Tests

It’s been a busy week. Last night I had a biology test. Tomorrow I have a differential equations test, and on Monday, a physics test. I wish all my tests weren’t concentrated in such a short amount of time, but I guess it’s better that I get them all over with within a week… only to be struck by another wave of tests a few weeks later.

Dayum. If you Google “lefty,” Being Left-Handed is currently #7. How long will that last? I don’t even know how it — I mean, my lefty page — is so popular. It’s by no means extensive, and virtually no sites link to it. Come to think of it, I should probably add some information I read in Stanley Coren’s “The Left-Hander Syndrome” for a high-school psychology paper in ’04… which shows how recently I’ve updated the page. (I don’t think I ever have, other than to remove some clip art and an animated GIF of my left hand in various annoying colors. If you remember that, I’m sorry.)

A few months ago, someone e-mailed me about an online quiz that they suggest I take. I checked it out, decided it was worthy of posting, and linked to it here. The other day, I got a surprisingly similar e-mail, addressed first to “Jordan” and later to “you guys,” suggesting I take a similar quiz from the same site. The author says, “I thought would be perfect for your site. Especially in your geek section.” The e-mail was from a live.ca address, and I think the first one was too (although it’s not uncommon, being Canadian Hotmail and all). I don’t have the text of the original e-mail handy, although I probably have it in one of my weekly system backups if you really, really care. (You don’t care.) Well, I just thought that was weird. Does this quiz site employ manual spammers, or is it just a coincidence?

Enough asking questions. People have questions to Ask Jordon. Well, one person does, anyway.

Laura: what is your favorite restaraunt?

If we’re talking about worldwide chains, Taco Bell can’t be beat. I mean, beaten. I love Taco Bell and enjoy having one right on campus, a five-minute walk away.

“Washington Crossing the Delaware” is a poem in which each line is an anagram of the title. It rhymes and makes sense and everything. Pretty impressive.

Music these days is way too loud. Record producers want their songs to be the loudest, so they compress the sound, making the quiet parts as loud as the loud parts. Every valley is being exalted, and every hill made low. The result is music that’s boring to listen to because there’s no variety. Luckily, the Turn Me Up campaign is working to reverse this trend.

Check out the Secret Word of the Day web site every day to see what the secret word of the day is. When you hear the secret word, scream real loud!

To the polls!

I can’t imagine spending two whole years running for president. In November 2006, I started hearing about people gearing up to run. Finally (well, not finally), on Tuesday, Florida has its primary, where the people will get to choose their party’s candidate… or not.

Okay, so here’s the deal. Certain states arbitrarily have super-early primaries, meaning that they’re often the most influential. Florida wants a piece of the action, so they move their primary from March to January. The Republicans punish Florida by stripping the state of half its delegates to the nominating convention, and the Democrats decide to remove Florida’s delegates entirely. So, as a Florida Democrat, my vote actually doesn’t count… maybe.

To make things worse, the dude I was going to vote for dropped out of the race on Thursday. That’s right: Dennis Kucinich has called it quits. I could go on like certain people about how he was ignored by the mainstream media, but it’s really a chicken-and-egg issue, isn’t it? A lack of support leads to a lack of media coverage, which leads to a lack of support and so on. But he probably was the most liberal candidate in the race, and it seems that you have to be close to the center to get the votes.

Way back in August, I took a political quiz to see which candidates would be closest to my viewpoints. Kucinich topped my list at 88%, which is how I actually heard about him in the first place. But the playing field has narrowed down quite a bit — case in point — so I thought I’d take the test again to see how things have changed.

1. Barack Obama (85%)
2. Hillary Clinton (76%)
3. John Edwards (72%)
4. Mike Gravel (63%)
5. Ron Paul (45%)
6. Wayne Allyn Root (30%)
7. Mike Huckabee (29%)
8. Rudolph Giuliani (27%)
9. John McCain (27%)
10. Mitt Romney (22%)

There were actually 31 results in all; the 21 I haven’t included were people who had dropped out of the race or were rumored to run but didn’t. I actually got a 0% match: Stephen Colbert.

