Everyday people

Since I’ve been living in Seattle’s Belltown neighborhood, I’ve been reading community blogs like BelltownPeople (a.k.a. Belltown People, belltownpeople) to find out what’s going on around here. Last Wednesday, Jesse and Trina, the people behind the blog, held a meeting for readers, neighborhood residents, and pretty much everybody who wanted to come.

The meeting was held in a basement of a hostel that wasn’t far from my apartment. Nothing could be too far away since this isn’t a huge neighborhood, but it was particularly close. There was free pizza and beer, and I was one of the first people to show. There were plenty of subjects for pre-meeting chatter, such as hobbies (I guess blogging is my main hobby these days since that’s what I talked about).

Eventually, about six or eight people had come, and something like an official meeting began. Jesse wanted to know how BelltownPeople could be improved. If I hadn’t gone to the meeting, I wouldn’t have known that everyone is free to sign up and write posts for the blog, so I volunteered that that aspect should be more prominent on the site. I didn’t even know that the blog had multiple authors, so I suggested that each article have a photo of the author near the byline. Yes, I’m quite often a blog skimmer, and as a joke I was going to insert a nonsense phrase into this sentence to see if anyone would catch it, but I think everyone would and I would never live it down. I am not clever enough to make that work. I mean, you are all too smart.

Anyway, there was also some discussion about the neighborhood, like restaurants closing, sidewalks not getting fixed, and those sorts of things. Jesse also asked each of us to share a Belltown moment we had had. Several people explained why they believe it’s a good place to raise children, pointing out that great places for a day out with kids are in walking distance whereas they would be too far away if you lived in the suburbs. Others compared urban Belltown favorably to the clean, “censored” suburban neighborhoods.

I hadn’t been in the neighborhood long enough to really get a feel for it, so I just explained why I chose to live there. I had been researching neighborhoods near Amazon’s headquarters, and the Walk Score website, first featured in the World of Stuff post of January 23, 2008, indicated that Belltown was the most walkable. From there, I did more research and liked what I saw. (My current address has a Walk Score of 97/100, which is typical for Belltown. My last place had a Walk Score of 5, and the new formula revises it downward to 1.)

Jesse said that as a newcomer, I could provide a unique perspective for BelltownPeople, so he invited me to share my thoughts. I suppose I will once I have enough to write about.

It was good to go out and meet people in the neighborhood. I’m looking forward to the next meeting, not to mention any other opportunities to go out and socialize in a setting that’s not awkward for me. I walk to work; I walk to the grocery store; I hardly have any social outings to walk to. Yet.

Time to answer an Ask Jordon question.

Kate: Do you think it’s worth celebrating Valentine’s Day if you’re in a relationship? Are there people who feel unhappy this day? What about you?

I don’t know whether it’s worth it to celebrate Valentine’s Day; I don’t have enough experience. But in my experience, plenty of people are unhappy are about it. It seems that it’s often because they wish they had a girlfriend or boyfriend and are jealous of people who do. Maybe they’re even the majority, but it’s possible that they’re just the loudest people. I used to be like that, but I haven’t been for the past couple of years.

The BBC reports on a French house that’s recently been opened to the public after just sittin’ around for a hundred years.

The great eight

The World of Stuff is 8 years old today! Holy crap. I know some people who aren’t even 8 years old. Actually, I think I don’t.

At this juncture, I’d like to give you a quick update on yours truly. As I alluded to earlier, I’m bogged down with schoolwork, but it’ll all be over soon. The last day of classes is two weeks from today, and I actually don’t have any exams during exam week! Finally!

Mostly I’ve been working on my senior project. The phrase “senior project” has been on my mind so much, in fact, that it’s starting to become hilarious. It’s something about the letter “R,” I think. I had the same problem once when I was working with MATLAB. varargin. Say it a hundred times, and you’ll get what I mean.

When I’m done with my education and they’ve found someone to replace me at work, I’ll have some more time to write about what’s been going on (and what went on during winter break—I know I’m really far behind on that!). And as I move to Seattle and start my career, I’m sure I’ll have a whole lot to say.

One more thing: I haven’t done away with my trademark “Links at the End of the Post.” It just so happens that 7 out of my last 8 posts have been what I call “11:59 posts.” I like to shove my posts out the door by midnight. I know you’ve been missing the links, so here are a few to keep you busy:

Young People on Car Ownership: Meh. That describes me pretty well.

