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).