Summer again

Well, hello there. I'm home, and there hasn't been much to report.

Friday night, my last night in Hume Hall, was pretty quiet. I basically spent it with my friend Andrea, who was as bored as I was. She made some food for us, but I got hungry later, as people are wont to do. That's when I found out that all of the dining halls, convenience stores, and restaurants on campus had closed early. We went to McDonald's, where there was a touch-screen game system presumably for the kids as they munch on their Happy Meals. After eating, we took a whack at a trivia game that was too hard for us, let alone some little McNugget-gobbling brats. It took us about a million tries to beat the high score, and we were very proud.

On Saturday, my dad came and helped me moved out. We spent the night at my aunt's house, and then on Sunday, we took the long way home. I got home Sunday night and, well, here I am.

I've been working online, and that's been pretty okay. As a webmaster, I do most of my work on the Internet, so it's been basically like going to work, except I don't have to walk there. That would be a long walk.

Also, I just found out today that I got all A's and B's in my classes. Awesome. Let's celebrate with an edition of Ask Jordon:

Carlos: When are you coming out of beta? Flickr already did.

Well, my friend Luke, since this design looks so modern and Web 2.0 (is that still modern?), and because it's always subject to change, I thought a "beta?" badge would be appropriate next to the logo until I have it the way I like it. The only thing I'm yet concerned about is the line spacing. Do you guys think there needs to be more space between the lines here? I'll have to check it out on Windows and see what looks okay.

Tomorrow is the National Day of Reason, which coincides with that National Day of Prayer thing. Americans United for Separation of Church and State explains why the National Day of Prayer is a bad idea.

Here are lots of crazy McDonald's menu items from around the world. Find out where you can get McSpaghetti.

Earth Hour was March 28. Here are some photos of cities around the world in the dark.

From Hogtown to Cowford

On Thursday, Get Carded held its third annual Lifeapalooza concert at the Orange and Brew, a coffeehouse on campus. It was similar to last year's, which is to say that a lot of people signed up to be organ donors. 52, in fact.

This year, rather than keeping track of how many people were entering the building, I mainly concerned myself with talking about organ donation to people as they made their way in. Unlike at our general tabling events, the people who weren't already organ donors were all willing to sign up.

Like last year, we were planning to have the attendees hold green glow sticks and stand in a ribbon shape to make a human green ribbon for organ donation, but that didn't happen. I think it was because the weather was fickle (it was very windy and it rained for a little while). Still, the turnout was good, and the music was good too. I think everybody had a good time.

I had a pretty boring day on Saturday. Around 8:00 at night, I was just pondering how boring my day had been when my friend Evan called. He wanted to go to Jacksonville in search of mozzarella sticks and live music. He had never been there, and neither had I for any significant amount of time, but I didn't need much convincing to go along.

After chatting about all kinds of things during the 90-minute drive, we parked downtown and went to the Landing, a place I had heard of. There was a band playing, and we found an American-type restaurant that had mozzarella stars, which were actually kind of triangular. After those and some chicken strips with french fries, we were satisfied. We took a few pictures to remember the trip by and went back to Gainesville.

Also, The World of Stuff is 6 years old today. Happy birthday, TWoS!

Yet another cool list from Wikipedia that will probably be deleted within six months: List of inventors killed by their own inventions.

Apparently, Microsoft's Steve Ballmer has always been crazy... and bald. See him pitch Windows 1.0.

Radio broadcaster Paul Harvey died recently. He was known to deliver amusing stories that no one else covered... because they were made up. He also put a misleading spin on some of his stories. That's what a reporter found in 1997 after investigating some of his fishy tales.

Just say no

Here in Gainesville, a debate is raging. On Tuesday, voters will decide whether to pass Charter Amendment 1, which would end the city's prevention of discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Unfortunately, some people still aren't aware of the fact that our sexual orientation and gender identity come from within us and aren't choices. Some still aren't aware of the tremendous suffering that many people go through due to exclusion and outright hatred from others.

The folks who got this amendment on the ballot say it's to keep men from claiming a female gender identity so they can go into women's restrooms and assault women. Sounds pretty tenuous, doesn't it? A fellow student points out that one of the pro-1 advertisements is self-defeating. It uses actual security camera footage of a man entering a women's restroom to spy on a woman. The ad doesn't mention that the perpetrator didn't actually claim to be transgendered. The real message here is that unsavory types will do what they can to go after women whether it's legal or not.

Actually, early voting has been going on, so I've already voted no on 1. The anti-1 group was providing rides from campus to the city's early voting location, so I took advantage of that on Friday. On the way to the polls and back, I met a number of kind folks who were in favor of civil rights for LGBT individuals. I just hope these people outnumber the others. We'll find out on Tuesday.

Yesterday was a nice day, so I went out and took some panoramic photos around campus. My magnum opus was a photo of the football stadium, which I've uploaded to Wikimedia Commons for use on Wikipedia.

When you search for other people's names on the Internet, you can find out a lot about them. Today, while I was Googling my name, I found out something about myself.

