Esperanto > Spanish

I’m home for Labor Day weekend. In fact, I’m about to go to my friend Nick’s house for a barbecue. Will the weather cooperate? Let’s hope. It looks like Hurricane Gustav, which is heading for the Gulf Coast, is bringing some clouds our way. And then there’s Hanna out there too. Oh yes, it is a good time of year for hurricanes. I believe September 12 is the statistical peak of the Atlantic hurricane season (that is, the day of the year that has seen the most hurricanes since recordkeeping began).

In the spring, I got an Esperanto club started at school. I filed the application at the end of the spring semester, and they were supposed to get back to me when it was approved. They didn’t. I asked our faculty advisor, Holly, if she knew what was up. She contacted them, and apparently we were approved. We just need to re-register for the ’08-’09 year as all student organizations do.

Holly was by far the best choice for faculty advisor. She’s a language teacher (Czech, specifically), and she was very impressed by our initiative in starting an Esperanto club. She was also willing to work to promote our club, and that she has done. She told me she had landed a gig for us at a language fair coming up in a week or two. They’re going to have a flyer with some basic phrases in each of the languages that are represented. Apparently, Holly got her to drop Spanish from the flyer in favor of Esperanto.

The phrases in English:

1. Hi, how are you?
2. My name is ____.
3. I speak English.
4. What are you doing tonight?
5. Goodbye.
6. Go Gators!

In Esperanto, with phonetic transcriptions added just for you:

1. Saluton, kiel vi fartas? (sah-LOO-tohn, KEE-el vee FAR-tahs?)
2. Mi nomiĝas ____. (mee noh-MEE-jahs ____.)
3. Mi parolas la anglan. (mee pah-RO-lahs lah AHN-glahn)
4. Kion vi faros ĉi-nokte? (KEE-ohn vee FAR-ohs chee-NOHK-tay?)
5. Ĝis! (jeese!)
6. Ek, Gatoroj! (eck, gah-TOR-oy!)

I’m not sure if I could justifiably shorten “aligatoroj” to “gatoroj,” but I wouldn’t say it’s justifiable in English either. Nicknames are off-limits from logic.

Here’s why you should never use an online translator.

From The Consumerist, it’s false advertising. This water slide thing looks way bigger on the box than it actually is. See the sad children for comparison.

At 1:00 A.M. on Sunday, September 10, 1995, WTVJ-TV, Miami’s NBC affiliate broadcasting on channel 4, and WCIX-TV, the CBS affiliate broadcasting on channel 6, traded channels. At the same time, WCIX changed its call sign to WFOR. Here are videos of the changeover as seen on channel 4 and channel 6.

Prediction: The title of this post will make people mad. Relax, amigos, it’s all in good fun.

College students aren’t unionized

Here are some things I’ve been thinking about.

My roommate plays the keyboard, and I play the guitar. We like some of the same music and should therefore totally jam. I haven’t talked to our suitemates much yet, but I heard one of them playing “Black Dog” on the guitar the other day. Cool points to the room next door. (Also, cool points deducted from me because I only know the song from “Weird Al” Yankovic’s “Trapped in the Drive-Thru.”)

I ran into my old roommate, Adam, and his friend, Stephen, at the food court in the student union the other day. (That term confused me when I was looking at schools. “College students aren’t unionized… are they?”) Anyway, we caught up on things, and Adam brought up the idea he had last year about me getting a column in the Independent Florida Alligator. I never wrote about it here in case I contacted the Alligator and had them read the blog. Well, that didn’t happen. I’ve thought about what I could write about. Columns give you so little space, and you have to, like, use good grammar and have a topic and things like that. Could I have a column about nothing?

(But if they liked my style and offered me a column unsolicitedly, that would be totally cool. Hey, Alligator editor-in-chief Jessica DaSilva, am I just the thing you’re looking for? Um, my writing, I mean. Is it just the thing you’re looking for?)

