Our first stop was the lighthouse, a short ride away. This would be our second visit to a lighthouse; we had visited the Hillsboro Inlet lighthouse in January. I couldn't help but compare the two lighthouses. Most notably, the Hillsboro lighthouse is only open to visitors a few days per year, while the St. Augustine lighthouse is only not open to visitors a few days per year. The former is still owned and operated by the US Coast Guard, while the latter is not.

The St. Augustine lighthouse is also more impressive overall. It's taller, and it has that classic conical lighthouse shape. We spent a while at the top of the lighthouse even though there were a lot of other people there. It was a nice day, and the breeze was strong but refreshing. After going back down, we checked out the adjacent museum and, of course, signed the guestbook.

Kate had wanted to go to the beach, so the next stop on our bicycle journey was Anastasia State Park. At the park, we ate some overpriced hamburgers and then went to the beach. It was a very wide beach with shallow water. After briefly going into the water, we decided to lie in the sun. I had grabbed a couple of towels from for us our host's bathroom (with his permission, of course), and I unraveled mine to find that half of it was labeled "FACE" and the other half was labeled "BUTT." Kate thought it was hilarious.

If there's one thing I hate, it's putting on sunscreen. It's greasy and smelly and makes a mess. So I didn't put on any sunscreen, and neither did Kate. Instead, we just lay. After a while, we were incredibly sunburned, and we decided to go back to our host's to relax. But a short stay turned into a long one, and by the time we went out on our bikes again it was getting dark.

I wanted to take Kate to see the scenic campus of Flagler College, so that's where we went. We spent a lot of time taking photos of the buildings (especially Kate, with her new camera) and then just talking. We were tired, having had a long couple of days. And it was pretty quiet, with only the occasional horse and buggy going by with an annoying tour guide and some family inside.

After a while, I thought we should head back; I didn't want to be out too late. At our host's place, Kate and I had some frozen dinners that we had bought at the grocery store. Not long after, we laid our sore, sunburned selves down to sleep.

Read about The Origins of 10 Nicknames. (Via The Presurfer)

Really interesting: Top 10 Codes You Aren't Meant To Know. I'll never think of stores the same way again. (Via J-Walk Blog)

I felt terrible. The day before that, I had told her that I wanted us to be just friends. And since she would be coming to visit in less than a month, I didn't know how she was going to feel about me. I really wasn't sure whether we would have a good time at all. It was bad timing on my part, but is there ever a right time for that?

I started to read the book. It was a really large book, and I was worried that I wouldn't finish it before she got here. But I read a little bit every day on the bus to and from class. At first I wasn't sure how interested I would be in it, since it seemed to be just some guy's life story. But it got more interesting, and I started chugging along.

Kate flew in to Miami on August 1 and spent the week making her way up through Florida. During that time, we texted each other with details of what we had been up to, and she told me how much she missed me. I was sorry. I missed her too. It hurts me to even think about what I said to her and how she must have felt.

I still hadn't gotten close to finishing the book on Saturday, August 7, when Andy and I went to the Greyhound bus station to pick up Kate. This was where I had last seen her over six months ago. We (or, at least, I) had gotten emotional because I didn't know when we would see each other again.

The bus arrived late, so I killed some time by reading the book. Finally, Kate's bus arrived. She stepped off the bus, and Andy and I greeted her in Esperanto, the language we usually used with her. Soon she asked if we could switch to English, so English it was.

Before she arrived, she had asked us to take her out to lunch somewhere, and she wanted it to be a surprise. Andy and I had decided on Merlion, the quiet Singaporean restaurant where he had taken me after our abortive attempt to watch a Fourth of July firework show. It was quiet there indeed, but as we slowly worked away at our dishes, the place got more and more crowded—too crowded for the staff to handle.

It was a graduation day, and a number of people had decided to make Merlion the place to celebrate. Each of us tried the others' dishes. With her dish, Kate got the "communist soup" (meat, potatoes, and not much else). Our waitress was busy with who knows how many tables, but eventually, she gave us the check.

It was already getting late, but Kate said that she wanted to go to the Kanapaha Botanical Gardens, so Andy dropped us off there and went home to take a nap. I had never been to the gardens before, so it was new for me too. The weather was getting terrible by this time, and it looked like it was going to start pouring rain any second. But we decided to set out and wander on (and sometimes off) the path, admiring the various plants all around.

Toward the end of our visit, not long before Andy was going to come back and pick us up, Kate asked if I was going to hold her hand. I did, and I felt more comfortable, like everything was right with the world again. We walked to a small gazebo and watched a fake waterfall for a little while. Then we headed back to the front of the park, where Andy was waiting to pick us up.

