Talents? How?

This may surprise you. After all, it surprised me. But here it is:

I'm going to be in a talent show tomorrow.

Yeah, it is kind of a weird thing. But a while back, I agreed to be in some sort of charity talent show with my multi-instrumentalist (is that a word?) friend, Evan. It was supposed to be in December, but it got postponed to... tomorrow!

I had almost forgotten about it, to be honest, but I haven't been worried too much because I don't think it's going to be a big thing. But I got together with Evan the other day so we could practice. I had thought we were going to do "She Loves You," which we practiced together a lot when we were suitemates last spring. But he suggested that we play this one song I wrote that I played for him one time. I thought it was a good idea.

Interestingly, I also played the song (solo) at my band's last gig in 2005, so now I think I know how a one-hit wonder feels when he's touring the country with all this great material and all everyone wants to hear is that one song. Anyway, Evan plans to make things interesting by playing the ukulele and harmonizing. He's quite the talent. (Wow, I just realized I've been spelling "ukulele" wrong my entire life.)

This is supposed to be a two-hour show, and judging from the set list, it looks like there are seven acts, several of which are real bands. I wonder if we could squeeze in another song so as to take some focus away from my songwriting abilities. Oh well. It should be fun. I just hope it goes down better than my last talent show experience. That was, well, interesting.

Not many of you are likely to get this, but: If programming languages were religions...

Do you travel a lot? Thanks to the good old Freedom of Information Act, you can find out what the Department of Homeland Security knows about you! Well, some parts are censored, of course. And it could take a long time for you to get a response, like a year. But one guy went through the process and shares the results. Scary? Yes!

Here's something I always wondered: why do gas prices include that extra nine-tenths of a cent? Of course, part of the reason is to make you think you're spending less than you are, but there's a little more to it than that. (Via J-Walk Blog)

Everybody hates Wednesdays

Well, maybe not everybody, but I do. Tuesdays and Thursdays aren't so great either.

Why? Because I have digital logic lab Wednesday nights from 7:20-10:10 PM. Never mind that it's a three-hour lab at night, but the pre-lab assignment takes much longer than that. Besides, I rarely have much of a clue how to do anything. It's about building circuits and stuff, you see. I can connect things on a breadboard, but I feel like I missed a prerequisite for this class because some basic things about building circuits that I thought were really important were sort of glossed over.

So when none of the things I made worked quite right, I should have known that I was forgetting to do something. Last night, I spent much of my lab wondering why the thing we had to build, a 4:2 priority encoder, wasn't doing what it was supposed to. I even rebuilt it just to make sure I didn't mess anything up. As the lab period was ending, I was the one of the last two people left, and that's when the TA got a good look and realized that I wasn't connecting the input to a resistor after the switches. I totally did not know I had to do that. But I fixed it, and it worked. I was in a celebratory mood for the rest of the night. I was still in a celebratory mood when I woke up.

As much as digital logic is the Bane of My Existence for Spring '09, the prospect of building things that work is kind of... ugh... cool.

Oh, and I actually sort of did miss the prerequisite for this class, but I have an equivalent credit. Plus, an advisor approved my schedule.

Guess which regular feature I only did nine times last year... It's Ask Jordon!

Joohan Park: My teacher said you were in her classroom before but I don't believe it.Her name is Mrs.Sgroe.Did you have classes with her when you were young?

Yes, Mrs. Sgroe was my teacher for 5th grade (1999-2000) and 8th grade (2002-2003) at St. Elizabeth of Hungary Catholic School in Pompano Beach, Florida.

This might be handy for some of you Americans who hate looking like tourists: via The Presurfer, it's How to Avoid Looking Like an American Tourist.

This might be handy for some of you Americans who hate using nonsensical units of measure: from the hilarious webcomic xkcd, it's a guide to converting to metric.

This might be handy for some of you Americans or non-Americans who hate not being able to take good photos at concerts: from Jenny of Cool Cherry Cream, it's Concert Photography Tips and Tricks for Non-Professionals.

Now it's time for me to eat dinner and then do hours and hours of digital logic homework worth 0.4% of my grade. I hate Thursdays too!

Stream of consciousness VII

Last weekend I was watching TV with this guy from down the hall. He had been having a pretty bad week. He had lost his student ID card... and his backpack. I don't know how, but there you go.