Last year, I was pretty impressed by my roommate’s dual-monitor setup. I was also impressed by his desktop backgrounds. Whenever he changed his wallpaper (which was pretty often), I had to try to make mine something cooler, even though I had only one screen. Now that we’re not roommates anymore, I’ve hardly changed my background at all, and my new roommate’s computer is situated such that I can’t see the screen. The arms race is over. (For those of you who are wondering, my background is this photo reversed.)

Living in a dorm has its frustrating moments. I encountered one such frustration last year during my repeated, failed attempts to connect to IRC servers. I was pretty sure that the dorm network blocked all IRC traffic, but they actually only block some ports (though they won’t say which ones). Port 6667 is definitely blocked, but I found out that it’s possible to connect to Freenode (irc.freenode.net) through port 8001. To help other students who have had problems with IRC in the dorms, I’ve set up this list of server/port combinations that work and don’t work on the dorm network. Hopefully some people will find it and contribute.

The BBC reports on some of the oldest known jokes, the oldest of which is a 3,900-year-old fart joke. It’s not very funny, but some of the others are.

In this video, a law professor explains why you should never talk to the police during an interrogation. The professor allowed a veteran police officer to speak after him, not knowing whether he would agree. The officer agreed.

Guitarist Herman Li of Dragonforce, which is apparently a band that makes use of guitar sound effects, shows you how to make some sound effects on the guitar. Pretty sweet.

These shoes aren’t made for walking

If I seem a little sophomoric lately, it’s because I’m now in my sophomore year of college. I haven’t felt this way in four years.

But seriously, my first day of classes wasn’t so bad. Well, the classes weren’t, anyway. There are no labs the first week, so I didn’t have to wake up at 6:45 for my Monday Morning Physics Lab from Hell. (That’s right, I said “hell.” HELL!) My first class was physics at 12:50. Right after that, I had programming, and then I was done for the day. Both are continuations from classes I took in the spring. I have the same lecture hall for physics and the same lecturer for programming. The lecturer is cool. After a long weekend (or a summer), he asks the class how they spent their time away. He spent his summer not shaving, and now he has a cool beard.

It rained a lot last week. Like, a lot. I had to do some walking around, and I got pretty wet. My tennis shoes (sneakers) also got pretty wet. I thought they would dry out eventually, but they didn’t after a few days. They also stank like whoa. My roommate and I decided that I should toss them in the dryer, but as I was leaving with them, I caught a glimpse inside. Now, I’d never looked at the insides of my tennis shoes before, but I’m pretty sure they weren’t supposed to be bright yellow with black spots.

Today I had to get up early for my technical writing class. After putting on my only remaining pair of shoes (a pair of sandals that aren’t comfortable for walking long distances), I made my way toward the class.

“Excuse me. Do you know what you have to do to get to heaven?”

I’d had a year of mental preparation for this, but I was surprised that they were just stopping passersby rather than just talking people who were sitting around and doing nothing. Last year, I took the bait to avoid being confrontational and to get a sense of the guy’s argument. Since then, I’ve decided that I’d be more frank in future meetings.

“I don’t think heaven is a real place.” The bespectacled, well-dressed young man smiled knowingly. “But,” I added hastily, “that doesn’t mean I think people should go around doing bad things. I think people should do good things for the sake of other people.”

“So you don’t think people should go around killing each other?” he said with a chuckle.

“No, no.” I shared the laugh. “People should be good to each other.”

“Do you know what the Bible says about what you have to do to get to heaven?”

“I think so.” Last time, I had been quoted to, chapter and verse.

“It only takes a minute, and I could walk with you.”

“Sorry, but I’m going to be late to class,” I said. “Thanks anyway.”

I was early to the tech writing class. It was an honors class for engineering majors, so I wasn’t surprised when my former floormates Cameron and Jason showed up. (Also, they had told me they’d be taking the class.) Then class started. The professor was a woman; I’ve never had a female professor. She went over the basic rules: no cell phones, no tardies — and at that point, someone came in late. Then a co-worker came in to tell her something, and she asked to use someone’s cell phone. She had to call the other professor, who had gotten into a car accident on her way to work. After that, she went over the course material with us. This was a tech writing class, but it was also a speaking class. She would be teaching us the speech component, she said. She had a slight lisp.

