Freein’ them PCs

This week, I helped install antivirus and free software for students as part of Florida Free Culture‘s semiannual Free Your PC event. We got an unusual amount of journalistic attention and, despite that, an unusually low turnout.

We usually pick three consecutive days for Free Your PC, but there was a scheduling conflict, so we picked Monday, Tuesday, and today. On Tuesday, a guy who I think was from the Alligator asked Mark and me some questions about our club and what we were doing. (They haven’t published an article about us, but if they do, it will probably be tomorrow.) Today, my friend Roxy, a journalism student, came to interview some of our members for an assignment, and I think at least one other journalism student did as well.

Also, both Tuesday and today, a photographer from the university’s news bureau, which I had never heard of, came around to take lots of pictures of us helping out with people’s computers. He said that one of his photos would end up on their web site with an informative caption. He was also interested in the club; he spent some time checking out our swag and asking questions. And, sure enough, I’m in today’s photo of the day.

The first day is always the slowest because that’s when people see the event going on and make a mental note to bring their computers the next day. On Monday, I think we maybe got one person during the four hours that we were out there. Tuesday was better. I expected us to be slammed on Thursday due to that article that hasn’t been published yet, but it hadn’t been published yet. Also, it was very cold today, and it’s almost spring break. That could be why not as many people came out.

For this Free Your PC, I continued a tradition that I started last semester by making a CD of some of my favorite Creative Commons-licensed music. I think I burned 12 or 14 discs, and we gave out most of them. In case you’re interested, here are the track listings and download links for both CDs.

Well, it’s almost spring break. I’ll be home soon, and then I get a week to max ‘n’ relax.

Really amazing statistics in video form: The State of the Internet. (Via Lifehacker)

The New York Times has an article on how Restaurants Use Menu Psychology to Entice Diners Trick You Into Buying Tons of Crap Food That You Otherwise Wouldn’t Want. (Via Lifehacker)

Finally, more statistics and a vaguely spring-break-themed link: it’s an infographic that’s basically about how dumb we college students all are and how much money we’re wasting going to college.

#9 for the month

It’s time for another privileged look into my strange, strange music collection.

I typically have Rhythmbox sort my songs in alphabetical order by title, and I’ve noticed some pairs of songs that have exactly the same titles. Out of 2,493 songs, there are 21 duplicates, which is more than I expected. (I didn’t count different versions of the same song.) As you might expect, the titles are pretty generic. You probably haven’t heard of all of the artists.

• “Because” (The Beatles, Dave Clark Five)
• “Changes” (Bridget Kelly, David Bowie)
• “Free” (Dubious Quip, Hobo Twang)
• “Goodbye” (Hootie and the Blowfish, Sean Fournier)
• “Holiday” (Persson, Weezer)
• “How Long” (Allison Crowe, Ringo Starr and His All-Starr Band)
• “Intro” (Ampiphy, WhiteRoom)
• “It’s a Beautiful Day” (MoOt, Persson)
• “It’s Over” (Harbinger, Persson)
• “I Want You” (Marvin Gaye, Savage Garden)
• “Learn to Fly” (Josh Woodward, Foo Fighters)
• “Like This” (Girl Talk, STEEP)
• “Low” (Coldplay, Silence Is Sexy)
• “Mary Jane” (Alanis Morisette, Fatblueman)
• “My Love” (Petula Clark, Junior Walker)
• “Solar System” (Depressive Art, Jamison Young)
• “Talk” (Coldplay, Silence Is Sexy)
• “What’s Going On” (Blind Mr. Jones, Marvin Gaye)
• “White Moon” (The Dada Weatherman, The White Stripes)
• “Woman” (John Lennon, Peter and Gordon)
• “You Can Have It All” (Yo La Tengo, Kaiser Chiefs)

Additionally, I have a couple of threebies (triplicates?):

• “Time” (Hootie and the Blowfish, Persson, Pink Floyd)
• “Wake Up” (Alanis Morissette, Josh Woodward, Smoke Fish)

If you have some time to kill, this may be fun to check out. How many duplicates do you have? Do you have more than three completely different songs with the exactly the same title? (My predictions: no one will answer, or people will include similar but not identical titles. Prove me wrong!)

And, while we’re at it, here’s some Ask Jordon.

Kate: What do you think about vegetarianism? Could you give up eating meat for some reason (and what could be this reason)?

I don’t mind if other people are vegetarians, but I don’t want it forced on me by anyone. Let me eat whatever I want, and I’ll let you do the same. I don’t care if the animals are mistreated or anything like that. If other people do care, then good for them, but I’m more concerned with human welfare.

