Elections: they’re not just for fall anymore

Yesterday I was going through old issues of the Independent Florida Alligator, formerly the dependent Florida Alligator, because I was looking for scans of old (public domain) issues to add to the newspaper’s Wikipedia article. It was really interesting to see what sorts of things were going on at the university decades ago and how many of them were similar to what’s going on today. I saw a lot about Student Government elections, which is appropriate because the spring SG elections are Tuesday and Wednesday.

Nice segue, eh? Before I jump to that subject, some gems from old issues of the Alligator: a 1964 editorial about Fidel Castro’s hostility toward the naval base at Guantanamo Bay; a satirical 1975 article, presented as a news story from the distant year 1995, about the threat of ozone cans to the aerosol layer; and the first issue of 1990, in which the newspaper introduced a brand new look that today’s students would find very familiar. Same logo, too.

Anyway, during the spring elections, the student body president and representatives of the various colleges are elected, so this is kind of a big deal. There are three main parties in the race:

The Unite Party mainly consists of former members of the majority, Greek-supported Gator Party, which was hit by scandal last semester when some damning e-mails got out about… I don’t know what they really said, but the implication was that the student body president had a hand in choosing which senators got elected or something like that. Allegedly! Anyway, now there’s the Unite Party, which aims to unite. My friend Cameron is running with them to represent the College of Engineering. He’s a responsible guy and great senator material. And since he’s running on the Unite ticket, he’ll probably win. But would I pick a Unite candidate for president? I’d look at my other options first.

The Orange and Blue Party was the party calling for change last semester, and they seem to have made some good progress considering they’re the minority party. Ben Cavataro, my dorm’s senator, is a member of the Orange and Blue Party, and my interactions with him indicate he’s a good guy.

And then there is this guy:

He’s Benjamin Dictor, presidential candidate for the Progress Party, which seems to have splintered from Orange and Blue. This never-before-seen photo is from the Andrew Meyer protest I attended. Ring a bell? “Don’t tase me, bro.” Right. Ben Dictor took a leadership role in those protests.

I don’t know him personally, but that’s how I know who he is, and my impression of him is that he’s a man of principles and action. Even if they weren’t the best principles, as I freely admit, he has good intentions and knows how to get things done. Also, Orange and Blue had their chance, but now I’d like to give some new guys a try in Student Government. That’s why I’m probably voting for Ben Dictor for student body president. I don’t think he’ll win, but it would be really cool if he did. Thus ends the lamest editorial ever.

This is pretty cool, though: Wikipedia Names Your Band. The idea is simple:

Go to “Wikipedia.” Hit “random” and the first article you get is the name of your band. Then go to “Random Quotations” and the last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album. Then, go to Flickr and click on “Explore the Last Seven Days” and the third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

When you see the album One Damn Thing Over and Over by Liberty Motor Car, and the cover has a picture of a chef smoking a cigarette and examining a pot full of bright green goo, buy it, because it’s mine. (Via waxy.org)

Some things take so long

Let’s not shy away from the fact that it’s Saturday night and I am, as many would say, “juss chillen.” I’ve been getting lost in George Harrison’s “Isn’t It a Pity” for at least the last three hours. It’s mesmerizing.

I’m feeling a little restless. I want to create something monumental. Maybe not worthy of a museum, but monumental for me and the people I know. I want it to be beautiful and moving. I want it to be the truth. But it would have to be oblique.

There are things I desperately want to say to someone, but I can’t. Commitments conflict. During the week, I’m digging myself out from under an avalanche of assignments. I’m not as in control of things as you may think. I have to take these classes. I know they suck. I know that more than you do. And during the weekend, everyone is out in public, somewhere, or in private.

I want, but I don’t want things. I want feelings and experiences. I want people. I want one person. Maybe a specific person, maybe not. Honestly, I don’t know. Now that I know how to find that person, I can’t. I used to fall in love all the time. I don’t know what happened. Growing up, I guess. And everything that came with it. Oh yeah. I guess it is irony.