We did an ice-breaking activity where we each wrote facts about ourselves on a piece of paper and then swapped with other people and initialed by the things that we had in common with them. By that time, the other professor had come in. She said she was still shaken and that the other driver was “an illegal Nicaraguan who didn’t have a driver’s license.” She spent the rest of the class giving us some basic rules of writing. I think I’ve probably broken about ten of them in this post. We already have an assignment: to write about a scientific topic in a way that a junior high school student (11-14 years old) can understand. It should be about something we already know; researching isn’t the point. I wonder what I could write about.

Here’s this year’s Beloit College Mindset List for the class of 2012, describing the world as it is to incoming college freshmen who were born in 1990.

You’ve probably seen some of these hilarious exam answers before, but I got some big laffs out of the new ones.

It’s hard to believe that students are still harassed at school due to their sexual orientation. At one Florida high school, the perpetrator was the principal. Here are details from the court ruling on this criminal activity.

Get soaked

I remember what it was like starting at college last year. It was tough. I hardly knew anybody, and I was shy about talking to the people who lived on my floor. Now, living in a dorm with mostly freshmen, I see that they’re having the same anxieties as I was having, and I’m now in a position to help them out.

It’s still hard for me to talk to a bunch of people I know. How do I know we’ll have anything in common? I think about things like that. But sometimes it helps to stop thinking about things and start doing things. People can introduce themselves to me, like this one girl Vicky who I ran into three times as I was moving in, but it’s better if I take the initiative. As I was passing by the common room, I did introduce myself to someone named Jon. Last night, as I was at the dining hall by myself, I saw Jon there by himself, so I went over to talk to him. We went back to his room, where I met his roommate, Cory.

Later, Jon and I went back to the common room, where I got to meet a bunch of people, viz. Michael, Patrick, Holly, someone else who I think was named Michael, and more. (I should mention now that I’m normally pretty bad at names. I seem to be doing well, but I’m using this blog post to practice.) The one whose name I know was Michael had a lot of questions for me about his upcoming chemistry class, the one I took last year. The others also had questions about what things would be like. Last year, I was wondering the same things, and I had to find the answers from experience. I’m glad I can use that knowhow to make people breathe a little easier.

Today, the Student Honors Organization put on its annual year-beginning barbecue. It wasn’t actually a barbecue as much as it was a huge line of people waiting to get some food that was catered by Sonny’s. I went with some of the gang from my floor, and I saw Jason, who lived across the hall from me last year but has moved off campus. Later, I distributed flyers for Get Carded, the organ donor awareness group I joined last year. In spite of a sudden downpour, I covered a lot of the dorms along with Roy and David, who were new members. I talked to David about Ubuntu and such things. He’s a fan.

I’ve been wondering when my roommate and I would get to meet our suitemates. As I was writing this post, they knocked on the door to properly introduce themselves. Their names are Michael and Cory, which seem to be common names around here. They’re freshmen. I wasn’t sure if they’d pair freshmen and non-freshmen in the same suite (they try not to do it in a room), but apparently they do.

Classes start tomorrow. I only have two. They’re in the middle of the day, back to back. Not bad.

Stuff White People Like is a blog that lists stuff white people like. I think it should be called Stuff White Liberals Like.

In England, the Avon and Somerset police have taken to an unusual step to curb the number of dumb calls they get on their emergency line: they’re posting them on YouTube in an attempt to shame the callers. Will it work, or will it just inspire others to imitate them?

A poorly titled but useful Wikipedia article: metric yardstick. It gives approximate practical equivalents of metric units.

