The World of Stuff .com

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.