Summer again

Well, hello there. I'm home, and there hasn't been much to report.

Friday night, my last night in Hume Hall, was pretty quiet. I basically spent it with my friend Andrea, who was as bored as I was. She made some food for us, but I got hungry later, as people are wont to do. That's when I found out that all of the dining halls, convenience stores, and restaurants on campus had closed early. We went to McDonald's, where there was a touch-screen game system presumably for the kids as they munch on their Happy Meals. After eating, we took a whack at a trivia game that was too hard for us, let alone some little McNugget-gobbling brats. It took us about a million tries to beat the high score, and we were very proud.

On Saturday, my dad came and helped me moved out. We spent the night at my aunt's house, and then on Sunday, we took the long way home. I got home Sunday night and, well, here I am.

I've been working online, and that's been pretty okay. As a webmaster, I do most of my work on the Internet, so it's been basically like going to work, except I don't have to walk there. That would be a long walk.

Also, I just found out today that I got all A's and B's in my classes. Awesome. Let's celebrate with an edition of Ask Jordon:

Carlos: When are you coming out of beta? Flickr already did.

Well, my friend Luke, since this design looks so modern and Web 2.0 (is that still modern?), and because it's always subject to change, I thought a "beta?" badge would be appropriate next to the logo until I have it the way I like it. The only thing I'm yet concerned about is the line spacing. Do you guys think there needs to be more space between the lines here? I'll have to check it out on Windows and see what looks okay.

Tomorrow is the National Day of Reason, which coincides with that National Day of Prayer thing. Americans United for Separation of Church and State explains why the National Day of Prayer is a bad idea.

Here are lots of crazy McDonald's menu items from around the world. Find out where you can get McSpaghetti.

Earth Hour was March 28. Here are some photos of cities around the world in the dark.

A sweet end

End-of-year things have been going on. Last Monday, I presided over the last Esperanto Club meeting of the year. Not a lot of people showed up, but I guess that can be expected since people had to study for exams and do more important end-of-year things. We had elections, but no one was challenged, so they were kind of pointless. Still, you've got to respect the democratic process.

Last Thursday, Get Carded had its year-end dinner at Bento Cafe, a hip Asian place. This year, they'd been awarding points to people for volunteering a certain number of hours at events. The member with the most points at the end of the year would get a gift card for the restaurant of their choice. I was the frontrunner all year, so Michael and Jehan, the guys in charge, already asked me what restaurant I wanted a gift card for. And on Thursday night, I was awarded Volunteer of the Year (defending my title from last year) with a gift card good for Chili's, Macaroni Grill, and a couple of other places whose names I can't be bothered to remember because I'm too lazy to take the gift card out of my wallet even though I could have taken it out and checked in the time it's taken me to write this.

Saturday night was a Gator Freethought party. I was only able to go to a few of their meetings this year due to scheduling conflicts, so I thought I'd make up for it by going to a party at the former president's house. It was fun; there were games, political debates, and s'mores. I wish I had gone to more of those parties.

Oh, and exams. My first exam was yesterday, a whole week after classes ended. I think I did well. My other two were today. In fact, the exams I expected to be harder were easier and the one I expected to be easier was harder. Is that ironic? It might be Alanis Morissette ironic, but I don't think it's really ironic.

For my discrete math class, we got to choose our own grade distribution (according to certain guidelines), so I took advantage of that by writing a program that would find the best grade distribution for me. I gave it a few possible values for my final exam grade and went for one of the distributions that weighed my final somewhat heavily but not as heavily as possible. It made getting an A pretty easy without the risk of getting a very bad grade if I somehow bombed the final. I shared my program with my classmates, and at least some of them used it, which was cool.

After that exam, which was my last, my roommate moved out, and I'm now left in a half-empty room till Saturday. But all is not lost. I planned a date with my new friend. We hadn't met for a while due to various things (mainly exams) getting in the way, but things worked out tonight. We went to Chop Stix, a pan-Asian place, for dinner, and it was delightful. I'd like to see her again before I go home, and I might.

And, well, that's basically it. I guess it's time to put this year to bed. I'll be moving out on Saturday, and I'll probably get home Sunday.

If world leaders were on Facebook, they would probably have a Facebook group for world leaders.

The Benny Hillifier makes any video sillier by substituting the audio with that sax tune from The Benny Hill Show.

You know you need to put your comic strip to bed when you reuse artwork and/or jokes from decades ago. Recently, Blondie and The Family Circus have been caught doing just that. (Via J-Walk Blog)

The end is near

It wants to be summer. It wants to be summer so bad. It's actually been hot the past few days, and I'm thinking of old summer memories. If there's one thing I am, it's nostalgic.

