The club scene

As I took a seat in one of my classes today, the guy next to me said, "World of Stuff?"

He explained that he'd been to this web site and wanted to freak me out by randomly mentioning it. I asked how he had heard of it, and he said he couldn't remember, but he remembered my face, presumably from the About Me page.

I wish that happened more often. Thanks, random dude!

As this school year has been getting up to speed, student organizations that have been dormant over the summer are springing back to life. I'm active in several organizations, so this means exciting haps for me.

Yesterday, I handed out flyers for Get Carded on campus. Actually, we weren't handing them out as much as going into dorms and putting them in residents' boxes. Not the mailboxes, but they also have these, like... cubbies. Yeah. They have cubbies. It was weird going to campus on a Sunday and seeing people mulling around because for two years, I was mulling around with them. In fact, one of the dorms I went to was Hume Hall, the dorm where I lived for two years. From what I saw, it's the same as it was a few months ago, when I last lived there.

Florida Free Culture, of which I'm now the secretary, is getting into full swing as well. There's already been an organizational meeting, during which many events were planned or at least discussed. Coming up soon are the Student Organization Fair, at which FFC will be present, and Free Your PC, our signature event during which we install antivirus software and free software on students' computers.

And then there's my own club, the Esperanto Club. Ah, yes. I'm hoping to have an even better year than last year, which should be pretty easy. For our first meeting, Andy and I will be talking not only about Esperanto but also about how we used it throughout our epic trip to Europe this summer. If we can drum up enough publicity to attract people who'll want to hear about our amazing story and this exciting language, this year will definitely be a success.

Here's an awesome time-lapse video that tracks the sun around the sky for a week near one of the poles. (Via The Presurfer)

Peter over at Greatplay.net came up with a cool idea that I wish I'd thought of: a random featured article from Wikipedia.

If someone told you they couldn't send e-mail to people over 500 miles away, would you say they were crazy? That's probably what this one guy thought when he was confronted with just that problem. Find out how the case of the 500-mile e-mail was solved.

Yawn

Besides being a blog, The World of Stuff is a bunch of stuff. Over the years, I've added new pages that defy categorization. Nonetheless, I've been trying for a long time to keep each extraneous page one of a few neat, little boxes. It's not working.

Currently, the navigation links are Blog, Archives, Geek, Writing, Video, Fun, Store, and About. Of these, the Blog, Archives, and Video pages are worth leaving alone. They do their job well. It's the Geek, Writing, and Fun pages I'm most concerned about. They're not very intuitive. (Would you expect to find Ultimate Cool Characters in Geek, Writing, or Fun? It's in Geek.)

I'm thinking of splitting up those three categories into the following four categories. (The current category for each page is in parentheses.)

Articles:

• Free Your Computer with Linux (Geek)
• Finding the Day of the Week (Writing)
• Courtesy Autographs on US Currency (Writing)
• Tredici (Fun)
• Being Left-Handed (Writing)
• The Dvorak Keyboard and You (Geek)

Fiction or Creative:

• PLEASE READ THIS!!!1 (Writing)
• The Prisoners (Writing)
• Romeo and Juliet: A Sock Puppet Adaptation (Writing)

Reference:

• Using IRC on UF DHNet (Geek)
• Kalilić/Kalilich Family Genealogy (Writing)
• Donation Information for Free Content Projects (Geek)
• Fix for Ubuntu Hard Drive Problem (Geek)
• "Click Here" Around the World (Fun)
• Minor Scale Chart Thing (Fun)
• Ultimate Cool Characters (Geek)

Interactive:

• RTS-SMS (Fun)
• From Canada with Love (Fun)
• Fake Cyrillic Generator (Fun)
• Greasemonkey User Scripts (Geek)
• Ask Jordon (Fun)

If I were going to change up all these organizational things, which I probably will, then I'd also change the name of the About page to "Meta" at the risk of alienating the 98% of the population who don't know what "meta" means. It's because I have not only About Me, About the Site, and Donations, but also press coverage of the site.

As for the store... the store makes me sigh. No one's ever bought anything from it. Looks like I'm going to need another way to effortlessly make money while promoting my blog.

By the way, all of the above is up for discussion; that's why I'm posting it here. Let me know what you think. Ideas for effortlessly making money while promoting the site are particularly welcome.

