Le week-end

Ah, another summer weekend approacheth. What’s a do-nothing teenager to do? Besides nothing, I mean? The house is going to be kind of empty. My dad has left to visit my aunt for the weekend, and my sister will be leaving tomorrow for a trip with the church youth group. They’re going to the Keys to snorkel. They spent last Sunday having a car wash to raise the money.

But make no mistake, I have plans. At least, I think I do. Three years ago, a guy my dad worked with gave me his amplifier in exchange for a bunch of guitar supplies. I tried out the amp for a while, and when it came time to seal the deal, my dad and I bought the paraphernalia he requested during a sale at the musician’s supply store. Spend $100 and get a free 12-string acoustic guitar! So I got an amp and a guitar out of that.

Wait, keep reading. This whole thing is relevant, I promise. After getting my nice new amp, I let Alex, the bassist in our band, borrow my old one because he was renting his (supposedly, anyway), and it was really pitiful. I’ve only seen him in person a handful of times since then, the last of which was at my birthday dinner last year. The band had one more practice and gig after that (neither of which he could go to), and then we disbanded.

So Alex has still had my amp since then, and I’ve been meaning to invite him back so we can jam and catch up. Of course, I also want my amp back, especially because three years ago, during the few months when I had both amps, my dad rigged up some cables so that I could plug my guitar into both amps at the same time. Can you say awesome? I know you can!

Not only that, but I heard Alex play the guitar on the phone last year, and he’s phenomenal. I still can’t believe it. Alex, who always seemed to take to music like a duck takes to fire, is now rippin’ it up better than I am (which, truthfully, isn’t saying much). This is something that needs to be recorded for the ages — so it’s a good thing I now have a digital recorder.

So that’s the plan, man. Alex is going to come over. I’ve also invited Sean, my good buddy who I haven’t jammed with since the band broke up. Actually, maybe I have. I can’t remember. But anyway, it’s always good to have him, especially now that he has a Gibson SG to show off. He got it a few months ago, and I haven’t seen it yet. Funny, he was always the Fender guy and I was the Gibson guy. Well, he’s had his trusty Squier Strat for a million years, and I have a Les Paul knockoff and an Epiphone hollow body.

It should be fun. Hopefully they’ll both be able to come. If not, I don’t know what I’ll do. But I do know what I won’t do. See, I cleaned my room some more a few days ago. Specifically, I got everything off the floor. You may be wondering why I would put things on the floor in the first place. I got into the habit of doing that because I actually had no other place to put stuff. Since I’ve thrown away (and recycled) a lot of stuff, that should no longer be a problem.

Here’s another idea that I wish I’d had: The Most Famous People on the Internet. Whoever came up with this has already made $161 selling nothing.

And you thought frivolous lawsuits were a recent phenomenon. In 1893, the US Supreme Court had to decide whether a tomato was a fruit or a vegetable for the purposes of taxation. Even though it’s technically a fruit, the court ruled that it is legally a vegetable because it is commonly deemed as such.

One year ago: “But why don’t the hot chicks go for Esperanto?”
Two years ago: “I don’t know what that would make them… super-dee-dupercentenarians, maybe?”

¿Qué es Dvorak?

Yesterday this e-mail rolled into my now squeaky clean inbox.

Yes! The Dvorak Keyboard and You has been updated relatively recently, if only slightly. (See the page for information on the Dvorak keyboard.) I guess that does boost its reliability in the eyes of readers, especially because many Dvorak-related sites are old and derelict. Anyway, I replied thus:

If nobody out there in Internet-land can recommend a good Spanish Dvorak tutor, I figure I could generate lists of words and things like that. After thinking about it for a second, I’ve realized how it could be done. Plus, it would give me a good opportunity to exercise my Visual Basic prowess (heh, that’s a good one) during a time when I’ve been immersing myself in JavaScript. If we go through with this, we could even post the tutorial on the web for any other Spanish speakers who want to use Dvorak(esque) layouts.