I would give up eating meat if my life depended on it, but I can’t imagine a situation in which that would happen.

From the American Museum of Natural History: a video that zooms out from the surface of the earth to the edges of The Known Universe. Watch it in HD! (Via Pharyngula)

A voice actor does a really good impression of Morgan Freeman: Morgan Freeman Talks About… Toilet Paper.

It happens to the best of us: Why It’s Better to Pretend You Don’t Know Anything About Computers. (Via Lifehacker)

Kate’s visit, part five

I was tired on Monday night, the 18th, but Kate had been wanting to jam with me and Andy. She had brought sheet music for a couple of songs—”Sunshine of Your Love” and “Tears in Heaven“—and we played them in Andy’s room. Kate played Andy’s keyboard, Andy played his bass, and I played my guitar. Kate also sang on “Sunshine of Your Love.”

The next day was the Kate’s last full day with me. She and I had Krishna lunch on campus again. After lunch, she spent a while in one of the computer labs making arrangements for the last leg of her trip, a few more days in New York. Later, she joined me for my Databases class.

In the evening, Andy, Kate, and I had a good video chat with Kate’s French-Canadian friend. We mostly used Esperanto, but we slipped into English sometimes because her friend was more of a beginner. After that, Kate said her goodbyes to Andy in case we didn’t get a chance to see him in the morning.

Later, I tried figuring out how we would get to the Greyhound station by bus (it’s conveniently not located along a bus route). After much frustration in trying to figure out the best combination of buses, which would have taken at least an hour and a half anyway, Kate suggested that we call for a taxi.

Kate woke up at 6:15 on Wednesday, January 20. Her alarm woke me up, but I lay in bed for a while, trying to go back to sleep. At 7:00, I got up and prepared her usual breakfast of bread and cheese. Even though she was packing her things frantically, I thought we would be late for our cab, which was arriving at 7:30. But somehow, she managed to pull it off, and we were early. She got another chance to say goodbye to Andy, and we went outside, where the taxi was waiting for us.

It was cold and foggy, and I couldn’t remember the last time I was out that early. The drive to the bus station seemed very long. It was essentially a drive across town through some minor streets. Along one of the streets were statues of the planets in planetary order. I hadn’t seen them since my visits to Gainesville as a child, and since I had moved here to go to college, I had always wondered where they were.

The cab driver made small talk, asking how we knew each other and what Kate thought of the country and things like that. I didn’t really feel like answering questions, but I did my best. After all, being a taxi driver has to be one of the most boring jobs. At one point, he got a call on his cell phone, apparently from his son. “Not now,” he said, “Daddy’s got people in the car.” I didn’t ask him about it.

Finally, we arrived at the bus station. I had never been to a Greyhound station before. It was pretty much a large room with a ticket desk, some rows of benches, and a few other people. It didn’t look fancy, but I should have expected as much. We were about a half an hour early, so I sat next to Kate for the last time, away from the TV that was competing for my attention.

We exchanged words. I could see the tears coming down from her eyes. I was starting to get emotional too. This was it.

The bus came. We shared one last kiss, and she got on.

She sat by the window where I could see her. I fought back tears. But she smiled.

She smiled, and I smiled back. The bus moved forward. I followed it through the parking lot until it stopped at the street. She smiled at me again.

The bus turned right and drove away.

I walked the other way, toward the nearest major road, where I could hopefully catch a bus to campus. Cars zoomed past me. It was still kind of cold.

I saw Firpo’s, a diner that we used to go to when I visited Gainesville as a kid. At least, it used to be Firpo’s. It was something different now.

Not far away was my bus stop. According to the bus schedule that was posted there, I had missed the bus by five minutes and would have to wait 55 minutes for the next one. I decided to keep walking instead.

One of my pet peeves is when people treat walking as a last resort, a mode of transportation for only the most destitute and desperate—worse, even, than riding the bus. People are always oddly fascinated if I tell them I spent more than 15 minutes walking to get somewhere, as if using my legs as nature intended were something I should be ashamed of. But what could be more beneficial? It’s good exercise, it’s entertaining, and you’re actually getting something done.

So, I kept walking. I had never seen this part of town. It looked like a lot of other parts, with gas stations, small strip malls, and even some neighborhoods. I passed by a historic house. I had never heard of it, but it was apparently one of the oldest in the city, dating from before the Civil War. I never would have been able to read the historical marker if I were in a car or a bus.