Awesome video: a complete Goonies reunion. (Via waxy.org)

Roomba + camera + time = Roomba time exposure. (Via J-Walk Blog)

Here are some rare and interesting mental disorders and illnesses you've probably never heard of. (Via The Presurfer)

nm u?

This semester's schedule has been pretty easy to get used to: class, work, lunch, class, work. The only thing that's odd is living off campus. I can't just go home if I have a free period. Moving from a dorm to an apartment is like moving from a summer camp to a house... sort of. I'm away all day, anyway.

On the bus, I pass by my dormitory of two years, Hume Hall. I notice that they've done some landscaping, and I wonder how they could have afforded it if there's some sort of budget crisis going on. I also think about the friends I made there last year. Many of them have returned to Hume and tried to get rooms on the same floor. All in all, I made more friends there last year than I did the year before. They were mostly freshmen last year, but they felt like equals to me.

Work has been good. I'm still the Dean of Students Office webmaster, a job I got to keep over the summer thanks to the miracle of the Internet. This week, I finally got to meet the new graphic artist, who started while I was gone. I would e-mail her from Europe because sometimes I needed to work with images, and I didn't want to risk installing the GIMP on the little netbook that Andy and I had bought.

The big project at work lately has been moving sections of the web site to their own subdomains per an organizational shake-up. Much of this was done over the summer by another webmaster in the department. The work was finally finished yesterday. Now the web site I'm responsible for is smaller, but this just marks another chapter in my webmasterdom. The Interim Dean of Students has some ideas for improving the web site, and I have some of my own. Can I say this stuff? Probably. I'm not giving away state secrets or anything.

One of my new professors says the key to success with schoolwork is to have it on your mind constantly. But at the end of the first week of the semester, that's the last thing I want to think about. Last night, I did something I don't do very much at all: I channel-surfed. Back-to-back Family Guy, car chases, Joe Biden eulogizing Ted Kennedy, The Land Before Time, a live-action show on Cartoon Network, an old college football game, news about kidnapped people, Tropic Thunder, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Al Jazeera, Craig Ferguson's stand-up. Who says Friday night TV is a wasteland?

Sugar Stacks lets you see how much sugar is in popular foods. (Via The Presurfer)

Did you know you can easily create a book of Wikipedia articles? PediaPress makes it possible.

A '50s-style instructional film: Facebook Manners and You. (Via The Presurfer)

Movin' on up

When The World of Stuff sleeps for a week, it means big things have happened... probably.

On Wednesday, my friend TJ had a party for his birthday and the end of summer. At his request, my sister and I brought seven-layer dip, which I had for my quasi-party the week before. TJ's was fun, but I got really tired before everyone else and went home instead of spending the night. Besides, I had to get up early the next day to start packing.

On Saturday, we made the move to Gainesville again. My sister had already moved most of her stuff to her new apartment, but since she was bringing her clothes this time, there was hardly any room for my stuff and my dad had to rent a small trailer. Yes, I'm blaming it on the clothes.

But no matter. I was excited to be moving into an apartment after spending two years in the dorms. My parents helped me move in, and then we went to the store for some important things like food. I had a meal plan my first two years in college, but I don't now. I also don't have actual dishes or cutlery (just paper and plastic, respectively), but that will probably change soon as I go shopping for stuff.

I sealed the deal for this particular abode with my then-current roommate back in January. My friend Andy, who I went to Europe with this summer, joined in as well. There was room for a fourth person in the apartment, but we ended up not finding anyone to join us, and they didn't assign us another roommate. We're locked out of the fourth bedroom, but we don't have to pay extra or anything.

The curious can see some pretty, pretty pictures of the apartment complex on its web site. I might post photos of our place eventually, but it's still kind of a mess, the lighting is bad (for photography), and my camera is starting to crap out after traveling around Europe in my pocket. I have a feeling it's going to be like the nimble old guy who retires from his lifelong job and then dies two months later.

Of course, some of the first things I checked out in my new apartment were the cable and Internet services. They're provided by some company called Pavlov Media. The Internet service seems pretty decent. The speed is good; they have an SMTP server; they don't block or throttle BitTorrent (I checked). However, not all is warm and fuzzy. There have been some times when my connection has been slow or nonexistent. Also, Pavlov Media practices DNS hijacking by redirecting nonexistent domain names to its own advertising-laden pages. To prevent these pages from loading, I added the line "0.0.0.0 lookup.pavlovmedia.com" to my hosts file. It's not a perfect solution, but it's very easy to implement.

