Field trip

Note: This is definitely not an attempt to squeeze in some posts at the end of the month to avoid what would otherwise be a 43-month low. Nope. Totally not one of those.

On an unrelated note, why does February have to be so short?

To recap: This week, the 9th-, 10th-, and 11th-graders have been taking the FCAT in the mornings, disrupting the normal class schedule. There’s no real reason for 12th-graders to even show up in the mornings, but they’ve been making us do stuff to keep us busy. Those 12th-graders who showed up on Monday and Tuesday mornings would get to go on a free trip to (as the field trip form put it) “Aetna Rx plant and local mall.” Fun? Well, it would be better than sitting at school, and I was eligible to go, so…

Well, the form said that we would leave at 7:30, but apparently there was a change of plans. When 7:30 rolled around, we went to the auditorium for the staff members to judge our presentations that they made us do on Monday while the other kids were testing. That made me nervous. My group’s presentation was bad. Like, really bad. As in, kind of insulting to the school and, overall, a poor effort. The best presentation would be shown to incoming freshmen to introduce them to the school, but our presentation didn’t even really try to tell new freshmen what they need to know. In fact, it was mostly filler.

I enjoyed watching other people’s presentations, which were mainly slide shows and videos. Many of them were insanely funny because they made fun of the teachers. One presentation that specifically warned of the Health teacher and urged new students to take Health online instead elicited a wild applause from the audience. (Taking Health online was the smartest thing I ever did.) Another included headshots of teachers that were humorously defaced with MS Paint. A science teacher was given a white moustache and hair like Albert Einstein; another science teacher was saying “Touch my neutrons”; a math teacher was surrounded by “2 + 2 = 9″ and “1/2 = 4/5″; an administrator was given the Mr. T look and, of course, pitied the fool. It’s always funny when students make fun of teachers. It’s not always right, but it’s always funny.

My group’s presentation was last. It was in Flash, so I wasn’t sure if it would work right. It didn’t. The music didn’t play. The background was white instead of black, obscuring some information. The videos we included at the end as filler didn’t play. I was very relieved. I would rather have a confusing presentation than one that the administrators didn’t like.

Then it was time for the field trip. But we were going to have to go in shifts, and guess whose group had to wait 40 extra minutes before leaving? That’s right: mine. But we were finally on our way to what turned out to be a mail-order pharmacy run by an insurance company. The purpose of the field trip was to give us information about careers? We toured the facility, and it was very much like an assembly line for filling prescriptions. In fact, that wasn’t what it was like; it’s what it was. There were lots of conveyor belts and things. I couldn’t imagine working in a place like that. I guess I’d feel more comfortable on the white-collar side, which we saw briefly. Also, the whole place smelled really bad, except for the actual assembly line, where it was all white and sterile.

Then it was time to go to a “local mall” for lunch. They wouldn’t say which mall it was, which made me certain that it was the outdoor Pompano Citi Centre (formerly the Pompano Square Mall). If we had known we were going to the Pompano Mall, most of us probably wouldn’t have gone on the trip. But we were there, and due to that two-and-a-half-hour delay for watching presentations and doing nothing, we had about a half an hour to buy lunch before having to go back to school. Since I was sure we were going to the Pompano Mall, I was set on going to Pollo Tropical. I did, and the food was amazing as usual. Then we had to go back to school, which wasn’t so amazing.

“Thing” is a very common word. Where did it come from? I’m glad you asked. The word once meant “assembly” in Scandinavian languages and is still used in the names of parliaments in the region. For example, you have the Law Thing, the Land Thing, the General Thing, the Great Thing, the People’s Thing… all kinds of things.

Here are some Truly Awful Star Wars Collectables. Who would have bought this stuff?

The view from the top

Since August, I’ve been keeping access logs for this site so I can have an archive of detailed statistics about browser usage, referers, and so forth. (For those with privacy concerns, consider that this is a standard procedure on most, if not all, major web sites.) I think it’s interesting to see that occasionally, someone will visit my site using, say, Windows 3.1.

Browser usage is probably the most interesting statistics. Over the past few months, almost exactly two-thirds of hits to my site have been from Internet Explorer (66.7% this month), while Firefox has claimed just over a quarter (25.8%). Considering that Firefox’s usage share is about twice the Internet-wide average, I must conclude that visitors to my web site are approximately twice as awesome as the average Internet user. The little blips on the browser radar are Safari (1.9%), Opera (1.9%, trailing very closely behind), unknown browsers (1.6%), Mozilla (1.0%), Netscape (0.3%), Konqueror (0.1%), and Camino (0.1%). Browsers with a share of less than 0.1% include Epiphany, K-Meleon, Galeon, and even Lynx.