“What happens when an English phrase is translated (by computer) back and forth between 5 different languages?” So ponders Carl Tashian, the creator of Lost in Translation, an exercise in machine translation gone wrong. Just feed it some text and watch as it gets translated back and forth between various languages. Here’s how it mangles this paragraph.

On a more comprehensible note, Tashian is related to Barry Tashian, a member of The Remains, a band that opened for The Beatles during their 1966 American tour, which was their final tour. Way cool.

How much do you know about major world religions, belief systems, and philosophies? Find out by reading the Big Religion Chart.

By the way, totally check out One Day in the Desert: Special Director’s Cut and leave some love on its Google Video page.

One year ago: “This book has once again confirmed my suspicion that I’m a horrifyingly slow reader.”
Two years ago: “Well, it’s probably all right because their legal department must have given it some thought!”

Some site stuff

Remember that site flipacoin.net? The oldest part of The World of Stuff (actually predating TWoS itself) has been pretty much neglected for the past two or three or four years. I did not touch it at all for nearly two years. Then, last month, I gave the main page a little facelift because the site’s design rendered horribly in Firefox. (The last time I had done anything on the site, I was using IE.) I also converted all the GIFs on the site to PNGs, saving me about 15% of the storage space.

Last month I also cleaned out my inbox, but several e-mails remained: e-mails going back to 2003 containing scans of coins for me to use on the site. I ignored them… until now. With a desire to have an empty inbox for the first time in years, I went through the e-mails, picked out the images that were of sufficiently high quality, and added them to the site. Now, if I’m counting correctly, flipacoin.net has 90 coins from 28 countries. The twelve coins I added today are the first to be added to the site since March 2003. March of 2003! Back then, I was 13 years old and in eighth grade. Even more mind-boggling is that there was no World of Stuff yet. Well, there was, but I was still working on it.

Either way, that’s a really long time to go without updating a web site. So I’m glad that I’ve updated flipacoin.net even though nobody seems to give a care about it one way or the other. If there’s any winner here, it’s me because I now have a spotless inbox.

Since downloading the Trackback Validator plugin for WordPress recently, I’ve noticed that it’s helped to control my trackback spam problem. After writing a Greasemonkey user script to better display the details it gives for the last 100 trackbacks, I could see how much of a problem it really is/was. Apparently I’m getting over 100 spam trackbacks every day, but hardly any of them get past the blacklist I’ve built up over time. Trackback Validator succeeds in catching the few that make it past the blacklist, which scans each comment and trackback for telltale keywords. It’s good to know that I’m in control of my blog instead of spammers.

A Photoshop tutorial: How to Make Digital Photos Look Like Lomo Photography. It’s a neat effect.

Barcodepedia is a database of barcodes. Have a webcam? You can scan a barcode that way to get information about the product. I don’t really see the point, and the scanner sometimes doesn’t work, but I guess it’s cool nonetheless. Maybe it’s just that my webcam is kind of bad.

Hey, by the way, check out One Day in the Desert: Special Director’s Cut!

One year ago: “For this post, I’m going to try something different.”
Two years ago: “Hey Jules, just wanted to let you know that you should beware tomorrow.”

One Day in the Desert: Special Director’s Cut

Remember last year when I went on a 24-hour fast with my church’s youth group and made a video of it? And remember earlier this year when I said that I would re-release it? Well, One Day in the Desert is back with a lot of new commentary and over 12 seconds of deleted footage. That’s right! 12.66 seconds, to be exact!

I shot the commentary scenes and put the whole thing together back in February, but it sat on the shelf because I couldn’t come up with a snappy new audio/visual logo for The World of Stuff. Stupid reason, huh? But the other day, when I was bored, I threw some old video, images, and sounds together to create a nice visual identity that’s independent of the site’s design. But who cares about that? Let’s talk about the video.

I knew I couldn’t host it on my site, because that’s crazy. For the original version of the video, that’s what I had to do, but since then, Google Video and YouTube have become popular. I considered uploading the video to YouTube, but I decided to go with my original choice of Google Video. Why? It’s simple. YouTube has size and length restrictions, and Google Video doesn’t. At over 10 minutes (11:16, to be exact), the video would have been too long to upload to YouTube from a free account.