So, Tuesday is the first time I vote ever. I’ve decided who I’m going to vote for instead. I mean, I wouldn’t feel bad about voting for Kucinich just to show my belated support, but it doesn’t really matter anyway.

I knew my Greasemonkey user script MySpace Ignore Bulletins was popular, but I didn’t know until recently that it was given a 5-star rating in a review on About.com. The reviewer calls it “handy,” “easily configurable,” and “a nice ability to have for any MySpacer.” (Not “fun for the whole family”?) I’m surprised at how good the review was, especially since it doesn’t make reference to even more convenient features I’ve added (probably after it was written). The only bone I have to pick is that he says “The instructions in the show/hide box are slightly misaligned in My Bulletin Space.” It’s aligned that way for a reason: so you can still right-click and copy your friend’s profile link when the box is open. But oh well. It’s a pretty nice honor. The article has even been Dugg. My next two most popular scripts also have reviews: MySpace Birthdays on Homepage earned a 4/5 and MySpace Go Right Home got a 3.5/5.

This guy made up a detailed list of every Bush scandal. The result: a 60-foot-long scroll. (The list is here. Some of them aren’t very scandalous, and some aren’t his responsibility, like #81: “Selling creationist materials at the Grand Canyon gift shop claiming it was 6000 years old.” But many of them are egregious.)

I bet you’ve always wanted to read a list of animals named after celebrities. Well, here you go. Thanks, Wikipedia!

Here are some fun examples of folded currency.

Esperanto club?

Esperanto. It was created to be a second language for the whole world. The number of speakers is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands, at least. I took up Esperanto briefly in 2003 and again in 2005. To prove how into it I was, I still have the category of Esperanto-related posts. But I haven’t used it much in the past two years. I got somewhat bored with it because I had no one to talk to. (If I were in a sitcom, this is where the audience would say “Aww…”)

Last week, I made a new friend and got her interested in learning Esperanto. (She has a boyfriend, by the way; I left my last post open-ended because I wasn’t sure.) Anyway, I haven’t gotten a chance to meet with her again, but we’ve been talking online quite a bit. As I was talking about her to Joey (from down the hall) and Adam (my roommate), Joey mentioned that his roommate Andy knew Esperanto. Sure enough, he said he’d studied it recently, and he was familiar with some Esperanto web sites, books, and authors. He also said it would be cool if we started an Esperanto club.

Do you hear that? It’s opportunity knocking.

I’m thinking that such a club would eventually consist of both Esperanto classes and social events. I’ve been trying to find information about other college Esperanto clubs to see what they do, but I can only really find two: one at UT Austin and one at Rochester. I guess it’s better than none.

I’ve been looking into the process for starting a student organization, and it doesn’t sound too terribly difficult. You have to have a president and a treasurer, three student members in all, a faculty advisor, and a constitution. Finding a faculty advisor will probably be the hardest part. His signature is required for you to start your club, but you can decide what his duties should be. Andy mentioned that the guy who teaches “The Tao of Star Trek” (it’s an actual class) might be a good person to ask, but I’d rather not promote the idea that Esperanto is only for freaks ‘n’ geeks. It’s a real language used by real people in real life, so I’d rather have a foreign language professor helping us out.

As for a name, I tried to think of one that would have the same initials in English and Esperanto, but eventually, I came up with “Esperanto@UF”: that way, it would be the same in both languages. I think it’d be good for other Esperanto speakers who will get the idea that we’re representing our university (the University of Florida) in the Esperanto community, and it’d be good for our fellow students who will find that “Esperanto@UF” implies that Esperanto doesn’t exist just at our university but also elsewhere. Plus, the @ is reminiscent of technology and the future.

The three of us will have to get together and talk about it this weekend. There’s a lot to plan.

How do you know when you’ve been procrastinating too much? I’ll tell you how. Last week, rather than doing some homework, I figured out how to get the Java Runtime Environment (necessary for running Java applets on web pages) working on my computer. Even though I installed the sun-java6-jre package from Ubuntu’s multiverse repository, Firefox wasn’t recognizing Java applets. So I referred to some documentation that explained everything. All I had to do was the enter the following commands:

cd ~/.mozilla/plugins
ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.03/jre/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so

One of the things that makes a neighborhood good is its walking distance from important places. Find your home’s Walk Score to determine how walking-friendly its location is. My house has a score of 43/100. My dorm gets a 37/100.

