Holding down the fort

You know how you loved making a fort out of your bed when you were a kid? And you know how you always talk about making another fort so you can relive the magic?

My roommate, Adam, has been talking about making a fort lately. Today, he decided to do something about it.

You can tell he put a lot of love into it. (Incidentally, he’s an engineering student.)

The entrance:

His mattress is inside, and there’s plenty of room for other stuff. He even put his TV in there, but the cables wouldn’t reach all the way.

First the pool party in the bathroom, now this. I love college.

You now know about my dream of appearing on Jeopardy!, but did you know I’ve always wanted to be on The Price Is Right? Yes, even though I’ve met Drew Carey, the host, it isn’t enough. The Independent Florida Alligator reports that a fellow UF student is living the dream. While she was on spring break in LA with her friends, they went to a taping of the show, and she got called down. Unfortunately, she’s not allowed to say how she did until the show airs tomorrow, but it’s an incentive to watch.

If you have a web site or anything of that nature, you have a lot of copyrighted material. Under US copyright law, no one can do anything with your copyrighted work until 70 years after your death. If you’d like to make a difference, consider becoming a public domain donor by allowing all your original copyrighted works to enter the public domain upon your death. Pretty clever.

From yet another one of those sites that does nothing but make lists of things for other blogs to link to, 25 of the Most Ridiculous (and Ineffective) Popular Diets. You’ve probably heard of some of them. (Instead, I recommend the simple, sustainable, common-sense No S Diet.)

A few years ago, some guy erased Garfield’s thought bubbles from Garfield and called it Arbuckle. He got a cease-and-desist and had to cease and desist. Now someone’s taking out Garfield entirely, leaving just Jon. It’s called Garfield Minus Garfield, and it’s quite a bit funnier (than both Arbuckle and Garfield).

Saturday night

Hello, Saturday. This has been the most boring day on record. I woke up around 10:00 as my roommate, Adam, was helping his girlfriend, Xandra, get ready to leave. After doing my weekly backup of my system, I went to the dining hall to eat, but there were tons of people lining up to get in there, so I went to Taco Bell. There were also tons of people in line there, but it was Taco Bell, so I stayed. I think all the people were in tour groups. Adam went fishing, and now he’s apparently somewhere with some buddies. I don’t think I’d want to be there, though.

Back up your files regularly. I cannot stress this enough. I use sbackup, which has a GNOME user interface. It’s probably available in your Linux distribution’s package manager… if you use Linux, that is. But seriously, invest in an external hard drive, and that’s half the battle right there.

I’ve been reading Hamlet quite a bit lately. I can’t get enough of that Hamlet character. Such wit he has. Even his first line, “A little more than kin, and less than kind,” speaks volumes or at least sentences. Then there’s this bit in Act 3, Scene 2:

Hamlet: Lady, shall I lie in your lap? [Lying down at Ophelia's feet.]
Ophelia: No, my lord.
Hamlet: I mean, my head upon your lap?
Ophelia: Ay, my lord.
Hamlet: Do you think I meant country matters?*
Ophelia: I think nothing, my lord.
Hamlet: That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs.
Ophelia: What is, my lord?
Hamlet: Nothing.

*Sylvan Barnet says Hamlet is making a pun here. What a rogue, that Hamlet. A rogue and peasant slave is he.

Who here thinks Hamlet was actually mad? I can’t help but think that he kept his wits all along. He just got a little stressed out by the whole thing, though. I do think Ophelia actually went mad, though. Is it an unfair characterization of women that they can so easily snap? Gertrude seems to have a good head on her shoulders, though, once Hamlet clues her in on Claudius’s doings.

Last month, I chose my dorm room for next year: it’ll be on the same floor in the same building as my current room, but on the other side of the floor. Turns out that this guy Ryan, who was one of my lab partners last semester, picked the same room. Pretty cool. But today he let me know that he changed his room to the building next door because his current RA is going to be over there. Dude must be a pretty awesome RA if he induces that kind of behavior. I never see my RA around, but that’s okay. Anyway, Ryan said I could still live with him, but I think I’d rather be in the building I’m in now. It’s a little closer to everything that’s worth going to. Hopefully Mystery Roommate Selection will work out as well as it did the first time.