Anyway, I don’t have much more to say than that. I will mention that going for over 24 hours without eating was quite an interesting experience, and it wasn’t as bad as I thought. (That is, I didn’t become rabid or pass out or anything, like I thought I would.) But you can see how the whole thing turned out by turning up your sound and watching One Day in the Desert: Special Director’s Cut!

If the new video goes over well, maybe I’ll go into future video endeavors. After all, now I have Google Video and a cool TWoS logo.

The Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, held in 1968-1969, was the first solo, non-stop, round-the-world yacht race, and it makes for a fascinating tale. One entrant had no sailing experience, one tried to cheat, one committed suicide, and one circumnavigated the globe (and then some) without accepting the prize. Ultimately, there was one winner.

How do you wrap your mind around the idea that there are 10 dimensions when most of us have a hard time grasping that there are at least four (length, width, depth, and time). Check out Imagining the Tenth Dimension to get an idea of how it all works out. Truly interesting.

One year ago: “It’s nice to know that I still get noticed.”
Two years ago: “It’s pretty creepy sitting on the quiet edge of two worlds.”

If you ever get killed by monster-aliens, please forgive me for standing by

My ongoing quest to have lucid dreams has been rather sad recently. During the first month or so, I could recall many of my dreams very well, which helps when you want to know whether you were able to realize you were in a dream while you were in it. But over the past couple of weeks, my dream recall has been hit-or-miss. That’s why I was pleased this morning to awake from another slightly lucid dream. Actually, I was so pleased about how late I had slept in that I proceeded to make myself breakfast. Then I remembered that I had had a dream, and that I should write it down. Here’s what I wrote.

It’s kind of funny how aliens killing my friends didn’t raise a red flag, but seeing a weird banknote did. That’s the geeky notaphilist in me. Speaking of which, the “Relief” part of the series designation meant that the effect of the intaglio printing produced a greater amount of relief than normal. I don’t know how I jumped to that assumption, though, because such bills don’t exist. The “22TT” part probably comes from the practice of appending a letter to a series year to indicate a minor change to a bill’s design. For example, Series 1935H bills were printed in 1963. This is still done, but the definition of “minor” has changed.

Anyway, those reality checks really help to determine whether you’re dreaming. Doing them a few times a day when you’re awake really does lead you to do them in dreams. Having a few lucid dreams, even if you don’t have much control over them, is a great feeling. I hope I can reach a higher level of lucidity and control soon. Luckily, it’s easy to practice. All you really have to do is write down your dreams, do some quick reality checks throughout the day, and sleep.

One great thing about dreaming is that it can give you the kind of inspiration that leads you to compose a hit song, create a revolutionary invention, write a timeless novel, or win the Nobel Prize. Here are twelve dreams with well-known consequences.

Here are some interesting facts about commonly used products. Maybe some of them are even true!

One year ago: “It’s about a six-hour drive to the nearest hill.”
Three years ago: “The World of Stuff has moved to its own domain name, and a new server to boot!”

The programming diaries

Whoowee. There’s nothing like a little late night programming to get the juices flowing. Well, not really. Yesterday after uploading my fourth Greasemonkey user script to userscripts.org, I decided it would be a good idea to make my own little namespace for them all. So I’ve created a Greasemonkey page that has links to the scripts and an explanation of what Greasemonkey and user scripts are.

All the scripts I’ve successfully written are really simple. But last night, I got an idea for another one that would take some effort. It would be for MySpace, and it would hide links to bulletins posted by certain friends. I spent two and a half hours working on it. After the first hour or so I got it working on the main home page, or so I thought, but I spent the rest of the time trying to get it to work in the expanded list of bulletins. I learned how to use JavaScript to remove rows from a table, but I couldn’t remove the right rows. I know it sounds so simple, but it wasn’t… for me. The script would remove the first bulletin successfully, but after that it might leave some that it was supposed to get rid of or vice versa. See, it would count which row the bulletin was in and then remove that row. But after that, the table would have a different number of rows, so if it kept chugging along, the numbers would be all out of whack. I tried everything I could think of to get the counter not to increment after removing a row, but the result was the same.

