How the classes are going

Two summers ago, I stayed home and hung out with friends. Last summer, I went to Europe. But if I want to graduate in Spring 2011 while taking a relatively light course load along the way (which I do), then I have to take a summer semester (which I am doing now).

Here at old Florida, there are three summer semesters. Summer A is six weeks long. Summer B, which follows Summer A, is also six weeks long. Summer C spans both Summer A and Summer B. I took Intro to Public Speaking during Summer A, and during Summer C, I'm taking Operating Systems and Finance. Summer A has ended, so the latter two classes are the ones I have left.

Summer course offerings are more limited than during the Spring or Fall semesters, so for my computer science major, I had no choice but to take Operating Systems with one of the department's more infamous professors. He claims that the average score on his exams is 60%, which includes 20% extra credit. He also gives lots of homework, and he's just assigned the term project.

The flipside, as I've been told by my friends who have survived his classes, is that you learn a lot from him. And I seem to be doing just that. I didn't think I would do very well on the first exam, but I got a 77 (which I first misread as 11, my mind precluding the possibility of such a "high" grade). The next exam is on Tuesday night, which also happens to be my birthday. I hope the exam makes it a good one.

The other class I'm taking right now is for my business administration minor. It's Finance (properly, Business Finance), and it's one of the classes that the business college has done a great job with. They record the lectures and post them online, so there's no need to actually attend class. Instead, I download the lectures and watch them at my leisure. The quizzes are also online (but the exams, alas, are not).

I chose to be a business minor because it would give me valuable skills (and because my major requires me to take a minor, but never mind), and this class hasn't disappointed me. I've learned, among other things, the importance of saving for retirement. Plus, I've been doing very well in the class. The way things are going, I could end up with an A. Yay.

I was actually very worried that I wouldn't do well in either of these classes (Finance is said to be the hardest class in the business minor), but I've been busting my hump for them, and it shows. I just hope I can keep up the good work.

I've been linking to a lot of infographics lately, some good, some not so good. Here's a parody of pointless infographics. (Via waxy.org)

Another one of those montages of clips from movies and TV shows: We've Got Company! I first saw this before watching Avatar and groaned upon hearing the line in the movie. (Via The Presurfer)

Stupid Fight compares the spelling and grammar of celebrity Twitterers' fans to see whose are dumber. (Via waxy.org)

Yo dawg, we heard you like interest so we put interest on your interest so you can get money while you get money

I'm taking a finance class, and it's been reasonably interesting so far. The professor has told us young persons how important it is to save for our retirement: we're not likely to have Social Security or a pension to help us out. He said we should start investing in the stock market. If the average annual return on stocks is 10% (which supposedly it is), and you invest $1,000 per year for 40 years, you should end up with something like $487,851.81. A penny saved is a dollar earned.

I've always thought of the stock market as something that would do me more harm than good if I tried to mess with it. Several times in school, when I was too young to care about these things, we would have to invest imaginary money in real stocks, and whoever had the most imaginary money at the end would win. I lost an incredible amount of imaginary money in these things. I just didn't get it, and I'm still not sure that I do.

Now that my finance class has taught me a little more about investing, I'd be interested in putting my money in stocks if only I could wade through all the acronyms and jargon and figure out how to get started. Two of my professors now have recommended Burton Malkiel's A Random Walk Down Wall Street in class, so that might be a good place to start. Or maybe I need Investing for College Students Who Know Essentially Nothing About These Things and Just Want Straight Answers.

I don't doubt that a lot of you readers have investments and know your stuff. What do you recommend for me?

For today's cool link of the day, I give you Lemonade and Other Things, a new blog by my friend Andrea. She's already written a lot of posts on various subjects, and I've found them pretty interesting. Let's hope she keeps up the good work.

No direction home

South Florida is vast and crowded. For years and years, my parents have wanted to sell our house and move someplace quieter. A while back, for about a year, they had the house on the market, but no one bought it. They've spent a lot of time fixing things up and recently put it up for sale again. They gave me the news yesterday: there's an official buyer. We have to move out by July 29.

Well, it's more them, really. Since starting college, I've only spent about 20% of my time there. According to this year's census, I don't live there; I live here at my apartment in Gainesville. But I only intend to have this apartment for as long as I'm in college, and I've always considered my home in South Florida to be my permanent address. In my heart, I do live there, and I've already planned to go back at least a couple more times.