I kept walking. On the opposite side of the road, there was a real estate agent’s office with a marquee in front. I expected it to say something about houses, but it said:

LET GO OF
WHAT EVER HOLDS
YOU BACK

Walking further, I made it to University Avenue and started walking toward campus. This was the way I had walked with Kate when I first met up with her 12 days ago, and now I was making the same walk alone.

I made it to campus and to the building where I work. I had been walking for a little less than an hour. The sun had come up some more, but it was still early for me; I wasn’t supposed to be at work for another hour. But I got started early.

My room seems quiet and empty without Kate here. All of her stuff is gone except for a few things that now decorate my room: the monthly calendar of St. Petersburg, a few more yearly calendars printed on single sheets of paper, a New York City subway map, a tiger-shaped bag containing coins from around the world, and a couple of record albums: a Soviet Beatles compilation album called A Taste of Honey and Paul McCartney’s Снова в СССР.

On my desk, she left a sticky note that she had written on early in her stay. It reads:

Life is a movie
without
a happy end.

Panoramic Europe / America ’10

During my European adventure this summer, I took a lot of panoramic photos. Well, I took the individual photos that I would later stitch into panoramas once I got back home. And once I got back home, I did just that. Then I posted them on Facebook, which didn’t really do them justice because they were all resized to be all tiny-like. I’d been meaning to post full-size versions of the best ones here on The World of Stuff, so I’ve done that now. Enjoy Panoramic Europe!

The summer of ’08 consisted mainly of me hanging out and throwing around baseballs with some of my friends, but that’s not to say we didn’t have big plans. My friend Nick, a history buff, floated around the idea of going on a road trip to see some Civil War battlefields, possibly the next summer, but that didn’t materialize.

Now, it’s official. Nick, Mike, and TJ asked me if I wanted to go with them on a two-week road trip in June 2010. They plan to visit Atlanta, Washington, New York, Boston, and Gettysburg. It won’t be all battlefields, as I could have guessed. Nick and TJ plan to go to a pizza restaurant near Atlanta to see if they can eat an 11-pound pizza in an hour. And I’m sure that won’t be the only crazy hap to happen.

I told my parents about the plans, and they didn’t say I could go, but they also didn’t say I couldn’t go. I figure that if they let me go to Europe for two months with people they didn’t know, they’ll let me go up north for two weeks with people they do know. Ah, to be trusted. It is good.

It might sound strange that I want to go on this trip because I just said that I don’t have enough money to go on another trip to Europe. But the projected cost for next summer’s road trip is much less than what I spent on plane and train tickets before setting foot in the airport in May. We’re talking apples and oranges here. Well, more like apples and… tiny apples.

Inevitable misreading: “Panoramic Europe-America ’10?” I put spaces around the slash for a reason. No excuses.

Here’s a video showing Every Nickelback Wikipedia Page Vandalism Ever. Warning: there’s Nickelback music, so turn your sound off. (Via waxy.org)

This would be fun to try if I were good at making stuff: Secret Knock Detecting Door Lock. (Via Lifehacker)

Thanksgiving Eve

‘Twas the day before Thanksgiving, and all through the university, people started putting up Christmas decorations and saying “’tis” and “’twas” a lot.

On Monday, I and some other folks from Get Carded (the student organ donor awareness group I’m a part of) went to some sorority houses to talk briefly about the benefits of organ donation. I had never wandered around Sorority Row, which is actually more of a neighborhood than a row, so it was all new to me. Also, I didn’t know that sororities (and probably also fraternities) allow just about anyone to come in and make an announcement during their weekly dinner. Yay for captive audiences.

Right after that, I accompanied my co-workers, Bonnie and Mark, to Wal-Mart Walmart to buy some toys for a needy child (and a gift card for his parents), as we had decided to do last week. A little boy is going to be very happy with the new toy trucks he asked for.

I think my professors should get into the spirit of the season by canceling classes the day before Thanksgiving. I mean planning not to have class in the first place. I e-mailed all of my professors last week, and they all said they would hold class as usual. On Monday, two of them changed their minds after finding out how many students were going to be there. Meanwhile, I had already made plans to get picked up on Wednesday afternoon. Le sigh…

Anyway, in a little while I’m going to my grandparents’, where I’ll be spending the holiday. I’ll get home either late Thursday night or on Friday.

Here’s a pair of Ask Jordon questions from my friend Justin.

Justin: Would you be willing to go on (another) expansive trip throughout Europe? I wish to backpack around the Mediterranean.