In slightly more comforting news, I might have housing secured for the year after next. My current suitemate Evan is getting a place practically across the street from campus, and if he has 3 other guys with him, it’ll only be $150 a month each. If I collect, find, or steal $5 a day, I’ll have it made in the shade. Not bad, I say. In fact, it meets the three C’s, my criteria for an off-campus housing arrangement: close, cheap, and having cool people. I just made that up.

Thanks to everyone who commented on my, uh, little dilemma regarding the opposite sex. The general consensus is, “Jeez, Jordon, you can’t learn how to talk to people by reading a book, so cut it out!” For some reason, I disagree. Actually, it’s because this one book, How to Talk to Anyone, has some good pointers on making good conversation and getting people to like you. Granted, a lot of it has to do with meeting businesspeople at parties, but a lot of the tips are good in general use as well. I’m already starting to internalize a few of the simpler ones.

Luke gave me something good to chew on: “You are Jordon. Jordon is pretty interesting, but sometimes he forgets to tell people that. You shouldn’t be someone else but less ashamed to show people who you are, which is not a list of _what_ you do but more _why_. For what does the history of Jordon serve as preface?” (Usenet-style emphasis in original.)

This site apparently grew out of a thread on Joshua McGee‘s web site: myhamsterdied.info, a “support group for hammie lovers.”

41 Hilarious Science Fair Experiments. At least a few are digitally manipulated, but they’re still funny.

The ACLU is keeping a running estimate of the total number of people on US government’s “no-fly” list. There’s also a list of some notable names on the list. Apparently the government thinks almost a million people — including dead people, small children, and Ted Kennedy — are terrorists. (Insert joke about Ted Kennedy’s car accident here.)

I won on Jeopardy!

It’s always been my life’s dream to appear on Jeopardy!. Yesterday, I got my chance… sort of. Okay, not really.

They had a Jeopardy!-type game going on at my dorm (the nerd honors dorm), so I decided to check it out. Everyone was split into three teams: one had four people, one had about five people, and mine had three people. Not very fair, I know. But I played like a pro. (We scored as a team, but other than collaborating on the Double Jeopardy and Final Jeopardy questions, we played individually.) I had the whole confident attitude down, too. We played a whole game, right down to the Final Jeopardy. Up to that point, my team had a big enough lead to win no matter what. But we got the final question right anyway, thanks to my ingenuity.

The secret of Jeopardy! is that it’s a learning game. The answers are things you don’t know about things that you do know. If you can guess what the answer is trying to tell you about some very obvious thing, you will get the question. That’s how I figured out the Final Jeopardy, which was: “This term still had ‘work’ on the end when Vinton Cerf & Robert Kahn, two of its creators, used it in a key 1974 paper.” I guessed “Internet.” And we were right. It’s something you didn’t know about something you know.

Even though I didn’t win anything, it was still cool. And it turns out that the questions were taken from an actual episode of College Jeopardy!, so maybe I’d have a chance on the show.

Now, for your enjoyment, here’s the video for “Weird Al” Yankovic’s 1984 song “I Lost on Jeopardy.”

Recently, a friend whom I mainly contact online asked me to be in his will. In the event of his death, I would be given the task of maintaining his web sites (with compensation). There would be an option for his son to take control of the sites when he turns 18, but that’s something like 14 years away. Say he dies in 10 years. How are the lawyers going to contact me? I won’t have the same address (I’m in college, plus, my family is moving), and I probably won’t have the same phone number. What’s more likely to stay the same? An e-mail address.

I’ve had my main e-mail address for 9 years now. My e-mail service is from company that I don’t know much about. I pay them for premium service by the year, but when I renew early, the next year of service starts immediately. I don’t think I can trust them to be around another 9 or 10 years. But I have to have some e-mail address for this will. What’s the solution? E-mail forwarding.