A few days later, Jon asked me if I knew what had happened with him. "Oh yeah," I said. "He lost his student ID card and his backpack." "No, not that," Jon said.

Apparently he was hanging out with another guy in the parking garage behind the building, and they were on the third floor, and he was sitting on the edge and fell off. I was told that he was pretty intact, but an article in the major student newspaper said he had suffered injuries to his face. They also said he had been smoking marijuana but printed a retraction the next day. They didn't, however, correct their statement that he was a 20-year-old sophomore when he's actually a 19-year-old freshman.

That's probably a good reason not to wish for having an interesting life. You just might get it. (Or, you might not. Whatever. No one's just granting you wishes.) Anyway, he's a great guy and I wish him a speedy recovery.

Why else am I here? Oh yeah, to talk about other stuff. Of course. This is The World of Stuff, after all.

Here is a stuff. It's a fun fact. (Yes, I did mean to say "a stuff." I used to talk to a Korean girl on Skype and she spoke perfect English except she would say "stuffs" instead of "stuff.") Anyway, here's an interesting foodstuff: I have not engaged in any courtship-related activities this year. And by this year, I mean this school year, beginning in August. And by courtship-related activities, I mean August. No. Damn it. I mean no dating. (Ah, my consciousness. It is such a stream.)

I really have not met anyone that I would be interested in dating. And by be interested in dating, I mean would be able to ask out. I know a lot of interesting girls. And by a lot, I mean some. But they have boyfriends or whatever. It's always something. "It's Complicated!" Oh, whatever.

The other day it occurred to me that I am now 19 and a half years old. It's less than six months till I'm in my twenties. I know I shouldn't be thinking this way, but I sort of feel like the clock is ticking. People my age are tired of high-school games. They want to meet someone to settle down with in a long-term relationship or something. I know people who are married.

So one time I apparently blinked and missed learning how to go about with dating and stuff. I am still learning. But now that I know that you should not just ask an acquaintance on a dinner date, I haven't had a chance to use that information. What is it, you meet someone and you just sort of click with them and you hang out a few times and then you go to the movies or whatever and it's magical and I don't even know what comes after that. But I just can't make it click. (Sounds like a personal problem.) I wish I had spent more time interacting with people rather than just chillin'.

In spite of these impediments, I do imagine that I'll have kids someday. I guess it's inevitable to imagine that, whatever reality seems to be indicating. But anyway, Jordon Jr. is not going to get a children's encyclopedia. He's going to get a baseball glove. And relax, I won't name him Jordon Jr. Jeez.

Okay, hive mind, help me out here: you've all mostly probably maybe met someone you find special in that special way. Even if you hate them now, you probably still like the memories, perhaps. Was there a moment where you "clicked"? Or, you know what? Just tell me how you met your significant other(s) and how they became attracted to you or vice versa. I will be using this personal information for my personal gain, and I will credit you if you wish. This Awkward Placing Of My Arm Around Your Shoulder Is Brought To You By [your name here]!

This is already running long, but I have to have one, so: a crazy PDF chart showing radio frequency allocations in the United States. It is pretty crowded. (Via J-Walk Blog)

Life with walls

Too few posts ago, I mentioned that I would have to use a certain Windows-only program to do work for my digital logic class. As a Linux user (Ubuntu, to be exact), I of course find this detestable. I first considered trying to run it under Wine, but the all-knowing app DB reports of a show-stopping issue when doing so: USB operations don't work. Or, actually, maybe they do if you pull the right strings. I don't know. But I was going to need to use a special USB peripheral to program circuits, so there was no room for maybes.

I decided to virtualize. As an engineering student, I'm allowed to download copies of popular Microsoft software (except Office) for free, including Windows itself. I figured I should pick Vista over XP because I'll probably need Windows for a while in the future. I picked Vista Business, the most basic variety they had available. When it came time to download it, I hit a little snag. They couldn't provide a simple download link. Oh no, that would be too easy. You have to download a downloader, which itself is a Windows program. Vicious cycle??

Not quite. I installed Wine to run the downloader, and it worked fine, as I could expect. Next, I downloaded VirtualBox OSE, the free software version. I'd never run a virtual instance of an operating system before, so it was a little scary. But the installation went well, and in half an hour, I had Vista running inside Ubuntu. It was then that I found out that the free version of VirtualBox doesn't have USB support. So I uninstalled the free version and installed the non-free version. For once, I'm glad that programs leave their configuration files behind after an uninstall; I was able to keep the same virtual machine.