The far side of the Hume

A soft rain fell in the parking lot. Nearby, a girl was on her tiptoes trying to put a garbage bag into a dumpster, only to have it fall back on her repeatedly. My parents carried boxes from the rented trailer. Finally, but with some embarrassment, the girl succeeded in her task. “Epic fail,” she said apologetically to the passersby.

I was back at Hume Hall, the honors dorm at the University of Florida, for my second year of college. Known as a haven for geeks and nerds who do nothing but play video games, the truth is more complex than that. Some of them are in fact ordinary people. And they know how to have a good time.

Tropical Storm Fay has been a bother. First it crossed over Florida, drenching South Florida in the process. While it moved toward the Atlantic Ocean, my family decided that yesterday would be a good time to make a run for Gainesville through the center of the state. We encountered some rain, but nothing really bad. The storm was forecast to move west, hitting Florida again. But before it did that, it stalled out. The storm was stationary from last night till about midday today, which bought me some time to move into my dorm room. Now it’s been raining for hours, but the storm’s large eye should be coming soon.

It is nice being in the same dorm as I was in last year. I haven’t been at good old Hume Hall (East) in almost four months, but it’s easy to get back into the swing of things. Everything is pretty familiar. I’ve already seen some of the same faces (my RA from the spring checked me in, and I had a chat with one of the cleaning ladies). I have a connection to this place. In fact, when I was thinking of things about last year I had forgotten to mention, I forgot to remember that my roommate and I wrote our names in cement that was drying outside the entrance of the building. Now that’s a connection.

I chose a room on the same floor as last year but in the wing farther from the main building. I wasn’t sure who I would get as a roommate, but it turned out that one of my chemistry lab partners chose the same room. That worked out well. I’ve spent this afternoon unpacking. I am now pretty unpacked, except that I haven’t put up my posters due to a lack of suitable tape. Also, I forgot one of my bags. My parents haven’t gone back home yet, though; my sister still has to move in to her apartment.

Ryan, my erstwhile chemistry lab partner and new roommate, had a head start on moving in. He got here a few days ago and has rearranged his furniture to his liking. Actually, he had to do it because he has a full-size keyboard. Incidentally, one of my floormates from last year had a similarly large keyboard and arranged his stuff the same way. Instead of having the bed against the back corner with the dresser against the back wall and the desk along the side wall, they both put the keyboard at the back wall, the desk facing forward in front of it, and the bed in front of that, with the dresser underneath the bed. Could that be the only possible arrangement when one has a large keyboard?

My roommate last year brought a TV, but this year, neither Ryan nor I had one. We didn’t see it as too much of a problem, since neither of us watches much TV, but I reasoned that if somebody offered me a TV for free over the summer, I would take it. A few days ago, a family friend was collecting some donated items and had some surplus stuff, including a TV. She offered it to me. That’s how I became the proud owner of a 13-inch Sharp 137LM color TV. It’s my first TV set. I was the only kid on the metaphorical block who didn’t have a TV in his room. When I asked my mom for one, she would say, “When you’re 14.” When I was 14, she didn’t remember saying that. My sister can vouch for it, though.

The only thing that was missing was a remote control. My dad had a spare programmable remote, but it didn’t know the radio signals for this TV, probably because it’s old enough to vote and drink alcohol. As I looked for a matching remote for sale on the Internet, I marveled at the hidden yet complex world of online TV remote stores. Some of them claimed to have a compatible remote in stock for $40 or $50. No thanks. Luckily, someone was selling an original remote (with new batteries) on eBay for $5.60. It should be arriving next week. Thanks, Internet!

Now, I don’t ask much of you readers, but if any of you feel a need to express your gratitude, friendship, thankfulness, camaraderie, undying devotion, or money, please write:

[Update Tue May 05, 2009 21:49 UTC-5: I don't live at this address anymore!]

I can also accept packages.