This guy tried to get the most expensive drink at Starbucks. It cost him $13.76 (after tax).

30 years in the future

I visited my suitemate in the hospital on Thursday along with some other people. His mother and his brother were there. He was asleep at first, but very slowly he woke up and we tried to make small talk. We stuck around for about two and a half hours. It was a little awkward, but I hope he enjoyed our visit. I can’t imagine whether he would have or not.

He lives near me, and it turns out that we went to the same mom-and-baby-type place when we were little. Maybe we played together. Maybe our moms remember each other.

I don’t think he’ll be back for a while.

Thursday night was the spring kickoff meeting for Gator Freethought. It was at this place called Tim and Terry’s, which is a house-turned-restaurant with just enough room for a little live music. The main dining area was the former backyard, so that’s where I made my way. There were a lot of people from the group just chatting, which was the point of the get-together. I sat away from everyone else at first, but then someone beckoned me to join in, so I sat between a girl and a guy. The guy introduced himself to me, and we made a little small talk. What’s your name? What’s your major? What year are you? Where are you from?

I decided to initiate similar small talk with the girl next to me. We talked for a while. Then we were both hungry, so we ordered some food at the counter inside. When we brought it back outside, we found our own table and talked some more. Did we ever. She’s a first-year student who lives alone in an apartment. She hardly has any friends in town. She goes home on the weekends to work, and she has a job in town during the week. She doesn’t like to go to parties. Sometimes when she’s bored, she makes up math problems in her head and solves them. She loves learning languages, and when I told her about Esperanto, which I studied a few years ago, she said she’d want to learn.

Almost four hours after saying hello, we were still talking as she was walking with me back to my dorm even though her apartment was really close to the restaurant. Now that I’m home for the long weekend, I’ll be able to bring my copy of Teach Yourself Esperanto for her to learn from… or for us to go over together.

It’s not often you can say with certainty that something is going to happen at a specific time in the future. But 30 years from today, on Tuesday, January 19, 2038, there’s going to be a Y2K-like problem that will affect many of today’s computers — if they still happen to be running.

Unix-like operating systems (such as Mac OS X and Linux) internally represent dates and times as the number of seconds since midnight on January 1, 1970. On 32-bit computers, the most common kind in use today, these operating systems store the time in 32 bits. But on January 19, 2038, the number of seconds will get too long to be stored in 32 bits, so the extra digits will be ignored, and these systems will think it’s December 13, 1901. In other words, it would be like Y2K, but on a smaller scale.

Don’t panic, though. Not every computer runs a Unix-like operating system, and anyway, the problem is slowly being fixed with the introduction of 64-bit computers, which allow twice as many bits for storing the time. This should serve us well for about 290,000,000,000 years. But because computers can and do last for more than 30 years, there will probably be some around that will experience the bug. Hopefully, though, they’ll be historical curiosities by then and not repositories of important data. Wikipedia has some more information about Y2K38.

If the text of this blog post survives 30 years, I wonder if people will read and laugh at it. I’ll probably laugh. Hey 2038 people, do you guys have flying cars yet? Does everyone use Linux? Are there still ice caps? Are we in a cold war with China? Oh, the questions I would ask the 48-year-old me. Where do I live? Am I married, and do I have kids? How much money do I make? (In 2008 dollars, please, so I can understand. 2038 Chinese yuan would be okay too.)

Rolling Stone presents The Almost-Impossible Rock & Roll Quiz. I got 30 right out of 58. That’s over 50%. I made a lot of guesses.

Do you know what Congress is up to? Now you can keep track at GovTrack.us.

Find out how many five-year-olds you could take in a fight with this quiz called “How Many Five Year Olds Could You Take in a Fight?” at howmanyfiveyearoldscouldyoutakeinafight.com. Turns out I could take 10 five-year-olds in a fight.