So, after two and a half hours, it was almost 1:30 in the morning, so I decided to hit the hay. I hadn’t given up, though. I woke up a little after 7:30, probably because it was hot and bright and noisy and I was uncomfortable in bed — not to mention that I had had unsettling dreams about my malfunctioning script. Even after a frustrating session of programming and so little sleep, I thought I could continue. I went back to the computer, which had hit a snag while shutting down and was still on. After spending some time trying different ways to fix the problem, I gave up. Then, because I was so tired, I tried to take a nap, but I never can, so I decided to tackle my problem from the opposite direction by guzzling a can of soda. Maybe I’ll read this in a few months and get inspired to give the script another whack. After all, it is potentially useful. Another idea I had was to filter bulletins with certain words in their titles. That would be just as much work, if not more.

Anyway, there’s a lesson to be learned here, and that lesson is this: if you try to do something, try really hard until you have no choice but to give up.

Gabbly is a pretty cool site that allows you to have a live chat with other people who are viewing any web page. Go to the site to see what I mean.

How much do you know about atheism and atheists? This YouTube video, “Atheist,” challenges the popular notion that atheists are horrible people. I recommend that everyone watch it.

One year ago: “I don’t know what beer tastes like.”
Two years ago: “In my June 22 post, I talked about the Linux operating system and listed four reasons why I might someday switch to it.”

A play

Yesterday I went to see my friend Reid star in a production of The Pirates of Penzance. I’d been to that particular theater before to see him in West Side Story. The venue was really small, so it didn’t matter that I sat all the way in the back. I could see and hear just fine.

Before it started, I looked through the program to see which part Reid played, and I was surprised to see a few other familiar names. Alexandra, a classmate from my AP European History class last year, had a bit part. (We had chatted online and she had told me that she was interested in theater.) Reid’s mom also had a role. It turned out that their annual summer production includes not only teenage-types, but also adults and small children. Yes, there were tiny kids in pirate costumes and Victorian dresses. How cute. Yeah, whatever.

Anyway, the play was a rollicking good time. It was funny, and the songs were good. After the show, we saw Reid, who has gotten even taller since I last saw him. I felt really short next to him, and I’m fairly tall myself. I hope I can go and see him in his next play, whatever it may be. And hopefully it’ll be a musical like this one. After all, he’s got talent.

The new chapter in the War on Trackback Spam is filled with hope. Last time, if you’ll recall, I downloaded a plugin that was supposed to limit access to wp-trackback.php, thereby stopping trackback spam before it starts. Unfortunately, it just didn’t work. So recently I tried out the Rice University Computer Security Lab’s Trackback Validator plugin. The concept behind it is simple; so simple, in fact, that I’ll just copy what the site says.

There’s only one problem with this plugin. If a trackback manages to get past WordPress’s blacklist, you will get a notification saying it has been posted successfully, even if it has been marked as spam by Trackback Validator. So you can’t rely on the notification e-mail to determine whether a trackback has been flagged as spam; you actually have to go to your site and check. Since this can get really annoying, especially if you don’t have a very comprehensive blacklist, I downloaded a plugin that automatically puts trackbacks not marked as spam into the moderation queue. That way, even if a spam trackback gets past the blacklist and Trackback Validator, it’ll still be subject to my own personal approval. This leaves me one step ahead of the spammers.

Atoms are crazy things. Though it’s hard to imagine, they’re mostly empty space. And since everything is made up of atoms, then most of everything is empty space. Here’s a scale model of a hydrogen atom. When the electron is the size of a pixel, the distance between it and the nucleus is 50 million pixels. (IE 6 doesn’t render the distance between them properly, but Firefox does.)