If the most populous countries had the greatest area, China would be the size of Russia, India would be the size of Canada, the US would be the size of itself, and so on down the list. Here’s a map that illustrates that idea. It really gives you a sense of the relative populations of different countries. (Via The Presurfer)

Bloggers: a comparison

I’m Kirsten, from All About Me – And Then Some, and Jordon is super busy right now so he asked me to help keep his blog alive, so here I am. Today I wanted to do a comparison because I didn’t know what else to blog about on someone else’s personal blog.

Jordon: blogs about stuff
Kirsten: blogs about herself – and then some

Jordon: living the collegiate life
Kirsten: living in a cubicle

Jordon: lives in balmy Florida
Kirsten: lives in blistering Las Vegas

Jordon: is 21 and doesn’t look like he has any wrinkles or gray hairs
Kirsten: has been 29 for seven years now and while she’s avoided wrinkles so far, the gray hairs are creeping in

Jordon: knows html
Kirsten: knows html, more or less

Jordon: knows php
Kirsten: knows php when she sees it but doesn’t quite know what to do with it

Jordon: is a coding maniac
Kirsten: sucks at all kinds of coding

Jordon: knows what algorithms are
Kirsten: barely has any rhythm

Jordon: listens to The Beetles
Kirsten: listens to angsty chick music

Jordon: will graduate college with a 4-year degree and some career direction
Kirsten: graduated with a 2-year degree in liberal arts and still has no direction

Jordon: went to Europe and was able to meet all sorts of people because of years of dedicated, self-motivated Esperanto studies
Kirsten: went to Europe and was not able to speak to anyone despite 6 years of French studies

Jordon: puts interesting links at the end of nearly every post
Kirsten: stayed up way too late and couldn’t find anything link worthy, so is encouraging everyone to go to wikipedia and just keep clicking on “Random Article” until something interesting comes along

Seven links

I don’t usually participate in these memes, but I thought I’d take the 7 Link Challenge (thanks, Kirsten). These answers aren’t necessarily authoritative since I’ve written over a thousand posts and can’t be bothered to go back and look at all of them except in special circumstances.

1. Your first post: The World of Stuff Opens, April 6, 2003.
2. A post you enjoyed writing the most: [sic]. You could say I started writing this one in junior high, when I would keep track of my teachers’ many slips of the tongue. In the post, I listed some of my favorites.
3. A post which had a great discussion: Tough one. We usually don’t have those around here. The discussion on Brain Damage went on for a while, though.
4. A post on someone else’s blog that you wish you’d written: That would have to be The Ultimate “0.999… = 1″ Guide over at Greatplay.net.
5. Your most helpful post: My Sony DSC-H55 Digital Camera Review seems to have helped a fair number of people so far.
6. A post with a title that you are proud of: Man, what post title am I not proud of? Half the time they’re clever as hell. Sometimes I think of them ages in advance. I was going through some old titles, and this one made me chuckle: A Turtle (And Also the Meaning of Life).
7. A post you wish more people had read: Any post with no comments. Seriously, I think if my every post generated a huge discussion, it would compel me to write more often. Not that I don’t write a lot, but I used to write more often than I do now. One post I like that seemed to go under everyone’s radar was By the Way… It brings back a lot of memories for me.

I guess this post should be called “Nine Links” because here are TWO MORE LINKS!!

Here are some Useless Fliers. (Via waxy.org)

Here’s a pretty extensive article about the guy Nintendo named Mario after.

I need you so much closer?

I got home on Thursday. I haven’t seen my friends yet since they still have exams. So I’ve had some time to think about things.

When I was in high school, I tried to write a book. I tried to write several books, actually, but the one I got furthest with was supposed to be a collection of poems and short stories. I looked back on some of them recently—they’re on my computer—and I realized how angsty I must have been when I wrote them. Even in this blog, if you go back a few years or even months, there are plenty of instances of teenage angst as well. (The classic example.)

In the past year or so, I feel like things have been on the up and up for me. I did some things that made me happy. I’m not one of those people who say that they’re a completely different person now than they were at some time in the past, but looking back on my old writings, I sure felt like I had changed for the better. I thought I was no longer capable of being angsty (I’m trying to avoid the word “emo” here). But I’ve found out that I still can be.

