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)

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)

Spring broken

Spring break was fun even though I was sick for a few days. On Tuesday night, I went out on my dad's boat, which was fun. I miss the ocean sometimes, so it was good to be back. Toward the end of the week, I hung out with Nick, Mike, and TJ more. We ate at a lot of restaurants, and I discovered that Hooters has delicious chicken wings. I wish I had hung out with more people and eaten more wings, but spring break must come to an end.

And so it did. After over a week away from school, I was actually... ugh... missing it. I mean, it's good to be back to being (supposedly) productive. People are counting down the weeks until the semester ends. (I think it's five or six? Oh no, I'm a bad college student because I don't know!)

Also, everybody got a haircut during spring break. Seriously, lots of people. I was going to get one myself, but I ended up not feeling like it. What is it about going home that makes college students want to cut their hair? I don't know about anyone else, but when I go home to get a haircut, my parents pay for it. And they know how much to tip.

Speaking of other people, I've decided to bridge the gap between The World of Stuff and a little web site you may have heard of known as Facebook. Some of my friends read this blog religiously, and some stop by once in a while, but a lot of them aren't blog-reading types. Still others don't know I have a blog at all. I think my friends and acquaintances would like my blog. How do I show it to them?

As it happens, Facebook allows you to import RSS feed items as "notes," which are what it calls blog-post-type things. Facebook will check back on the feed every few hours and post any new items as your notes. You can't edit them, though. To maintain control over my posts and keep comments in one place, I disabled commenting on my notes and imported a custom RSS feed (created with the help of Feed Wrangler) that just shows the auto-generated summary for each post followed by a link to the full post. Welcome, new readers who I'm already friends with!

A blog with tips on spotting Canadians: How to Spot a Canadian. (Via The Presurfer)

One year in the past, I discovered I could take 10 five-year-olds in a fight. Now I've found out how many ninety-year-olds I could take in a fight with this quiz called "How Many 90 Year Olds Could You Take in a Fight?" at howmany90yearoldscouldyoutakeinafight.com. Turns out I could take 14 ninety-year-olds in a fight. (Via The Presurfer)

I sometimes enjoy listening to Internet radio stations or radio stations on the Internet. So I was pretty pleased when my friend TJ told me about Split Infinity Radio, which apparently features DJs who work from their homes and pick a wide variety of tunes to spin. It's fun to tune in and see what they've got going.

Happy new stuff

Happy new year. It's the last year of the 2000s or whatever we're calling them. Notice anything different? That's right: The World of Stuff has a new look.

First of all, if the layout looks like a garbled mess, press F5 to force a reload of everything. That should work in most browsers.

Now, you may be asking why I made this change, the fourth major update to the design of the site. The previous layout was introduced three years ago, on January 1, 2006. Back then, I said,

Bearing in mind some of the feedback I've gotten and some observations I've made, I'm going to record a general overview (for the me of the future and the you of today) on what to expect in TWoS 4.0: it'll have the fun feel of TWoS 2.0 and the navigation design of TWoS 3.0 combined with the web standards adherence and universal accessibility of TWoS 5.0.

And that is what you see here today. Certain aspects of this design, such as the color scheme, are taken from the second layout (screenshot), which was in turn based on the first layout (tiny screenshots here). One of the things people missed the most from TWoS 2.0 was the random slogan displayed on each page. So I always intended to bring them back in the fourth layout, and here they are. I have most of the same ones to start with, but I would add new ones and remove old ones regularly.

Now. Why the change? Frankly, it's long overdue. The first layout lasted a year and a half; the second was around for not much more than a year. The third layout persisted for a whole three years. In that time, computers and the Internet have changed. The third layout was fluid to accommodate small (less than 1024x768) resolutions. I realized that things wouldn't look so great on bigger resolutions, but I thought it wouldn't matter. I didn't expect that wide screen resolutions would become the standard in only a few years. This layout is fixed-width to keep pages from being unreadably wide.

I also want to put this site on par with more popular blogs. This new design is modern and shiny, but you can see that it still has my own special "what-was-he-thinking-and-does-he-really-know-what-he's-doing" touch. And because the design is so Web 2.0, I'll say that this layout is in "beta." Not because it's not tested (oh, trust me, it's tested) but because it's open to suggestions for improvement. Think something needs to be placed somewhere else, or maybe some style doesn't look quite right? Bring it to my attention, and I'll weigh in on it.

