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)