We got back to the apartment, where Andy had written (and I had helped sign) a greeting to Kate in Russian. She got a big kick out of it. Later, Kate and I watched Kurt Cobain About a Son on her computer. Soon after, it was night. It was a wonderful night.

And now, the links:

Icons of the Web is a huge graphic showing the favicons for a few hundred thousand of the most popular sites on the Internet. The size of each site's icon is proportional to the site's popularity. Yes, theworldofstuff.com is there—it's one of the smallest icons, but it's there.

The BBC talks to some guys who make cheesy knock-offs of popular movies.

And today it's my 21st birthday. I went to work in the morning, and now I'm taking a quick break from studying for the Operating Systems exam I have tonight. Yes, when I decided to take summer classes, I expected that I would have class on my birthday, but the reality was far worse. After the exam, I'm going out to dinner with a couple of friends. And after that, I have to do Operating Systems homework, which I'll probably have to pull an all-nighter to finish. Yay...

(I know, I know, I have to update my age on the sidebar and the bio and everything. It's not like I forgot, but I'm really, really, really, really, really, really, really busy.)

This link goes out to all my friends who misspell "a lot": The Alot Is Better Than You at Everything.

On Monday morning, I attended the closing ceremony of the conference. Well, there wasn't much ceremony; the term used in Esperanto means "solemn closing." It wasn't especially solemn either. It was mainly a series of closing remarks, capped off with a singing of "La Espero."

The organizers of the convention presented some statistics, most notably that the attendance was over 100. The president of Esperanto-USA gave some details about the next national convention, which will be held at the University of California, Berkeley, in early June 2011, and the one after that, which will be held in north Texas in 2012.

I was the only college-age kid to attend the closing ceremony. Once that was over, I rejoined the others in the lobby. Andy, Darcy, and I got to talking about exciting it was to be with so many other young Esperantists and how to keep the energy going. For a while, Esperanto-USA had had an active youth branch called USEJ. We decided bring USEJ back to life by starting up an IRC channel where we could constantly chat with each other and by having regular voice chats online. We also decided to look into the possibility of having a national youth congress in South Florida in the winter.

I've come back energized, and I've come back with a goal. I want to take new Esperantists with me to Berkeley next year. That means Andy and I will have to work hard to attract new members to our club and help them learn Esperanto, but it's a worthwhile challenge.

I didn't actually go to DC at all during the trip, even on the drive to the train station. Yes, instead of flying back to Florida, we took the Auto Train with Andy's dad and Andy's dad's car, which Andy is now using. It was actually pretty comfortable, and I even expected to sleep at one point. I don't think I actually did; I should have known better. But the complementary dinner and breakfast were pretty good, and it was fun to see "America at see level" (Amtrak's former or maybe current tagline).

We arrived in Sanford, Florida, on Tuesday morning, and we drove to Gainesville. As soon as we made it to UF, I raced into my public speaking class, which was already in progress. I was going to have to deliver an impromptu speech. We had each submitted a quotation, and then when it was our turn to give a speech, we had to pick one of them at random and and deliver a speech about our reaction to it.

For some reason, there weren't as many quotes as there were people, and I was the last to go, so I was left with none. The teacher asked people to submit some more, so I had fresh pickin's. I chose:

"We are not here merely to make a living, we are here to enrich the world."
—Woodrow Wilson

Within three minutes, I explained a little bit about what Esperanto is all about and about the experience I had had with other Esperantists over the long weekend. I tied it all together by explaining the shared hope that Esperanto can help enrich the world. I got a strong round of applause, and people had more questions for me after the speech. I got a 98% on the assignment.

With Congress.org's MegaVote, you can sign up for weekly e-mails with information on how your representatives are voting. Good idea! (Via HackCollege)

I had no idea Google allowed you to purchase advertising time on TV, but someone at Slate tried it out. (Via waxy.org)

You know what's cool? Science. You know what's cooler? Infographics that aren't totally stupid and help you understand science. Here's one that organizes popular health supplements by the amount of evidence for their effectiveness. (Via Lifehacker)

On Sunday morning, Andy and I went with some of our cohorts to Caribou Coffee. I made sure to get back to the hotel in time to listen to a lecture by the eminent Esperantist Humphrey Tonkin, who talked about the need for Esperanto organizations to adapt to today's Internet-based society. Next, there was supposed to be a video chat with participants at the Russian Esperantists' Congress, which was going on in St. Petersburg at the same time. For whatever reason, they weren't able to get that going, but I managed to text Kate, who was at the Russian convention.