My web host doesn’t offer e-mail, but it does offer e-mail forwarding. So, I begrudgingly switched on e-mail forwarding for my domain name at a cost of $0.02 per day. I’ve used it before, but I never liked it. You send me an e-mail to a beautiful-looking address that I can’t reply from. You expect me to reply from that lovely address, but you get a reply back from my ugly one. It’s unprofessional. So what do you do?

At first, I wasn’t sure you could do anything about it. Now that I have a compelling reason to use e-mail forwarding (lest I can’t be contacted and my deceased friend’s sites turn into a barren search-keyword wasteland), I decided to look into ways around this mess. My first source was to refer to my web host. Their FAQ says that if you want to send e-mail that appears to be from your forwarding address, you have to configure your e-mail client to do it.

Since I use the pretty amazing Thunderbird for my e-mail, I thought that there should be a good way to do it. I tried an extension that managed to get the job done, but it wasn’t pretty. I could send e-mail “from” my forwarding address, but I had to type it in manually every time unless I was writing a reply. (The extension author’s English also wasn’t pretty.) I figured that Thunderbird should have something like this built in… and it turns out that it does.

Say you have a forwarding address that forwards to your real address. Adapted from instructions here, this is how you can send e-mail from your real address that looks like it’s coming from your forwarding address:

• Go to the account settings for your e-mail address.
• Click “Manage Identities…”
• Click “Add…”
• In the “E-mail address” field, enter your forwarding address.
• Hit OK, OK, OK, etc. You’re done.

Now when you write an e-mail, you can select either address from the “From:” drop-down menu. If you reply to an e-mail that was sent to your forwarding address, the forwarding address will be selected by default for you to send from. I’m not very good at deciphering e-mail headers, but it appears that your actual address isn’t visible in messages that you send.

Now that I don’t have any worries about using e-mail forwarding, I’m phasing in a nice-looking theworldofstuff.com address. Problem solved!

(I eagerly await the barrage of people saying, “use gmail use gmail use gmail.”)

Fitna, the controversial film by Dutch politician Geert Wilders, has just been released on the Internet. Watch it here to get an idea of the things religious extremism can do.

I don’t think I get enough e-mail for this to happen: e-mail apnea.

National Geographic has a cool article on this new particle accelerator thing: “The God Particle.” It’s funny how many of their articles have nothing to do with geography.

Oh, those orchestra members

Okay, so you know how I got a 15 out of 20 on my last physics test? (I mentioned it last time). Anyway, that was an unofficial score based on me comparing my scratch work to the answer key, which was posted online. A few days later, I got my actual score and it was… 13 out of 20. Something happened on the answer sheet, like I bubbled in the wrong answers, or maybe I forgot to bubble them in at all. You can be sure I won’t let that happen next time.

In less disheartening news, I had a programming test yesterday that I think I did well on and a biology test this evening that I think I did very well on. We’ll see soon enough, but I’m not going to make any guesses.

Last week, Sarah, a girl I asked out a few months ago but then she never talked to me again and I think she has a boyfriend, texted me, asking me to go to her orchestra concert. I thought it would be fun, so I told her I’d go. It was Thursday night, and the theme was Oscar-nominated film scores. Listed on the program was another member of the orchestra that I knew; the president of the club I’m in was a violin. (Yeah, he was actually a violin.) I got to talk to him during the intermission. I didn’t actually talk to Sarah, but I waved to her, and she saw me and pointed me out to whoever was next to her. (This was before the concert, not during it.)

Speaking of which, have you ever wondered what orchestra members do before they make that nice tuning-up sound? They practice. Individually. Think of that bit from “A Day in the Life,” but for twenty minutes solid. (Also, how do orchestra members applaud if they’re seated with their instruments? They slap their legs and stamp their feet.)

The orchestra played music from Gone with the Wind, Braveheart, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and Goldfinger, plus others I had never heard of. (Just so you can make fun of me, let me add that I have never seen any of those movies! No, not even [insert your favorite one here]! I know, I’d better go to Blockbuster and rent it right this minute. ‘Cause I totally rent movies all the time.)