The operating system stats are also interesting. This month, 91.9% of hits have come from Windows users. Windows XP alone accounts for 83.8% of the total. Only 0.9% are using Windows Vista. Less than 0.1% are using Windows 95. Only 3.1% of visitors are using Mac OS, a figure that I expected would be a little higher. Visitors using Linux account for 2.3% of the total. Among the Linux distributions that are recognized by my log file analyzer, Ubuntu comes out on top (as it did even before I switched to it). Trailing far behind are (in descending order) SUSE, Red Hat, Fedora, Debian, and Centos. Other OSes have less than 0.1% share. They include Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, OS/2, WebTV, Irix, BeOS, and — get this — the Sony PSP.

This month, the most popular pages on the site are:

1. Ultimate Cool Characters (13,816 hits)
2. This helpful resource for our e-mail-harvesting friends (3,089 hits)
3. The Dvorak Keyboard and You (2,733 hits)
4. The main page (1,280 hits)
5. November 2003 archives (1,022 hits, probably due to this image)
6. “Where’s My Trailer?” (987 hits, the biggest spam magnet for some unknown reason)
7. “Really Bad Rita” (647 hits, another big magnet)
8. Fake Cyrillic Generator (645 hits)
9. “Tornado Waste of Time” (610 hits; why do these attract so much comment spam?)
10. “Where’s My Trailer Again?” (535 hits)

So I didn’t get voted Most Likely to Succeed (or any other honor, for that matter) by my class, but I forgot that I still have the distinction of being on the Top 10 page on the yearbook, where they list the top 10 seniors by class rank. I’ve pretty much been consistently ranked #3 in the class, so last week, I got pulled out of class quickly to have my picture taken by a couple of students who were working on the yearbook. Their design for the page is to have #4-10 standing around the letters in “SUCCESS,” with #1-3 looking down on them, having “the view from the top.” So for this picture, all they had me do was look down and point, and that was that. It was a pleasant reminder that I am on the top… in terms of GPA, anyway.

Find out 10 Shopping Tricks That Stores Hate.

In a similar vein: 12 Simple Ways to Save Money on Utilities.

6,500,000,000 vs. 1

Today was another exciting day of FCAT testing. Since we seniors don’t have to take the FCAT, we get to do nothing, except that the school doesn’t like that, so they’re trying to keep us busy during the mornings while some of the other students are testing. Today we were supposed to go to the auditorum for a trivia game in the style of “1 vs. 100,” a show I’d never heard of until last week.

We went into the auditorum early, and there was a representative from a technical school there to talk about the future and stuff. (Technology is always changing, you guys. In the future, we’ll all use technology.) I thought that maybe we had been duped into listening to a college presentation. It seems like I’ve heard hundreds over the past few years, the next most recent one being a few weeks ago in Mr. Mumtaz’s class (which I’m in twice a day — fun). They get really tiring after a while. This lady didn’t even talk about the college. She just went through a PowerPoint presentation about how technology is the future.

After that, we were split into groups to play 1 vs. 100 (actually, since this was about half of a senior class, it was 1 vs. 25). There were enough people in the auditorium that few people noticed that I didn’t get up to play even though my group was called. I didn’t feel like it, and gift cards and snacks weren’t good enough prizes to sway me. My stock excuse, in case I got caught, was that I had a headache. After a while, I did get one because it was so boring watching people get mostly easy trivia questions wrong, and the hosts (assistant-principal-types) were talking really close to the microphone. Eventually, I got restless.

Next, they kept us in the auditorium for a senior meeting. One of the big points of discussion was that some people are missing too many minutes of school. Not days. They count by minutes now. 2,400 minutes in 9 weeks (or is it 18 weeks? I don’t remember) is all they’ll tolerate, it seems. If you miss 2,510 minutes, you can’t go to Grad Bash (Universal Studios’ version of Grad Nite), and if you paid for it already, they’ll keep the money anyway. 2,620 minutes, and you can’t go to prom. If you miss 2,730 minutes of school, you can’t go to the graduation ceremony (although they’ll still give you your real diploma along with everyone else).

