a “home spun” feel. I like running such a website.

TWoS: What duties have you divvied among yourselves? In other words, who does what?

CS: The server is run jointly by both of us. Some duties are allocated to one of us or another (like file system backups or web server maintenance) but for the most part we try to make sure either of us can take care of any issues that might arise.

The selection of the list alternates between the two of us, with one person taking Mondays and the other Thursdays. There are exceptions, of course, to deal with travel and work schedules.

SA: Each of us edits one list per week. Whenever one of us is on vacation, the other will edit all the lists. In over ten years of running the top ten list, we’ve only had to have a guest editor (Christian’s sister) once when both of us were unavailable.

TWoS: The design of your site is very simple, yet the style changes regularly. What has motivated you to keep the same basic design after all these years?

SA: Two reasons: it works and we’re lazy! We change the style from time to time to keep the site looking fresh. But we see no compelling reason to change the basic design, since the concept itself is so simple.

CS: I advocate the idea of HTML as a content-description language and not a page-layout language. I understand why it has gone in the direction of page-layout, but I feel it is best as a marker of the type of information and now how to display it. The basic format has worked well and I haven’t seen a need to change it. We still use the same perl scripts as we did 10 years ago to collect the submissions. I think a design change would also take us away from the “old school” feel of the website that I like.

TWoS: I had several lists and top ten submissions accepted years ago (under the moniker “Slowpoke”), but I included a link to my site in the “Name” field. Since then I’ve had no luck with getting picked. Do you block annoying users, or am I just not trying as hard?

SA: When editing the list each week, I begin by selecting the 20-40 funniest entries out of the hundreds we receive. I don’t look at the submitter’s names at all. I then begin ordering the entries and narrowing it down to the ten funniest. When the list is more or less finished, I may check the submitter’s names to make sure a single person isn’t overly represented in the final list.

We absolutely do not play favorites, nor block users. Some of the submitters submit a lot of entries, and some have a sense of humor that more closely resembles that of our own.

CS: We do not block any submitters. When we select the entries, a program lets us pick the top ten without seeing the names. The names are then matched up with the submissions at the end. It is always hard to say why certain people have or don’t have success. I think it has more to do with how well their sense of humor aligns with ours, and those things tend to change with time.

TWoS: On your site you say that there are too many funny ones to easily narrow it down to ten. Are there any particularly funny entries or list suggestions that you wish you hadn’t left out?

CS: I don’t recall any particular submissions at this point. After almost a thousand lists, it is hard to remember all the details of each selection. However, I do often read an old list and think “gee, that one isn’t as funny to me any more.” Sometimes something will seem hilarious on a Monday or Thursday morning, but will lose some of its appeal later. Humor always depends on context and so each list “ages” differently.

But, to answer your question more directly, usually, it is simple to narrow it down to 15-30 good entries. After that it is very hard. The last few that get cut could often have made the 10th spot on a different day.

SA: Some weeks I wish we had a Top Eleven or Top Fifteen List. Other weeks I feel like I can barely scrape together a Top Nine that makes me happy.

Of course there are funny tidbits that I wish I could have shared, but ten is a nice round number that makes for a nice dose of humor.

Christian Shelton and Scott Atwood have run Christian and Scott’s Interactive Top Ten List since 1995.

World’s Biggest Slacker

Hello, my fellow teenage readers, many of whom I know as personal friends. Do you…

• …have a cell phone?
• …have a job?
• …drive?
• …have an MP3 player?
• …have a significant other?
• …exercise?
• …have a TV in your room?
• …have any extracurricular activities?
• …have career goals?

If you answered no to all of these questions, you are Jordon Kalilich, World’s Biggest Slacker! I am the loser’s loser. Not one of you can compare to me.

I was just contemplating things the other day. It started when I asked myself, why do I buy 45s instead of getting iTunes? Well, I figured, if I get iTunes, I’ll buy songs compulsively (one doesn’t have to worry about shipping, you know), and I really don’t have the kind of income to support that. I get $5 a week for allowance and that’s it, ’cause I have no job. Also, if I ever get a girlfriend, I’ll have to spend a lot of money on her, and since I make a negligible amount of money, I’d eventually run out. Likewise, why don’t I have a cell phone? No money!

So, why don’t I have a job, so I can make money? I’ve expressed interest in looking for one, but I haven’t actually done it yet. I guess I’m lazy. But I think I’m also afraid of working, probably because my New Year’s gift from my longtime weekend job was a permanent vacation. I’m afraid of working for a large company again because then everything’s all official and I have to pay taxes and things of that nature. Also, if I get another job, my parents say I have to walk there myself.

So, why don’t I just drive there, you might ask if you don’t know me? Well, I can’t drive a car. I don’t even have my learner’s permit. I haven’t even taken the steps to getting my learner’s permit! So why haven’t I done that? Well, I don’t know. I’m lazy (again with the laziness). Also, I think the ‘rents have mentioned something like I’ll have to pay for my own insurance once I get my license (or at least that they will not). And here, my friends, is where the vicious cycle ensues. Who’s to blame?

Some are born slackers, some achieve slackerdom, and some have slackerdom thrust upon them. It’s true that I’ve always been lazy, but suffice it to say that I don’t think it’s 100% my fault that I’m mired in this situation. Seriously, the only thing I have going for me are my grades in school. Other than that, I’m not that good of a person in any context. I don’t even trust in my ability to listen to and follow directions. It took me years to learn the Macarena.

How will I be prepared to function like a normal member of society if I don’t function like a normal teenager? When I was little I would ask my parents if I could have a TV in my room like the other kids. “Not until you’re 14,” they would say. Well, I’m 16 now, and I’m still waiting while they deny they ever said it. It’s not essential to life, but at the very least it’s a peeve and something my friends might make fun of me for.