Fay, Fay, go away, come again another day (or don’t)

My last post might have been a snoozer for many of you, but hopefully not. I try to make things interesting around here. But as evidenced by the break from my usual form, I have a lot of things to write about right now. In fact, I have a long list of topics to get to, which is a good thing. If you look back at the archives, you can see that I posted more during the first few years than I have during the past few years. Recently, the occasional brief lull has crept in. I’m not proud of that; I’ve always striven to post regularly. I can’t say that when I started blogging, I did it for the lulls.

Readers, I am outraged. My friend Luke informed me that Sunday’s South Florida Sun-Sentinel stole the title of my blog post from Saturday. Just look at that headline. Like mine, there isn’t even a comma to set off the subject of address!

Okay, so a quick Google search reveals that I wasn’t the only person to think of this clever headline, but is it even appropriate for a newspaper? The Sun-Sentinel seems to be more style than substance these days. Case in point: see the headline at the top? “A Bold New Sun Sentinel.” They’ve apparently redesigned the paper to look less newspapery and more short-attention-span-y. Now, the title of the newspaper can intuitively be found in tiny letters under the giant “S” on the side of the front page.

In any case, this weather has put a damper on some of my plans. I might be leaving for college on Thursday rather than Wednesday. And I was going to play baseball with my friends Nick and TJ today, but that’s not going to happen because we’re starting to get hit by the tropical storm right now. It’s not too bad right now, and maybe it won’t get too much worse.

Fortunately, I did get to hang out with Nick and TJ on Saturday night. We went to South Beach, looking for some fun. Because we were checking out the nightlife, I naturally brought my new sunglasses. But once again, we didn’t plan far enough ahead. Apparently there’s nothing to do there if you’re under the drinking age, which is a puritanical 21. We learned an important lesson: being over 18 isn’t a big deal if you’re under 21.

Yet another Jeopardy!-related link: a contestant describes his recent experience on the show.

You may be a bad speller, but be glad you’re not as bad as this newspaper that misspelled its name on the front page.

Getting around on a bicycle in the United States seems to be a real inconvenience. A reluctant Walmart customer describes her experience having to take her bike into the store because there was no place to keep it safe outside.

Free software vs. open source

Over the past ten years, the term “open source” has found a place in the public consciousness. The idea got an early boost in 1998, when Netscape decided to release the source code of their flagship program, the Communicator suite, for others to improve upon. It seemed like a desperate business decision for a company that was about to be crushed by Microsoft. But the hard work that countless programmers, designers, and testers put into Netscape’s code has brought us the ever more popular Mozilla Firefox browser, which is now used by nearly 20% of web surfers. (Yes, I just said “web surfers.” Really puts you in the 1998 mood, doesn’t it?)

Nowadays, every software company announces that it’s open-sourcing this or that, always to the delight of the community. There’s a large and growing number of software developers and users who support the open source ideals. But what exactly are these ideals? How did they come about? What implications do they have?

The open source movement originated from the free software movement, which was founded by Richard Stallman. When Stallman became a computer programmer in the 1970s, it was customary for programmers around the world to share the source code for their programs so that other programmers could study and improve them. Stallman saw the good things that this atmosphere of cooperation created. But by the early 1980s, it became more common for companies to distribute proprietary software, which placed restrictions on the users’ ability to modify and redistribute the software for their own needs.

To combat the proliferation of software that kept its users “divided and helpless,” Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation in 1985. He codified the programmer community’s vanishing ethic in the Free Software Definition. According to this document, a program is called “free software” if it gives its users all of the following freedoms:

• The freedom to run the program for any purpose.
• The freedom to study how the program works and adapt it to your needs.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.
• The freedom to improve the program and release your improvements to the public so that the whole community benefits.

The free software movement grew slowly at first but became more popular as the the FSF’s GNU operating system, combined with the Linux kernel, found its way into server rooms and onto computer geeks’ desktops. The success of GNU/Linux, better known simply as Linux, had people fired up about free software. But some supporters differed from Stallman in several respects.