Unrequited Love, we meet again. Last time, your visit was more pleasant, but this time, I have questions. Why can’t I be friends with a girl without falling in love with her? (Do I even know what love really is? Probably not. Thanks for catching that.) And, more importantly, why is it so hard to dig myself out of it? How can I prevent this from happening in the first place? Can I at all? Should I? Who can I even talk about this with?

I don’t expect anyone to be able to answer these questions, least of all myself. But it makes me remember why I wrote those little stories at the heart of my teenage years. Just phrasing the questions is somehow therapeutic. It’s comforting to know that anyone who might read them has been there before and can provide advice or, if nothing else, commiserate. And once I’ve written this and sent it off into cyberspace, I can preoccupy myself with something else for a while.

There’s nothing quite as powerful as writing. That’s why I blog.

Happy birthday, The World of Stuff

I’ve become one of them.

How many people do you think would be less likely to read a particular blog if they couldn’t get e-mail notifications of new posts? Probably not that many, right? Well, since I introduced e-mail notifications at the beginning of last year, I’ve accumulated 20 e-mail subscribers.

Now, how many people would be less likely to read that blog if they couldn’t be notified of new posts on Twitter? Probably more than the e-mail people, I would say. Or at least as many, anyway. Twitter is, like, the biggest thing in the world right now.

I’ve resisted it for so long, but in the end, the desire for not-so-shameless self-promotion won out. TWoS is now on Twitter. Well, more properly, I’m on Twitter (words I thought I’d never say), and I’ll be tweeting (more words I thought I’d never say) whenever there’s a new post. Twitter etiquette dictates that I do more than just that, so I’ll probably join in on the collective conversation as well. My hope is that this will introduce new readers to the blog.

I predict that there will be three main reactions to this announcement. Some of you will be disgusted. Some of you (mostly people I don’t know in real life) will be overjoyed. And the rest of you won’t care one way or the other. That’s okay. It’s just another way for you to creep on me, and I promise I won’t mention Twitter too much here.

Consider the whole thing experimental for now, but I think it’s a good way to celebrate TWoS’s seventh birthday, which is today. Here’s the link: @theworldofstuff.

In this interview, an anonymous Facebook employee gives insight on the inner workings of Facebook.

The BBC talks to people who never forget a face.

Yet another list: 16 Things You Never Knew About the Automobile. (Via The Presurfer)

Behind the screens

Well, April is upon us, and you know what that means: Lifeapalooza!

Get Carded‘s annual organ donation awareness concert was on Thursday night, and unlike in previous years, I had an exam at the same time and couldn’t help out for most of it. All I had time to do was set up and clean up. Go figure. But I was around to witness us reaching our goal of signing up 50 organ donors. At least, I think we made it. If not, we were very close.

My exam was the crucial second exam in my accounting class. (I’m taking it for my business minor.) To give you an idea of what my accounting class is like: during the first week of class, the TA asked us, “How many of you have heard this class is hard?” Most people raised their hand; I didn’t.

Back to Thursday. I was setting up for Lifeapalooza around dusk, when the insects come out to play. Some of them decided to bite my face, and then they decided to bite my face some more. So I took a two-hour exam with an itchy face. After the exam, I needed to show my student ID to one of the proctors, so I shoved my hand into my pocket, opening a cut on my finger and causing it to bleed profusely. Despite those bad omens, I did better than I thought I would on the exam, and a B remains within sight. My weekend has also been pretty mixed, but I’ll get to that in a future post.

Right now, I’d like to draw your attention to the fact that I just upgraded WordPress, including my database and several of my plugins. If you notice that any aspect of the blog is broken, please contact me right away.

I’ve been using WordPress for over five years now, but I’ve always hated upgrading, so I rarely do it. The official instructions tell you which files to delete and which ones not to delete, but I always feel like I’m going to accidentally delete something important. It wouldn’t be a big deal because I always back my stuff up before upgrading, but still, I just don’t like it. It’s awkward and painful. I liken it to pulling out your own teeth. Not that I’ve done that, of course.

But if upgrading WordPress the regular way is like pulling out your teeth, then upgrading with Subversion is like having a sexy dentist cart out the laughing gas and take care of everything for you. Essentially, Subversion allows you to download all the updated files with a single command. Pretty sweet. Hopefully now I won’t be as lazy about upgrading.

For a long time, I had some measures in place that eliminated automated comment spam but let manually posted spam right through. The manual spam was never a very big problem until recently, so I have some new anti-spam measures that you should also be aware of. For years, I’ve been too lazy or paranoid to install Akismet, the premier anti-spam plugin for WordPress. Well, I’ve finally installed it, but I’m not using it the way it’s normally used.