At the same time in another room, Andy gave a presentation about the different types of sounds in Esperanto and their representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet. Even though his lecture wasn't listed on the program, the room filled up. I was going back and forth, trying to see if they had gotten the video chat working yet. Andy didn't mind because what he was saying wasn't new to me. That's the kind of stuff we talk about in the living room on Thursday nights.

Next, it was getting to be lunchtime, so a bunch of people went to Chipotle, also a short walk away from the hotel. After that, I attended lectures about Esperanto-USA's website, how to lecture about Esperanto, and the World Esperanto Association's relationship with the United Nations. Those were all okay, but I was really looking forward to Darcy's talk about her experiences starting and running an Esperanto club at a university. I think her talk was better attended than most of the others. The main bits of advice that I took away were to emphasize to people that Esperanto is fun and to make all of the club meetings fun.

After that, there were some games going on. Some of us got wrapped up in a game that involved guessing words one letter at a time. That was fun, and it seemed like a good way to build vocabulary. (Maybe we can play it at our meetings next year.) While that was going on, the rest of the youths (and some of the semi-youths) decided to go to a nearby tapas bar called Jaleo, so Andy and I joined them. I think there were 18 of us in all, sitting at two long tables. I just ordered some gazpacho, which I hadn't had since I had first tried it in Spain last year. Ah, the memories...

After our early (or seemingly early) dinner, we went back to the hotel, and I sat in on a lecture about the 6th World Congress of Esperanto, which was held in Washington, DC, in 1910. (Its 100th anniversary was one of the factors in the decision to hold the national convention in the DC area this year.) The lecturer mainly showed contemporary newspaper articles, which described the events of each day of the congress in detail. More people were aware of Esperanto back then.

Next, there was some entertainment, including a much-hyped visit from a mysterious guest. The mysterious guest turned out to be one of the guys from the conference in drag lipsynching to Esperanto translations of "Material Girl" and "Dancing Queen." There were also more conventional performances of bluegrass and other folk-type music, mostly in Esperanto. I especially enjoyed a performance of "Here Comes the Sun" in Esperanto on the ukulele. In between performers, we watched Conlang, a humorous short film about a power struggle in a small club for lovers of constructed languages.

After that, it was pretty late, but I and the other young types decided to go out. Some of us wanted to go out for a bite, and some of us just wanted to go out for a bit. I was all for going to the diner that they had gone to the night before. Like everything else, it was a short walk away from the hotel. It was called the Tastee Diner, and it was definitely the dineriest diner I had ever been to. We had the same waitress, a young woman with a strong Russian accent, that they had been served by the night before. I got a patty melt and chili cheese fries, but it was a tough decision to make. I wanted everything.

Back at the hotel, I was able to sleep in a bed because some people had already left. I slept better than I had the night before, when I had slept on the floor.

Watch this really, really epic TV theme song medley. I've only seen a few of the shows, but I still thought it was well done. (Via waxy.org)

Some guy writes about why theatre was the most important class he ever took. (Via Lifehacker)

Graffiti that dares to be erased: "COME ON PAINT ME WHITE AGAIN." This really reminds me of my friend Brian. Brian, if you're reading this... sarcastic graffiti makes me think of you? (Via waxy.org)

My Esperantist friend and roommate Andy has been away for the summer, but we met up at the Jacksonville airport on Saturday. I took a bus there; Andy flew from Fort Lauderdale. From Jacksonville we flew to Baltimore, where Andy's dad met us and drove us to the site of Esperanto-USA's national convention, a hotel in Bethesda, Maryland, near Washington, DC.

Andy and I arrived during one of the excursions to Washington, so not a lot of people were around. We registered on-site (not much planning had gone into this trip) and hung around, waiting for people to come back. The person I most looked forward to seeing was Darcy Ross, who had started an Esperanto club at the University of Illinois around the same time that Andy and I started one at the University of Florida. I wanted to know the secret to her success; while our club had virtually no members, Darcy had brought some of her many club members to the convention for the second year in a row.

Fortunately for Andy, there was a piano in the hotel, so we spent a lot of time hanging around there as Andy played. Some other Esperantists who were milling around conversed with us. I had seen in the program that there was an "official" cafe that was giving a discount to convention participants, so Andy and I decided to check it out. It was a Caribou Coffee located a short walk down the street from the hotel. It seemed exactly like a Starbucks, except it was decorated more like a lodge and less like a generic coffee place.

A little while later, it was getting to be dinnertime. Andy and I decided not to go to the banquet, which would have cost us around $40 per plate. Instead, we went to dinner with Andy's dad and his dad's friends, who lived nearby and let us stay at their house. We ended up having dinner at a Lebanese restaurant that was a short distance away from the hotel. By the time we were ready to leave the restaurant, it was getting late, but Andy and I decided to go back to the hotel instead of going to the house where we had planned on staying.