Also, there's something wrong with the cable jack in my room; every channel is fuzzy. I hope it gets fixed soon. I'm afraid my complaint will get bounced back and forth between the cable company and the apartment management.

My decision not to take out loans this year means that I'm more responsible for my finances than ever. I spent probably half of my savings on my trip to Europe. That means that I'm going to be cheap throughout the foreseeable future. I can feel it happening already. Turning off a light here, refusing a trip to a restaurant there... it kind of sucks, but that's what you've got to do, I guess. I've been heeding reader Kirsten's recommendations to read Get Rich Slowly, The Simple Dollar, and Wise Bread. Some of their articles aren't directly relevant to me, but I hope the rest will at least enter my brain subconsciously.

Overall, the new place is comfortable, and I'm hoping we can get it looking nice and spiffy to reflect that. Once that happens, and once I actually get some pots and pans and start cooking stuff, things should be great.

Oh yeah, classes. Yesterday was the first day of school. My classes aren't too bad, which is good because I've had some rough semesters in the past. All of my professors seem pretty chill. For my computer science major, I'm taking linear algebra, statistics, and data structures and algorithms, and for my business minor, I'm taking microeconomics (the lectures are recorded and posted online; they're also funny). Yes, I'm fully aware that two of my CS classes are in fact about math. After this semester, all of my CS classes should pretty much be related to computers. Does that mean I'm getting a bad education? I don't want to know.

For the first time, I have no classes on Tuesdays or Thursdays, so today, I pretty much got to chill (and watch economics lectures).

As Unix turns 40, The BBC has a short article about its early history.

Lost and found

First, three tech-related discoveries:

Sometimes I feel like loading up on Firefox extensions. Why? Because I can. And also because they can be useful. I've installed some privacy-related extensions lately. They are...

• BetterPrivacy: Lets you manage "Local Shared Objects," little-known cookie-like files that are set and used by Flash. I found out that there were lots of LSOs hidden away on my computer, some for as long as I've had it (two years!). Now I've set BetterPrivacy to delete all LSOs when Firefox exits.
• Ghostery: Shows you which common tracking scripts are being used on a given page and lets you block them. Sometimes they're used by curious amateur webmasters, but others belong to advertising networks. I figure if I'm already using Adblock Plus to zap ads, why should advertisers have a shot at tracking me at all?
• Perspectives: Can determine if a site using a suspicious SSL certificate is legitimate.
• Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out (TACO): Sets persistent cookies to opt-out from behavioral (tracking-based) advertising by major ad networks. This together with Ghostery might be overkill, but it can't hurt.

During my trip to Europe this summer, one of the bits of news I did find out was that The Pirate Bay had gotten bought out. When I came back, I half-noticed openbittorrent.com as an alternate tracker for my Pirate Bay torrents. The domain is apparently registered to Fredrik Neij, one of the guys from the Pirate Bay. The web site describes OpenBitTorrent as a tracker that anyone can use. There's no index or anything. This could be a good solution for distributing large files. Noted!

Unlike all of my friends, I've never stopped watching Homestar Runner cartoons. In the age of RSS, you would think that the site would provide a feed, but there is none. People seem to be happy with this one, which scrapes the site for new stuff, but I hate it. It includes the fanstuff and the quote of the week, but it doesn't include new cartoons. I know; I've been trying it for years, probably. Fortunately, the legions of fans who maintain the creepily comprehensive Homestar Runner Wiki have a section on the main page for updates to the official site. And, it turns out, this section has its own RSS feed. So if you can stand the four-second wait between the release of a new cartoon and its addition to the wiki, you should check it out.

Next, three tech-related discoveries-to-be:

I'm in the market for a good comment spam plugin for WordPress. The measures I have in place prevent all automated comment spam but none of the manual spam that crops up from time to time. Akismet would be nice, but the censorship allegations concern me. I guess an all-around better solution would be Bayesian filtering at the local level, similar to what Thunderbird does for filtering spam e-mails. In other words, I'm looking for something like WPBayes but simpler to install and compatible with WordPress 2.8.