One exception: the navigation bar is not open to criticism. You do not know how long it took me to test that thing. I do not know how long it took me to test that thing. But it was somewhere on the order of days. Days and days and days. In fact, I spent a ridiculous amount of time making sure everything looked perfect or at least pretty reasonable in every browser and on every OS that people are likely to use. You don't know frustration until you've designed for Internet Explorer. (At this juncture, I would also like to give CrossBrowserTesting.com another plug. I should buy those guys a pizza.)

Since people lamented the loss of the random slogans last time, I suspect that some people will lament the loss of the photos this time. The photos had a good run, though. It's the slogans' turn to come back, and they're always different. If you don't like the new layout or if you find it hard to get used to, don't worry. You will like it or get used to it soon enough.

Besides updating the design of the site, I've also tried to make it easier for you to follow along with the blog. For those of you who use a feed reader, your browser will now discover relevant feeds if you're viewing an individual post or a category listing. If you don't use a feed reader, I recommend signing up for e-mail updates. That way you'll be notified instantly when there's a new post! You can sign up under the "Subscribe" section on the sidebar. And of course, your e-mail address is safe with me.

So I guess that's all I wanted to say. I hope you enjoy the new layout as much as I do, and I hope you're having a great new year.

More things that have nothing to do with each other

Last time on The World of Stuff: I was looking for a way to notify readers of new blog posts by e-mail. In an update to the post, I mentioned a WordPress plugin called Subscribe2. At first I thought it wouldn't meet my needs, but I've figured out how to make it work. The plugin automatically generates the subscription/unsubscription form on a WordPress page. This is what I didn't like. But then I realized I could just copy the form manually and put it on the sidebar.

Subscribe2 is probably better than RSS-to-e-mail (or RSS-to-email) services because it can send out e-mails right after every post is posted. Plus, there's no third party involved to collect addresses and send out notifications. Just me with your e-mail addresses, and you can trust me. The only minor downside is that I'll get an e-mail for every post I write. That's not too much of a problem because I can just have Thunderbird delete them automatically. [Update Wed Dec 31, 2008 11:48 UTC -5: By default, a single message is sent with the recipients in the Bcc: field, and the admin's address in the To: field. If you set the number of recipients per e-mail to 1, each recipient's address will be in the To: field, and you won't get a copy of the notifications.] So anyway, you'll be able to subscribe by e-mail soon. Yay.

I've been to the movies twice since I've been home for the break. I saw Yes Man last week. It was actually pretty good — vintage Jim Carrey — and might be characterized by some as "cute." And yesterday I saw Valkyrie, the true story of Tom Cruise as a one-eyed Nazi who tries to kill Adolf Hitler. I had never heard of the actual story, but if it's anything like the movie, it's pretty interesting. Despite that you know the ending (because Hitler wasn't assassinated), there's still a good deal of suspense. Oh, and Terence Stamp is in both movies. Not that I knew who he was before IMDbing them.

I've had another what-the-heck moment. Actually, it happened a few months ago. There's a Norman Rockwell calendar on the fridge, featuring one picture each month from the prolific artist. Several of his earlier works are included, each with copyright notices like "Copyright 1917" or "Copyright 1921" along with the name of the alleged copyright holder. What's wrong with this picture? Nothing published before 1923 is still copyrighted in the United States. Plus, Bridgeman v. Corel sets down that faithful photographs of two-dimensional works that are in the public domain are themselves in the public domain. The copyright holder of Norman Rockwell's post-1922 works is claiming exclusive rights to art that belongs to everyone.

(Something I learned while I was looking that up: Only works created by humans are eligible for copyright. So paintings by animals and the computer-generated gobbledygook in spam e-mails are in the public domain. All right!)

Anyway, this isn't the first time that a company has tried to exercise control over works that are probably in the public domain. I mentioned seemingly recently the case of "Happy Birthday to You," which makes Time Warner millions each year. And remember that "This Land" video of Bush and Kerry from 2004 and how JibJab, the creators of the video, got sued by the copyright holder of "This Land Is Your Land"? In defending JibJab, the venerable Electronic Frontier Foundation discovered that the song has been in the public domain for decades, yet JibJab still had to pay up, I think.

Is there any whistleblowing blog that calls out corporations for claiming copyright over public domain works? I would like to see one if there is. But hopefully there aren't enough cases to warrant creating a whole blog.

'Tis the season: Patron Who Complained About Indiana Library Nativity Faces Retaliation. What was it doing there anyway?