Oh, I lied. I did see Lawrence of Arabia, which the orchestra performed a piece from. For the occasion, they brought out the actual Oscar statuette that the film won for Best Picture. It was being guarded by a huge guy with a baseball bat. After the show, people lined up to have their picture taken with the Oscar. I think a lot of people thought that the Oscar wasn’t real (probably because the fat guy was so comical, pointing his bat at anyone who got near the thing, including the conductor, who, at the end of the show, could no longer resist the urge to go over and pick it up), but in the program, they thanked some collection in California that the statuette was on loan from.

Anyway, the concert was really enjoyable. It’s pretty cool to actually see an orchestra playing. I can’t remember if I had ever seen one before, but now I can say that I have. Also, I’ve seen an Oscar.

Now, a quick Ask Jordon:

Alexis: Okay I was wondering if I was going to go out with this guy i like when spring break is over?

I could give the standard Magic 8-Ball answer, but I’ll try to be a little more helpful this time and offer actual advice. You sound like you’re asking for a prediction, but you needn’t be. Here’s a tip. Take matters into your own hands. That way, you have a chance of getting the outcome you want.

With the war in Iraq entering its sixth year, I just want to know why the hell this hasn’t happened yet: ImpeachBush.org.

This is similar to a link I posted four years ago. (I can’t find the original post; maybe I didn’t actually post it here.) Anyway, this news article lists some of the more famous extended family members of the presidential candidates. For example, Barack Obama is related to a number of Presidents; George W. Bush is his tenth cousin once removed. He’s also related to Brad Pitt. Hillary Clinton is related to Celine Dion, Alanis Morrissette, and a few people who aren’t Canadian singers. Do you have to be half-WASP to have such extensive family records? I want to run for President just so they can tell me I’m related to Chuck Norris.

Worst idea ever: Ten Cent Beer Night.

Where was I?

A lot has happened in the past week.

I had a physics test on Tuesday. I needed to study a lot for it, because I got only 12 out of 20 right on the first test. Luckily, my physics professors know how hard their class is, so a 60% is only a C+ (at my junior high it would have been a solid F). Still, I don’t like C’s or even B’s. (Maybe I should mention here that you’re allowed to have a handwritten cheat sheet for each test. I got a 60 with a cheat sheet.) So all the time I spent copying formulas and the answers to common problems paid off, because I got a 15 out of 20 – a B. I now have a B in the class. Yay.

I had a date planned for two Fridays ago, but it got postponed. A few minutes after sending off my last post, I rescheduled. We agreed Friday night.

On Wednesday, I did the whole “Are we still on for Friday?” thing. You know, where you… ask if you’re still on for Friday. She said yeah, and that she’d like to bring a friend along. Oh crap. I try so hard to make my intentions made clear without looking like a jerk or a fool, but apparently I don’t try hard enough. So I’m like, well, I think it should be just you and me… And she’s all, oh, so it’s like a date? And I’m, well, yeah… And she goes, oh, sorry, I’m not… whatever whatever. So I’m like, that’s cool, you can bring your friend. And she’s all, okay.

I was very disappointed about that. I’ve been trying all year, and I’ve still never been on a date. I talked about it to my friend Daniel, and he sent me some e-books on how to pick up girls and communicate with people and things like that. The one about girls caught my interest. It was from a guy in the seduction community, which I had only ever heard of on Wikipedia. Basically, it’s a loosely-knit group of people who practice the art of picking up women. This one guy’s recommendation was that you stand out and play hard to get. Well, everybody tells you to do that, but he explained it in detail. According to him, you have to say something crazy to get her attention, tell lots of interesting stories, and then act like you don’t give a care about her. I mean, there’s more to it than that, but that’s basically it. If you do it like he says, then she’s supposed to be begging for your phone number as you come up with excuse after excuse not to give it to her, only to divulge it finally after she’s practically grabbing your arm. Or whatever.