As is custom when I'm putzing around with my Ubuntu system, I now provide the gritty details of what I did, both for my future reference and for everyone's benefit. (This is for Ubuntu 8.10 "Intrepid Ibex," by the way. I don't think I know what an ibex is. It sounds like a six-dimensional ibis or something.)

First, in the Settings window, I went to "USB" and created an empty filter so that the virtual machine would recognize all USB devices. After that, I was able to mount and use my printer from Windows. VirtualBox recognized my other USB devices but wouldn't let me select them, so I had to do more tweaks. These fixes came from various sources and I found that they worked when applied together.

I edited /etc/udev/rules.d/40-basic-permissions.rules and replaced the two USB lines with

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ENV{DEVTYPE}=="usb_device", MODE="0664"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb_device", MODE="0664"

For good measure, I added myself to the vboxusers group even though I think I was automatically added already.

sudo usermod -G vboxusers -a `whoami`

For my next trick, I had to go to Users and Groups to find the number of the vboxusers group. On my computer, it was 127. Thus, at the end of /etc/fstab, I added the following:

none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=127,devmode=664 0 0

Then I think I rebooted, and everything went swimmingly. I was able to mount multiple USB devices from Windows.

I still hate Windows. But even when I get mad, all I have to do is think back to Tuesday, when I was at work with my friend Mark and we were watching live streaming video of Barack Obama being sworn in as President of the United States. That's something to be happy about. Now whenever I'm unhappy about something, I can just say to myself, "Barack Obama is the President," and I'll feel a little better.

Here's a computer simulation of that airplane landing in the Hudson River. (Via The Presurfer)

During the inauguration on Tuesday, the new incarnation of whitehouse.gov went online. Jason Kottke examines the country's new robots.txt file. (Via waxy.org)

Ending in failure

When I heard the other day that Circuit City was going out of business, I knew I had to get there quick or else my $25 gift card would become worthless. So I went the local Circuit City on Saturday, the day after the announcement. It was pretty busy there, which was probably unusual. I think the last time I had been to a Circuit City was when I bought my portable CD player in 2001.

It was a small store, and stuff was flying off the shelves at reduced prices pretty quick, but I hung around a while to see what I might want. The digital photo frames looked like a pretty cool thing to have, but my gift card wouldn't go far for any of them except the one with the 1-inch screen. Also, I have a hard enough time deciding what one picture to put in a frame, let alone 400.

I decided to get a 7.5-GiB SanDisk Cruzer Micro flash drive. The $25 covered about half of it, but I figured it was better than getting a smaller one that I'll want to replace a few years later. This thing should last a while. I also got it because I could put it on my keychain. I already have guitar picks, a flashlight, and a Swiss army knife, so why not include the geek's most valuable tool?

I've already copied over some PDFs of books that I haven't finished (or started) reading, and I plan to install GIMP Portable on it as well. That's for when I'm at work and I need to do image editing on a computer that doesn't have Photoshop. Or maybe I'll just use it whenever I'd use Photoshop. That's not a bad idea either.

While I was waiting for the bus on the way back from Circuit City, I wondered why there wasn't a service to find out where your bus was by sending a text message. UF Student Government pays a company called TransLoc to provide this bus tracking applet that shows some of the city buses on a real-time map. There are also "alternate [sic] access methods" for people with mobile phones and the visually impaired. These lo-fi sites textually describe the location of each bus.

Bingo, I thought. I can send text messages to e-mail addresses. My web host offers an e-mail-to-POST feature. I could write a script to receive the POST values, get the relevant data from the text-only web site, and e-mail information back to the requesting phone, which will receive the locations of the buses in a text message.

And that is what I have been doing this weekend. I actually got it working before I went to bed on Saturday night, but I've spent the remaining time implementing a queuing (man, I could not spell that) system and generally hardening the whole thing against spam and other potential attacks. And since this service would be getting (a small amount of) data from TransLoc's site, I thought I should ask for their permission before letting people have a go at it. I've first asked the city bus service and my student senator if they could help me make my case to TransLoc. I've got to be on the safe side or risk having the plug pulled on The World of Stuff.

What else? Oh yeah. It's the last night of George W. Bush's presidency. On this occasion, I have some special links.

Remember when Bushisms were popular? The BBC looks back on some of the verbal missteps of the "misunderestimated" president.

