The World of Stuff .com

Life

Have you ever been in a situation that could either bring you either untold amounts of joy or more misery? A situation you weren’t quite in control of? It probably made you feel like you were hanging in the balance, caught between extremes and not being able to choose which way to go. What can you do in a situation like that? Besides feeling a little excited by the possibilities, I think all you can do is hope for the best… or try to nudge things in your favor.

Today was an interesting day. If you’ve been reading for a while, you know that I volunteer for Get Carded, which gives out organ donor cards on campus. Our big event of the fall semester was today. I didn’t even know about it until a few weeks ago, but I guess I’m not quite in the loop since I don’t have a chairmanship/chairship/chair/whatever. Well, I do have a chair. I’m sitting in it.

But anyway, it was called the Festival of Life, and the main thing was that we were trying to break the world record for largest human green ribbon, green being the color for organ donation (also cerebral palsy, lymphoma, HIV testing, bipolar disorder, Lyme disease, celiac disease, hemochromatosis, environmentalism, the earthquake in China, farm families, peace, missing children, the genocide in Darfur, the Jena Six, music education in Hispanic communities, street urchins in the former Soviet Union, and maybe other causes).

We spent hours getting ready: setting up the tent, putting posters all over campus, blowing up green balloons for the people in the human ribbon to hold, and more. Volunteers came and went because they had to go to work or class. Fortunately, I was able to make it for the actual event at 1 PM (with the added bonus of not having to sit through a physics lecture). We definitely didn’t expect to break the record of 689 people… and we didn’t. We probably didn’t have more than 50. But we did get people interested in organ donation. Free pizza helped too.

There were a couple of journalists and TV news crews there. This evening, I saw the piece that WUFT (which, as a university-run TV station, is located several yards from where we were standing) put together. They didn’t interview me or anything, but it was nice to see that some other people were interviewed. And, of course, it was all for a good cause.

I guess I haven’t been to YouTube in a while. Remember when I said that the 16:9 aspect ratio was becoming more popular for video? YouTube has now made it the aspect ratio for their player. Fortunately, existing 4:3 videos aren’t cropped or stretched or anything nasty.

Donald Knuth collects photos of diamond-shaped signs. Also, ten cool points to those of you who have heard of Donald Knuth.

Finally, here are 9 Brain Habits You Didn’t Realize You Had. The most visible color is chartreuse? That’s one of those tidbits I think I’ll remember for the rest of my life. I’ve even had a chance to bring it up in conversation already.