At the hotel, we finally met the famous Darcy Ross, who was very surprised to see us there. (To be fair, I was surprised to see us there too, since we had decided to go less than two weeks before.) Darcy had her friends from her Esperanto club with her—we called them her sheep—and there were a few people from other universities as well. They all (including Andy) wanted to go out to a club, and I, having woken up very early that morning, didn't. So they went out, and they let me sleep on the floor in one of their hotel rooms.

Stay tuned for the rest, because it gets more interesting.

One of those lists again: the Top 5 Unluckiest People Who Ever Lived. (Via The Presurfer)

This may be a repost, but I like it. Book-A-Minute is a collection of extremely condensed versions of classic books.

You know how you always hear about people who are in the hospital in critical condition or stable condition or something like that? They just expect you to know what each one means. Wikipedia explains the whole scale of medical states.

Although he makes spontaneous trips like that all the time, I wasn't ready to take a plane trip halfway across the country on a few days' notice. He called me a few times and seemed to be having a good time. I wish I could have been there. Maybe we can go together next year with some more planning.

Well, with a little more planning, we're going. This year's congress is in Washington, DC, which I first visited only a few months ago with some other friends. There were piles of snow everywhere then, and now it's probably as hot as it is here, so that should be interesting. Oh, and I have my own camera this time!

I'm in Gainesville, and Andy is in South Florida, but isn't stopping us from traveling together. Tomorrow, Andy's taking a flight that goes from Fort Lauderdale to Jacksonville and then to Baltimore. I'm going to get on the plane in Jacksonville. Andy's dad is going to pick us up in Baltimore and take us to Bethesda, Maryland, where the congress actually is. We'll be staying with friends of Andy's dad. On the way home, Andy and I (and Andy's dad's car) are taking the Auto Train from Lorton, Virginia, to Sanford, Florida, overnight. From there we'll drive back to Gainesville, hopefully in time for my class.

It's funny. I never used to consider myself a big traveler. Before last year, I had only flown in an airplane twice. Tomorrow I'll have flown five times in 369 days!

Anyway, when we're not traveling, we'll be checking out the sights in Washington and spending time with some cool Esperantists from throughout the country. I expect to have a good time and do a lot of interesting stuff. I'll be sure to write all about it when I get back.

Wired presents: science! How to Make a Solar Cell with Donuts and Tea.

The event was held on Wednesday evening, the last day of classes, in the smaller ballroom in the student union. There were a lot of empty seats, probably because people were at home studying for their upcoming exams. I guessed that most of the audience members were there to see their guy or gal take part in the discussion; not many people looked like they were genuinely disinterested. I have to admit I was in the former camp. I sat with a group of Freethought members.

(Derail: People always seem to say "disinterested" when they mean "uninterested." I've also seen an excellent clip from The Rachel Maddow Show [which I otherwise don't watch, by the way] in which Ms. Maddow says "uninterested" instead of "disinterested." If you're uninterested, you don't have any interest—you're bored or you don't care—and if you're disinterested, you don't have any interests—anything that could be considered a possible source of bias or prejudice. Paul Brians has an entry on this error in his Common Errors in English Usage web site, which is worth checking out. In the associated book, there's a cartoon in which a man says to a woman something like, "Let me make myself clear: I'm not disinterested, I'm uninterested.")

Um, right. So, the forum was emceed jointly by what appeared to be a Christian and a Muslim. Answering their questions, as well as some from the audience, were the panelists:

• Representing Christianity was a guy from Campus Crusade for Christ. He seemed ill at ease and spoke with thinly disguised contempt at the other belief systems that were represented. He must have said that Jesus "stepped into the pages of history" at least six or seven times. I was surprised they couldn't get a better speaker, considering how many Christians there are.
• Representing Islam was a dapper local businessman. He had a good sense of humor and explained how Islam gives people advice on how to live their everyday lives. He used the word "brother" in referring to some of the other panelists and joked with brother Blake that only a freethinker was brave enough to sit between a Muslim and a Jew.
• Blake was the only student on the panel. His answers were short and to the point (giving him less of a chance to dig himself into a hole, he said later), and he was careful to represent freethought in general without mentioning the A-word. I liked his answer to the question, "Who is the most important figure in your religion (or lack thereof)?" He said, "Yourself," because freethought is about thinking freely (hmm...) and not taking for granted the things that other people tell you.
• Representing Judaism was a local rabbi, who explained how Judaism also gave advice for everyday life. A kid from the audience, badly feigning ignorance, asked him some innocent-sounding questions to try to get him to link Judaism with Zionism. The rabbi didn't fall for it. You could have cut the tension in that room with a knife right then.
• Speaking for all denominations of Hinduism was a distinguished Indian woman of a certain age. She explained how Hindu beliefs and practices vary greatly and called out some of the moderators' questions as being specifically geared toward the Abrahamic religions. She had to dip out about halfway through, so she made a quip about avatars as another distinguished Indian woman of a certain age took her place.
• Speaking specifically for Hare-Krishna-ism while wearing Krishna robes and Krishna face paint was a young representative from the local Krishna House. She gushed with enthusiasm while getting all buddy-buddy with the other Hindu and quoting the Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit. Though she would get extra credit in the enthusiasm department, she used a lot of terms that were vague (like everyone's favorite, "energy") or not very clear to us laypeople.
• Finally, representing the Bahá'í Faith, whose name I had to copy and paste from the Wikipedia article, was a professor or something (what, you want me to actually read the program I took home?). The Bahá'í Faith (Ctrl-V) is essentially a greatest-hits compilation of the world's major religions, but Ms. Bahá'í Faith didn't do a good job of explaining what it was actually about. She talked a lot without saying very much.

It was a great way for Blake to go out as Gator Freethought's president. He was definitely one of the better speakers on the panel, and even though freethought was the odd belief system out (as evidenced by the tacking-on of "or lack thereof" to seemingly every question), he did a good job of representing our club.

And this is what I do when I should be studying for exams. I'll be glad to have them over with. By the time I write my next post, I'll be home free... for a little while.

Need to come up with blog post titles that are sure to draw readers in? Go to the Linkbait Generator for random gems like "8 Ways to Get Rich with Ninjas" and "10 Myths About Mustaches That Hollywood Wants You To Believe." I was sure that "Sony DSC-H55 Digital Camera Review" would net me some intense comments from photography-loving Google searchers, but it's nothing but the same old same old right now. (Via The Presurfer)

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 photo was taken at last year's International Youth Congress of Esperanto in Liberec, Czech Republic. From left to right are Esperantists from South Korea, Togo, Ukraine, and Vietnam. And then there's me.

Another postscript: When I got home after seeing Kate off, I noticed that the dry erase board on the refrigerator still had a Russian sentence that Kate had written. I took a picture of the board and then went to put the picture on my computer. But... the camera wouldn't read my memory card. My last memory card.

It had already stopped reading each the others, most recently a few days before. It was now official: I really needed a new camera. My beloved Sony DSC-P73 was a brick.

I had been wanting to buy a new camera for a while, but now I really have a good excuse. My ideal camera is a compact point-and-shoot with manual controls. Oh, and it has to take good pictures. I don't ask for much, you see. But it turns out that new lower-end point-and-shoots have done away with manual configuration entirely, leaving me with no choice but to jump up to the next price range.

I didn't want to get a Sony again because I knew how much they love pushing their own proprietary formats, particularly their Memory Stick storage format for cameras. My dad pointed out that some of their new cameras also accept SD cards, which have apparently become the standard while I've been busy fiddling with Memory Sticks.

That made me feel a little better, and knowing that Sony products tend to give you a lot of bang for your buck, I had a look at what Sony had to offer. The DSC-H20 and the DSC-HX5V caught my eye. I liked the former because it was cheaper and had already been released. I liked the latter because it was smaller, didn't have a lens cap, took SD cards, and shot higher-quality video (in stereo, yet).

I've decided to go for the HX5V, but apparently it's not coming out until the end of March. Till then, I am cameraless, which kind of sucks because... I'm going to Washington, DC this weekend!!

That's right. I'm the secretary of the UF chapter of Students for Free Culture, and we've decided (sort of at the last minute) to make the trek to George Washington University for the organization's Free Culture Conference 2010 this weekend. We'll be staying with Gavin Baker, the legendary founder of our chapter whom I've never met (apparently everyone else who's going has.

It won't be snowing, but it will have snowed, so it'll be the first time I actually see snow. (what jordan u've never seen sno? what is wrong with you, dont u ever travel in the winter?? its not like its incovenient or anything...) I'm pretty excited about that. I should have enough warm clothes, but I think I'll need boots or something to actually walk through the stuff.

If you have a car, you may be interested in this: How to Decode Your Car's VIN. (Via Lifehacker)

Scientology Sucks is a contest in which participants submit videos of themselves pranking the Scientology cult. The submissions should be posted online tomorrow, and the winners (as judged by the judges) will receive cash prizes.