Things that have nothing to do with each other

RSS is a great way to keep track of your favorite web sites, but a lot of people (probably the majority) don't know what it is or don't want to get a feed reader. In fact, I bet most of you just go to the main page of this site every once in a while and read the last few posts there. If that's you, this question is not for you. This is for the bloggers.

I'm looking for a good RSS-to-e-mail service that readers of this site can use. Here are the features I have to have, in no particular order:

• E-mails can be sent shortly after items are posted.
• Users don't have to create an account.
• Good privacy policy.
• No ads in the e-mails.
• Free.

FeedBurner, while popular, fails on the first point; it only sends a "daily digest" during a two-hour window that you specify. Also, I assume the feed link in each e-mail is to their special FeedBurner feed. I would want to keep things simple and publicize only my official WordPress-generated feeds. RSSFWD fails on the second and third points; the privacy policy link is a 404. Other services I've found have similar problems or whatever. Any help, anyone?

[Edit Sat Dec 27, 2008 22:05 EST (UTC -5): There's this WordPress plugin called Subscribe2 that looks pretty amazing (Joshua apparently uses it), but it requires setting up a WordPress page for the subscription form. I want to have the form on the sidebar, i.e., on every page of the site. Plus, this whole site isn't generated by WordPress, so a plugin is out.]

I'm still following electoral-vote.com because the 2008 elections aren't over. The Senate race between Norm Coleman and Al Franken was so close that it's still being decided. But anyway, the Votemaster has published a spreadsheet of state-by-state election results (available on his Data Galore) page. As a statistics junkie, I was especially interested in seeing how much of the vote each candidate got in each state. (For the purposes of presidential elections, the District of Columbia is a state.)

States that went the most for Obama:

1. District of Columbia (92.46%)
2. Hawaii (71.85%)
3. Vermont (67.46%)
4. Rhode Island (63.13%)
5. New York (62.80%)

States that went the most for McCain:

1. Oklahoma (65.65%)
2. Wyoming (64.78%)
3. Utah (62.58%)
4. Idaho (61.53%)
5. Alabama (60.32%)

States that went the most for Nader:

1. Maine (1.45%)
2. North Dakota (1.32%)
3. Arkansas (1.19%)
4. Connecticut (1.16%)
5. Alaska (1.16%)

States that went the most for Barr:

1. Indiana (1.06%)
2. Georgia (0.73%)
3. Utah (0.73%)
4. Idaho (0.72%)
5. Texas (0.69%)

States that went the most for Baldwin:

1. Utah (1.26%)
2. Idaho (0.56%)
3. Alaska (0.51%)
4. South Dakota (0.50%)
5. Wyoming (0.47%)

States that went the most for McKinney:

1. Louisiana (0.47%)
2. Maine (0.40%)
3. West Virginia (0.33%)
4. Arkansas (0.32%)
5. California (0.29%)

States that went the most for others:

1. Montana (2.17%)
2. Oregon (0.74%)
3. Nevada (0.65%)
4. Wyoming (0.60%)
5. Vermont (0.59%)

These figures don't include states where the candidates weren't on the ballot. For example, Chuck Baldwin and Cynthia McKinney weren't on the ballot in Montana but were eligible as write-in candidates there, which probably accounts for the high percentage of "other" votes there. Obama and McCain were the only candidates on the ballot in every state, so the statistics for the other candidates might be kind of meaningless as some of their votes inevitably fall in "other." Aww.

Here are 10 Fascinating Last Pictures Taken of or by certain people. They're pretty fascinating. The subjects are familiar, but the photos aren't commonly seen.

Here's a case for the textbooks: a woman can't recognize people's voices except for Sean Connery's.

1,000th post

This is my 1,000th post. What a milestone. What a crazy, awesome, and crazy awesome milestone. This blog has been a big or semi-big part of my life. I've written 560,791 words (that's including this post) by my own count. I've met some awesome and amazing people (you know who you are). The site helped me land my first job. 1,000 posts is a lot for anyone, and it's taken me five and a half years to reach, so it's a milestone worth observing.

For the occasion, I went back and looked at every post I've ever written. Man, did that take a long time. Looking back, I can see that I haven't changed very much. Sure, my early posts were written differently. They weren't as long, and they tended to rely on quotations and images (especially borrowed images). And I was only starting high school. But it is still me.