Since my parents have made their intentions known for so long, I've had a lot of time to come to terms with the move. Still, I can't help but feel a little sad that my permanent address will be no more.

We moved in on December 6, 1997. I was eight years old. We were only moving across town, and we were able to keep our phone number, but I was still pretty distraught. I had lived in our old house for my whole eight-year-old life, and it was everything I knew. My parents had taken my sister and me along on dozens or hundreds of "house hunting" trips. I remember seeing for the first time what would eventually be our new house. I remember seeing the old big-screen TV in the corner where we would later put our Christmas tree.

I remember us having a garage sale—the only garage sale I think we've ever had for as long as I've been alive. And I remember the last time I was in the old house, when it was completely empty. We had to get rid of our dog because our old house closed in October and we couldn't move in to the new one till December, and we would be living in a condo in the meantime. Also, at the new house there wasn't a fence around the backyard.

I'm going to miss that backyard. I was so excited to have a real pool, even though I take it for granted now. I remember jumping into it with my sister in February and then jumping right back out again. I remember my friends and I wandering around the backyard with our guitars, my sister supervising the photo shoot with a disposable camera I bought with some money I had somehow managed to scrounge up. I remember having birthday parties there. A pool party early on. Was that the one with pie fight? Well, whipped cream in pie tins. And later, the infamous birthday dance parties on the patio. I think we had them four years in a row.

I remember the band practices in the garage or sometimes in the living room, the Driveway-A-Thon, and our secret spot at a juncture of fences behind the house. I remember the lake across the street that's not actually a lake but part of a canal. I remember getting pushed into the lake, and I remember getting other people to run into the lake. I remember playing video games with the neighbor with the two-story house, and my other neighbors' mom leaving a pitcher of water on the front porch overnight to make it North Pole water.

I remember sitting at the old computer, my dad and I composing an e-mail to Geocities asking how to sign up for an account. I remember declaring my latest web site ready for the world on a Sunday. I remember being lighted by artificial light as I wrote a post for a camera. I remember the wall getting painted red and the computer moving to the opposite one.

Dishes broke. I dropped taco meat on the kitchen carpet. The tiles detached themselves from the living room floor; we moved out for a week. The house weathered more hurricanes than I can try to remember. Georges, Frances, Jeanne, Katrina, Wilma. My room was repainted. My sister's room was repainted. More carpets were replaced. Our next dog made that necessary.

But there's still a spot on the inside of the front door where I would place my greasy, pubescent nose as I tiptoed to look through the peephole. There are still lots of holes in my bedroom walls that my dad drilled so I could hang up random stuff. And there's still the sad-looking concrete lawn flamingo with rebar legs that we found on moving in and that I for some reason find irresistibly charming.

I remember packing up and leaving for vacations and being thrilled to come back. I'll miss the place.

The "someplace quieter" that my parents want to move to is the same general area I'm in now. But they still haven't found the right house. In the meantime, they'll be living with my grandmother in her house. And I'll be changing my address for everything.

A fake movie trailer: Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. (Via waxy.org)

Another list: 7 Totally Awesome and Totally True Ways People Quit Their Jobs. (Via The Presurfer)

Attack of the parasites!

A few months ago, my sooth-seeking friend Andy took in a stray cat. He named him Tucker and kept him in his bedroom in our apartment. I would go in once in a while and see Tucker there. He was affectionate but unfortunately never very healthy. After about a month, Andy and his vet decided to let Tucker go to the great scratching post in the sky.

Three weeks later, Andy and his friend Scott, who was visiting, discovered that Tucker had left something to remember him by: fleas.

They took swift action, vacuuming and flea-bombing Andy's room and the living room. They asked if they should do my room too. I said not to worry about it. Mistake of the Century. Shortly after that, I said:

Andy and Scott left on Wednesday, and I've been alone in the apartment. It hasn't been so great, but not for the reasons I would have expected. I'll go into that later.

I was left to fend off the fleas by myself. On Thursday afternoon, I went to the front office to ask for pest control to come, and I was told that they only come on Thursdays and that I had just missed them. Andy, who took responsibility for the whole situation, gave the office a call and got the pest control people to maybe come on Monday.

It was a long weekend. I called a vet's office, and they said to put Borax onto the carpet and vacuum a week later, but I couldn't find Borax at the grocery store. (Is that something you can get at the grocery store? I don't want to waste my time again.) I did buy some insecticide for fleas, and it seemed to get rid of them after a few days of spraying. I also did some vacuuming to (hopefully) get rid of the flea eggs.