From Harper's: a retrospective of the Bush era by the numbers.

And if you have a lot of time, here's a list of every article about George W. Bush from The Onion: "Other histories of the Bush years will doubtless be more factual, but none will ever be truer." (Via J-Walk Blog)

I hope Bush pays for his crimes, but since that won't happen, I fear that people in the future will gloss over the horrible things he's responsible for. Never forget.

On a more positive note: if you don't happen to have a TV around at noon tomorrow, here's a large list of sites where you can watch Barack Obama's inauguration online. (Via The Presurfer)

A place of my own

I decided an indeterminate amount of time ago that this would be my last year in the dorms. Living in a dorm is pretty nice because you're close to things, but dorms are really for freshmen, and most of the people here are freshmen. I guess it's time for me to stretch my legs a bit; it's not always fun living in a small room. Choosing an apartment is a big decision, but I didn't worry about it too much because my roommate and I decided that we would get an apartment together.

On Saturday, we set out to go apartment hunting. We went to about half a dozen places in a few hours, taking a tour whenever possible and asking about rates and things like that. There were a lot of aspects to consider. Furnished or unfurnished? Close to campus or more secluded? What about utilities? Some places were pretty nice, and others were showy or lousy. Some were expensive and others were less expensive. I was getting tired, but I agreed to go to one more, a place out on 62nd Boulevard.

I had gone down this way a few times en route to the mall, and I recognized some of the neighboring apartment complexes, but I had never paid attention to this place called The District on 62nd. The buildings looked pretty nice. We went to the main office for a tour, and unusually, we had to wait a few minutes. Finally, a tour guide came out to greet us. She was a student who functioned as an RA of sorts. I had never heard of such a thing in an apartment complex.

She took us to the model apartment, which was furnished pretty nicely. It looked pretty roomy and comfortable. The living room was pretty spacious, and the kitchen was a kitchen. Next to the kitchen was a laundry room with a washer and dryer. There was also a patio. Our tour guide explained that, like a gated community, visitors have to buzz in at the front, and then you get a call so you can let them in. Then she turned the TV to a certain channel, and we could see the entrance of the complex where cars come in. You can see your guests as you talk to them on the phone. It's like the future!

That's when she told us that utilities were included and that a furnished apartment was just $10 more per person per month. The pricing scheme was not exactly bad news. My roommate and I decided that we could further save money by having two other roommates. Sharing an apartment with three people might not sound very good, but when each person has his own bathroom, as the District's 4-bedroom model did, it was an attractive idea. So we found out that for a furnished, 4/4 apartment it would be $499 a month, which is a little pricey but reasonable.

But wait, there was more. Our guide took us to the clubhouse, where there were racquetball courts and more conventional game-room things, and a TV with an allegedly bitchin' sound system. Apparently there are a lot of social events for students to mingle, and that's definitely a plus. I was concerned that I wouldn't meet people at an apartment complex, but at a place like this, it wouldn't be a problem.

I had already been sold before I found out about the discounts. They're currently offering $50 off each month's rent, plus a month's rent free or a new Dell laptop. And if we came back in two days (actually three because there was a Sunday in there) we would have our $150 security deposit waived. And so it was: $449 a month (minus one month) for socializing, having a bathroom, and other cool stuff. Pretty sweet.

We went on Tuesday to sign the lease. It went pretty well, and nothing in the lease jumped out at me as being particularly crazy (especially after the guy going through the lease with us explained which parts weren't enforced). We had to just pay a $50 deposit each for background checks, and I had to have one of my parents sign this one page and give it back. That's what the mail and/or fax machines are for.

My roommate and I can't find anyone else who needs an apartment, so we utilized the roommate matching form. This is a step up from the dorms, where they just pair you with any old person of the same year and sex. According to my preferences set out in the form, I hope to be matched with some non-smoking dudes who don't make a lot of noise, go to bed kind of early, and rarely entertain guests!

So, it looks like I'm going to have an apartment. It's a big step, and I'm looking forward to it.

Quick, before this gets pulled from YouTube. Microsoft has a new program called Songsmith that generates backing music for vocals sung into a microphone. It also apparently takes existing files. Here's what Songsmith came up to accompany the vocal track for The Police's song "Roxanne." (Via waxy.org)

If you like tracking satellites in real time, have I got the site for you: real-time satellite tracking (with the help of Google Maps) at n2yo.com.