September 15, 2003: "Sure, I keep to myself a lot, but I think I should try to be more outgoing."

July 5, 2008: "I need to be more attuned to whether [girls] like me and not rush to date them. So that leaves a few simple steps: ... Actually contribute to a conversation, including talking to her. Be outgoing."

I thought that for my 1,000th entry, I would list some of my favorites from the past. (It's old-school to call blog posts "entries," but it's classy at the same time. Peppering your speech old-fashioned but still technically acceptable terms can make you sound authoritative, like when sports announcers refer to a football team as a "club" or a "squad" or when they call a game a "contest." Yes, I have been watching too much college football on TV, but in the early days of this blog, I used "post" and "entry" pretty much interchangeably. In fact, the permalink for each post still says "permanent link to this entry.")

Anyway, I thought that for my 1,000th entry, I would list some of my favorites from the past. But what really makes a post great? How do you separate the memories from the posts themselves? I don't think it's possible. Many of these posts are my favorites because of the notable events that they describe. And of course, they're in top-ten format, because is there any other way?

Without further ado, here are my top ten favorite posts of all time.

10. "To blog or not to blog?" (July 25, 2003)
    Few readers remember that The World of Stuff wasn't originally a blog but a bunch of random pages with a common home page where I kept track of updates. In one of these early entries, I proposed the much-quoted question, "To blog or not to blog?" (with the equally memorable answer "I mean, come on, who's going to want to read about a 14-year-old kid?"). Of course, I decided to blog, and it didn't turn out to be a bad idea.
9. "Election Day" (November 7, 2006)
   In 2006, Florida Senate minority leader Ron Klein was running for the US House of Representatives, and former President Bill Clinton campaigned for him at my high school. I was glad just to be able to write about being there, but in this post, I included some of the pictures I took. They really are worth a thousand words each. My favorite is the one of Clinton saluting the cheering audience as the band plays behind him and Klein beams off to the side. Klein went on to unseat the 13-term incumbent.
8. "Constraint in writing, fun in spring" (April 14, 2006)
   I wanted to see if I could write a post without using the letter "e." I came up with this post almost 500 words long. Besides lacking the most common letter in the English language, it was completely typical. I wrote about what was going on with my life as well as including some links and the usual "One year ago, two years ago" flashbacks I was doing at the time.
7. "[sic]" (February 25, 2006)
   In junior high school, I had a number of teachers who were prone to slips of the tongue. They often went unnoticed, but I wrote them down as I heard them because some of them were really funny and bizarre. When I got into high school, I expected the same thing of my new teachers, but there were no verbal goofs to be heard. After sitting on my old list of "teacherisms" for a while, I decided to post some of the best ones. They're still funny.
6. "Some more details" (November 30, 2004)
   Not all of these posts are my favorites in a good way. In my sophomore year of high school, Mr. Laguerre, a new teacher, died unexpectedly. Mr. Firestone, my psychology teacher, had become friends with him during his short time at Pompano High, so he decided to spend his next class explaining the psychology of death. He talked about his mother's failed battle with cancer, and many of my classmates broke down in tears as they shared stories of their own family members and friends who had died. It was so terribly sad and therapeutic at the same time. Just before graduating, I won a scholarship in Mr. Laguerre's honor.
5. "Things work out" (September 16, 2005)
   This might be my most referenced post of all time. At the beginning of my junior year of high school, I felt ready to start dating. I asked a girl named Nacole if she would go to a football game with me. The game was canceled due to Hurricane Katrina, so she changed the venue to her house and then to a hotel. My nervous feelings got worse when she announced her love for someone else and dated the guy. Finally, I approached her about the apparent misunderstanding. It turned out she hadn't considered our thing to be an actual date. Fortunately, it didn't hurt our friendship, and I still talk to her every so often. As first (non-)dating experiences go, it was pretty memorable and taught me some valuable lessons. We never went on the date.
4. "Day One (and Day Two)" (August 25, 2007)
   I thought my first few days of college would be like day one and day two of high school, but they weren't. When I started high school, I was nervous and just plain confused. But when I started college last year, I was more enthusiastic, and I managed to learn a lot in a short time. After less than a week on campus, I had prepared some advice based on my observations. I still recommend them to my friends who are starting college. I ended the post with my mailing address and a shameless plea for support that ended up receiving one generous reply.
3. "Where was I?" (March 22, 2008)
   My first year of college was an annus horribilis when it came to dating. After two rejections in the fall, I asked an acquaintance out to dinner and was excited that she said yes. But we had to reschedule, to my frustration and embarrassment (I had already postponed a visit to my family). As the date finally drew near, she asked if she could bring a friend. She... wait for it... didn't know it was a date! And when I told her it was, she said she wasn't interested in dating. I caved and let her bring her friend to dinner. It went smoothly. Later we went to see Kimya Dawson and friends put on a great show. So even though I was sorely disappointed, the night went rather well. It was another learning experience as well as the closest I've ever been to being on a date.
2. "The interview" (March 15, 2006)
   Another painful memory that has to be shared. During my junior year of high school, the school contacted me about participating in Boys State, a prestigious summer leadership program in the state capital. After much preparation, I went to the advisor's office to be interviewed by members of the American Legion, who immediately rejected me for not being religious enough. Having only recently come out of the atheist closet, I felt helpless, humiliated, and miserable. The only consolation came from my teacher, Mr. Miller, whose few words I will never forget. I wrote to Americans United for Separation of Church and State but received no reply. My readers in the school administration evidently didn't care either; they let the practice continue.
1. May 2007
   My final month of high school was jam-packed with so many unique experiences that it would be impossible to pick just one. First, I helped lead my school to an unexpected second place finish in the countywide high school programming competition, and the programming team landed a spot on the school's morning announcements. The school put on a carnival for the senior class. I helped give a disastrous speech for some BS technology thing. At the senior class awards, I won a scholarship while two of my friends sneaked out to streak at a football game. On the second to last day of school, there was a food fight in the cafeteria. At the senior breakfast, I was named class salutatorian. I danced with a hot girl at prom and then delivered a speech at graduation. So many things happened one after the other, but I captured them in as much detail as possible, knowing that nothing like this would ever happen again. And the memories are all there.