First, they didn’t like the development model that the FSF used for GNU. The FSF had a very authoritative role in the development process of its operating system, controlling which improvements it would accept from members of the community. Linus Torvalds, on the other hand, allowed a large community of programmers to guide the development of his Linux kernel, which is probably one reason why it became so popular. In addition, the younger supporters of free software, such as Torvalds himself, grew up in a world where proprietary software was commonplace. Unlike Stallman, they weren’t around to see their freedoms being taken away. They were more focused on the community aspect of software development than issues of freedom.

This led a group of free software supporters to create the Open Source Initiative and publish the Open Source Definition. Its requirements are similar enough that almost all open source software is free software and vice versa. The OSI advocated the term “open source” to make free software more community-oriented and palatable to companies that might be afraid of the word “free.” Shortly thereafter, Netscape announced it would be open-sourcing Netscape Communicator, and the media ate it up. Open source stayed in the minds of the public in a way that free software never had.

Since then, the many people have moved to the term “open source” because they see it as less ambiguous than “free software.” But is it really? The FSF cites cases of various authorities assuming “open source” to mean “software for which the source code is available.” Those people clearly haven’t read the Open Source Definition, which extends “open source” beyond its literal meaning to describe the freedoms that users have with the source code. In fact, the definition begins, “Open source doesn’t just mean access to the source code.”

The term “free software” can be confusing because “free” can mean either “without cost” or “unrestrained.” But according to the FSF, “free software” is less ambiguous: one sense of the term captures the FSF’s intended meaning, but no sense of “open source” encompasses the OSI’s full meaning. The confusion over the meaning of “open source” means that companies can release code under licenses that allow the viewing of source code but little else, and some people will inevitably call it “open source.”

While the FSF and OSI seem to resent one another, they do work together because they basically have the same goal in common. It’s their ideologies that differ. When you talk about free/open source software, you might want to consider which side you’re really on. The FSF says that software should respect your freedom to do whatever you want with it. The OSI emphasizes its belief that the most valuable software has a community of users developing it.

If you haven’t been able to tell, I know which side I’m on. I support the free software movement, and I recognize that without freedom, there can be no community collaboration. But if you’re not sure, or if you want to stay neutral, you might like the increasingly popular term “free and open source software” (FOSS) or the even less ambiguous “free (libre) open source software” (FLOSS). In the meantime, you can browse the official sites of the FSF and OSI to get a feel for what their respective movements are about.

Stay away Fay

Over the summer, I’ve discovered the wonders of BitTorrent by downloading all sorts of things. But pretty soon I’ll go back to living on the campus of a university that is hostile to sharing. Before Wednesday, I’d like to get my upload/download ratio up to 1 on these torrents. They have to go, go, go! (Well, I could still seed them whenever I’m home for the weekend, but who knows when that will be?) They’re all released under Creative Commons licenses, so you can share them without getting into trouble!

• WhiteRoom by WhiteRoom. Nice, kind of quiet music with exotic influences. Ogg Vorbis audio, 96.4 MB, BY-SA.
• Alternative Freedom: a documentary about the growing free culture movement, featuring Richard Stallman, Lawrence Lessig, and others. In English, subtitled in Danish. AVI video, 600.0 MB, BY-NC-SA.
• Originals: 1976 to 1981 by Harbinger, an obscure Canadian band. They started out sounding like the old alternative music that my parents like to listen to, but their later stuff sounds like ELO or something. My favorite track is “Let Yourself Go.” Ogg Vorbis, 99.4 MB, BY-NC-ND.
• Lawrence Lessig Keynote. A lecture given by the creator of Creative Commons in his distinctive style on June 10, 2006. Ogg Theora video, 238.7 MB, BY-NC-SA.
• Your Reality by STEEP. Reviewed previously. Ogg Vorbis, 40.4 MB, BY-SA.
• The Great Pharaos by The Pharaos. Reviewed previously. Ogg Vorbis, 15.3 MB, BY-NC-SA.
• The Puppet String’s Too Tight by Marauders. Power pop/rock from France. It’s in English, though. Ogg Vorbis, 38.7 MB, BY-NC-ND.