Not for a while. Though I had a blast this summer, my bank account also had a blast. As in, it, like, blew up. Okay, that didn’t work. I spent a lot of money is the point.

Also Justin: Would you consider telling Luke that I miss our friendship?

Sure. Luke, Justin misses your friendship.

Kind of cool, kind of creepy: a piano that “talks” by playing a bunch of notes that are extracted from a recording of human speech. (Via J-Walk Blog)

Every Beatles fan must hear this: analyses of the multitrack tapes of “She’s Leaving Home,” “A Day in the Life,” and “Come Together.” They’re originally segments from a BBC radio program(me). Hear different tracks isolated and even some stuff that didn’t make the final mixes.

Playing Russian roulette with the Black Jack Taco?

Recently, I was enjoying lunch at Taco Bell with a friend when she pointed out that the food I was eating wasn’t particularly healthy. Normally, that wouldn’t put me off too much—I knew where we were, after all—but I heard her out.

I was eating the new Black Jack Taco, which is a standard taco but with pepper jack sauce and a black (or very dark blue) shell. She said that there must have been a lot of food coloring in the shell and that it was carcinogenic—as in, cancer-causing.

Pish-posh, I said. It wasn’t like I was eating a lot of them. I had only had this exotic taco a few times.

It didn’t matter, she said. Even if you’ve only had it once, you’re not off the hook. If you’re unlucky, you could end up getting cancer from one drag of a cigarette, a single sunburn—or, apparently, a black taco.

Could it be true? And if so, how could the FDA allow such a thing?

I decided to find out what kind of dye was used in the Black Jack Taco and whether it was dangerous at all. But Taco Bell apparently had other ideas. Their list of ingredients of ingredients only mentions regular taco shells, not the dyes they use for some menu items:

Corn, Vegetable Oil (May Contain One Or All Of The Following: Soybean, Corn, Or Cottonseed Oil), Oat Fiber, TBHQ (Used As A Preservative).

A handy tooltip reveals that TBHQ is tertiary butylhydroquinone, but you probably knew that already. Wikipedia says it in fact may cause cancer in large amounts, but that wasn’t what I was trying to find out here.

Their Black Jack Taco page isn’t helpful either; it just gives nutrition facts and allergen information. (The taco doesn’t contain wheat. Yay?) Google searches turn up nothing but puzzled reviews and people saying, “It’s dye, right?”

I guess there’s no way to know what sort of food coloring is used without asking Taco Bell themselves. I could try, but it would probably be off the menu by the time they got back to me. In fact, it might already be off the menu now. Their special offers don’t stick around very long.

As for my lunch: I finished the Black Jack Taco without much hesitation, but I haven’t touched one since.

And now, the links:

Clips from one episode of The Jay Leno Show raise the question: Is Jay Leno a corporate shill? (Via waxy.org)

Yet another interpretation of the Super Mario Bros. theme music, this time by a band called Gameboys. It’s very well done! (Via waxy.org)

Stream of consciousness VIII

Here’s something I haven’t done in a while. Streamed my consciousness out for all to see. Okay, it’s not true stream of consciousness because I’m not adding in stuff like gee I have to go to the bathroom every five seconds. I don’t have to go to the bathroom right now, but it’s an example.

On Sunday nights I tend to get philosophical. Earlier I was reminiscing a bit about the days when I used to jam with my friends. I don’t feel very comfortable as a musician, but with them, it was all right. I don’t know if I could ever meet people like that again. That’s why I’d like to get together with them and play some music once in a while.

I haven’t been playing much because my guitar is kind of shot. The frets are worn down. I do have others, but they’re… well, I’ll describe them. I have my first guitar, a Hohner (as in, the harmonica company) acoustic that I believe is 3/4 size and whose case cost more than the instrument itself. I have my DeArmond electric, a sort of a Les Paul copy that’s held up pretty well. I have my Epiphone Dot, which I’ve considered my primary guitar since I got it in March 2003. It’s the one that’s sounding pretty sad. Finally, I have a Carlo Robelli 12-string acoustic guitar, which sounds heavenly but is nearly impossible to play because it’s a 12-string acoustic guitar.

The suggestion I’ve gotten in the past is to sell some or all of those babies and buy a new one. But I’m not sure how much money I’d get for them, and they have a lot of sentimental (and practical, sometimes) value. Maybe I could buy one good acoustic or one good electric, but I don’t know. I also don’t know how much money I could sink into a new guitar considering I am a college student and all. Also, I don’t play nearly as often as I used to. Is it because I’m no longer interested or because I have a guitar that sounds like crap and is musically unviable? I’d like to think it’s the latter. (The poor Dot, by the way, is the only one I have at my apartment, a five-hour drive from my house.)