Besides being awfully manipulative, it requires you to act like someone you’re not, which is not only dishonest but also a lot of work. Although, I have to say, acting like myself isn’t working well at all. There’s got to be some sort of middle way where I can still be myself, but in a better way. I hope I can gleam some valuable information from the other e-books, which I haven’t read too much of yet. The other one I’ve read most of is about body language. I find it interesting because I can’t read body language at all. I’m hardly ever aware that someone may be using body language to convey feelings other than what they’re expressing verbally.

There’s just so much I have to think about. I could probably follow that one book to the letter and take a girl home every night, but I wouldn’t like it. I probably should make a habit of approaching random girls — I’m sure not meeting many as it is — but how do I go about it? Should I continue to act the way I am even though it frustrates me in ways you can’t possibly imagine? Should I pretend to be something I’m not? Should I actually change? Why should I even have to read these books anyway? It makes me feel like less of a man that I can’t do these things myself. It’s like I was born not knowing how to engage in social interaction.

Once I read an article or something that said how smart children are treated differently by adults. They don’t spend as much time fostering the children’s emotional and social development as much as they do with other kids because they think that the smart kids are just so precocious that they don’t need their help. But it’s not true. The result is that you have smart, neglected kids who can’t do anything. So the article went. I wonder if I can find it.

So, maybe I need to practice reading body language and doing things like that. Actually, while I’m at it, why don’t I go off on this tangent: Kissing sucks. Actually, I don’t know whether it sucks, but here’s what sucks about it. Being a good kisser is a great thing, and if you’re not, everyone you ever love will hate you. That’s a given. There are good kissers, and there are bad kissers (so I hear). But the thing is, you can’t practice. I’ve never slipped anyone the tongue. How will I know what to do? Oh, easy, just read a book about it. Okay, but I’m thinking of the stereotypical comparison of learning to ride a bike. Imagine that you only learn how to ride a bike by reading a book. Then one day, the local volcano erupts, and you need to use your bike to make a speedy escape. You’d better make damn sure you read that book thoroughly.

Okay, so, I decided to go on the non-date which we still had scheduled. I got to restaurant in about half the time I thought it would take, so I was just sitting at a street corner for a while watching the cars and people go by. Behind me was the university, and across the street was the Outside World. A car came out of the university and slowed down as it passed me. The car was full of girls, about four of them. It looked like they were going to ask me for directions, so I got ready to point.

The one in the back on the passenger side spoke: “Excuse me, which way is UF?”

“…It’s right behind you,” I said, pointing backwards, but they didn’t want to hear. They just kept going. Then I said something that they definitely wouldn’t have wanted to hear.

Girls, man.

What is it about me that makes me like a human punching bag?

So, anyway, tonight we went to Tijuana Flats — a “fast casual” Mexican place that I love — for dinner, with the girl’s friend, who I had seen around. We ordered, ate, and had some light conversation. It was rather uneventful, and I had a good feeling that I could have pulled off a nice evening without the extra friend there.

They said they were going to go to a concert afterward, and I didn’t really want to do that, but when they said it was on campus, I figured I’d go along. It was at the student union, where there’s an amphitheater in front of a lake. It’s pretty nice. The first guy had a loud guitar, and he played drums with foot pedals. Other than his singing, he sounded like the White Stripes. The next guy was a little more talented; he played the acoustic guitar and was very rhythmic with it. Finally, there was the headliner: she was the woman who did a lot of the soundtrack for Juno, a movie I actually saw. So some of the songs, sung with her distinctive voice, were familiar. But they were all captivating and entertaining. Her name was Kimya Dawson.