I don't like spraying chemicals all over the place. It's not due so much to my concern for the environment as it is to my tendency to accidentally spray myself (which did happen, as usual). So I made a flea trap by setting a bowl of soapy water on the floor and angling a desk lamp over it. Fleas are attracted to heat (this ordeal has made me a damn flea expert), so they jump toward the light bulb and fall into the water, where they get stuck. It's also a fire hazard, so don't try this at home. I won't do it again.

Needless to say in a world where "yes" means "maybe" and "maybe" means "no," pest control didn't come on Monday. They called me on Tuesday and asked if the whole place had been vacuumed up because apparently they wouldn't even come if it weren't. I said no and asked them to come on Wednesday. They didn't. They were definitely supposed to come on Thursday, as usual, but they didn't even appear then. They finally showed up on Friday, but by then they could tell I had already gotten rid of the fleas, so they didn't do anything.

(Before you say anything: no money was lost here. The management of my apartment complex hires said company to do free pest control work for residents. We had considered hiring another company, but it would have been too expensive.)

I haven't seen any fleas in five days, so I think they're gone for now. Then again, they hid for at least three weeks, between the time Tucker died and the time anyone noticed them. Hopefully they're not like an STD that pops up from time to time and can never go away. I'll have to do some more vacuuming.

This is why software is awesome. Someone wrote a Python script that does some time-stretching and -compressing on a song to change the beat. The result: everything swings. Sample tracks include "Every Breath You Take," "Enter Sandman," "Around the World," and "Don't Stop Believin'." (Via waxy.org)

Here's a breakdown of cable subscription fees by network, showing how much you're paying for channels you don't watch. (Via The Consumerist)

American kids don't have a monopoly on stupidity: 10% of British children surveyed thought that the Queen invented the telephone. Some also thought that Luke Skywalker was the first person on the moon and that Isaac Newton discovered fire.

The wanderer

A year from now, I will have graduated from college. I've mentioned the sort of career I think I want to get into, but lately I've been trying to figure out just where I want plant my roots... or some other sort of ridiculous tree analogy.

I go to school in North Florida (Gainesville, specifically), and my home is in South Florida. At first glance, it might seem like a good idea to move back to South Florida, but that wouldn't be a good option for me. My parents have put the house up for sale again; they plan to move to some rural part of North Florida.

As I see it, here are my options:

1. I could move back to South Florida, but I'd have to have my own place. It's expensive to live there, so I don't know if I'd be able to afford it.
2. I could move in with my parents in the countryside of North Florida, assuming they move there within a year.
3. I could stay here in Gainesville, where I'm currently studying. I've thought about this option the most, actually. I was thinking I could try to move up from my current job at the university. One of the guys who once had my job as a student now works above me.
4. I could move somewhere else entirely, but it can't be someplace where it snows. I don't play those games.

Another wrinkle is that I don't know how to drive a car and I don't have time to learn. Unlike most teenagers, I was never very interested in learning to drive, so I didn't. Even now, the only time I feel like I should get my driver's license is when I'm home visiting my friends and they have to chauffeur me around everywhere.

I definitely can get by without a car for as long as I'm a student, but after that, who knows? That's the only reason I can think of to learn to drive. I'd just have to make sure I could afford it. Cars are expensive; gas is expensive; insurance is expensive; maintenance is expensive; other things I haven't thought of are expensive. And I'd have to find time to learn.

Some other reasons not to drive: I'm terrified of getting into an accident; most cars are bad for the environment; the cars that are better for the environment are really expensive; I have poor hand-eye coordination. Did I mention I'm terrified of getting into an accident?

Other options include public transportation, which completely sucks almost everywhere in this land of ours, and riding a bike car magnet everywhere.

So, I'd have to live in a city that's warm, good for walking, and (of course) inexpensive to live in. I'm asking for the impossible... OR AM I?? Your thoughts, as always, are welcome.

An article explaining how scientific knowledge can be forgotten: "Scott and Scurvy." (Via waxy.org)

In American buildings, exit signs say "EXIT." In most of the rest of the world, they have of a person running toward a door. Read about the international war over exit signs. (Via J-Walk Blog)

The sensational student-semester

In the spring, I took a class called Introduction to Software Engineering. The main assignment over the course of the semester was a group project to design, create, and present a software application. Sound like fun?