Slings and arrows

I’m not sure how much of this I should say. I got back to my dorm room late this afternoon when my roommate gave me some awful news. Apparently, one of our suitemates tried to kill himself last night. He took about 60 pills, and he’s apparently still in the hospital.

I wasn’t sure what to do when I first heard about it. Couldn’t we have been better friends with him? He definitely has other friends, but he’s never really been very happy. And I know that forging a friendship with him wouldn’t solve all of his problems, but everybody could use some more pals. But now look. He’s in the hospital, and he might not be back here for a while. I wasn’t sure what to do when or if he comes back, so I thought I’d ask you all here.

As I was writing this, Evan and Joey from down the hall came in, and we talked about it. Evan said it would be nice if we could visit him in the hospital tomorrow; after all, it’s right on campus. It looks like we’re going to do that tomorrow morning. I hope we can get some more people to go.

Jack Kevorkian spoke here at UF last night, and my sister and I went to hear him. So did a lot of other people. The speech was at the basketball arena, and there was a huge, huge line outside that moved pretty slowly because they searched everyone with metal detectors. Kevorkian, an advocate (and erstwhile practitioner) of physician-assisted suicide who was recently paroled after eight years in prison, is no stranger to controversy. There was a relatively small number of protesters outside as people slowly filed in, and the bomb squad was there too. (What better way to stop people from dying than by killing somebody?)

Pretty much everybody expected that Kevorkian’s speech would focus on euthanasia. Of course, that’s an issue that’s important to him, but he didn’t talk too much about it because apparently the conditions of his parole stipulate that he can’t talk to anyone about it “in detail.” He did try to set some things straight. He made clear that he killed people to relieve their suffering rather than for the sake of them dying; he compared this to a doctor amputating a person’s leg to get rid of a cancer rather than for the sake of cutting off the leg. He also talked about the historical use of euthanasia among the ancient Greeks, who pretty uniformly accepted and even regulated it. (Only the Pythagoreans, he said, were opposed to it, and it was their fringe belief that was incorporated into the Hippocratic Oath.)

The second part of his speech was concerned with reforming the judicial and penal systems. (If you feel you were wrongly imprisoned for such a length of time as he was, you’d probably concern yourself with the same thing.) He presented the idea that people who break the law should be placed in a “sanctuary” where they would be able to work out with the victim and his family how they should pay for their crimes. (If the perpetrator is uncooperative, only then should he go to jail.) This, he said, would minimize guilt and wouldn’t ruin people’s lives like prison often does. He said he read about this idea in a book and has since made contact with the author. He also called on UF’s law school to offer classes on the “sanctuary” idea and sponsor a pilot program.

The last part of his speech concerned civil liberties, and the Ninth Amendment in particular, which reads in its entirety:

He said that the Ninth Amendment has been pretty uniformly ignored. I’ll agree with that. But he also said it has never been used in court, which is obviously not true. He was big on civil liberties, saying that the government is pretty authoritarian in structure, like Nazi Germany, but “more subtle.” (An actual example he gave was that “the tyrants” make you wear a seatbelt so you’ll think that they care about you.) He said that the Republicans and Democrats were basically the same, and that the only way to go was to vote Libertarian. The audience applauded. But at almost the same time, he said something pretty confounding: “Everyone should refuse to vote. That will give the tyrant a message.” This was one of the only times he was booed by the audience. And although he was running over time, he spent some time condemning the war in Iraq and listing some characteristics of fascist states that sounded uncomfortably familiar: things like rigged elections, pompous displays of patriotism, the glamorizing of soldiers, and the if-you’re-not-with-us-you’re-against-us mentality.

When his speech was over, a lot of people started leaving, even though there was going to be a Q and A session with questions submitted in advance through a moderator. I figured I’d heard enough by then. It was interesting to go to, although I wish he could have talked more about euthanasia. He sure did stir up a debate around here, though, and I guess that was the idea of hiring him.

Here’s a humorous version of the Microsoft End-User License Agreement (Flash).

Learn some Everyday Loopholes “to get annoying things done the easy way.”