I like reading blogs, but in all my years in the blogosphere, I haven't found many good ones. Finding local blogs would be interesting, particularly if they were by fellow students at my university. Remember, years ago, when you used to submit your site to geographical blog directories that would plot local blogs on a map? Whatever happened to those sites? And how, in this day and age, would I go about finding freshly updated blogs in a certain area? GeoURL is kind of lame and isn't limited to blogs. So, failing that, how would I find good blogs at all?

I also like listening to Internet radio stations in Rhythmbox. Well, sort of. I think I just like knowing that I have them available. But of course, that's not always the case. Internet radio streams use weird protocols that make Rhythmbox freak out. Some stations seem to change up their stream URLs every few months, leaving me with dead radio stations. Is there some sort of Rhythmbox extension that can import tons of high-quality, working radio stations en masse and update their stream URLs periodically? Probably not, but there should be. Any takers? No? I didn't think so.

Finally, for the people who just kind of looked at their screens funny as they read all that, the payoff.

Kickstarter is a new site that allows people with ideas to collect the money they need. (Via waxy.org)

An art student has painted a car to make it look invisible. Article and more photos and video. (Via J-Walk Blog)

If the fire alarm goes off while you're band's practicing, don't panic: play along! (Via waxy.org)

Darker futures

My sister and my mom were away on Saturday, so I spent time with my dad. He took my grandmother to her hair salon and then took me to a place nearby. I was in need of a back-to-school haircut.

It was a small, old-school barber shop where men could be men. There was a TV with NASCAR on. The barber was smoking despite the "No Smoking" sign and said that we could have a beer or a soda if we wanted. He did a good job with my hair. His name was Rob, a fact I'm only taking note of because I might want to go back there. The price was fairly reasonable.

After that, we went to a new diner called Nelson's. It's run by a guy my dad used to work with (and his name is Nelson). I should have expected that the place would be all '50s style and that our waitress would be named Candy, but I didn't. Anyway, the food was good.

On the way home, we went to Blockbuster and rented It's Bad for Ya and The Dark Knight. That's some feel-good viewing right there. But it was fun to spend a night in and watch movies (with popcorn, to boot). I should do that more often.

Florida's Bright Futures scholarships pay for students' college tuition based on their academic performance. Like many others', my tuition is 100% paid, and I get some extra money for books. Even though that sounds pretty good, I've still had to borrow money for housing and meal plans. Spending two years in one of the most expensive dorms really made the difference. I wasn't even familiar with the concept of having leftover scholarship money deposited into your bank account, but it seems that this happens with most people.

So you can tell how pleased I was to get this in my inbox yesterday:

Dear Student,

The Florida Bright Futures program has undergone recent changes that will affect you as a recipient. This email is to ensure that you are aware of these changes, which are effective for the 2009-10 year, and understand that they apply to all students, "new" and "continuing". Please carefully review the information contained in this email.

1. The Bright Futures program will no longer pay 100% or 75% of your tuition and fees, but rather a fixed amount per credit hour. If you are a Florida Academic Scholar your award will be $126 per credit hour. There is no longer a stipend that accompanies this scholarship....

It concludes with, "Have a great year!" Yeah, I'll have a great year now that I have to worry about money more than ever in my life. Apparently my fine university used to charge $125.91 per credit hour, but it will now be charging $145.76. The amount they've offered me for Bright Futures isn't going to cut it. Fortunately, I have another scholarship, so I should have $599.36 left for whatever else I need, any unforeseen charges notwithstanding (and they probably are withstanding). Probably all of that money will go toward textbooks, and voila: I still won't have anything for my own bank account.

In eighth grade, I was taught how to budget (or at least make pie charts). I've never needed that skill. Even today, I don't. But rather than borrowing money for school ($[imagine your own number here],000 is enough), I'll now try getting by on the money I make at work and dipping into what's left of my savings if necessary. So, for the first time, I'll have actual income and actual expenses. I've crunched the numbers on those too, and it looks like I'll be lucky to break even. When rent, utilities, and this web site are all said and done, I'll have about $3.84 per meal. Why do I have to eat 90 times a month??

But really: how can I make some money on the side? eBay and craigslist are calling out to me.