She was very funny, and it turned out that the tour was a family affair: the first guy playing was her husband, and the second was a good friend who got a namecheck in one of the songs in Juno (which prompted his local newspaper to publish a story saying that an area songwriter’s name would be mentioned in a song in an upcoming movie). At one point, she had people in the audience raise their hands to request songs. A big group of people raised their hands together, and they requested a song of hers and asked if they could go down and dance to it. She let them. There were about twelve of them, and as she did this moderate-tempo acousting number, they were swing dancing and generally flailing about randomly. Then she asked anybody who had ever dreamed of auditioning for Annie to come down and sing “Tomorrow” with her a cappella. A lot of people did. Finally, a huge number of people came down to dance to her final number, and they continued to swarm around her and give her hugs long after her set ended.

During the set, my non-date and her friend had gotten about four other people to meet up with them, so I was now in a large group. There were a lot of things going on at the student union (they have a whole program of things to do on Friday nights to keep kids from going to parties, I guess), so a few people decided they wanted wax hands. I don’t know if you’ve heard of them, but it’s where they dip your hand in wax and then it hardens and you buy it for ten dollars. After waiting in line for an hour even though I didn’t want a wax hand, I realized that the night was winding down, so I decided to leave right then. My non-date seemed to understand.

This is it

Spring break is over, and now it’s back to school. There are no more holidays till the end of the spring semester — the end of my first year of college. It’s gone by so fast, I don’t even know what to think. But it’s not over yet.

On Friday, I did manage to go to the beach with my sister and our friends Yamilee and Austin. We only stayed for about an hour. I think I like the idea of going to the beach more than I actually like going to the beach. The sun’s unbearably hot, you have to put on sunscreen which is kind of icky, sand gets all over you, there are lots of people around, and, in our case, the water was freezing. I managed to get about halfway in, but that’s the best I could do. It’ll be warmer in the summer.

After the beach, we ate lunch and went to Whole Foods so Austin and Yamilee could shop.

That night, my sister and I got to hang out with our friends Nick, Mike, and Jarian. They’ve apparently discovered this Brazilian restaurant/pool hall, so we went there to shoot some pool. A lot of pool, actually. We stayed for about three hours. I’m not very good at pool, but I have my moments. It was pretty discouraging how bad I was, though. Another thing I noticed was that there were a lot of couples there. Mike and Jarian each brought their girlfriends. I also had my attention turned to a hot girl who was playing pool with her boyfriend at a nearby table. Every once in a while, they stopped to suck face.

There was some kind of party going on in the restaurant portion of the place, so there was live Brazilian music that was extremely loud. I mean, it was just two guys, but the volume was immense. I left with a headache, which continued to plague me throughout the next day.

Soon, my date will be rescheduled. Maybe right after I post this…

On Saturday, we left to stay at my aunt’s house, and today, I got dropped off at the dorm. And here I am. I’ve been dreading coming back because I have a big physics test on Wednesday, but once I got settled back into my dorm room, it felt kind of nice. I just wish I didn’t have to go to class tomorrow, though. Oh well. I don’t have any classes on Tuesday.

And now, the links.

Unicode has some crazy Miscellaneous Symbols.

It’s pretty interesting to see what Europeans think of each other.

This Visual Trace Route Tool might be of use to someone who wants to see where a web site is physically located. It shows theworldofstuff.com as being on Florida’s space coast, even though it’s hosted in Arizona. I’m not sure why there’s a discrepancy.

Nothing has changed, it’s still the same

I visited my old high school today, less than a year after graduating. I was with my sister, my sister’s friend Jennifer, and the (in)famous Ed. My friend Nick and his friend Tyler also joined us. This trip had been in the planning stages for a few days, but the timing was a little unfortunate. This week there was standardized testing in the morning, so we were limited to visiting in the afternoon. Actually, that wasn’t so bad, since I don’t think I would have been able to wake up early enough to visit in the morning. College does this to you.

So it was about maybe 1:30 when we got there. Ed said he had gotten immediately kicked out when he tried to visit twice in December, but we encountered no problems with anyone. We just went around saying hello to the teachers we wanted to see: Dr. Singkornrat, Dr. Shipe, Mr. Mumtaz, Ms. Scott, Ms. Boudinet, Mr. Chandler, Ms. Zambrano, Ms. Zolna, and maybe some others that I forgot. (Sorry, others!) They were all the same as ever. They tended to ask the same questions about college life and things like that. And when I told them I was majoring in computer science, they all said, “Oh, of course!” I’m smart, so I must be a computer nerd. Isn’t that a stereotype?