I’d feel better if I did something, but it’s too cold to do anything outside. I just realized that it’s cold during most of my time at school. I hate cold weather. Hate it, hate it. South Florida may be overpopulated and expensive to live in, but it is comfortable.

So I’m glad it’s almost March. Then things will start warming up, I guess. Maybe I’ll go to a baseball game. The stadium’s right there, I think. I hear it all the time these days. I could get some people together and we could do a thing.

But tonight, I think I’ll go out into the common room and see if anyone’s playing cards. That would be fun for a while.

Isn’t it a pity, isn’t it a shame.

Another week

I’ve survived another week. These classes are pretty demanding. I had my first two exams; digital logic on Tuesday and discrete math today.

Digital logic was pretty rough. I wish I had studied more, but I’m not sure how much it would have helped. In any case, I think I did okay. The exam counts for 28% of my grade.

I was expecting discrete math to be pretty bad because the teacher (a grad student) doesn’t teach well, but I studied with a friend who reminded me that we were allowed to have a cheat sheet. Boy, was that helpful. Also, a lot of the questions on the exam were adapted from or taken directly from the practice problems. So I felt good about the exam. It’s 20% of my grade.

What else? At work, we’re working on moving the web site to a new server. The site currently runs on Mac OS X (did you know there were Mac servers and that people actually use them?), and the new server runs FreeBSD. (No, I didn’t make that choice. I’m not in charge of the server configuration, so stop asking me questions about it. I don’t even have root access to this new server yet. “Jordon, you’re the webmaster and you don’t have root access to the new server?” No. No questions. Stop.)

Anyway, the main issue for me is that file names in Mac OS X are case-insensitive, while on FreeBSD, like any good Unix, they are case-sensitive. Past webmasters have been, shall we say, inconsistent with capitalization on the site. For ordinary requests, this will be fixed with the Apache module mod_speling (ha ha, Apache), but some PHP includes would still be broken, so I’ve had to change them to use all-lowercase file names throughout the site. This is in anticipation of my renaming all of the files on the site to all lowercase, which the network guy wants me to do.

There’s much more to the move, but I can save that for another day.

Meanwhile, my Esperanto Club has been meeting every week. We’ve got a small group that includes some people who weren’t with us last semester and doesn’t include some people who were with us last semester. I hope people aren’t skipping out because they think our lessons are stultifyingly boring. I think we could do some more fun things, but first, we have to teach the basics. Andy, my trusty Vice President, has been making comprehensive slide shows based on the excellent Teach Yourself Esperanto, third edition. He’s also videoblogging about our meetings in Esperanto and I bet he’d love it if random people watched his videos and commented on them!

So that’s all that’s been going on. And now, the links.

Apparently, Queen Rania of Jordan (which is not to be confused with me, Jordon) has her own YouTube channel. Here’s a video where she spoofs David Letterman’s top ten list. The question remains: if a queen cracks bad jokes, do her subjects have to laugh? (Via The Presurfer)

This would be fun if you like to confuse people: How to Make a Sawed-Off USB Key.

And finally, the Stories Behind 10 Famous Food Logos. (Via The Presurfer)

Airline food?

Today, Jordon weighs in on…

• Hot dogs: Hot dogs are like the universe. They’re filled with all sorts of stuff, but it’s more or less evenly distributed throughout. Also, they may contain intelligent life.
• The Middle East: Can anyone recommend a good book on the history of the Israeli conflict? I feel like it’s a soap opera that I wouldn’t understand unless I had started watching it years ago.
• Natasha: I want to meet my Canadian friend more than I want to go to Europe this summer. For obvious reasons, she’d prefer to visit me in my natural subtropical habitat. I hope she can this year. We could do some fun stuff.
• Vaccines: I was raised with the belief that vaccines cause more harm than good and that they can induce autism. As I broaden my horizons I notice that this is considered nonsense by almost everyone, including the scientific establishment, which has the scientific method to back it up. There must be a reason that children no longer get diseases like the measles, rubella, or polio in large numbers, and smallpox didn’t just decide to stop infecting people. Also, while diagnoses of autism may be increasing, diagnoses are not equal to cases. More people are diagnosed with allergies these days also, but that’s because we no longer shrug off the symptoms by just saying that little Johnny is a sickly child.
• Regime change: Last week, Archie, my RA, quit and moved out. So we were RA-less for a week, during which time I took the liberty to hang up a flyer for my Esperanto club in the common room, there being no one to stop me. Yesterday, I bumped into the new RA. Her name is Jordan, which might get confusing. She didn’t know which rooms she was responsible for, so I had to tell her. Should be interesting.