The class had four discussion sections, which made it only natural that each discussion section should correspond to a group. The groups were about evenly distributed, each one having 16 or 17 people. In my group, we spent several weeks hashing out ideas for what kind of program to make.

I would talk about the ongoing project to my friend Mark, who had taken the class previously. When he first heard about it, he was shocked. "Seventeen people? That's going to be way too many. You need two or three people." Or, you know, something like that. I'm not a journalist, jeez.

I wasn't really sure what he meant. I figured that with a lot of work, two or three people could complete a project on the scale of what we were doing, but with more people on the team, it would be easier for everyone.

Our group eventually decided on an instant messaging application for Android phones. The app would be designed specifically for our fellow UF students; each user would see a map of the campus with their buddies' current locations marked. Users would also be able to create and invite their friends to events, which would also be shown on the map. The name of the program: ChompChat. The alligator-themed wordplay is inescapable around here.

We basically split ourselves into two teams: the client team, which would make the actual ChompChat application, and the server team, which would be responsible for handling interactions between users. After a while, the server team got something that worked, and the client team got something that worked. The hard part was getting them to work together.

Some of our other assignments for the class involved reading Fred Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month, a classic text of software engineering. The titular essay explains that people and time aren't interchangeable. As more people join a project, proportionally less work gets done because the new members have to learn the ropes and each member has to communicate with more people to figure out what's going on. It's summed up as Brooks' law:

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

In the meantime, I had a hard time finding a place for myself in the project. We were using Google Wave to communicate (we had several big Google fans in the group), and not everyone was in on every wave. We had our own Trac installation set up for us, but no one ever filed any tickets.

I got most of my information from our weekly class meetings, and even then, I couldn't help but bounce around from subteam to subteam, looking for something to do as the strong-willed and more technically able actually did most of the work. It got to the point where I decided to hold off from the development lest Brooks' law come into play. Other members of the group agreed that this was a good idea.

When it came time for the groups to present their software projects, we had just gotten the client and the server to communicate with each other. Chatting and creating events worked, but geolocation and the other features we had originally dreamed up for ChompChat were absent. I felt as though the ghost of Fred Brooks were there in the room, laughing to himself. Actually, I didn't because he's still alive. But whatever.

Fred Brooks was right. Mark was right. And everyone else came around. Toward the end of the semester, the professor took a poll of the class, and almost everybody agreed that the groups should have been smaller. Too bad it took so much manpower to figure that out.

Statistics reveal America's "beer belly," where bars outnumber grocery stores. (Via The Consumerist)

This might be fun if you like math: an inverse graphing calculator that produces the corresponding equation for a curve that you draw. (Via J-Walk Blog)

This 1995 Newsweek article reads like satire in 2010: "The Internet? Bah!" A Newsweek blogger provides a modern commentary and manages to get a word from the author.

The retractions are coming a minute apart

Some ignorant things I've said in the past have been weighing heavily on me, so I'd like to try to apologize for them. I don't know how much it'll help, but I feel like it's better than nothing.

In 2005, I wrote a cynical take on a Black History Month talent show that they had everybody attend at school. It pretty much devolved into a rant about how I couldn't identify with any specific racial or ethnic group. I don't suppose I have much to apologize for here, but I feel like I should mention that I understand the situation more now.

The message of the show was that "black history is everyone's history." It would be more accurate to say that white history is everyone's history. The reason we have things like Black History Month is because the standard historical narrative is dominated by white people—the majority. (As usual, The Onion got to this idea before me.)

There have been one or two times when I was one of the few white people in the room, and that gave me a small taste of what it might be like to be part of a racial or ethnic minority. It wasn't fun, let me tell you. White people have the luxury of being the majority in many parts of the United States, and this white guy no longer feels like celebrations of white history are something he's missing out on. If you think about it, they're everywhere. On the other side of the coin, it's also good to bond with people who aren't like you, whence all this stuff about sharing your culture.

I do regret referring to the JROTC as the "Nazi Youth." As much as I'm against warmongering and all that stuff, the fact remains that the Nazi Party didn't invent marching in lockstep.

The following year, I was tapped to join a new club at school. It was ostensibly about being an upstanding citizen, but it had religious undertones, so I decided not to join. In the ensuing rant, I said:

Religion has given us the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the Holocaust, to name but a few atrocities.