Oh, and at least two people recognized me from Beowulf: The Movie and its sequel, which are now shown to every senior English class (except for the AP classes). Me and my Beowulf buddies are basically school celebrities. (Nick, who played Beowulf, says people recognize him all the time.)

Besides teachers, I had meant to see a few students, but I couldn’t find the class they were in. I did, however, run into Allison, who I had lunch with over winter break. She was getting ready to go to a track meet.

After that, we went to lunch at Bru’s Room, a sports bar. It was pretty empty, which meant no one was using the pool tables. We played Cutthroat, and through sheer luck, I won the only game that I took part in. (I’d previously had a 1-1 record.) The food was good. I’d only ever played pool there; it was my first time eating there.

Then Nick and Tyler had to part with us. On our way out, we saw Ms. McFadden, a guidance counselor of sorts, enter the restaurant, so we talked a bit and had that same old conversation about colleges and things. Then we went back to school (though classes had ended) because Ed wanted to see some coaches (he’s an athletic guy). As we parked, a giant Bronco with huge tires came up. It was Reed, who went to our school a few years ago but dropped out or something. Last I heard (a few months ago), he was making money street racing, and he had a bunch of cars. Well, that was one of them.

While Ed and Reed chatted it up (or played monster truck derby), my sister, Jennifer, and I all roamed around school again. I met up with Susann, whom I was trying to find during school. She took me to Gaby, who practically tackled me with hugs. (They love me there.) Jen and Danae were also there, along with this guy Richard and some other people I didn’t know as well. I had about 10 minutes with them, but then it was time to go, and that was the end of my big day visiting high school. I wish I could have seen more people, but hey, that’s what the Internet’s for, right?

Tomorrow: the beach!

You know, Christians and atheists do have a lot in common. Here are a few Gods We Don’t Believe In.

Here’s one of those crazy stories that you just can’t believe: Retired Teacher Reveals He Was Illiterate Until Age 48.

Popular Science has a ranking of America’s 50 Greenest Cities. Not surprisingly, Florida isn’t represented at all.

Amazon MP3

Has anyone used Amazon MP3? The idea of having an online store with DRM-free music from all four major labels and many independent ones is big. Really big. I want to know what people’s experiences with it are.

I quit eMusic a few months ago. It wasn’t really for me. Between its monthly pricing scheme and narrow selection, I found myself in a rush to get my monthly allotment out of the way. I had the cheapest plan: $9.99 a month for 30 tracks. I’m not a voracious music fan who buys two or three albums a month; I just get a catchy song stuck in my head once in a while and feel the need to add it to my collection. Therefore, paying for individual tracks would be better for me. And, of course, no DRM. That’s a must.

Unless you’re downloading a whole album, Amazon MP3 charges by the track. They seem to be in the range of $0.89 to $0.99 (USD). Albums typically go between $5.99 and $9.99, but to get that pricing, you need to use Amazon’s downloader, which is now available for the most popular Linux distributions as well as Windows and Mac.

(The only issue I would seem to have is that to get the special album pricing, you need to use a program that probably isn’t free software. But I don’t think it’s that much of an issue because I’m already using proprietary wireless and graphics drivers as well as a proprietary BIOS. To shun Amazon’s downloader would be hypocritical.)

So, have you used Amazon MP3? Did they have everything you wanted? Did you use it to discover new things? How is it on your wallet? Did you run into any technical problems? I want to know.

And now, the links.

Check out The Evolution of Tech Companies’ Logos. Microsoft’s original logo was groovy!

Scientology kills. Read all about it.

Here’s a New York Times chart showing the adoption of new technologies over the past century. It’s plain to see that people pick up on new technologies faster than they did 100 years ago.

I break for spring

I’m on spring break. Woo spring break!

Now what?