We are the champions

Ah. Victory is so sweet. Even if it is vicarious.

So my university's football team went to the national championship game on Thursday night and won their third national championship. It was a nail-biter but a good one in the end. The last national championship was only two years ago, and the first was ten years before that. Not bad, I say. Yeah, I do like football, and whenever I feel like I picked this school because of its superior sports programs, I remember that even after I had been accepted, I wanted nothing to do with college sports. Remember? This is me not wanting to watch the basketball championship!

I still don't care about basketball, but times have changed, so I was glued to the football game Thursday night. I could have watched on semi-big screens with thousands of other fans in the basketball... arena?... but I stayed at the dorm and watched it with this one guy Jon and some other people who weren't paying attention. We ordered a pizza during the game, and when we went outside to get it, the streets were basically empty. Sure, it was a college campus at night, but it was still kind of eerie. It was strange to know that almost everyone was inside watching the game on TV.

"But Jordon," you ask, "how do you know that so many people were inside watching the game on TV?" Oh, easy. When we won, they all went outside. I had heard that after recent football and basketball championships in the past, students would storm University Avenue, one of the main roads through town, and engage in general merrymaking get crunk. After the game, Jon and I set out. It was kind of cold, but people were pouring out of the streets and onto the avenue, which I think had already been blocked off.

I don't think I've ever been in such a crowded crowd of people in my life. People were singing fight songs, chanting cheers, climbing poles, blaring horns, waving signs, getting amorous, throwing toilet paper, taking pictures, shooting off fireworks, and who knows what else. I'm misrepresenting the crowd, though. A lot of people were just mulling around, including me when I wasn't shouting "It's great to be a Florida Gator!" I stayed till about 1:30 in the morning and was hanging around with some other acquaintances after that.

Oh yeah, there are classes going on too. That brings me to an unfortunate development. As you may know, I've been getting by using Linux exclusively for almost two years. This semester, it ends. At least, I think so. For my digital logic class I have to use a program called Quartus from a company called Altera. I've done a little bit of searching and it seems that running it under Wine won't work for what I need to do (programming logic things). I think I could accept having to virtualize, especially if I'm going to need Windows again later, which is likely. I really, really, really, really, really, really, really don't want to dual-boot. Really.

Oh. Man. I think I have just found what I am looking for. Turns out there's actually documentation about running Quartus in Windows in VirtualBox in Ubuntu. And I think my school has a deal with Microsoft so I can get Windows for free or a low, low price. I guess that's what I'll have to do.

Windows sucks.

Pretty cool from the BBC: Ancient Supernova Mystery Solved. Apparently it's possible to learn about a past supernova by detecting the faint echoes of light it leaves behind.

Here's evolution at work. This guy named Roger Alsing created a program that would start with some random polygons and, over many generations, approximate a predefined image, discarding the results of mutations that looked less like the image and keeping those that looked more like it. After about 900,000 generations, the program came up with a good re-creation of the Mona Lisa. He then released source code and binaries and posted some other results people sent in.

The 'ship

"We're goin' to the 'ship! We're goin' to the 'ship!"

A month ago, the #2-ranked Florida Gators football team beat #1 Alabama to win the Southeastern Conference championship. All around campus, people were celebrating: honking their car horns, taking to the streets, running around in the football stadium. Winning your conference championship is a big deal, but this was something more. By being so highly ranked and winning such a big game, we were virtually guaranteed to be picked for the national championship game, and everybody knew it, particularly this guy from my floor who, during a postgame car ride, stuck his head out the sunroof and shouted that we were going to the 'ship while trying to elicit hoots and hollers from passersby.

Tonight, the Gators will try to win their second national championship in three years. The 2006 championship game (in January 2007) was held in Arizona, but this one will be closer to home, in Miami. I thought about entering the lottery for student tickets, but I would have automatically been charged $175 if I had won, and the tickets are non-transferable. This doesn't sound so bad except that I had no idea how I'd get there. (I would have had to hope that other friends with cars also got tickets.) So I will remain in Gainesville, six hours away, for the game. It's such a shame, too. I live down by Miami, and I saw Dolphin Stadium on my way back from the zoo on Monday. The Florida Gators' and Oklahoma Sooners' logos were hanging up on a giant banner.