There are always a lot of movies being made, and for various reasons, some of them never get finished. Read about the Top 10 Unfinished Movies of All Time.

One year ago: “Come on, who hasn’t done that?”
Two years ago: “Well, I finally figured out how to do them, like, two days ago.”

I am the very model of a modern… oh, forget it

My birthday was yesterday, and it was good. I woke up to find two balloons in the dining room, where the table was half-set for dinner. Later, when dinnertime rolled around, my grandparents came over, and we feasted on pasta, bread, sausage, and salad. For dessert we had an ice cream cake from Cold Stone Creamery. It had coffee-flavored ice cream, and I guess cake, and some dark chocolate stuff, and Heath bars on top. Yes, there is still a lot left if you want to come over and have some.

Not counting the value of the dinner and the concert, I got an amazing amount of money for my birthday. I also got gift cards for Starbucks from my parents and for FYE from Katherine. Thank you, everybody. So what am I going to do with the money? Put it in the bank, of course. I don’t really have much I could spend it on, so why not give it a bit of a guard against inflation and invest in the future? As for the gift cards, I already have tons of unused ones from birthdays past, so I hope to actually get some use out of them now that I remember that I have them.

Yesterday Casey told me that my friend Reid was going to be in a performance of The Pirates of Penzance. I haven’t seen either of them much since back in October, and it’s nice to see Reid doing what he loves the most, so I’m going to go and see the play. I believe my sister was invited too, but she doesn’t really get along with Casey anymore. I have nothing personal against her, and it’s really more about seeing Reid on the stage, so I’ll go. I think we’re going to be joined by Michael, so that should be cool.

Ah yes. I remember when my sister and I would go to Reid’s house and we would make up and record ridiculous movies. It started with “Dumb Wars,” a parody of Star Wars. We had to be in third grade or something, and one day after school a bunch of us little somethingth-graders were acting out this whole Star Wars parody. The next day a bunch of us decided to get together and act it out before the video camera. Others followed, including a magic act, a tribute to the ’70s, and the campy “Pigzilla.”

A few years later, Reid was in an acting company for kids. We even made a few class field trips out of his plays. He was like the star of junior high… I guess. Then, after eighth grade, he went to an art school to study acting, and the last I talked to him, he was having a blast there. How cool is that? It’s been fun to look back and see his transformation into a real live actor. I hope he pursues his dream further and wins an Oscar or something. Now I’m really starting to sound like some teacher signing a kid’s yearbook, so let’s just cut to the links.

Here’s how the constitution of the Confederate States compared to that of the United States. Speaking of which, one blogger out there echoes my feelings by asking why the heck the Confederate flag is such an accessory, and in New Jersey, no less.

I guarantee this is the weirdest thing you’ll see today (at least on YouTube, anyway): sock puppets speaking Esperanto. For what it’s worth, their pronunciation is good and their grammar is okay.

One year ago: “Now figure out this English-language colloquialism translated into Esperanto: ‘Mi ne havas vivon.’”

Go me, it’s my birthday…

Today is my birthday (andmysister’sbirthdaybecausewe’retwins). I am now a spry young 17. I don’t really feel older, although I thought I might. It just hasn’t hit me yet, I guess.

After all, look where I am. Career goals? Undecided. College? Undecided, but leaning toward places that will give me a free ride. Job? None. I could try to get one if I wanted to, now that I have ID to prove that I exist, and if the workplace were close enough to my house, I wouldn’t need a ride there. But there’s still one roadblock: I am the laziest human being alive. But should I worry? There’s a dichotomy of opinions here. Maybe I should enjoy the last summer I’ll have before having to grow up, or maybe I should gain valuable job experience that will benefit me later. Who knows?

Getting off that subject, I recently learned more about my (our) genesis, even though I’ve had enough depressing information as it is. Nobody plans to have twins, after all, so it’s kind of a downer to think about that. I knew I was (we were) born by C-section, which is how most twins seem to be born, except if they’re on a TV show. What I didn’t know was that we were scheduled to be born. So the moments preceding my (our) birth were not heralded by “Oh my God, my water broke,” but rather, “How does Thursday morning at 9 sound?” Oh well. I guess it doesn’t really matter, as long as you’re alive when you come out. Maybe I just watch too much TV. Damn media.