Well, I’m home, for one thing, after spending a weekend at my grandparents’. Now that I’m back in South Florida, I’m looking to visit the old school. I dropped by after school one day in December, but I haven’t been around while classes were in session, so I’ve missed out on seeing a lot of people. The teachers, especially. I have all the answers lined up for them:

“Not too bad.”
“It’s nice.”
“Yeah.”

Maybe I don’t have that much to say to some of them. But I’m sure a lot of them would appreciate it if I stopped by to say hello! I’d also like to see a lot of people who I no longer see except on MySpace. Good times will be had… if my sister and I can get there in the first place. It’s that darn not-having-a-car thing. Also that having-too-much-pride-to-take-the-bus thing? Complicating things is the fact that they’re having standardized testing in the mornings for the rest of this week, so we’d best not interrupt. It’ll have to be in the afternoon, then.

I customarily go to the beach with my friends at least once during spring break. (I only go about twice a year despite living relatively right next to it.) But many of my spring break beach buddies now go to school at nearby FAU, which had its spring break last week. Hopefully we can do something, anyway.

In Oklahoma, the recently proposed House Bill 2211 would allow schoolchildren to express their religious beliefs in just about any way possible without being penalized. Students taking science tests would be able to answer with their own beliefs rather than actual facts, and they would have to get a good grade. The child who says that the earth was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster would have to get just as much credit as the student with logic and reasoning on his side. Disgusting. Worse yet is that Texas already passed this law (which was written not by politicians but by a group of fundamentalist lawyers), and the state’s schools are suffering for it.

This would be totally cool as a real movie: Minesweeper: The Movie.

Are you extremely vain? Get a personalized doll that looks just like you!

Cautious optimism

On Sunday, I asked a girl out to dinner. It was not the first time. I always get blown off, so the date never happens. Tonight, the tradition continues. Yesterday this girl said she couldn’t have dinner Friday night because her ride was picking her up for spring break on Thursday afternoon. She offered to reschedule. We will reschedule later.

I want to have a normal love life so nobody thinks I’m a retard. Seriously, 18 and I’m going on my first date? And then I shout it from the mountaintops to all my friends, and they’re all, “Congratulations, Jordan, for finally doing something we managed to do at the age of 13!” And my parents would be all, “We met in high school and got married a few years later!” If I weren’t embarrassed enough before, now I have to tell everyone that I’ve gotten worked up for nothing. Yeah, moping in seclusion till Saturday sounds good.

Tomorrow is the last day before spring break, and unlike people who have already left, I shall be going to all of my classes as usual.

In other news, what’s up with selling out? One of the things that attracted me to the No S Diet was its noncommercial nature — one average Joe came up with this extremely simple diet plan (14 words long) and made a web page about it to promote it to other like-minded Joes and Janes. The site says, “You wouldn’t take diet advice from a fat person, why take it from a fat book?” Well, the guy accepted a book deal that fell into his lap, and perhaps we can say that he has “sold out.” His 14-word diet has become a 208-page book with some random nutrition expert for a co-author. If I hadn’t been happily practicing the No S Diet, I might be turned off by this. What is the deal?

I sure hope I’m not a sellout because that’s not cool. If there’s anything sellouty about this site, it might be the store. But since no one’s ever bought anything from it, I’m not sure whether it counts. On the other hand, today I rejected the umpteenth advertising offer to come my way (actually, it’s probably closer to the umpth). I hate advertising, so the last place I would want to see ads would be my own site. Hooray for principles?

Okay, I want to ask you something, so I’m going to resurrect Jordon Asks You. This is a question I’ve been thinking about quite a bit, and I’m not sure how I would answer it myself. The question is: Would you date someone with different religious beliefs from you? Why or why not?

This might be of use to someone: this Reverse IP Domain Check shows web sites hosted on the same server as a given site.

Here’s a video with a tip for shutterbugs: how to make a $1 image stabilizer for any camera.

Another one of those videos: Are Americans Really That Stupid? (Answer: It’s probably just selective editing.)