I don’t want to buy a new one, so I’ll probably do what I can to fix the Dot. All I can think of doing is changing the action because I don’t think that having the frets redone would be worth the money that’s been spent on it. It’s already had a costly repair a few years ago.

Speaking of things not working, I’ve mentioned that the memory card I bought for my camera in anticipation of my big European trip (you know, the one that broke during the trip)… umm… broke. It turned out that it worked in my dad’s camera, so I figured the issue was with the adapter that I used to fit it into my camera. Apparently that’s not the issue, I’ve found out after my dad bought two new adapters for me. The memory card and the camera just don’t get along. I’ll have to have the thing reformatted, I guess. Or buy a new one. Actually, I don’t want a new one because I’ve been locked into Sony (we’re talking Sony cameras and Memory Sticks here). I think I’ll just wait for my current camera to bite the dust, be it in one week or ten years, and then buy all new stuff. And no vendor lock-in this time.

From my dad’s camera, I did manage to get 10 photos that I thought were lost when the memory card crapped out. That brings my total number of photos taken during the trip to 4,012.

Creepy video of the day: Barack Obama’s Amazingly Consistent Smile. (Via The Presurfer)

Here’s an epic song directed at Lily Allen, who apparently has been concerned that file sharing will rob her of her income in the future. (Via waxy.org).

Sharing is caring, it can be fun

The World of Stuff’s first original video in almost three years is hardly original at all… but that’s okay!

Here’s the skinny: Copyright law gives you the exclusive rights to the works you create, as evidenced in the familiar phrase, “All rights reserved.” Creative Commons is an organization that provides various licenses that you can apply to your works if you only want “some rights reserved.” Some licenses allow commercial uses of the work, others allow creating derivative works, etc. The Attribution and Attribution-Share Alike licenses are the most permissive.

Jamendo, one of my favorite web sites, allows musicians to post their Creative Commons-licensed songs for people to download at no cost. And a lot of it is is good stuff. I’ve rolled a custom RSS feed that lists the latest albums uploaded to Jamendo under either the Creative Commons Attribution or Attribution-Share Alike license. It lets me stay on top of things.

Recently, an artist named Josh Woodward released an album called Breadcrumbs on Jamendo. He followed up by releasing an instrumental version with the vocal tracks removed. Both versions were released under the Creative Commons Attribution license. It wasn’t long before another artist named Sean Wright added his own vocals to one of Woodward’s songs, and released it on Jamendo under the Attribution-Share Alike license. This is the kind of stuff that gets me going!*

Both songs are really great,** so I wondered what it would sound like if I synchronized them. I spent much of Sunday working to share the result. Hence The World of Stuff’s latest video, Creative Commons in Action: Josh Woodward and Sean Wright. Have a listen! They sound even better together. The best part is that I didn’t need to seek anyone’s permission to make the video; the Creative Commons licenses already granted it.

Here’s a bit of a technical background for the curious. I haven’t really worked with editing video since I was just starting out with Linux almost three years ago. The truth is that video editing software is the last frontier that Linux has yet to conquer. For this video, I used Pitivi, which is finally pretty stable and lacking only video effects (in my opinion). In the past, I might have used Kdenlive, the only other working video editing program for Linux that I’ve encountered, but it’s a KDE application, and I use GNOME. Other Linux users will hopefully understand this.

Also, it’s interesting to note that the video was produced entirely with free software and free formats. I started with Ogg Vorbis versions of the two songs (licensed as CC-BY and CC-BY-SA), combined them in Audacity, and saved the result as FLAC audio. The visuals were created using the similarly-licensed album artwork and Bitstream Vera Sans in the GIMP before being saved in PNG format. The video itself was produced in Pitivi and saved as Ogg Theora/Vorbis. I’ve licensed it as CC-BY-SA, and it’s available on YouTube as… Flash. Yeah, I know. But I have the original file if you want.

Just today, Sean Wright released more songs based on Josh Woodward’s instrumental tracks. If you enjoyed “From Your Lips,” do check them out!

This post is already running long, but here are a few links:

An instructional video: How to Make Your Own Soda. (Via Lifehacker)

Here’s a map showing the distance to the nearest McDonald’s for every point in the contiguous United States. The “McFurthest Spot” is somewhere in South Dakota. It’s a 233-kilometer drive from there to the nearest Golden Arches. (Via J-Walk Blog)

* Not the only stuff that gets me going
** I like the original better

Review des extensiones

Two months ago, I wrote about some Firefox extensions I had installed. Now it’s time to check back in and see if I’m still using them!