If you were to come to Gainesville today, you would see that something big is about to go on. In anticipation of fans storming University Avenue like last time, the police department isn't allowing cars to park there today. There's a cage around the new alligator statue (which, incidentally, commemorates the 2006 championship) outside the football stadium. And my 8:30 class is canceled tomorrow even though the president of the university doesn't want classes to be interrupted (unlike two years ago, when he was apparently more lax about it).

Oh yeah. Yesterday was my first day of classes. They don't seem too bad yet, although we've hardly done anything. I have a friend I can sit with in each of my classes, and two of them are in the same room one after the other. I guess that's the good thing about getting big into your major.

In my last post, I mused about getting a Flickr account so I could share my photos with the world. Here's a pretty cool reason to have one: a guy allowed his one of his Flickr pictures to be used in Iron Man.

One of the great things about new things is that you can go back and discover things that are kind of like it that are really old. Here's the oldest known lolcat, from 1905.

Zoo 2

Yesterday, while my friends were moving back to their dorms/apartments and getting ready for classes, I was still at home, checking out Miami Metrozoo with my mom and my sister and my friend Amanda. It brought back memories of the last time I visited, which was a few years ago. I didn't bring my camera then, but I did this time. I'm glad I did. I think this trip made me realize that I should have a Flickr account. I'll see what I can do about that.

I'm going back to school shortly, so instead of me writing stuff, here are a few pictures.

A white tiger and two regular tigers lick each other in the shade. Yes, my descriptions of animals are so majestic.

A zebra eats hay.

This is me standing in front of a giraffe. The original photo is pretty underexposed, but I managed to touch it up so satisfactorily that I think I'll write a tutorial about how I did it.

An African elephant. It actually was kind of red like that over most of its body. I guess it was dirty.

There were quite a few tanks of marine animals as well. This is a stingray or some other kind of ray.

OpenStreetMap is a collaborative mapping project. It's the Wikipedia of maps. It sounds like a cool idea, especially because the maps are licensed under a generous Creative Commons license, but I wouldn't rely on them for navigation.

Grooveshark is a site that allows you to listen to music for free online. It's slightly well-known at the University of Florida because it's based right there in Gainesville. Their PR guy spoke at a Florida Free Culture meeting last semester and explained how the site was run. It was pretty interesting. Now you don't have to go to YouTube to get that song you don't have a copy of out of your head.

There is an elephant in the way

Some weeks ago, my printer started choking on paper. A sheet couldn't go in very far before getting crunched. I tried to look inside, but I couldn't see anything wrong. I thought it might be something simple, like the input tray being misaligned, but I can't really fix anything, so I brought it home for my dad to look at. We had a look inside and eventually saw something stuck in there. It was white, but it wasn't a piece of paper. It was... a cotton ball. There was a cotton ball in the way.

My printer is right next to my garbage can, which is in turn near the sink. I go through a lot of cotton balls. Usually they land in the garbage can, but sometimes they miss and land on the printer's input tray. When I find them there, I throw them away, but I must have missed one. You can bet that won't happen again.

If you've been reading for a while, you probably know about my Canadian friend Natasha. We met through this site a few years ago. For Christmas, she got me a framed photo of the skyline of her hometown. She sent a letter separately that arrived today (well, technically, yesterday). With the letter she included some photos that she wrote on the backs of like postcards. They got me thinking.

If you have friends, they've probably sent you postcards every now and again. I have a large corkboard on which I hang up various things, including postcards I've gotten. Although it may sound strange, I'm faced with a dilemma when hanging up postcards: which side do I show? Do I want to show off the photo or the customized greeting? I like reading what my friends write to me, but I also like pretty pictures. Personally, I've always posted them greeting side out, but it's starting to look a little ridiculous. What would you do?

You know those questions that you're really not sure about until you ask someone, and right then it seems totally obvious? That was one of them.

John Lennon is endorsing the One Laptop Per Child project... well, sort of. In this commercial, a voice actor stands in for the late musician, and archive footage is digitally altered to make it look like he's talking about buying computers for Third World children. I'm not sure what to make of it. What do you think? Is it inspiring? Shameful? Creepy? I'm tending toward weird myself.

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which I've never heard of, recently quizzed Americans on their civic knowledge. The results were abysmal. Ordinary citizens achieved an average score of 49% on the 33-question, multiple-choice quiz, and those who had held elected office averaged only 44%. Now you can take the quiz yourself. I scored 100%. Maybe I should run for office.