I got my guitar back yesterday. We took it in last Monday, and they actually gave the call saying it was fixed on Friday, right when they were closing for the weekend. So I had to wait all weekend for the guitar, but that was okay. I was just glad that it was fixed. Not only did it produce sound again, but it was also restrung and given a good cleaning up that it’s never had before. It looks and sounds like new. I had some fun playing it last night.

Really creepy: Food Network Subliminal Advertising. I heard on the news that the network has since apologized for this and said it was an error.

Here are twin galleries of photos. One set was taken in various locations around San Jose, California, in 1975, and the other set was taken of the same locations in 2006. It’s interesting to see them side by side.

Walking robots

Today was an FCAT day, so the school has begun assigning busy work for seniors who really don’t need to show up to school at all until the afternoon. Today’s assignment was to make a presentation for incoming freshmen introducing them to good old PBHS. As you may recall, we were given the choice between making a movie file with iMovie or Windows Movie Maker, making a slide show in PowerPoint, or making a “podcast” with a microphone and a computer. I think they grouped everybody by what they chose because maybe somebody wanted to do an iMovie and they would have been put in a class that didn’t have Macs. I don’t know.

But anyway, the school seems to be serious about this. They gave us a rubric with what they’re expecting. It was asking for a lot; in order to score the big points, you had to use lots of stupid flashy stuff (colors, text effects, crazy transitions, flashing lights, etc.) but in a tasteful, reserved way. That’s kind of a contradiction in itself. Another part of the rubric would score how well we adhered to “copyright guidelines” in our presentations. In other words, we would have to be good, upstanding young citizens and respect the intellectual property rights of our dear corporate America. I don’t think most teenagers would know if they were breaking copyright law in their little presentation. Even if they weren’t that ignorant, they wouldn’t care anyway. In the whole room, I didn’t see a single presentation that didn’t have some form of copyright infringement.

Mr. Mumtaz, whose room we were in, told us to do our projects in groups, so I teamed up with Gilbert and a goth girl who wants to kill everyone. Since Flash is Gilbert’s area of expertise, we made our presentation as a Flash movie. I had some snarky ideas for deliberately breaking the guidelines set down by the rubric. But the overall message was the same as many of the presentations that I happened to see other people working on. You’ve got to do well on the FCAT (though they’ll give you busy work when you’re a senior) in order for the school to continue having Fridays off (which the county doesn’t like) and maintain its high rank in the state (if only we could beat the top 12 schools…). After that, there were some videos of the sun rotating and robots moving around. I think we’ll have to present these videos on Wednesday, and they’re going to be (gulp) graded. I wonder what class they’ll count for.

Many people who have used Windows Vista say it’s far from perfect. Here are the Five Sins of Vista (according to one reviewer).

Here are the secrets to choosing the right sunglasses for your face. (I assume the rules apply to regular glasses also.) I’ve been told I have a diamond-shaped face, so I would look best with oval-shaped glasses.

They’re desperate

Next week is FCAT week. This is our school’s chance to prove, once again, that we’re one of the best in the state. The school’s reputation is riding on the performance of the 9th-, 10th-, and 11th-graders on this test, and there’s apparently a lot at stake. This afternoon, the principal, who is new this year, made a special announcement on the school’s TV system about doing well on the FCAT. He seemed very anxious about it, which is a departure from his usual demeanor. He’s probably nervous because if the school’s scores fall, everyone’s going to blame the new principal — him.

What about us 12th-graders? In the past, while the other students have been taking the FCAT, seniors have been herded into classrooms and left to pass the time (with the supervision, of course, of a teacher reading a book or doing a crossword puzzle). The obvious course of action, then, for non-test-takers would be to skip school in the mornings, arriving on time for classes to really start later in the day. But you know, the school administration doesn’t like that because… well, they’re not skipping class, but they are skipping school even though they’re coming back for their actual classes… but… they’re still skipping, and they just shouldn’t do it, okay? So the obvious course of action for the administration is to make the seniors actually want to go to school. Hence what they’ve come up with for this year.

I can’t even begin to describe how stupid their plan is. Well, maybe I think it’s stupid because everyone else has said it’s stupid. But they’re trying to engage the seniors during the three mornings of testing rather than leaving them to their own devices. Activities will allegedly include watching a movie and making a presentation for incoming freshmen about what to expect at our fair school. They were actually asking people today whether they would want to use a PowerPoint presentation, a movie file, or a podcast. (Psst — hey, guys. A podcast is when you say stuff into a microphone and maybe add some music and put it on the Internet for people to download. Why not just call it an audio recording?) But yeah. crazy. And if we go on Monday and Tuesday, they’ll take us on a field trip to the mall (probably a shopping center) on Wednesday and we can buy our lunch?