One of my favorite parts of blogging is sharing cool links that I find. Over the years, I've posted untold numbers of links, so I thought I'd present my favorites, excluding the ones that are now broken. (Honorable mention goes to season one of the BBC series Look Around You, which I linked to on July 5, 2006. Several of the links to individual episodes have died, but the rest are still riotously funny.)

Here are my top ten favorite links from the last 1,000 posts.

10. Internet '96 (July 29, 2006)
    Remember what the Internet looked like twelve years ago? Neither do I. Luckily, one netizen (does anyone say that anymore? did anyone ever say that?) provides snarky commentary on how major companies' sites looked in the early, amateurish days of the World Wide Web.
9. New and Improved Stereotypes (January 1, 2008)
   A collection of made-up stereotypes, complete with illustrations.
8. Mr. Roger Lord Mortimer's Neighborhood (March 26, 2006)
   A rich guy rips off Mister Rogers' Neighborhood... sort of. Hilarity ensues. This was the second YouTube video I ever featured.
7. Redefined: A Cappella Nintendo Medley (April 16, 2005)
   An a cappella group called Redefined sings and acts to a medley of old Nintendo theme songs. Very funny and impressive, considering that the Super Mario Bros. theme song is very hard to sing (and is accordingly one of the most butchered melodies in the history of music). Be sure to watch as well as listen. These guys are great!
6. 5 Men and a Limo (August 28, 2005)
   Do you ever wonder what those gravel-voiced movie announcers do in their spare time? Here's a video featuring five of America's top voice-over artists in one car, including the late, great Don LaFontaine.
5. Spamusement! (July 21, 2004)
   Poorly-drawn (but all the funnier) cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines. The site is apparently no longer updated, but there are over 300 cartoons and active forums.
4. "Office Space" Recut (June 2, 2008)
   How about Office Space recut as a thriller? There are a lot of crappy recut trailers, but this one's pretty good. I promise. (In fact, it's amazing.)
3. Minesweeper: The Movie (March 10, 2008)
   Continuing the long tradition of movies based on video games, it's a movie based on everyone's favorite game to play when they're bored. Seriously, I played me a lot of Minesweeper in the spring, prompting my roommate to take notice and show me this video.
2. Back to the Future: The Enchantment Under the Sea Dance Revisited (August 9, 2006)
   What would it look like if the dance scenes from Back to the Future and Back to the Future Part II were synchronized? They actually fit together really well.
1. Dinosaur Comics (December 13, 2005)
   A webcomic that features the same panels every day, but with different dialogue. It's an example of constrained writing, but it hardly seems constrained at all. In fact, it's more like the author's random musings as projected through the main character, T-Rex. I've been reading Dinosaur Comics for three years now, and it's seriously hilarious. It's #1 because it's the cool link that keeps on giving.