There’s one born every minute. Here’s the story of a Canadian who lost $150,000 in a Nigerian scam. (Via J-Walk Blog)

Some people with lots of time on their hands calculated the acceleration due to gravity in the Super Mario Bros. games. (Via waxy.org)

Here’s a map of the United States that shows the motto of each state. Some of them are pretty weird. Most are in English or Latin, but there’s one each in Spanish, French, Greek, Italian, Hawaiian, and Chinook. (They’re all listed below the map.) (Via J-Walk Blog)

Someday the somethingteenth

This semester, I’ve got a lot of homework. It’s kind of odd. In previous semesters, I haven’t had much homework that I had to sit down and write out on paper and turn in a few days or a week later. Now I have regular homework assignments in three of my four classes, and they’re keeping me busy during most of the week.

I was up late last night working on a MIPS assembly programming assignment for my Computer Organization and Design class. For those of you who don’t know, programming in assembly language is the digital equivalent of going about your normal day without your right arm and your left leg. It takes a conscious effort and a lot of work not to fall over (or just give up on life).

One assignment was to ask the user for an arbitrary number of integers and then calculate how many of them were divisible by 4. This took me a couple or three hours. I tried using the “div” operator, but it wasn’t working the way I expected it to, so I had to find the divisibility of a number by 4 using other MIPS operators. I have discovered a truly marvelous way to do this, which this blog post is not boring enough to contain.

Something else: recently, someone on Slashdot asked, “How Will Recent Financial Downturns Affect IT Jobs?” The consensus, if you read the comments, is clear: do stuff. Grades don’t matter, experience does. Help out with an open source project, they say. I wish I had the time and knowhow to do that. (And, let’s face it, the inclination. Maybe there’s some program I would be interested in developing, but I don’t know what it would be.) Are any of you readers involved with that sort of stuff? Could you provide any tips for an Ubuntu user who doesn’t know how to compile from source?

A video from my friend TJ: Ninja Poetry. Could this be the next big viral video? He really did write the poem.

In 2001, C. Brian Smith had just graduated from college and was living in a new town when his only friend there invited him over for dinner at her family’s new house. Smith writes about his visits to the White House and what it was like to hang out with George W. Bush.

A look from the other side: Interview with an Adware Author. The guy actually started out with good intentions, but it became a slippery slope from there. (Via waxy.org)

Play nice, kids

[Edit Tue, Feb 10, 2009 22:27 EST: Wow. Um, this post is about me getting my Internet access cut off because I was using BitTorrent. After I wrote it, I got a message saying that my access was blocked because of bad authentication - I had just changed my password, and it hadn't propagated through the system yet. So, um, let's just pretend I didn't accidentally incriminate myself.]

Brian Malow is a comedian… who jokes about science! Don’t worry, his jokes are very accessible and still pretty funny.

Last year, there were several Internet outages due to cable breaks in the Mediterranean. New Scientist reports on why the sea is the Achilles’ heel of the web.

Europe ’09

A few months ago, my friend Mark mentioned that he wanted to go backpacking through Europe over the summer. Then he bought a plane ticket. The implication was that I was invited to come along. The more, the merrier, Mark said. Our friend Andy decided he would go along, and Dan did too. How could I resist?