As time passes, I’m getting to be an old person. I started this blog two years ago. In less than two years I’ll presumably be in college — wherever that may be. Frankly, if I was afraid of going into high school (and I was, as a stroll through August 2003 will tell you), I would be absolutely terrified of going to college. And I am. I’m not ready, but here people are telling me about taking the SAT and picking what college I want to go to.

All in all, life is a bunch of sucky experiences with a few good things thrown in so it doesn’t totally depress you. But it only gets worse as you trudge along. In short, growing up blows. I would give my life to save every kid from ever growing up. I would. No one deserves to undertake the misery of living.

But I’m interested… teenagers, or anybody: go back to the beginning of the post and leave a comment with your answers to the questions.

Speaking of stupid things (no, not you), read some Computer Stupidities: tales of people who just don’t get computers. Somewhat less entertaining (because you’ve probably gotten all of them in your e-mail inbox at one time or another) are the more generic Things People Said.

Exams

When your school goes by semesters, October is a time of mid-term exams. But usually they’re later in October than this week. Because the school year starts so much earlier this year, mid-terms are consequently earlier. Usually, we end exam week by having exams on Wednesday and Thursday (which are early release days), with Friday being a day off (as always). But because Rosh Hashanah is this week (When does it start and end? Michelle?), had exams today (early release) no school tomorrow, a regular day on Wednesday, and an early-release exam day on Thursday.

My first exam today was Spanish III. It was mostly multiple choice, with some listening, fill-in-the-blanks, and a question about the needs of an immigrant family (which was also the topic of an essay we just had to do, so that wasn’t hard). I hardly studied for it, and I think I did very well. Predicted grade: A.

My second exam was for European history. This weekend I studied like a madman for that test. Besides memorizing all the many things from the six long chapters we’ve gone through, we had to know the Tudor and Stuart lines of England and the Valois and Bourbon lines of France. As I saw, however, no amount of studying could fully prepare me for the test. There were some awkward questions and some things I didn’t study but should have.

It turned out that knowing those kings and queens was for extra credit, as was knowing the six wives (in order) and various children of Henry VIII, which I didn’t study. I’m pretty sure I got all the Tudors, Stuarts, and the rest. I decided to give the Henry thing a shot, also. Here’s what I put.

1. Catherine of Aragon
2. Anne Boleyn
3. Jane Seymour
4. Pattie Boyd
5. Linda Eastman
6. Yoko Ono

Thank goodness it was only extra credit. Predicted grade: B.

On an even lighter note that made my day (possibly even my week), my friend Mark came to school today with no hair. Now, I know he does weird things for no reason, but this has to be the weirdest. I should have known he would do it eventually. Fortunately he keeps (kept) his hair short, so it should be back to normal fast. Meanwhile, today I happened to come across this link for Bald Guyz Grooming Products. (Sunscreen, anyone? How about head wipes?)

Great minds think alike, as Coloribus points out with its galleries of startlingly similar advertisements.

Because it’s an early release today, I can catch some shows I wouldn’t normally get to see, and because there’s no school tomorrow, I can watch more TV tonight. So today there’s a rare juxtaposition coincidences — TV schedules vary and school schedules are never this convenient. Here’s what I’m in for.

Comedy Central – 2:00, 2:30 – British “Whose Line Is It Anyway?”
TBS – 3:00, 3:30 – “The Drew Carey Show”
ABC Family – 8:00, 8:30, 9:00, 9:30, 10:00, 10:30 – American “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” (with a new episode — the first of the eighth season — at 9:00!).

It’s good to stare at screens other than computer screens for a change.

In Cameron Diaz’s shoes

A little while ago I was wandering around the house while the TV (which is always on) was turned to some fashion channel. They were playing a commercial for a chick flick with Cameron Diaz, when suddenly a familiar sight caught my eye: the Deerfield Beach train station.

(Note to self: I got this screen capture in HyperSnap-DX 4 by opening the Quicktime movie file in a separate window and doing a multi-region capture.)

I did some IMDb-ing around for the movie, In Her Shoes, and I found that it was indeed filmed in Deerfield, including at the city pier (where, incidentally, President Gerald Ford visited in 1976). I wonder why I didn’t hear about the movie being filmed. After all, our seaside suburb isn’t exactly a hot spot for moviemakers.

The train station is nearby; I used to pass it going to work. There isn’t much there, really. After all, it’s a train station. The national Amtrak and the local Tri-Rail stop there. I was at the station when I took the Tri-Rail when I was younger, and that’s the only time I’ve been there.

Incidentally, Deerfield Beach used to be known as simply Deerfield, so the train station said “Deerfield Florida.” When the city became Deerfeld Beach, the word “Beach” was crammed between Deerfield and Florida, where it remains to this day, as you can see in the above still from the movie trailer.

Yesterday I was supposed to meet with Mandi and Nicole about being in their band. My grandparents took me to the mall where we were supposed to meet at 1:00. I realized that we had stupidly not picked a place to meet. So we circled the mall three times and checked the food court twice, all to no avail. After 45 minutes of searching, we just left.

Try not to get us Floridians mad. Today a state law went into effect making it legal to use deadly force whenever you feel threatened. A series of ads are running in British newspapers warning potential tourists about the dangers of traveling to Florida. The ads are sponsored by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, which has a site at shootfirstlaw.org. The campaign is headed by James Brady, who was wounded and disabled in Ronald Reagan’s 1981 assassination attempt. Will this law and the backlash against it have a significant effect on our tourism industry?