I haven’t downloaded any Hollywood films, but that doesn’t mean that they’re all bad. I went to see Tropic Thunder with my friends Nick and TJ on Wednesday night, the day it came out. Without giving too much away, let me just say that it was crazy and full of surprises. Very funny too. Lots of laffs.

Just as I’m leaving South Florida, hurricane season is starting to heat up. I thought I’d be safe from them because they usually don’t hit in June or July. But, as Tropical Storm Fay reminds us, it is neither June nor July. Just look at this forecast cone.

See the point where the storm is most likely to be at 2 P.M. on Wednesday? That’s where I will be at 2 P.M. on Wednesday. Even worse, the storm could strike South(east) Florida and then work its way up to North Central Florida at the same time I do. Yes, this storm might stalk me. But what’s certain is that it will dump a lot of rain all over the place. Whether I will be at “the place” remains to be seen.

The New York Times has an Olympic medal map (Flash) with each country’s size proportional to the number of medals they’ve won at this (and previous) Summer Olympics.

This sounds pretty crazy, but it might just work. It did for someone. With a Bit of Creative Savings, $5 Can Get You at Least $12,000.

In 1992, a ship’s cargo of bath toys was washed overboard. The Friendly Floatees have turned up all over the world since then, giving scientists clues about the workings of ocean currents.

Once more, with chip clips

It’s now less than a week until I go back to school for my second year of college. At the beginning of the summer — it seems so long ago now — I unpacked all of the boxes that pretty much filled my room. Now I have to fill them up again. I haven’t really, uh, started that yet. But I still have my list of things to bring from last year. I typed it on two sheets of paper and left space to write in the many things that didn’t come to mind right then. Ultimately, it was very comprehensive. I think the only things I forgot to bring were chip clips.

Back-to-school time is clean-up-your-look time, and I’m still deciding what I want to do with my hair. As you may recall, it’s long, and I might want to cut it short or at least style it in a different way. I’ve been asking my friends for their opinions, but I was surprised to receive an unsolicited opinion today. I was standing at the counter at the library with my mom when I smelled cigarettes. A middle-aged woman with dark, leathery skin moved in next to me. She had blonde hair. It was probably dyed that way, but I couldn’t bring myself to look long enough to know for sure.

“Someone who still has long hair,” the woman croaked. She was impressed. She rasped that she was a child of the ’60s — although pretty young then, she assured me — and grunted about how awesome the times were back then, as well as how bad today’s men look with their “square heads.” The one-sided conversation had begun without warning, and I was trying to figure out how to get out of it while providing an occasional “yeah” or “oh” in acknowledgement. The woman gravelly imparted to me that she turned down a man because he didn’t have long hair. Or something like that. Just then, my mom was leaving, so I had a good reason to abruptly end the most awkward conversation ever.

I was kind of flattered that someone took time to point out how much she liked my hair, although I would have enjoyed the conversation a lot more more if she were thirty years younger and didn’t have a cloud of tobacco smoke floating around her.

Questionable accolades from frog-throated ex-hippies notwithstanding, I do think I look good with long hair, and I worry that I wouldn’t look as good with short hair, which might throw my newly unburied facial features into high relief. Maybe parting my hair almost right down the middle isn’t the best thing, but most people are shorter than me, so they shouldn’t see too much of it anyway.

I have decided to get new clothes, though. I recognize the need to replace my uniform of plain t-shirts and jean shorts. Last weekend, I got some new patterned shirts of the polo persuasion as well as new shorts that are non-jean. Most of them are khaki, but the ones I’m wearing now are like fake corduroy or something. Anyway, I plan to phase out most of the plain clothes I’ve been wearing at least since I started high school. The simple way to do this is not to bring them with me to college. I’ll still have them, but I can’t wear them all the time. Hopefully, my new clothes will advertise me as interesting; the supporting act will be my long jeans and T-shirts that have things on them.

Sometimes, the media gets things wrong, and the results can be embarrassing. Here’s a long list of premature obituaries.