Of course, this blog would be nothing without you, the readers. Whether you're a friend or a stranger, I enjoy interacting with you. Many of you have been reading for a long time. And of course, any subjective top ten list like the ones I just posted is subject to debate. (Am I absolutely insane for not including Post X?!) So comb through the archives and share your favorite posts and links with everyone. That is, if you have any favorites. If you don't, that's cool too. I'll just be over here celebrating.

Man, a thousand posts. Crazy.

College students aren't unionized

Here are some things I've been thinking about.

My roommate plays the keyboard, and I play the guitar. We like some of the same music and should therefore totally jam. I haven't talked to our suitemates much yet, but I heard one of them playing "Black Dog" on the guitar the other day. Cool points to the room next door. (Also, cool points deducted from me because I only know the song from "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Trapped in the Drive-Thru.")

I ran into my old roommate, Adam, and his friend, Stephen, at the food court in the student union the other day. (That term confused me when I was looking at schools. "College students aren't unionized... are they?") Anyway, we caught up on things, and Adam brought up the idea he had last year about me getting a column in the Independent Florida Alligator. I never wrote about it here in case I contacted the Alligator and had them read the blog. Well, that didn't happen. I've thought about what I could write about. Columns give you so little space, and you have to, like, use good grammar and have a topic and things like that. Could I have a column about nothing?

(But if they liked my style and offered me a column unsolicitedly, that would be totally cool. Hey, Alligator editor-in-chief Jessica DaSilva, am I just the thing you're looking for? Um, my writing, I mean. Is it just the thing you're looking for?)

Last year, I was pretty impressed by my roommate's dual-monitor setup. I was also impressed by his desktop backgrounds. Whenever he changed his wallpaper (which was pretty often), I had to try to make mine something cooler, even though I had only one screen. Now that we're not roommates anymore, I've hardly changed my background at all, and my new roommate's computer is situated such that I can't see the screen. The arms race is over. (For those of you who are wondering, my background is this photo reversed.)

Living in a dorm has its frustrating moments. I encountered one such frustration last year during my repeated, failed attempts to connect to IRC servers. I was pretty sure that the dorm network blocked all IRC traffic, but they actually only block some ports (though they won't say which ones). Port 6667 is definitely blocked, but I found out that it's possible to connect to Freenode (irc.freenode.net) through port 8001. To help other students who have had problems with IRC in the dorms, I've set up this list of server/port combinations that work and don't work on the dorm network. Hopefully some people will find it and contribute.

The BBC reports on some of the oldest known jokes, the oldest of which is a 3,900-year-old fart joke. It's not very funny, but some of the others are.

In this video, a law professor explains why you should never talk to the police during an interrogation. The professor allowed a veteran police officer to speak after him, not knowing whether he would agree. The officer agreed.

Guitarist Herman Li of Dragonforce, which is apparently a band that makes use of guitar sound effects, shows you how to make some sound effects on the guitar. Pretty sweet.

Fay, Fay, go away, come again another day (or don't)

My last post might have been a snoozer for many of you, but hopefully not. I try to make things interesting around here. But as evidenced by the break from my usual form, I have a lot of things to write about right now. In fact, I have a long list of topics to get to, which is a good thing. If you look back at the archives, you can see that I posted more during the first few years than I have during the past few years. Recently, the occasional brief lull has crept in. I'm not proud of that; I've always striven to post regularly. I can't say that when I started blogging, I did it for the lulls.

Readers, I am outraged. My friend Luke informed me that Sunday's South Florida Sun-Sentinel stole the title of my blog post from Saturday. Just look at that headline. Like mine, there isn't even a comma to set off the subject of address!

Okay, so a quick Google search reveals that I wasn't the only person to think of this clever headline, but is it even appropriate for a newspaper? The Sun-Sentinel seems to be more style than substance these days. Case in point: see the headline at the top? "A Bold New Sun Sentinel." They've apparently redesigned the paper to look less newspapery and more short-attention-span-y. Now, the title of the newspaper can intuitively be found in tiny letters under the giant "S" on the side of the front page.

In any case, this weather has put a damper on some of my plans. I might be leaving for college on Thursday rather than Wednesday. And I was going to play baseball with my friends Nick and TJ today, but that's not going to happen because we're starting to get hit by the tropical storm right now. It's not too bad right now, and maybe it won't get too much worse.

