The World of Stuff .com

Five

It’s been over two months since I took the AP European History exam. The results have been available by phone since July 1, but since you have to pay a fee for that, I’ve been watching the mailbox intently, waiting for my scores to come in the mail. Last night, Ms. Vazquez, my teacher who talked me into taking the class (and who taught it for the first few months), sent out an e-mail to her former students asking how they did. I told her that I didn’t know yet, but I would tell her as soon as I found out.

There was a lot of speculation about how each person in the class would do on the test. Both Ms. Vazquez and Mr. Miller, her replacement, showed a tendency to predict students’ AP scores. Both said that a 5, the highest score, was within my reach. Toward the end of the year, Kelsey bet me ten bucks that I would get a 5, and I with my low self-esteem took her up on it. I myself had made some calculations based on my results of practice tests, and I concluded that the worst I could do was get a 4, which is also very good. Still, there’s always that nagging feeling of inadequacy.

Today when the mail came, I went out as usual to see if we (that includes my sister, who took the AP English and Psychology exams) had gotten our scores. Sure enough, there were two envelopes from the College Board. I ran back to the house and we quickly tore them open. My score: 5! I wish I could find out how I did on each part of the test, but apparently they don’t reveal that information. I guess it’s good enough to know that I did as well as I could possibly do, despite all my worries.

Today I got this e-mail with the subject “UG5.” It was from one “Wilma Mcgraw,” a very spammy-sounding name. Curious as to why my spam filter didn’t catch the e-mail, I opened it to read:

Since I view messages as plaintext by default, I figured that there must be more to it in HTML — but no dice. That’s the whole text of the e-mail. (Remember when spam e-mails tried to sell you something without being entirely incoherent?) I marked it as spam only reluctantly because I don’t think Thunderbird‘s Bayesian spam filter is smart enough to know the difference between this and legitimate e-mail. I don’t think it’s ever given me a false positive, though, so hopefully this won’t screw it up.

Wiki + Google Maps = Wikimapia, where you can find information about places. Of course, it’s a work in progress, but you can contribute to make it better.

We customarily think of the future as being ahead of us and the past as behind us, but the Aymara people of South America have it the other way around. They kind of have a point: you know what the past looked like, but you can’t see the future.

One year ago: “And I’m sure if you arrange all the words I’ve ever typed on the blog, you get vertical columns that spell out the secrets of the Freemasons (like: what the hell do they do?) and say things like the world was supposed to end back in ’87.”
Two years ago: “Buying a new digital camera that has exactly what you want for a good price is like trying to dig to China with a plastic shovel.”