Okay, a few posts ago I linked to a rendition of the Super Mario Bros. theme by a printer or something. If you thought that was neat, this is going to blow you away: "Bohemian Rhapsody" as performed by old-school electronics. (Via waxy.org)

In the style of bash.org, here's a database of nerdy limericks.

For a while now, YouTube has had a system in place to automatically silence or delete videos containing certain copyrighted musical works. It was only a matter of time before a curious netizen would try to see how he could game the system. How much can you transform a song before it's unrecognizable to YouTube? See the interesting results.

Nine days and five hours away

I had a little get-together for my birthday on Friday night. It was also a sort of coming-home party. I got to see some friends I hadn't seen in a year or two and also some friends I hadn't seen in a day or two. I got a slideshow going of all the pictures I had taken in Europe. It would have taken four and a half hours to complete, but everyone (including myself) left long before it could finish. The fun moved to TJ's house. That's where the fun usually is. I've also been there several times since to spend the night. I wish I could do that during the school year, but alas, college is five hours away.

I usually do a good job of following the news, but while I was in Europe for two months, I was basically living under a rock. I found out that Michael Jackson died, but that was about it. (That was the night we spent in Pisa. It was late, and Andy was outside the hotel room, making calls on our computer. I was channel surfing [we actually had a TV] and saw that Thriller was playing. When it was over, I saw "Michael Jackson 1958-2009" on the screen. I couldn't believe it, so I flipped to some other channels, including the BBC and CNN, which were all over the story. When Andy came back, I told him the news and jokingly asked if he had heard of Michael Jackson. The day before, I had found out that Ed McMahon and Farrah Fawcett had died; Andy had never heard of either of them.) (Oh, and I also found out that Billy Mays died. I wasn't completely cut off from the world.)

But when I came back, I learned that the government was providing cash for clunkers, that Microsoft had rebranded its search engine, and that there was a new reality show called Police Women of Broward County. As a citizen of Broward County, Florida, I thought it would be interesting to see how the area would be represented. I actually watched an episode. The show is every bit as horrible as it sounds. As a show that showcases crime, it's inherently unflattering to the region, and I can only wonder what went through the heads of the BSO brass when they decided to try to give our county a bad reputation across America.

When I upgraded to the latest version of Ubuntu in April, an annoying new bug/feature was that the operating system would only check for non-critical updates once a week irrespective of my preference to check daily. Or something like that. I was gone from my computer for two months, okay? Anyway, the official fix didn't do anything (or maybe it did but I didn't get any non-critical updates after that). The instructions I found here seemed to do the trick. In short: sudo chmod ugo+x /etc/cron.daily/apt, followed by the official fix (gconftool -s --type bool /apps/update-notifier/auto_launch false). Of course!!

The New York Times has a lengthy article about The Beatles: Rock Band, which comes out next month. If you're particularly interested in The Beatles or Rock Band, have a read. (Annoying registration possibly required; use BugMeNot.) (Via waxy.org)

This is what the Internet is all about: Cats That Look Like Hitler.

Here's the true and exciting story of the little-known State of Franklin. (Via The Presurfer)

Return to form

Well, now what?

During my trip to Europe, I spent so much time writing for this blog that I thought I had almost forgotten how to write normal posts. You know, ones that don't include 18 pictures or chronicle everything you've done over a period of several days in minute detail. Ones that have how many links at the end? Two? Three now? Is that too many? Whatever. I come across a lot of cool links. (I actually did forget at one point.)

Before the trip, I had messed around with panoramic photography, aided by Hugin and Autopano-SIFT. During the trip, I made sure to take panoramic pictures whenever I saw something particularly breathtaking (or wide). Well, they wouldn't be panoramas until I stitched them together, but you know what I mean. Now that I have free time (and a reasonable amount of processing power), I'm making them. You can see woefully tiny versions in a dedicated Facebook photo album that I'm continuously updating. Maybe when I'm done with all of them, I'll put them on this site. Maybe. (I get charged for exactly how much storage and bandwidth I use at all times.)

I've also spent the past few days playing Peggle at TJ's house (again) and having dinner with some relatives I don't often see (again). Apparently a lot of my relatives have been reading this blog as well. The ones without computers have been reading the print version courtesy of my dad's laserjet. The attention wasn't just on me but also on my second cousin Jared, whom I hadn't seen since he was yea high. Turns out he's the lead singer of a band back home in Minnesota. Pretty cool. (Minnesota or the band? Probably both.)

