Collegiate spam

Today is the day that the sophomores take the FCAT Writing test. Since I took it last year, I get to remain in my first hour class for twice as long. And that class is -- you (might have) guessed it -- Programming II. So here I am, blogging in Programming class, like in the old days. (Don't worry, we're not doing anything, and I've finished what we had been doing anyway.)

Speaking of tests, the results of my more recent PSAT have been made available to colleges. For the past couple of weeks I've been getting mail and e-mail from some colleges, most of which are apparently two-bit, no-name businesses that are struggling to make money. I've heard of a few seemingly better ones, though. For example, I got an e-mail from Rutgers, which is apparently prestigious. (As a side note, my friend's dad, an influential urban planner, teaches there. Well, he used to, at least. I don't know if he does now.) And yesterday I got a large amount of material from Ohio State (though I originally played that one down, having confused it with Kent State). No, it isn't really spam and junk mail because I chose allowed colleges to see the score I got on the test. And besides, it's a good thing. Maybe once I've decided what I want to do with my life, choosing a college will be easy. Maybe.

It's been nearly a year since I made a documentary-type thing out of the 24-hour fast I went on with my old church's youth group. Since the movie, "One Day in the Desert," is now "out of print" (I took the file down from the site), I figured it would be fun to re-release it with a director's commentary and deleted scenes. It would also help me get across my point that I have no animosity toward my old youth group now that I'm an atheist. For the new director's cut, I figured I would have the same problems I had with the original version: I would have to host the video on my site (a relatively expensive course of action), and it would only be viewable on Windows (because I'm too cheap to ditch Windows Movie Maker and get real video editing software).

As I sit here in class and watch how other people are spending their free time, I see there are three main things that they're doing. Most are playing games, listening to music, or watching videos online (or some combination of the three). And what site do they head to in order to find entertaining video? Google Video. Not only does Google Video host your videos, it also embeds them into Flash, so you don't need a specific program like RealPlayer, QuickTime, or Windows Media Player to watch them (I think). So Google Video solves both problems. Once I've finished the new version of the film (including a new machine-readable transcription), which will probably be some boring weekend very soon, I'll upload it to Google Video, and then they'll approve it and it will be there. Yay.

Pikachu hors d'oeuvres made of cheese. I don't know what else to say about this one.

This is a great application of science: determining the complex opening chord of the Beatles' hit "A Hard Day's Night." Apparently there are two guitars, a bass guitar, and a piano involved. I wish I could get together a guitarist, a bassist, and a pianist, and we could all try it.

Two years ago: "Anyway, I can tell today is going to be a bad day."
Also two years ago: "It actually went pretty well, in spite of the things I had worried about."