The World of Stuff .com

Dear Future Generations: We like Tech-no-lo-gy™…

Last week, on the first day of school, I sought to get out of my Spanish class next semester in favor of being a “tech kid” who goes around and helps teachers with their computers. This morning I got called down to have my schedule changed. I was expecting to get a hard time for trying to get out of what I think is an AP class, but the lady in the guidance office didn’t seem to care about that. She made the change without any fuss, and that was that. On the first day of the next semester, which I believe is January 9, I have to report to guidance, perhaps for a briefing.

My school is really weird, and I end up having to explain their weird policies here a million times because they’re unlike those of most schools. One thing my school does differently is that they send the yearbook to the presses during the summer. That means that it can be updated to reflect changes in students and faculty, and better yet, it covers end-of-the-year things such as spring sports, prom, and graduation. I don’t know how many schools do that, but I’d never heard of it before, so I thought it would be an important fact to know before you read about what else happened today.

As you might have guessed, I got my copy of last year’s yearbook today. I had found out yesterday that they had come in, so today I brought the receipt I had gotten back in February after shelling out more money than I care to talk about. The cover of the yearbook was pretty disappointing, I think. Three years ago, the cover was black. Two years ago, it was gray. Now, last year’s yearbook is mostly black with some gray.

Luckily, there’s a world of color inside; there are more color pages than ever this year, which is pretty cool. I mean, you don’t know what you’re missing if your yearbook is in black and white. Actually, you probably do know that you’re missing colors. On one of the first pages (which is in color), there’s a photo from an outdoor pep rally. I didn’t notice it until TJ pointed it out to me, but Luke and I are visible in the picture. (My face is partly obscured by someone else’s head.) I thought it was strange that a camera captured us sitting there right then because it wasn’t long before we meandered over to where the teachers were sitting so that we could talk to Mr. Miller.

Since the school offers just about every sport imaginable, a great deal of the pages covered sports: boys’ and girls’, varsity and junior varsity, blah blah blah. Well, I’m sure I would care if I were on the boys’ JV bowling team or something, but I’m not. I did find my picture rather easily among the listings for the juniors, though. And as I was looking in the back, I remembered that I had been invited to be in the Programming Club photo by virtue of being in one of the programming classes. Indeed, I was there, and indeed, they spelled my name wrong. I just had to see whether they spelled my name correctly with my picture. Luckily, they did.

I swear, when/if I have kids, I’m totally giving them first names that people know how to spell. Strangely, very few people have trouble spelling my tongue-twisting Slavic surname. I think it’s because they have to ask how to spell or pronounce it, but when I tell them my first name is “Jordon,” they think they already know how to spell it. People might see my name written as “Jordon,” but it usually doesn’t permeate their brains, and they end up spelling it as “Jordan” (or perhaps “Jorden” if they can’t even misspell my name right). I’ll have to make a habit of introducing myself as “Jordon with an ‘O.’” That should make me stand out in people’s minds, at least.

Oh right, the yearbook. I don’t like the overall look of it. It suffers a problem that I’ve started to see even in professional books: bad JPG compression. The table of contents page is apparently a heavily compressed JPG (or JPEG, if you like), and some of the larger photos suffer what is probably several generations of compression. If the people who design the yearbook want the photos and graphics to look good on the page, they should use a form of lossless compression like, I don’t know, PNG? Maybe? Also: a lot of pages are ugly and hard to read because the yearbook staff apparently adopted a “look at what we can do on the computer” approach to design.

My criticisms notwithstanding, the yearbook is supposed to serve as a record of the year, so future generations will be fully aware that we in the year 2006 didn’t know how to make yearbooks that weren’t tacky.

How to Get Six-Pack Abs. I’ll, uh, file that away for later, just in case I ever care about exercising sometime. Hey, it could happen.

One year ago: “But my biggest triumph would be to have it banned on the school computers, an honor that this site has not even achieved.”
Two years ago: “In fact, the seven-man outfit (including a maraca player!) has just cut a record. Where are they headed next?”
Three years ago: “What a shame that a show so good has to be so short-lived.”