That is pretty ridiculous, and it seems that the school’s attempt to encourage attendance during those meaningless mornings is actually doing the opposite. I’ve heard from lots of people who say that they’re not going to go to school during those days. Personally, I’m not keen on missing school for any reason (I hate having the feeling that I’ve missed something, and I’ve achieved almost four years of perfect attendance), but suffice it to say that I’m looking forward to the weekend.

People have discussed volumes about what makes a good password, but here’s a simple method for making your own passwords hard to guess and easy to remember. If that’s not your thing, go for a Strong Password Generator.

You can see some photographic firsts and antique oddities by reading about The Wonderful World of Early Photography.

Beware the sweater

My guitar is broken. The good one. Well, the better one, anyway. It’s an Epiphone Dot that I got about four years ago. The problem is that it has no sound. I tried switching between pickups, cables, and amps, but no dice. Actually, the guitar had this very same symptom a few months ago, and a quick spraying of the three-way switch was all that it needed. This time, it wouldn’t work. There was obviously a problem in there, but the thing about archtop guitars is that there’s no door in the back that opens up to reveal the electronics. The only way in is through either of the f-holes.

My dad took a look at it noted that the switch and the output jack were corroded quite a bit. He blamed it on sweat. As it turns out, I do sweat quite a bit, but I’m pretty sure I don’t sweat all over the switches and jacks of my guitars. After a good look, he decided that we needed to take it somewhere to get it fixed. I called the store where I bought the guitar and asked if they did warranty repairs for Epiphone. They said that they did, so we took it in. The repair guy was very helpful. He took the guitar into the back to make sure it wasn’t something he could fix right away. It wasn’t. He also took notice of the corrosion, and my dad told him what he thought the cause of it was. The guy called me a sweater. Meanwhile, I was sweating.

Anyway, the repair guy said that it was probably the jack that needed to be fixed, and the biggest hassle would be taking apart the electronics and pulling them out through the f-holes. He said he could have it back in a week or so. That’s fine as I’m in no hurry and I have other guitars. I just hope that it’s not too expensive. Otherwise, I could have put the cost of the repair toward, say, a new guitar.

As I’ve been moving from Windows to Linux, I’ve had some crazy Linux adventures. Most of my experiences have been pleasant, save for downloading codecs for proprietary formats. (The downloading itself was fine, but everything on the screen becomes scrambled if I try to view WMV files or DVDs in fullscreen mode. I can just barely see the screen well enough to allow the computer to reboot, which brings things back to normal. The annoying thing is that I’ve now caught this happening after getting out of the screensaver. Hopefully that one was just a fluke.)

On the positive side, I’ve learned some things about Linux that make maintenance a lot easier. See, every Saturday morning, I scan my Windows machine for spyware and viruses; delete browser caches and cookies as well as unwanted e-mails; empty the Recycle Bin; and defragment the hard disk, in that order. It turns out that in Linux, steps 1 and 4 are unnecessary. None of the few viruses that exist for Linux are found in the wild, and in order for a program to maliciously affect your system, you’d have to go out of your way to give it permission. Linux spyware (if it exists) would have to be run the same way. And here’s an easy-to-understand article on why Linux doesn’t need defragmenting. Those conveniences free up about 99% of the time I’d otherwise have to spend on keeping my system orderly.

For those who enjoy Ambrose Bierce’s cynical Devil’s Dictionary, here’s a modern version: The Devil’s Dictionary (2.0).

Compete allows you to compare traffic rankings for web sites. Here’s a comparison between The World of Stuff and Greatplay.net.

The move is on

I thought that my move to Linux (specifically, Ubuntu) would be put on hold for a while because the computer my dad and I were using really couldn’t handle it. But then, on Wednesday night, my dad told me that he was actually installing the OS on his computer. I didn’t think he would ever consider it because he’s wary of dual-booting, but it’s not a dual-boot setup at all, it turns out. He’s simply making use of this radio-button-type thing that switches between hard drives to boot from.