Normally, Akismet checks an incoming comment against its database and puts it in the blog’s spam queue if it thinks the comment is spam. That’s all fine and good, but I get dozens if not hundreds of spam comments every day, and I’m not going to sift through them to find false positives. Fortunately, I’ve discovered a helper plugin called Conditional CAPTCHA. Now, if Akismet thinks a comment is spam, the submitter will be asked to fill in a simple CAPTCHA. If it’s filled in correctly, the comment proceeds to the spam queue, where I can approve or reject it. If not, it is summarily deleted.

With these two plugins working together, automated comment spam is still zapped instantly because Akismet generally recognizes it as such and because robots can’t (or don’t) solve the CAPTCHA. The spam queue will hold what we might call false negatives (comment spam posted by beings intelligent enough to solve a CAPTCHA) and false positives (the hopefully very few legitimate comments that Akismet thinks is spam). Of course, true negatives (i.e., normal comments) will be merrily allowed through as always. Nothing is different about that.

What’s the advantage of all this, you ask? Now, the blog has a defense against both automated and manual comment spam (as long as Akismet can recognize it, which it almost always does). Also, when I mark comments as spam or not spam, the Akismet system learns from its mistakes. Pretty cool. I can teach it that anyone who violates my plainly stated no-advertising policy is a spammer, so don’t even think about linking to your irrelevant web site where you sell stuff, or you could be blackballed from other blogs too.

By the way, my roommate Andy suggested the title of this post. Thanks, And-Man.

Just one link, since this is getting pretty long. I don’t normally like so-called 8-bit music, but MOON8 is pretty cool. It’s what Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon would sound like on an original Nintendo. (Via waxy.org)

April is the cruelest month

I should be studying now. I have an exam tomorrow. I also have homework due tomorrow, Get Carded’s Lifeapalaooza tomorrow, homework due Friday, a Linux installfest on Saturday, a project somewhere else out on the horizon, and who knows what else I’m forgetting. It’s been a busy week, and April is going to be a busy month as the spring semester comes to an end.

Oh yeah, and I get to pick my classes on Monday. Apparently my peers all get to pick their classes today or thereabouts, but since I don’t have as many credit hours as most of them, I can’t register for classes as early. It’s not fair, I know… or is it? It probably is. I can’t wait to catch up on my credits over the summer so I can register for next spring’s classes relatively early. Well, we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.

Some of the blogs I read have open threads periodically (or all the damn time). I find them kind of annoying, probably because I don’t feel like I’d fit in in a discussion with the rest of the commenters. The World of Stuff, I think, is different. I think you’d all get along with each other, and I don’t often abdicate my responsibilities as a blogger by declaring open threads. The circumstances are extenuating this time. That accounting exam won’t take itself.

Oh, and The World of Stuff’s birthday is on April 6. Happy almost birthday, The World of Stuff!

What to say, what not to say

Yeah, so I’ve been pretty busy. I know, I tend to start a lot of posts with that, but it is true. Sometimes I actually have (gasp) homework.

But in between homework sessions, there’s this little thing called life, and things do happen to me. Some of them are interesting or even blogworthy. Those things often end up here in the blog. Often, but not always.

As I get older and more people I know are aware of my blog, I feel that there are more things I can’t say.

“What?!” you ask. “You just wrote a five-part series detailing every waking hour you spent with your special friend Kate. You kissed and told. You even mentioned that you cried.”

Okay, first of all, crying is okay sometimes, especially if it’s one’s party and one wants to. Second of all, more things happened than I mentioned in my blog posts, either because I momentarily forgot about them (for example, Kate and I played some eight-ball at the student union one day—I forget which day it was, but I remember the TVs were all tuned to sports channels, which were announcing the news of Lane Kiffin‘s move to USC) or because they just aren’t things I want to share with the world. You know?

You’ve probably heard about bloggers who got fired from their jobs because of something they said on their blog. It’s kind of like that as well. I don’t want to say anything that will make me look bad to potential employers (although I think I kind of have already, though I won’t link to any examples for obvious reasons), and once I get a full-time job, I probably won’t mention it very much as a precaution. It might also be very boring as well.

