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.