Unlike on the other computer, the whole thing went without a hitch, and desktop Linux has finally come to this desktop. I’ve been moving some stuff from my Windows machine over to this computer, starting with my program settings. The fact that I’ve used such open-source apps as Firefox, Thunderbird, and Gaim on Windows makes the switch to Linux that much easier. Plus, the way these programs store user preferences and data really simplifies the switch from one operating system to the other. I copied my profile folders for all three programs to their respective locations on my new Linux setup with hardly any difficulty. (The biggest issue was with Gaim, which didn’t allow me to transport the plugins I had downloaded for it. Surprisingly, the least hassle was with Firefox and my 30+ extensions for it.) Next: moving my actual files. That shouldn’t be hard either, but the implications are great.

I guess now I’ll have to try it for a while and do a little write-up. After all, if I’m going to use Linux when I’m out in the world by myself, I’ll need to get used to it first. The learning curve doesn’t seem that bad, actually, so that’s a pleasant surprise. For the most part, it’s pretty easy, and I’m looking forward to learning more and making it my own.

Wednesday was Valentine’s Day, but I didn’t feel all that bad. In fact, I was really happy, and I have no idea why. I guess it’s a coping mechanism.

Here’s an interesting article about a pair of TV signal hijackings that occurred in Chicago one night in 1987. The mysterious perpetrator was never found, and no such incidents have taken place in the US since.

Here’s a lengthy article on why Europeans are getting taller and Americans aren’t.

Time passes…

Progress marches on. On Thursday (I think it was), we got new USB flash drives from the school. Three years ago, they gave us 64 MB drives, which they’ve apparently continued to give to new students. I don’t believe I’d ever encountered such an animal three years ago, so they were a pleasant jump up from floppy disks (which have since gone the way of the dinosaurs).

These new drives are a whole 512 MB — 8 times the capacity of the old drives. Actually, that’s a lie. I formatted my new flash drive so that I could change the volume label to “J KALILICH” (which may be handy in case it ever gets lost), and in the process, I discovered that the drive has a capacity of about 514,000,000 bytes. You might think that that’s more than 512 MB, but since there are 1,024 bytes in a kilobyte and 1,024 kilobytes in a megabyte, it’s actually less. These drives do not have a capacity of 512 MB but rather around 490 MB. Filthy liars.

As for the actual physical appearance, it’s smaller than the old drives, and it’s black and like an oval or a squashed sphere. The old drives were clear purple, so you could see the insides. I thought that was kind of cool, but I value capacity more than looks, even if they lie about it.

This weekend was St. Elizabeth’s annual spring festival, which I’ve always made a point to go to. Ever since I went to school there, I’ve looked forward this time of year for the food, rides, games, food, live music, bingo, and food. Actually, the four-day event used to sort of coincide with the vernal equinox, but in recent years they’ve pushed it back by more than a month so that they won’t mix merriment with the somber season of Lent.

I decided to go yesterday, and I spent most of the day there. I hung out with Nick pretty much the whole time. When we weren’t covering for Nick’s mom, who had to leave for about a half an hour while she was working at the soda booth, we spent a lot of time at the youth group booth, which had a putting game. Nick challenged me to a putt-off, and on and off over the course of the day, we ended up taking 100 shots each. Nick got 50, and I got 37.

Toward the end of my stay, after it had gotten dark, an oldies-type cover band went on to play, and they were good. They reminded me of our band (currently dormant), which played at the festival from 2002 to 2004. It rekindled my idea that we should get back together for a gig before we all have to go off to college and stuff. It would be a reunion of all the original members, for old times’ sake. But Nick raised an objection that I hadn’t considered: he and Alex have never gotten along, and Nick still resents that Sean didn’t go to our last gig. (He didn’t go because he didn’t feel that the band was prepared — the five of us hadn’t all played together in a year.) Ah, such drama. Oh, also, Nick is also convinced that for any future gig, we have to have a keyboard player, even though this is supposed to be a sort of nostalgia thing, and we’ve never had a keyboard player. I’ll have to get him to settle his differences at least temporarily if this is going to work out. Also on the agenda: getting a venue, deciding a set, and actually talking to the other members of the band about this whole thing to see if they want to do it.

Scary stuff on Google Video: Tickle Me Elmo on Fire.

If you somehow enjoyed that: How-to Download Videos from Websites Like Google Video, YouTube, MySpace, and Others.

Beowulf 2: This Time It’s Personal

Yesterday, America prepared for the most anticipated cultural event of the year. That’s right: the premiere of Beowulf 2: This Time It’s Personal! Beowulf 2 picks up from the events of the Beowulf: The Movie. In the movie, Hrothgar asks Beowulf, who has slain Grendel, to retrieve Grendel’s head from his final resting place underwater. Little does Beowulf know that danger — or worse — awaits.