In my junior year of high school, I was told that, based on my PSAT score, I had been recognized as a National Merit Scholarship Semifinalist. But my school never contacted me about any further developments, so I never had a chance to win the scholarship. Even so, I mentioned my National Merit Semifinalist status on this blog (multiple times, actually) and even in my resume. Thanks to Google, I've unearthed an issue of my high school's newsletter that says I was recognized as a Commended Student by the program. The National Merit people say:

Commended Students are named on the basis of a nationally applied Selection Index score that may vary from year to year and is below the level required for participants to be named Semifinalists in their respective states. ... Commended Students do not continue in the competition for National Merit® Scholarships ...

Funny that the school administration was reading this blog the whole time but never bothered to correct me.

The length of each dashed line on each road in the United States is mandated by the federal government. How long are those lines, anyway? The answer may surprise you. (Via J-Walk Blog)

I've always thought about doing this, but I'm afraid I'd creep myself out: Sleep Talking on the Mic. (Via waxy.org)

Since Google sends its Street View cam out to so many places, there's a good chance that it'll capture lots of crazy moments. (Via The Presurfer)

Look around you

No posts in six days. That must mean I'm having fun, right? The answer is yes!

Actually, I got sick this week, and that was annoying... you know, because I was at home on spring break and all. But I passed the time with... panoramic photography.

See, I'd long missed putting together panoramas easily with a certain program that I no longer find ethical to use because it's not free as in freedom. I was wondering what was free but also very easy to use. There's Hugin, which runs on Linux, but from what I had seen, it couldn't stitch panoramas automatically. You had to choose a lot of corresponding points between images for it to put them together.

Actually, it turns out that Hugin can work with programs that pick points automatically, which makes the task of stitching panoramas much easier. It's not quite as easy as giving a program some images and telling it to go ahead, but it's close. I just downloaded Hugin and Autopano-SIFT (both available from Ubuntu's software repositories) and made sure that they would work together, and then everything was ready.

All you have to do is follow the instructions in Hugin's Assistant tab. It will guess the focal length of your camera based on the EXIF data in the images or something like that. All I know is that it didn't like photos I took with the camera sideways unless I stripped the images of their EXIF data and entered the focal length manually as three-quarters of the camera's actual focal length as calculated by Hugin (due to the aspect ratio being the opposite and aw, you don't really need to know this, do you).

Anyway, you load the images, then you and Hugin decide what the camera's focal length is. Next, Autopano-SIFT picks points common to different images so Hugin knows how to stitch them. You're then presented with a rough idea of how the panorama will look, and there you can set some parameters like the projection. That's one thing that I don't remember [non-free automatic panorama stitching program] being able to do.

It turns out that one projection is not suitable for all kinds of panoramas. For example, it's common to see buildings looking very bendy, like in some of my previous panoramas, but they look much better if you can keep straight lines straight, as in this example. But that sort of projection isn't always the best because the edges of the image get more distorted as the field of view gets wider. It's a trade-off.

Finally, Hugin generates an image. I like that it's an uncompressed TIFF with transparency around the panorama, as opposed to the aforementioned program which generated a (compressed) JPEG with black around the panorama.

Taking panoramic photos can be tricky, but with the right software, stitching images together doesn't have to be a problem. As long as you do a good job of taking the pictures, you can get a pretty flawless panorama like this one I took of my backyard. It consists of 17 photos.

(Also: I finally upgraded WordPress today, so let me know if you notice anything funky with the blog. 2.7 is sexxay.)

I have lots of gift cards that I rarely get a chance to use, so this site might be handy: you can buy and sell gift cards at Plastic Jungle. (Via mcgees.org)

Fun project: a Scrabble Keyboard. And it's for a Mac. Go figure. (Via The Presurfer)

You may have heard of Songsmith, Microsoft's new program that generates backing music for melodies. (See a recent post where I link to Songsmith's treatment of "Roxanne.") But it turns out that the program can do more than that. Here, Songsmith plays melodies based on recent stock charts... descending melodies, of course. Funny in a seemingly inappropriate way. (Via waxy.org)

Title that will make you want to read this

To no one's surprise, the Unite Party basically swept the Student Government elections, winning the executive and treasurer tickets as well as 42 Student Senate seats. The Progress Party picked up 8 seats, while the Orange and Blue Party won none.

Also, 61% of students voted to ban SG funding for facilities that require biometric data for entry. Recently, the main student gym announced plans to install hand scanners at the entrance because they thought that showing your student ID card to an attendant would be too slow and inexpensive. In the fall elections, something like 84% of students expressed their disapproval of this incredible waste of money and arguable invasion of privacy in a non-binding referendum. This semester's initiative is binding.

The turnout was 19%, which I think is considered high. Kind of a shame, if you ask me.

Um, what else? Spring break is in a week. Yay. Um, that's it, I guess. Talk amongst yourselves.

Tupper's self-referential formula is a certain formula whose graph looks like the formula itself. The Wikipedia article makes the rationale sound simple, but I still think it's pretty wacky.

Bhutan, the quiet Himalayan kingdom that got television and the Internet at the same time, is now the world's first non-smoking nation. (Via The Presurfer)

At howoldareyou.net, you can see pictures of people and guess how old they are. You can also submit a picture of yourself... if you dare to find out what people think. (Via Atheist Revolution)

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)

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)

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.

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.

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)