• BetterPrivacy: I’m still using this one. It’s one of those set-it-and-forget-it extensions, and it’s doing its job well.
• Ghostery: I uninstalled this extension and subscribed to the EasyPrivacy filterset for Adblock Plus instead. The filterset is updated regularly, and I was already using ABP anyway.
• Perspectives: This one hasn’t come in handy yet, but I like to think it will be useful sometime.
• Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out (TACO): I uninstalled this extension for reasons I will explain below.

Since then, I’ve installed the following security-related extensions:

• CS Lite: A simple extension that lets you manage your cookie settings from the status bar and offers more options than Firefox does by default. I have it set to block all cookies except from sites I’ve specified. For some of those sites (e.g., Wikipedia, The World of Stuff), I’ve allowed cookies to remain till they expire. For others (e.g. Facebook, my bank), I allow their cookies to stay until my browser session ends. CS Lite also lets you allow cookies from a site for the current session only, which can be useful for sites like nytimes.com (which still makes you register to read certain articles) or my high school’s web site (which ingeniously redirects to itself if cookies are disabled). Since I now use CS Lite and EasyPrivacy, I don’t feel TACO is necessary.
• NoScript: One of the most popular Firefox extensions, it blocks JavaScript on all sites and allows you to set exceptions for sites you trust. It takes a little while to set it up if you visit a lot of script-heavy sites regularly, but after that, it’s not too much trouble. In fact, it makes many sites zippier, particularly blogs that are weighed down by tons of crap scripts. NoScript contains a lot of other security features like protection from cross-site scripting attacks. It also lets you block plugins like Flash and Java on untrusted sites, which makes sites like my high school’s web site a whole lot more bearable. I never installed this extension before because I thought it was incompatible with Greasemonkey, but NoScript now allows most Greasemonkey scripts to run.

I could probably get used to using CS Lite and NoScript, but some web sites that rely on JavaScript or cookies don’t tell you to allow them, and that can be annoying at times. Web designers shouldn’t just assume that visitors will have JavaScript and cookies enabled.

I haven’t actually tried this, but it sounds interesting: Omegle lets you chat with a random stranger. Exciting?

This is pretty epic: a non-traditional visualization of Beethoven’s Fifth, showing each note and instrument. Of course, there’s audio too. (Via The Presurfer)

Dinner at Andrea’s

Now that I attend a university with a top-ranked football team, I watch a lot of football games. Usually, I watch them alone because everyone else is going to the game or going out drinking or just doing something else entirely. That’s all fine and good, but it’s nice to actually socialize once in a while.

So I was pretty pleased when my friend Andrea invited me over to watch the game. A few of her other friends came too, and we watched (in HD) while having some pizza and snacks. I actually got there way early and stayed way late (through Saturday Night Live), so there were a lot of good times to be had. Well, I thought so, anyway.

The game itself was good too. The #1 Florida Gators’ star quarterback had suffered a concussion in the previous game, and no one knew if he would be able to play in this, the biggest game of the season (at #4 LSU). He was finally cleared to play, and he lead the team to its fifteenth straight win by a score of 13-3. College football = epic drama.

During the game, the announcers offered a trivia question (brought to you by Aflac): when was the last time LSU hosted a game between Top 5 teams? I impressed or creeped out everyone present by knowing not only the year but also the teams, rankings, and score. (1959, #1 LSU def. #3 Ole Miss 7-3.)

I had read it in the newspaper the day before. I swear, they must get all their trivia questions from the college paper because that’s not the first time that’s happened. Anyway, I happened to come across that fact in an article, and I thought, That’s interesting; I’ll absorb it with my mind. Maybe it’ll come in handy someday!

Anyway, it looks like the fun times will continue because I’m going to Howl-O-Scream at Busch Gardens with Andrea and friends on Thursday night. I haven’t been there since I was too short or wimpy to ride the brand-new Montu, and I’ve never been to a Halloween-type event at a theme park (omg omg omg so awesome how could you not ahve ever been). Friday is Homecoming, a school holiday. Nice.

From Rocketboom: Know Your Meme: FAIL. (Via The Presurfer)

Birds on wires = music notes on a staff? See what some birds sound like when they’re turned into notes. It’s actually quite nice. (Via waxy.org)