I finally got done with the editing yesterday afternoon, and I soon found out that I had been invited to a Super Bowl party (you know, that other anticipated cultural event) at co-star Mark’s house. Because other co-star Nick would be there too, I decided it would be a good time to have a little premiere. Fortunately, it was well received. Meanwhile, at home, the video was slowly being uploaded to Google Video, where you can see it now.

Today, I gave Mrs. Mackey, our English teacher from last semester, a copy of the movie to show in her classes. Maybe over the next few days, we’ll get more comments from total strangers about how awesome our movie was. And, of course, we’re starting to talk about Beowulf 3. Hopefully, it’ll be as much fun to make as Beowulf 2 was. On behalf of everybody involved in the production, I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we have. Watch Beowulf 2: This Time It’s Personal!

Are you sick and tired of racking your brains while waxing poetic, only to find, much to your dismay, that the best you can muster is a banal cliché? Then have no fear, because the Cliche Finder is the tool for you!

I might have to learn How to Make a Folded-Paper CD Case.

The editing stage

After nearly two months of delays, the long-awaited sequel to Beowulf: The Movie is almost ready for prime time. Most of the footage was shot at my house one day in December, but we used two cameras: mine and Justin’s. Since I couldn’t transfer the videos on Justin’s camera to my computer, he was going to have to burn them onto a CD for me. Early this week, he gave me the CD, and so we finished up a few shots we had intended to shoot. The shooting is almost complete. The only thing left in the way of that is a scene or two that I’m doing by myself (I’ll be reprising my terrible role as the cheesy narrator guy.)

I forgot how tough editing video can be, but when I look at the finished product, I know it’s immensely satisfying. I should probably use this space to show my gratitude toward a certain Kevin MacLeod, whose extensive portfolio of quality royalty-free music helped make Beowulf: The Movie more than just an English class project. I’ll be using his music as a source once again. Maybe, since I’ll be giving him a proper attribution this time, I’ll actually tell him about this one. And, as promised, there will be an original song in Beowulf 2. I know you’re excited, but you’ll just have to wait a little longer.

Speaking of Justin, he emceed the school’s variety show on Thursday night. It was the same show I auditioned for back in September. I could have followed through and gone to the many subsequent rehearsals, but I think the criticism was enough to put me in my place. Anyway, the show was better without me, and it was quite a bit of fun. Unfortunately, Justin seemed to get upstaged by his co-emcee, but it was still enjoyable to watch him onstage.

Although its name is fun to write, I’ve gotten bored of doing Jordon Asks YOU!!. (I’m surprised it took me this long, actually.) I might resurrect it sometime, but there will always be Ask Jordon.

Kelsey: Where should I go to college? Where I dream of(WFU) or where it is free(UF)?

I’m supposed to say that you should go where you dream of going, but that’s not always possible. Financial considerations are a big factor for many people, myself included. In spite of that, everybody’s situation is different, and advice that works for me might not work well for you. So I’d have to say that you’ll need to decide for yourself. I know it’s hard, but you have time. Use it wisely.

mambala: what does my name mean?

Isn’t that like some game that was popular in the ’90s? No, wait, that was mancala. Well, it was a long time ago. It must have been when I was six or seven or eight when that game was popular. I never understood it. Maybe that’s because I never played it. I think only girls would play it because it involved pretty-looking fake stones. But I’m not really sure. The point is, I never played it with anybody, although I did somehow manage to get a faint idea of the object of the game. It doesn’t seem too terribly complicated, after all. In fact, it kind of superficially reminds me of backgammon, which is a game that I actually used to play, but which I’ve now forgotten. I wouldn’t mind getting back into the swing of that one, though. Anyway, to answer your question: no, I’ve never played mancala.

Congress has just voted to raise the federal minimum wage, which has been $5.15 per hour since 1997. However, it’s not a universal figure — it’s only a minimum, after all. The states are free to legislate a higher minimum wage, and Florida’s is currently $6.67. Check out the State of the Minimum Wage (Flash) to see how the states’ minimum wages have compared in recent years.

Here’s a Super Mario Brothers race (Google Video), apparently from a school talent show (which, if true, would make it the most awesome talent show act ever). It’s mind-boggling to think that you can beat the game in just over six minutes.