Whatever. Happy birthday to me. I might as well enjoy it!

How to Boycott the Music Industry and Still Enjoy Music. I didn’t think it was possible. In fact, just after swearing off the RIAA, I bought music for the first time in years. I thought the only way to enjoy music while boycotting Big Music was to support independent groups, none of which I like very much. But the list suggests something that never occurred to me: buying used music.

Here’s a long explanation of why .999… = 1. On the same blog: a divisibility test for 7, 11, etc.! All right!

One year ago: “Well, that’s enough self-deprecating for one day.”
Two years ago: “Anyway, being 15 makes me feel old.”

Last days 16

Yesterday, my sister and I had our birthday dinner at Macaroni Grill, an Italian restaurant. Four of the six people I invited could make it — a pretty good turnout for the summer, but I didn’t invite people who I knew would be out of town. My sister’s friends have all known each other for centuries, so as we were waiting at the front of the restaurant, they all chatted up a storm. I thought it would be awkward for my friends because I wasn’t sure how well they all knew each other, even though they all go to my school. It turns out that they all did know each other, so that was good.

I got cards from almost everyone, I think. I even got a few actual gifts, both of which came with homemade cards. Nick and Mark brought a gift in a black garbage bag. I was afraid that it was one of Mark’s trademark grab-bag gifts (which he makes by putting anything he can find into a bag), but they assured me that it was something they had made in their engineering class at FAU. Michelle handed me a large, square, sort of flat gift wrapped in a brown paper package tied up with string. It felt like a coffee table book, but she said it wasn’t, and I was stumped.

We sat down to eat at a large table or two in the back of the restaurant. My friends promptly took to coloring on the large sheets of paper that cover the tables. Gilbert used it to give me a lesson in binary and how it relates to ASCII. We got food, and it was good, as usual. On my side of the table, the conversation was lively and interesting until everybody got to talking about Star Wars. I didn’t realize how much people can talk about Star Wars. People can talk about Star Wars a great deal.

Of course, the meal winded down with the customary dessert with a candle on top. They had some small cakes that were pretty good. And of course, I was curious to see what my presents were. The one from Nick and Mark was a bridge made out of newspaper and tape. The one from Michelle was some LPs by ELO, Stevie Wonder, Johnny Winter, Genesis, and others. I’m going to give those a listen when I have the chance. (The turntable is right next to the TV, and I never want to get in the way of anyone’s TV watching.) After some more conversation, people left, and we all went home.

Back when my sister and I had our large “dance” parties, I would analyze my birthday cards and find the Jordon-to-Jordan ratio to be consistently around 1:1. (I leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine which spelling is correct.) Looking at the cards, I was surprised to see that most of them had spelled my name right. I guess it just goes to show that your real friends are the ones who know how to spell your name. (By the way, this year’s award for the most creative spelling of my name goes to Mark, with “Jardín.” The award for the best card goes to Nick, with a graduation card for a granddaughter.)

Tomorrow is my real birthday. I’ll be turning 17, which makes me the young one among most of my friends. But still, I feel like I’m getting really old. I don’t want to be 17; there’s too much pressure! (Note to myself when I read this in ten to twenty years: Shut up! You don’t remember what it’s like!)

Luckily, I’ve never had AOL, but it’s commonly known that canceling your account with them is a nightmare. So when some guy decided to cancel his rarely-used account, he was wise enough to record the phone conversation. Listen in horror as the customer support guy tries everything he can to talk him out of canceling the account.

These days most radio stations stream their broadcasts on the Internet. Live-Radio.net is a large, searchable database of radio streams from around the world. Now it’s easier than ever to find interesting radio stations that you can listen to anywhere.

One year ago: “Twenty cool points to Greasemonkey.”
Two years ago: “I’ll probably play around some more tonight.”