Things coming up

Tonight, Jack Kevorkian is speaking at UF. As an advocate (and erstwhile practitioner) of physician-assisted suicide, he’s pretty controversial. Over the past week or so, the debate has been heating up around campus. As I walked past the facility where the former doctor is due to speak, I saw that there were seemingly makeshift “free speech zone” signs posted around. My sister reports that a plane is currently flying over campus with a banner saying that Planned Parenthood kills babies and Jack Kevorkian kills parents. I think we can expect about as much protest as there was when Alberto Gonzales spoke a few months ago. That is to say, a lot. Difference is, I’m actually going to this one.

Opinion: Terminally ill people in a sound state of mind should be able to put themselves out of their suffering. And why is it any of your business?

(Let the flames begin!)

From the Why-Don’t-You-Join-a-Club Dept.: I went to the first few meetings of Gator Freethought hoping to have some intelligent discussion with freethinking Gators. But the meetings got increasingly boring as they tended to focus on yawners like philosophy. I didn’t even go to the last few meetings, which were about morality and Nietzsche and things. Luckily, the student organization’s “new year’s resolution is to have more fun,” and they’re going to start the fun with a meet-and-greet on Thursday night at a local restaurant-type place.

The meeting after that will be just before Florida’s presidential primary and will deal with how our religious beliefs (or lack thereof) will affect our choices in the polls. The next meeting will be around Valentine’s day and will be a discussion on religion and dating. This is an issue that affects me (in fact, I’ve been meaning to complain about it here), so I’ll be sure to attend… unless I have a date. In fact, I’ve figured that going to Gator Freethought meetings is probably the best way to meet a sweet atheist (or agnostic — I’m not that picky) girl, so it should be really interesting to see what other people in my situation have done or are doing.

If you’re a freak who notices every single little change I make on this site, you’ll know that last week, I changed the Creative Commons license for this site to allow commercial use of my content. (Previously, commercial use without special permission was prohibited. Attributing to me and sharing alike — that is, releasing the derivative work under the same license — are still required.) Here’s a brief summary of the old license, and here’s a summary of the new one.

Why the change? I’ve occasionally gotten requests for commercial use of my images, which, because they were prohibited by the old license, had to be approved by me on a case-by-case basis. To give a recent example, the Piute County (Utah) Chamber of Commerce asked to use my image of a $1 bill signed by former U.S. Treasurer and Piute County native Ivy Baker Priest. I decided to allow their use of the image as long as they credited me and my web site. Every time someone asks for special permission to use my stuff commercially, I allow them to do it, so I figured I’d change the license to allow it in general.

Some people might be concerned about this apparent display of flip-floppery. Most of the content that was under the old license is now under the new one. Which license applies? It depends on when you accessed the content. If you saved an old copy of an article or post from this site, that copy still falls under the old license. But if you access that same sexy article today, the new license (which has fewer restrictions) applies.

You’ve probably heard a lot about the OOXML standardization debate, but it’s all very confusing. Here’s an overview of the ISO standardization process that OOXML is attempting to go through.

Read some stupid essays by some guy. They don’t look like they were really printed out and graded by an actual teacher, but they’re still funny.

Here’s a film from 1967 (confirmed authentic by Snopes) reporting on what technology would be like in A.D. 1999.

Zanniamania

Dorm life just got interesting. (Well, more interesting.) We have a new RA this semester. I didn’t get to meet her until Wednesday, when we had a mandatory floor meeting. Her name is Zannia (rhymes with “mania,” although she’s not particularly manic), and she was apparently told that she had to plan lots of activities for everyone to do. Shannon, our RA from last semester, never did anything like that, so when Zannia asked us for some ideas for fun activities, we were a little confused. Someone (I won’t name names) continued to draw inevitable comparisons to Shannon whenever Zannia said anything, leading to the outburst, “Do I look like Shannon to you?”

I suggested we have a Super Bowl party. “Right here,” I said, referring to the common room. I don’t know why everyone laughed.

Since it’s the beginning of the semester, there have been inevitable shakeups in the dorms. Besides having a new RA, a few people have moved out. Several have yet to be replaced. Other than that, everything’s been pretty much the same. People playing cards in the common room at every possible opportunity… a bunch of people in the next room being loud at 2:30 in the morning… and, of course, doing fun stuff or just hanging out — “bro-in’ out,” as my suitemate Cameron would say.