Okay, I had to think about it a bit. It is a big decision to spend a lot of money traveling on another continent for two months. But it’s the chance of a lifetime. Who knows how many people I’ll meet and how many things I’ll see and do? And when’s the next time I’ll be able to travel across Europe with friends?

So I made it official. Yesterday, I bought a plane ticket to London on the same flight as Mark and Dan. We’re leaving May 26 and coming back July 31. Yep. Over two months.

Interestingly (I’m reminded of a professor I had last semester would stress the third syllable of that word), Mark, Andy, Dan, and I, are the officers of the Esperanto Club here at the University of Florida. We plan to do at least some traveling within the Passport Service, a hospitality network for Esperanto speakers. It’ll be a great way to meet people, practice the language, and save money. We also plan on going to the International Youth Congress of Esperanto in Liberec, Czech Republic. As it happens, our club’s faculty advisor teaches Czech and will be in the country then, so maybe she’ll come along.

While I happen to be on the continent, I’d really like to visit my distant cousins in Croatia and see the beautiful town that my ancestors emigrated from. Also, if my friend Kevin happens to be with his family in Spain over the summer, I’d like to drop by and say hola. And if any of you want to put up four guys for a few nights, it would be much appreciated.

So, people who live in or have been to Europe: what should I see? I’ll have two whole months, and I’d like to do as much as possible. What do you recommend? Do you have any tips? Also, I’ll be celebrating my 20th birthday during the trip, so if you have any ideas for that, I’d like to hear them.

If you know me, you probably have a lot of questions: “What about this? What about that? What a horrible idea!” Obviously, I don’t have all my arrangements made yet, but I am thinking about them. I think I want a travel-sized guitar because I obviously can’t go without playing the guitar for two months. I might also bring my laptop, even though I nearly broke it last year when I took it to the dining hall down the street. If I don’t bring my computer, I’ll at least try to blog as often as possible. I’d also like to take hundreds if not thousands of pictures, so I’ll pick up a larger memory card for my camera.

Wow. I can’t wait. It’ll be the experience of a lifetime.

Rejected titles for this post include:

• Go east, young man
• Eurotrip
• The World of Stuff goes to Europe
• The World of Stuff Live! In Europe
• The World of Stuff’s European Vacation

Barack Obama wrote some books, and that means there are audiobook versions of his books. Here’s your chance to hear the President utter some questionable quotations like “Sure you can have my number, baby!” and things you can’t say on TV. (Via waxy.org)

In case you doubted it: the Top 10 Signs of Evolution in Modern Man. Pretty fascinating stuff. (Via The Presurfer)

Wikipedia has a long list of shibboleths. (There’s also an article explaining what a shibboleth is.)

Antics

On February 27, 2005, I complained about a local political candidate who received permission to put a sign in our yard and then put in two. A commenter at the time had this to say:

Evidently, Jordon, you have a firm grasp on reality. Your wanting to scream and cry and pull your hair out regarding Anita Cruz’s campaign antics was a desire shared by many. In the end, Deerfield voters did the right thing and reclaimed the city with the re-election of Vice Mayor Gonot. Yes, Jordan, as hard as it is to believe, there actually exists a politician of honesty and integrity. That man is Steve Gonot. Watch him, and learn.

Fast forward to December 11, 2008: Deerfield Beach Commissioner Arrested On Grand Theft Charges.

A city commissioner in Deerfield Beach has been arrested on grand theft and other charges, according to the Broward State Attorney’s Office.

In a news release, a representative of the Broward State Attorney’s Office said Deerfield Beach City Commissioner Steve Gonot surrendered at the Broward County Jail on Thursday.

Gonot is accused of misusing $5,135 in campaign money.

Gonot faces charges of grand theft and official misconduct, both third-degree felonies, as well as misdemeanor charges of a candidate falsifying campaign finance report and a public officer falsifying records.

The bond for the charges is $3,000.

There are probably some things I could say about this, but it pretty much speaks for itself.