Random observation: I just realized that my last post wasn't my first called "Back in the USA." The automatically generated post slug ("back-in-the-usa-2") in the URL tipped me off, so I got curious. Although I rarely leave the country, I wrote about my friend Kevin being back in the USA after a trip to Honduras in 2005. The title of my last post was a reference to the Chuck Berry tune of the same name, continuing my streak of (mis)appropriating song, movie, and book titles; schoolyard rhymes; Olive Garden dishes; and other familiar phrases.

Just as I've written about my trip to Europe, a BBC correspondent writes about what it was like to spend eight years in the USA.

Dead At Your Age is a site that can tell you what famous and accomplished people you've already outlived. Here's what it says for me today:

You are 20 years and 27 days old today.

That’s exactly half the life of somebody famous. In another 20 years and 27 days, you will have lived exactly as long as Vitas Gerulaitis. He was a tennis player who won 24 singles and who, with Bobby Riggs, lost the 1985 Battle of the Sexes match who died at the age of 40 years, 54 days of carbon monoxide poisoning.

(Via The Presurfer)

Somebody programmed some sort of laser cutter thing to move around just such that it plays the Super Mario Bros. theme. Well done. (Via waxy.org)

Back in the USA

And now, the exciting conclusion of my European adventure.

On Thursday night, Andy, George, and I went to see the West End production of Chicago. I had no idea that we were right in the West End with theaters scattered all over the place, but the theater was just a short walk away (with a gelato shop in between). The show starred Michelle Williams of Destiny's Child, but I obviously wouldn't have known that if George hadn't told me. I had never seen the movie, but I enjoyed the show. The orchestra was on the stage, and the conductor interacted with the characters, which I thought was pretty clever. The songs were catchy too.

After the show, for our last dinner in Europe, we went to an Indian restaurant called Tandoori Nights (which a Google search reveals is actually a common name??). Well, it wasn't George's last dinner in Europe, but it was mine and Andy's. After that, we returned to George's dorm room on Drury Lane (yes, the Drury Lane on which the fabled Muffin Man is said to live). I was ready to go to bed in anticipation of a long day.

On Friday morning, Andy and I got our things together, thanked George for his hospitality, and made our way to the airport. We took the Gatwick Express, the same train we had taken from the airport two months ago. Even though it was pretty expensive, it was fast and direct. And we didn't have very much time to look into other options.

At Gatwick, Mark was waiting for me, just as I'd hoped. My cousins in Croatia had given me a bottle of liquor as a gift, so I was going to give it to 21-year-old Mark so he could take it into the country (I mean, as a gift for him to keep). He had been waiting there for a while, but I'm glad he was patient. Otherwise, I think I was just going to chuck the bottle.

With the alcohol out of the way, I wasn't too concerned about the other things I had to bring into the country: a bottle of olive oil, which was also from my cousins, and some stroopwafels that I had bought from a vending machine in Amsterdam two days before. I had been infatuated with the sweet treats ever since my friend Kevin brought some home from the Netherlands a few years ago. I had wanted to pick some up for myself and everybody back home, but while I was in Amsterdam I wasn't in the mood to seek them out. Luckily, I happened to spot some in a vending machine right before I left for London.

We got through everything relatively easily (we didn't even have to take our shoes off for security, which apparently might have been a mistake) and soon found ourselves waiting in the terminal for our flight back to the USA. The three of us were worried that Dan wouldn't show; he and Mark had split up back in Switzerland and weren't staying in the same hostel in London. But Dan did arrive, so the four of us had some time to recount our individual adventures.

Soon, it came time to board the plane, which I would not have been looking forward to at all if it hadn't meant I'd be going home. The plane took off about 40 minutes late, and I managed to keep myself entertained by watching movies (I Love You, Man and The Boat That Rocked) and imagining how great it would be to be home.

Somehow, the plane landed in Orlando a few minutes early. According to my watch, it was getting close to midnight, but the sun had never gone down during the flight. I imagined that the jetlag would be harder to get used to this time because it wouldn't be as simple as skipping a night and then sleeping a lot the next night. But jetlag or no jetlag, I was glad to be back.