Fortunately, I did get to hang out with Nick and TJ on Saturday night. We went to South Beach, looking for some fun. Because we were checking out the nightlife, I naturally brought my new sunglasses. But once again, we didn't plan far enough ahead. Apparently there's nothing to do there if you're under the drinking age, which is a puritanical 21. We learned an important lesson: being over 18 isn't a big deal if you're under 21.

Yet another Jeopardy!-related link: a contestant describes his recent experience on the show.

You may be a bad speller, but be glad you're not as bad as this newspaper that misspelled its name on the front page.

Getting around on a bicycle in the United States seems to be a real inconvenience. A reluctant Walmart customer describes her experience having to take her bike into the store because there was no place to keep it safe outside.

Good migrations

More metablogging: in my last post, I mentioned that "for reasons that are outside the scope of this entry, my posts from 2003 and 2004 have never been loaded into WordPress." It's a topic I want to go into a little more, so it's the scope of this entry.

Before I moved to WordPress on January 2, 2005, I wasn't using any particular blogging software to blog. I was manually writing posts on the main page, moving old posts to the archives, and adding items to the RSS feed one by one. It got tedious after a while, which is why I made the switch. But I never moved my old posts (except the post of January 1, 2005) to WordPress, where they could each have an individual URL and be tagged and commented on. That left 346 posts from 2003 and 2004 that don't quite fit in with the rest.

The most obvious reason for not adding the Original 346 was the issue of permalinks. They are supposed to be, as the name implies, permanent. Back then, I found it most convenient to use a permalink scheme unlike any known to man. Each monthly archive was on a single page (for example, /archives/200312.html) with each post's "permalink" being specified by a different fragment (the part after the #). The fragment was originally in the numeric format YYYYMMDDHHMM, but I later changed it to dDDHHMM. The letter "d" was added to the beginning because fragments should be specified by unique element IDs, and IDs may not begin with a number. I updated all the old permalinks and the posts that linked to others. Sounds pretty impressive, but it was just a matter of doing search-and-replaces in HTML files.

Anyway, to move the old posts to WordPress, I'd have to change these permalinks a second time, and it seems like the best way to do this would be to do 346 find-and-replaces on the database with PHPMyAdmin, a la these instructions. That doesn't sound too hard. I've done more tedious things. As for redirecting the old links, I wouldn't create hundreds of complex .htaccess rules to redirect old posts to their new permanent (?) URLs, but it would be simple to redirect them to their new monthly archive pages.

Those issues are technical. They can be solved relatively easily. But there's an editorial consideration that arises from technical conditions. WordPress allows you to set a single time zone for your blog. I have it permanently set to Eastern Standard Time, UTC -5. In the pre-WordPress days, things were different. From April 2003 to October 2004, I dated my posts with UTC because I was dumb. This means that I had a different definition of "today" than my environs indicated. I would write a post just after "midnight" describing the events of yesterday, but yesterday was actually that same day because "midnight" was 7:00 P.M. I thought that people in other time zones wouldn't understand EST but would understand their offset from UTC. Yeah, really.

The question remains: should I edit my old posts to reflect my local time? Should I change those old yesterdays to todays and the todays to tomorrows? This could have interesting consequences, such as having posts move from one month to another. It would also throw my old flashback "One year ago, two years ago" links out of whack. But it would make the old posts consistent and less confusing for readers.

There are a few other issues associated with moving the Original 346 to WordPress. The only one I can think of off the top of my head is that I'd have to remove the occasional formatting from post titles (example) as well as the "Plus:" subtitles that I used to use. No big loss there.

If I do move the Original 346, which sounds increasingly likely, I'll probably convert the blog's categories to tags and re-tag each of my posts. Categories are pretty hierarchical, and you tend not to create new ones except once in a great while. Tags are created on the fly and can be for the nonce, although they're most useful if they're used at least a few times. They can touch upon things that would be too trivial to merit creating a category. For example, if I wrote a post about going to a steakhouse with my friends, I could tag the post "friends," "dinner," "steak," the name of the restaurant, and so on. It sure would be interesting to look back on all my old posts that had to do with steak.

From the BBC: How not to do an American accent.

Here's a recipe for chocolate cake in 5 minutes. I haven't tried it. It might be disgusting.

More about Legos: A rare glimpse inside the Lego factory.