I’ll just add that I’ve donated to Change Congress recently. If you don’t have the money to spare, you can at least join their “donor strike.” They’re rallying citizens to withhold donations from members of Congress who don’t support citizen-funded elections. Congress is now missing out on contributions from citizens who gave $700,000 during the last election cycle.

Gapminder.org has some pretty cool charts ‘n’ graphs. This world chart conveys a lot of information about the countries of the world.

You’d think that a site as popular as Twitter, which all the geeks seem to be using these days, wouldn’t allow an unlimited number of login attempts… but they did. (Via waxy.org).

The BBC ponders: Should we not dress girls in pink? I, for one, feel that the girl = pink, boy = blue convention is really pointless and arbitrary. It’s also very recent, but since the media have gotten a hold of it, it’s likely never to go away.

In the spotlight

On Saturday, I was in a talent show with my friend Evan. I’ve talked a little bit about how I ended up being in it, so now I’ll explain how it actually was.

I couldn’t really find the place. I mean, I had directions, but it was in a part of campus I had never been to before, and I had to navigate my way through a maze of buildings. But I knew I was in the right area when Evan showed up with his ukulele. Eventually, we found someone who showed us where the auditorium was.

The Facebook page for the talent show had us listed as “Evan and Jordan [sic]” and then just “Evan and friend” for whatever reason. But we decided to be introduced as “Evan and Jordon.” Meanwhile, the other acts started to show up, including Sweet City Action, an indie trio that I think I’d heard of. We introduced ourselves to one another and chatted a bit, I think. They let us borrow one of their amps, so we went with them to get their equipment from their cars.

Finally, it was time for the show to start. It was lightly attended, which was kind of a shame because there was some great talent. First was an all-female student a capella group doing a few songs, mostly new hits but also my sister’s favorite jam, “I Want to Break Free.” They were good.

And let’s see, there was a dance troupe, and maybe some others. And then it was time for some sweet Sweet City Action action. They were doing folksy-type stuff, I think is something other than what their name would imply to me. But still, they did some good songs and I was impressed by how multitalented each member of the group was. During their set, they played guitars, bass, piano, violin, melodica, pots and pans… did I miss any? It was a fun set.

Then it was our turn. I had decided that I wouldn’t need the huge tube amp I had lugged all the way from the parking lot, so I decided to use my own little amp that I brought. It seemed to be a good choice. After setting up, we were situated on the stage to do our own song, a song I wrote five years ago. I thought back to the last talent show I was in and how everyone ridiculed me for staying still on the stage. So I shifted a bit, but I think it was also due to nerves.

As I was playing, I realized that I was holding the pick sideways and that there was nothing I could do to fix it short of stopping the song. It’s possible to play holding your pick the wrong way, but it’s harder and less pleasant. But I persisted, shuffling here and there, looking around, and trying not to get too close to the mike, which was pretty sensitive.

Before I knew it, I was done with the song. For a brief moment, silence. I stepped back and said “Thank you guys” before the small audience applauded. Then we got our stuff off the stage and sat with Evan’s girlfriend while enjoying the last act, a Hispanic duo from Tampa. They had the longest set by far, but it was good stuff.

Then the show was over, and there were free burritos for everyone. I had my share. I got several comments about the song being good, which I appreciated. Evan helped Sweet City Action take their stuff back to their cars and I, not having anything to carry, just chatted with them. One of them, I found out, plays the bells in the bell tower some days. You can take a class to learn how.

So, that was the talent show. No video, unfortunately. In a way, it was nice to play in front of an audience, and I wish I could do it some more if I had a band that would want to play my songs. And then we could record stuff too. Just what I always wanted.

Yesterday, I quietly launched RTS-SMS, my text messaging service thing for buses in Gainesville, after getting permission from the company that tracks the buses. I’m interested in seeing how popular my service can get with as little promotion as possible on my part. But I think I’ll start plugging it soon.

Because there was football yesterday: here’s a fun little video about how they draw the yellow first-down line on the screen.