Programming class is pretty awesome, even though we haven’t really done anything yet. It just gets me pumped. The lecture hall only has one computer (for the instructor), so we’ve just had to write down his instructions or follow along on our own laptops. (I haven’t brought mine to class yet.) Since we’ll be programming in Java, we were supposed to download JDK 6 from Sun’s web site, but I found it as sun-java6-jdk in Ubuntu‘s “multiverse” repository. The teacher showed us how to write a “hello world” program in Java, and I managed to write and compile it on my own computer.

Lots of people have brought their laptops to class, and, as a Linux user, I’ve found it interesting to note the share of operating systems. This is Programming I for Computer Science Majors or something, so we’re talking about computer people here. The distribution doesn’t seem much different from your average randomly selected group: mostly Windows and a few Macs. Yesterday I happened to see that someone was dual-booting Vista and Ubuntu. (He chose to boot into Vista.)

Using Linux does have its advantages for this class, though, and not just because the JDK was easy to install. The teacher had to explain how to get the “java” and “javac” commands to work outside the directory where java.exe and javac.exe were located. I didn’t have to do that on Linux. And while the teacher was going over Windows command-line basics, I already knew how to get around with the command line on Linux. It turns out that I won’t need to use Windows at all because the computer labs, where we’ll meet once a week, use Linux. So I won’t need to pay much attention to the Linux command-line lessons either. I can show off my relatively mad Linux skillz.

On Monday, we’ll be counting in binary, which is something else I know how to do. (One of my crowning achievements in high-school programming was making a program that converted numbers between binary, decimal, and hex while everyone else was having problems just going from decimal to binary.) In fact, the other day, I converted numbers from decimal to hex on paper because I had showed up to a class early and was very bored.

Strictly No Photography features pictures of places where photography isn’t allowed.

What does it feel like to be lashed? Find out.

In Croatia, there’s a sea organ, a unique musical instrument played by waves that flow into the organ and push air through different holes. That page has a beautiful sound clip; here’s a short video with more.

Lazy Thursday

I’ve known about geocaching for a long time, but until recently, I’d never actually done it. Basically, geocaching is where you hide a small box with little things in it and post its coordinates on the Internet so people can try to find it. People who find your cache can sign a log in the box and swap out whatever little trinkets you have in there. It’s for people who like treasure hunting and going out into the wilderness and things like that.

My suitemates Adam and Cameron recently found out about geocaching, and one of the first things we did together when we got back from winter break on Sunday was to look for some caches in the woods next to our dorm. Cameron had seen on the geocaching web site that there were two there. With their coordinates programmed into his GPS, we set out to find them. Adam found the first one in a tree that had fallen over. That one was pretty easy. Searching for the next one was pretty interesting because it took us to an area we didn’t even know existed; it was pretty scenic, like a park.

The spot where the cache was supposed to be was near a boardwalk, so we looked over and around it and in the surrounding woods, but to no avail. Finally, Cameron found a hidden container with a few things in it — but it wasn’t a geocache. It was a letterbox; letterboxing is similar to geocaching, but this wasn’t the cache that Cameron had found out about online. The notebook inside indicated that it had been placed earlier that same day.

So the search continued. Eventually, I found a box that was hidden along the side of the boardwalk; it was the same color as the wood, so it was camouflaged very well. That was the geocache we were looking for. According to the log inside, numerous people had found it over the past few years.

It only goes to show how popular geocaching and letterboxing are. Maybe I should get into it. I do have a GPS receiver at home that I never found much use for. And if we were able to find two (actually three) caches in such a small area, I can’t even imagine how many there must be all over town. (Actually, if I went to the geocaching web site, I could look it up, and then I would be able to imagine it.) And, of course, it would be cool if I hid my own cache somewhere and checked back to see if people had found it. It’s a cool idea.