Also, have a look at the archives for September 2003, won’t you? There are a lot of minutiae in there. I don’t bother too much with the little things about my day anymore. Maybe they no longer interest me, but I think it’s mainly because I just tend toward longer, less frequent blog posts. I guess I prefer them that way because I want each of them to have a lot of substance. I want them to really be good reading.

What brought this about? My friend Andy recently mentioned in his new blog that he admired my “ability to censor [my]self enough so that [my] blog is not just random thoughts” but also “to be open enough so that [my] blog is interesting.” My initial reaction was: He doesn’t know the half of it! Boy, do I ever censor myself. I probably censor myself more than not… whatever that means. Or something like that.

What really brought this about was that last night I had a dream that one of my female friends was smooching me. I wanted to talk about it with someone to try to see what it meant, but how best to go about that? I certainly wouldn’t mention it to the girl herself. (Creep-a-leepy.) And, of course, I ruled out the blog as well. (Sort of.) I ended up talking about it with Andy.

There are many reasons for me not to mention certain things here, but if they’re really interesting, I try to remove any sensitive details (see the previous paragraph for an example). A pretty good story is better than none at all, and you deserve a good story.

Here’s a handy chart showing How the Health Care Overhaul Could Affect You. (Via Lifehacker)

The Bouba/Kiki effect suggests that people might not attach sounds to shapes arbitrarily. Interesting stuff.

Failure Magazine (yes, really) presents a three-part series: Quirkiest Basketball Failures, Parts One, Two, and Three. Related: quirky football injuries.

The server post

Well, spring break is history, and now it’s back to the grind. I’ve been meaning to mention this for a while, so here goes.

The weekend after Kate left, I experienced a strange emotion called “boredom.” I was thinking about how I was starting to rely increasingly on my external hard drive, and I was also thinking about how my sister and I both use said hard drive for backups. I was the keeper of the drive, so I could make a backup whenever I wanted, but my sister could only make a backup when I brought the hard drive to her. She had made her last backup in August.

On a whim, I decided to see if I could set up an SSH server on my computer so my sister could access the hard drive from her apartment. I figured it would be pretty simple because we both use Unix-like operating systems (yes, Mac OS X and Ubuntu are cousins). I installed the openssh-server package, and that was that. (Ubuntu’s wiki page was a good introduction.)

I made some tweaks to improve security, such as using a non-standard port (I know, security through obscurity is bad, but not if you also have better security) and disabling password-based authentication in favor of key files. SSH uses public and private keys, similar to PGP in the scheme I’ve described previously. Essentially, in order to log in, you have to have a copy of a key file that has been approved by the owner of the server. Your key itself can be encrypted, with a password used to decrypt it. This is useful because my sister doesn’t have to know my password to log in; she just has to know the password for her key.

Since my IP address changes from time to time, I decided to give my server a name that would be consistent and easier to remember. I signed up for a free account at DynDNS.com and got a subdomain of the form example.dyndns.org. (I won’t say what it actually is. Security through obscurity…) Then I installed and configured the ddclient package, which contacts DynDNS periodically to say, “Hey, I’m at IP address such-and-such. Point example.dyndns.org to it.” So, essentially, the subdomain becomes a synonym for my computer.

I didn’t realize how arcane all this stuff was until I was on the phone with my sister trying to get her to log in. She’s not dumb; I just had a hard time explaining how Unix command-line applications work in one marathon session. (Try doing it over the phone as well.) After about an hour, she had a key and was backing up her stuff on the external hard drive on my desk. Since then, we’ve performed another backup successfully. I’ll describe the backup scheme in a future post.

But that’s not all an SSH server is good for. Port forwarding makes a lot of fun things possible! Since setting up the server, I’ve used my computer as a web proxy, which might come in handy sometime. I’ve also installed a VNC server so I can view and control my desktop from other computers. Ubuntu’s wiki has some handy information on how to set up things like that. I could also cover them in a future post if you’re really interested (I can tell you are!).

It’s worth noting that if you’re using key-based authentication on your server and you want to use PuTTY to connect to it, you’ll have to convert your private key to PuTTY’s format.

For today’s first link, I’d like to showcase my friend and roommate Andy’s new blog, Seek the Sooth. For you polyglots, Andy is also blogging in Esperanto and Spanish! I’m looking forward to reading your posts, Andy, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

I should start using this video to help explain why I’m afraid of Google. (Via The Presurfer)

I’m too young to remember some of these, but you might find the article interesting: The Twelve Most Tarnished Brands in Tech.