Why did I say that the Holocaust happened because of religion? You have to try to understand the position I was in at the time. Hear me out.

When I was growing up, it was my understanding that people were Jewish in the same way that we were Catholic and our neighbors were Lutheran or what have you. Judaism was just a religion to me, and why should be anything else if my Jewish playmates looked just like me? Of course, I saw the Passover episode of Rugrats, so I had this vague idea about the Jews being a people, but I didn't fully comprehend it; in my experience, Jews were just people who practiced Judaism. And since I thought that that was the only difference between the Jews and the other people in Europe, that must be the reason for the Holocaust.

Embarrassing as it may be, my perspective didn't start to change until I took a history class in college. I learned that in the United States, Jews were considered non-white until World War II, when a shift in cultural attitudes suddenly occurred. (If you want to reward the guy who taught me this, buy his iconoclastic new book, The Permissive Society: America, 1941-1965, available now at fine bookstores everywhere!) And that's pretty much how it occurred to me that the self-described Chosen People really are a people, even if they tend to look like some other peoples, who in turn all tend to look like each other.

So, in short: the Holocaust wasn't caused by religion.

Last and least, I said New Yorkers were mean, and then I backpedaled but stopped short of apologizing. Well, now I apologize for saying that New Yorkers are mean. It's unfair to characterize 8 million people like that.

A cartoon from The Oatmeal: 10 Reasons to Avoid Talking on the Phone. I'm reading The Oatmeal regularly now. It's pretty hilarious. (Via J-Walk Blog)

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.

Interfaith forum

Regular readers probably have forgotten that I attend meetings of Gator Freethought, the campus organization that's friendly to atheists, agnostics, and all others who question religious beliefs. We've had our last meeting of the year, but that wasn't the end. Blake, the outgoing president of the club, was going to be representing freethought at an interfaith forum on campus.

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)

Get the best deal

I've been living in my apartment since August, and it's getting to be (or has already been) that time when you're supposed to renew your lease or find another place. Since I've been pretty satisfied, I decided I would renew my lease for next year.

Andy and Ryan, two of my roommates, were a little less sure; they both wanted to move closer to campus. Ryan ended up finding another place, but Andy is more likely to stay with me next year. (My other roommate will be graduating and moving out, I think.)

Last year, we signed early and got punished for it because the rates plummeted later. Our rate is $449 per month, but if we had waited a few months, it could have been $299. I was gambling that the same thing would happen this year, so I decided to hold out for the best deal possible. A few months ago, I could have renewed with a rate of $348 and gotten a Visa gift card that would essentially drop the rate to $299. But it wasn't really $299, so I decided to wait some more.

The incentive program ended, the rate didn't go down, and the renewal deadline (for keeping your same apartment) was drawing near. What could we do to get the best deal? I decided that we should bargain.

A couple of weeks ago, there was a pool-party-slash-barbecue to promote renewals. Uniformed representatives were going around, asking people if they were going to renew their leases. One guy asked Andy and me what it would take for us to renew. I mentioned a comparable place I had heard of that was within walking distance to campus and was $290 per month, so that would be the price to beat. I also thought it would be nice to get new kitchen appliances for free. He made a note of it.

Last week, the rate still hadn't fallen, but they started another incentive program, giving out Visa gift cards that would essentially lower the rate to $330. Even if we couldn't strike a bargain, I thought, it would be a good deal.

On Tuesday, Andy and I went to the office and talked to a manager about possibly negotiating a more favorable price. She refused, saying it was against their policy. So much for that idea.

Right after that, I renewed my lease to take advantage of the Visa gift card deal. $330 is pretty reasonable.

No matter what they end up doing, Andy's and Ryan's current leases expire in August, and they'll pretty much be spending the summer at their respective homes. Our other roommate's lease runs out very soon, I think, and he (and his girlfriend who's shacked up with him) will be moving out.

That should leave me with the whole place to myself for a few months as I take summer classes. I'm not really sure how I feel about that. I'm not depressed by it, but I'm just kind of concerned about being bored. Any ideas on how to not be bored?

This video is a collection of infomercial clichés: a tribute to doing it wrong. The soundtrack is appropriate. (Via The Consumerist)

I personally find it terrifying that some people are this big into Jeopardy!, but here you go: an archive with details of every episode ever, including the questions and answers. (Via J-Walk Blog)

Here's a look back at 20 years of Adobe Photoshop. Includes screenshots!