Buying textbooks is kind of crazy. Luckily, my purchases were covered under my financial aid, but that doesn’t mean that things had to go smoothly. As I picked up my order from the bookstore on Monday, they gave me the wrong Physics books; I was supposed to get parts 1 and 2 of the textbook when instead I got parts 3 and 4. Unfortunately, I didn’t notice till I had gotten back to my dorm, so going back and trying to explain the situation was a big hassle. I got the books I needed, and to give back the ones I didn’t, I was redirected to the return and exchange line, which started outside the door of the store. My new books set off the anti-theft alarm. Lovely, right?

So I’m trying to explain to the security guard why it seems like I’m stealing these books. I don’t think he really suspected that, but when you have a store security guard saying “Let me get this straight…” to a long-haired college kid in a Rolling Stones t-shirt, it tends to look suspicious. Once I managed to explain that I paid for parts 1 and 2 and needed to return parts 3 and 4, they held the new books for me (standard procedure, y’understand) while I waited in line to give back the books I didn’t need. Finally, when I got the cashier there to understand what was going on, he deactivated the bar code on my new books, which a staff member had brought over, and took back the books I got by mistake.

I should have kept them for next year.

I haven’t had much luck selling my books. I managed to unload my chemistry book, but my calculus book is now out of date, and nobody wants the old edition. I did sell my course pack for Social Geography, though; I pulled it off by standing outside the class as it got out on Tuesday and asking if people wanted to buy it. I was asking $50, but the guy I was talking to only had $45, so I took that. Not bad for a $63 book.

New feature: when comment on a post, you can now choose to be notified of future comments on the post via e-mail. I’ve tested it out, and it seems to work, so give it a try. With each e-mail, you’ll be provided a link to manage your subscriptions and even change your subscription e-mail address. As usual, your address is safe with me; it won’t be given to anyone ever in any way. I enjoy this feature when it’s employed on other blogs (such as mcgees.org and now All About Me – And Then Some), and I think you’ll enjoy it on The World of Stuff. Hopefully, it will encourage commenting, discussion, and “first post” comments. That would be awesome.

If passed by the House of Representatives, H.R. 888 would be a grave insult to non-Christians and everyone who cares about separation of church and state in America. Joshua McGee says it better than I ever could.

Diamond-encrusted gadgets are always tacky. Here’s Wired‘s list of The Worst Diamond-Encrusted Gadgets Of All Time.

Here’s a pretty cool periodic table.

Round two

Adam saw me updating the old blog and said, “Hey Jordon, tell the world that I said ‘Hi.’” Everyone: my roommate, Adam, says hi.

Joey, from down the hall, wondered what he meant. Adam explained about the blog. We’re watching the BCS National Championship Game in my room, and in the third quarter, I’m losing my attention span.

Joey said, “Tell them I said, ‘Surrender or die.’”

“It’s not blogworthy,” said suitemate Cameron.

Well, you know what that means: I’m back to school, and I’m still alive.

I got back to school on Saturday, but I just dropped off my stuff in the room and then went to my aunt’s house. While I was here briefly, I saw that my door didn’t have my and my roommate’s names on it — instead, it had the name of the guy across the hall. The new RA got our rooms mixed up when she was putting the names on the doors, apparently. I wrote a note to my roommate on the whiteboard: “Don’t worry Adam, this is still our room.”

So I spent the night at my aunt’s with my family. On Sunday morning we took a hike… literally! Even though our dog, Speck, lives up to his name, he was able to keep up with the big dogs. We were mainly in O’Leno State Park, but we also spent a few moments in River Rise Preserve State Park because they apparently border each other. Overall, the hike was about five miles or something like that. It took us about two hours, it seems. I enjoyed it.

In the afternoon, it was back to the dorm for reals. I got settled in and everything, and my roommate had already settled back in.

I was a little nervous for today, the first day of the spring semester, because I would have to face not two or three but four new classes in one long day. Yeah, that’s the way my schedule worked out, but it was the best I could do, and I don’t want to mess with it. My classes don’t really seem that bad, but it’s hard to tell because all the professors try to scare their new students. It’s the same everywhere. Here’s the breakdown.