In the US, we make a big deal about the President and Congress. But that third and ever-so-important branch of government, the Supreme Court, often flies under the radar. But they’re still there, all right, and they’ve been holding on to some quaint traditions.

A blog featuring poorly chosen photos from real estate listings: It’s Lovely! I’ll Take It!

Good migrations

More metablogging: in my last post, I mentioned that “for reasons that are outside the scope of this entry, my posts from 2003 and 2004 have never been loaded into WordPress.” It’s a topic I want to go into a little more, so it’s the scope of this entry.

Before I moved to WordPress on January 2, 2005, I wasn’t using any particular blogging software to blog. I was manually writing posts on the main page, moving old posts to the archives, and adding items to the RSS feed one by one. It got tedious after a while, which is why I made the switch. But I never moved my old posts (except the post of January 1, 2005) to WordPress, where they could each have an individual URL and be tagged and commented on. That left 346 posts from 2003 and 2004 that don’t quite fit in with the rest.

The most obvious reason for not adding the Original 346 was the issue of permalinks. They are supposed to be, as the name implies, permanent. Back then, I found it most convenient to use a permalink scheme unlike any known to man. Each monthly archive was on a single page (for example, /archives/200312.html) with each post’s “permalink” being specified by a different fragment (the part after the #). The fragment was originally in the numeric format YYYYMMDDHHMM, but I later changed it to dDDHHMM. The letter “d” was added to the beginning because fragments should be specified by unique element IDs, and IDs may not begin with a number. I updated all the old permalinks and the posts that linked to others. Sounds pretty impressive, but it was just a matter of doing search-and-replaces in HTML files.

Anyway, to move the old posts to WordPress, I’d have to change these permalinks a second time, and it seems like the best way to do this would be to do 346 find-and-replaces on the database with PHPMyAdmin, a la these instructions. That doesn’t sound too hard. I’ve done more tedious things. As for redirecting the old links, I wouldn’t create hundreds of complex .htaccess rules to redirect old posts to their new permanent (?) URLs, but it would be simple to redirect them to their new monthly archive pages.

Those issues are technical. They can be solved relatively easily. But there’s an editorial consideration that arises from technical conditions. WordPress allows you to set a single time zone for your blog. I have it permanently set to Eastern Standard Time, UTC -5. In the pre-WordPress days, things were different. From April 2003 to October 2004, I dated my posts with UTC because I was dumb. This means that I had a different definition of “today” than my environs indicated. I would write a post just after “midnight” describing the events of yesterday, but yesterday was actually that same day because “midnight” was 7:00 P.M. I thought that people in other time zones wouldn’t understand EST but would understand their offset from UTC. Yeah, really.

The question remains: should I edit my old posts to reflect my local time? Should I change those old yesterdays to todays and the todays to tomorrows? This could have interesting consequences, such as having posts move from one month to another. It would also throw my old flashback “One year ago, two years ago” links out of whack. But it would make the old posts consistent and less confusing for readers.

There are a few other issues associated with moving the Original 346 to WordPress. The only one I can think of off the top of my head is that I’d have to remove the occasional formatting from post titles (example) as well as the “Plus:” subtitles that I used to use. No big loss there.

If I do move the Original 346, which sounds increasingly likely, I’ll probably convert the blog’s categories to tags and re-tag each of my posts. Categories are pretty hierarchical, and you tend not to create new ones except once in a great while. Tags are created on the fly and can be for the nonce, although they’re most useful if they’re used at least a few times. They can touch upon things that would be too trivial to merit creating a category. For example, if I wrote a post about going to a steakhouse with my friends, I could tag the post “friends,” “dinner,” “steak,” the name of the restaurant, and so on. It sure would be interesting to look back on all my old posts that had to do with steak.

From the BBC: How not to do an American accent.

Here’s a recipe for chocolate cake in 5 minutes. I haven’t tried it. It might be disgusting.

More about Legos: A rare glimpse inside the Lego factory.