Of course, we had to go through customs and all that first. I got quizzed about my trip to prove I wasn't a terrorist. The fact that I had been gone for so long and had visited so many countries and brought back food was apparently too much for Customs and Border Patrol to let slip by. But I showed them I was legit, and that's when I parted ways with Andy, Dan, and Mark. I had a working cell phone for the first time in two months, so I called my parents to let them know I was there.

They were glad to see me; I was glad to see them. I was also very tired. They drove me home, but we stopped for dinner along the way at the Outback Steakhouse in Vero Beach. It was right about there that I realized how great it was to be back in my own country: in a familiar place with familiar food. Those who are about to call me an ugly American should keep reading.

My sister was there when we got home. I showed everybody the stone souvenirs I had brought back from Croatia, as well as the olive oil, the stroopwafels, and some trinkets from Italy. Then I went to bed. Of course, it was not only wonderful and amazing to be back home with my family, but it was also awesome to be back in my own bed after two months of traveling.

Since then, I've gotten to see some family and friends. I spent Sunday night at TJ's with Nick and some other friends. It was an overnight thing, though, which I was glad about. I think going to bed at 04:00 and waking up at 12:00 helped get rid of my jet lag. I'm still getting tired sort of early and waking up sort of early, though. Last night, I went to a family dinner with some relatives I don't see very often. They had lots of questions about the trip, and apparently many of them have been reading this blog too. Between spending time with family and friends, I've been relaxing as I typically would during the summer. I've also been working online.

Europe '09 by the numbers:

• Days: 67 (May 26 - July 31, 2009)
• Countries visited: 14 (United Kingdom, France, Spain, Monaco, Italy, Vatican City, Slovenia, Croatia, Austria, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium)
• Places I slept: 21
• Times I stayed with family members: 2 (Andy's relatives both times)
• Times I stayed with friends: 3
• Times I stayed in hostels: 2
• Times I stayed in hotels: 3
• Times I stayed with Esperantists or at Esperanto events: 12
• Sleepless nights on trains: 3
• Sleepless half-nights on planes: 1
• Days I traveled without Andy: 17 (25%!)
• Number of currencies I ended up with: 8 (pounds sterling, euros, Croatian kunas, Slovak korunas, Russian rubles, Belorussian rubles, Czech korunas, Hungarian forints)
• Number of times I mentioned to people that I collected coins and banknotes: 3
• Photos taken, December 25, 2002 - May 24, 2009: 4,178
• Photos taken, May 26 - July 31, 2009: 4,002
• Total size of photos: 6.5 GB
• Most photos taken in one day: 411 (June 28, in Rome)
• Videos recorded: 13
• Total size of videos: 248 MB
• Average length of videos: 0:14

So, boring statistics aside, what are we to learn from this trip? I was hoping that going for a two-month adventure would leave me feeling more adventurous. It has, but not for the reason I thought. It was Andy who showed me that you can't be uptight about everything. I can't count the number of times he said, "Let's do it; the worst that could happen is that they yell at us." And you know, we didn't get yelled at very much. It was an eye-opener.

Before I left for the trip, people had told me a bit about Europeans, but you really need to go to Europe to understand them. The impression I got everywhere was that they're content with having less than Americans. They're fine with their small cars and their tiny apartments, and they don't see why they should have dryers when they already have clotheslines and the sun. The US has long been the land of plenty, and that has shaped who we are as Americans; Europeans, living on a continent that has been ravaged by war and political strife, are more down-to-earth.

Things are different there, but I wouldn't say that Europe is, in general, better or worse than America. It's just different. Europeans like their water gassy and their milk creamy. They love soccer and the 24-hour clock. Those are things that I don't think I could get used to (except for the 24-hour clock, which I've always been a fan of and have now decided to use in writing). In the US, we may have crappy schools, overfilled prisons, and drug laws that don't work, but that doesn't mean that our country isn't great. If nothing else, it's great because we are and always have been filled with potential. The American Dream and all that stuff. It's all here.

Some people have asked me if I would live in Europe. Everything I have and everything I know is here in the US, so answer is obvious. But still, I'm glad to have had the trip of a lifetime, and if I could do it all again, I would. Europe '09 taught me more about the world than any book could; the stories I have really are priceless. Every day, I learned something new and did something that I might never do again. So, sometimes the only way to really learn is to be adventurous. After all, the worst that could happen is that they yell at you.