• Physics – They tried to scare us with facts: statistics about how last semester’s class did.
• Differential Equations – The professor’s funny, but I hope the subject matter isn’t that bad. Calculus 3 isn’t necessary to understand the course, and I took it, so I should be good if only I can remember the Calc 2 material.
• Programming – Not sure about this one. It turns out that we’ll be using Java. This’ll be a good chance for me to learn programming the right way, though.
• Biology – This one shouldn’t be that bad. I’ll have my sister to study with. It sounds like it’ll be boring at first with the details about cells and stuff, but the rest, like evolution, should be cool.

Anyway, my Tuesdays are much better because I have no classes. Tomorrow I plan to sell my chemistry book (the only one I’ve been able to get rid of) and try to hawk my Social Geography course pack after the first meeting of that class ends.

It’s too early to say how this semester is going to be. Before my first class, I thought that the hardest part would just be carving out a routine. Now I realize that that isn’t so bad; you just have to let things fall into place. (Routines sure do make life easy, though; there’s not much thinking involved.) The hardest part, at least at the beginning, will be studying for my classes to make sure I don’t fall behind. At least, I think so.

Check out some peculiar streets around the world.

It’s now an election year, and that means it’s time to go over some flag pin etiquette.

Here’s an old list of officially recommended telephone exchange names (as in PEnnsylvania 6-5000). In an earlier time, my cell phone number might have started with SYcamore 8. Also, I wouldn’t have had a cell phone.

The last night

Tonight’s my last night home for winter break, but I’m not returning to the dorm just yet. I’ll be staying with family tomorrow, so I’ll be back to school on Sunday. Class starts Monday. I see here that the UF bookstore is closed on the weekends, which kind of stinks because I’ve ordered books there, and I need to pick them up. Hopefully, they’ll be open on Sunday. Considering all of the students coming back this weekend, they’d better… or I’ll give them a knuckle sandwich.

Overall, the break has been pretty nice. I did most of things I wanted to do. But all good things must come to an end. I guess I should focus on all the good things about the coming semester: having no class on Tuesdays, having 150 dining hall meals and $330 to spend on other food and stuff, chillaxing in the dorm with the suitemates… stuff like that. You know, the things that don’t involve thinking or going to class.

I had a good time today, as it happens. I had lunch at a Chinese restaurant with some friends from high school: Ed, Allison, Allison’s sister, and Susann. Ed was nice enough to give me a ride; we live near each other. It was good to see everyone. I wish more people had been able to go, but that’s how it goes sometimes. At any rate, I know I’ll be back here for spring break (March 8-16), and possibly the Martin Luther King Day weekend (January 19-21). I never have time to do anything when I’m home for three-day weekends, though, so it looks like fun plans will have to wait for spring break. Those are the only two holidays of the spring semester.

When I wrote The Dvorak Keyboard and You to promote awareness of the Dvorak keyboard, I had no idea how many people would come across the site and switch to Dvorak (or at least consider it). Now I sort of have an idea: a lot. That’s the great thing about having articles on your web site. You can say what you want people to hear, and people will find them. I don’t need to promote Dvorak very much because the article does it for me.

When I started using Linux last year, I knew that having an article about it on my site would be a great way to make people aware of Linux-based operating systems. I figured I should allow myself at least six months of Linux experience before writing about it in such a way. I passed that mark in August, so over the past few months I’ve been working on the article intermittently. Actually, I wrote about half of it on a bus in October, and I resolved to finish it at home during winter break.

And after having my Linux-using friends look over the page, I decided it was ready. Late last night, I finished it, except that I hadn’t come up with a title. I spent quite a while trying to think of a good one. Finally, in a sudden stroke of inspiration, I came up with a catchy phrase that I felt best summed up the article. With that, I invite you to Free Your Computer with Linux.

J-Walk of the J-Walk Blog plotted the results of yesterday’s Iowa caucus against each candidate’s estimated campaign spending. It’s interesting to see the correlation between campaign spending and votes received. He also gives the “cost per vote” for some of the candidates.

Think pollution isn’t a problem? Read about the huge agglomerations of plastic waste in the Pacific Ocean and how they might affect you.

Here are ten fun facts about dreams.