The last day classes was Wednesday, and it could not have come sooner. I had my last exam for digital logic on Tuesday. I didn't do as well as I hoped to, but with the inevitable curve, which the professor says should be "substantial," I'll have a B. My other exams are all on Wednesday and Thursday, and I leave next Saturday.

One aspect of on-campus life that I've never taken advantage of is the swimming pools. There are several here, at least two of which are located near dorms, and at least one of which is located near my dorm. It's across the street, in fact. I've just never gone because of the weather (most of the time I'm here, there's a risk of having to wear a sweater) and I guess because I usually wouldn't have someone to go with. But some of my friends from the dorm want to go soon, and I happened to be thinking the same thing.

24-hour quiet hours went into effect at midnight Thursday. In my experience, the continual quiet forces an anticlimactic ending to a year of life in the dorms. People take will take exams over the course of the next week (they start tomorrow and run through next Friday, excepting Sunday) and, being unable to laugh and shout and have a good time, quietly disappear. Inevitably, I am one of the last to leave. I just happen to pick classes that have late exams, and I live so far away that my parents can't swing up and get me whenever they want.

I'll actually be one of the last to leave this time, but for once, a lot of other people are checking out on Saturday morning. So maybe this last week won't be too quiet.

One of my pet peeves is hearing compression artifacts in digital audio. It's distracting and unnecessary now that we have high-bandwidth connections and better audio formats that make MP3 obsolete. It turns out that not everyone cares about fidelity as much as I do. In fact, a Stanford music professor has found that in six years' worth of listening tests, his students have shown an increased preference for low-bitrate MP3s over their higher-quality counterparts. One explanation is that people like what they're used to, and many young people are used to stuffing their iPods with every MP3 they can find and taking them on the go. This also explains why some people think vinyl sounds better. It actually doesn't, of course; they're just used to hearing music that way.

Some guy called Doug Nufer wrote a book called Never Again. Each word in the book is used only once. Talk about a constrained writing experiment; it's actually almost 200 pages. And it looks like the second word is "the." Tough. (Via J-Walk Blog)

This is probably something I would do. The BBC reports: "A Finnish computer programmer who lost one of his fingers in a motorcycle accident has made himself a prosthetic replacement with a USB drive attached." The article has a picture. (And the prosthetic is detachable, which is good because he'd probably want more than 2 GB eventually.)

Important things

My university is able to attract prominent guests all the time. Last year there were quite a few that I can remember: John Kerry, the MythBusters, Alberto Gonzales, Jack Kevorkian, Bob Saget, and Bill Nye. This year saw the likes of Ralph Nader, Joe Biden, John Roberts, Howard Dean, Zach Braff, and others. This year's crop didn't seem to be as interesting or varied as last year's, with one exception. I am speaking of Demetri Martin.

My roommate last year told me about Demetri Martin, and we watched some of his stand-up material. The dude is hilarious. His act consists largely of absurd one-liners, often with the accompaniment of music or drawings. And Wikipedia has just informed me that he is 35, which is weird because I would have guessed he was 25. The bowl haircut takes off years! (He's also been a correspondent on The Daily Show, and he has a new show called Important Things with Demetri Martin.)

When I found out that he was coming to campus on Tuesday night, I knew I had to go. And when I found out that my new friend whose name you haven't missed because I haven't mentioned it yet was going, I knew I had to go with her. So we met beforehand for dinner at the student union. She chose Taco Bell. Good choice. (What's the record for Wikipedia links in a World of Stuff blog post? I think it's going to be broken.)

Then we made our way to the basketball arena, where Mr. Martin was due to perform. Opening for him was a 2002 grad who was also associated with The Daily Show; he did a more conventional (but still very funny) stand-up act. Then, it was Demetri Martin's turn. He started by making some Martinesque observations about the decor. There was the obligatory drawing segment as well as the piano segment. He also made random remarks toward the camera operators, the sign language interpreter, and audience members. The Independent Florida Alligator captured some great nuggets for your reading pleasure.

He did a long show, and it kept going even when I thought it was about to end. Toward the actual end, as he was providing a light guitar accompaniment for his jokes, he delved into some of his classics. People called out for their favorites, and he obliged. Meanwhile, someone unwittingly added to the humor by knocking down the curtains and fake plants that flanked the stage. I was in stitches for the whole two hours; I can't remember ever laughing that much. My new friend seemed to have a good time too.

After the show, I accompanied her to her car, which was parked near my dorm. We were going to meet again tonight, but she had to go home for the weekend, so hopefully I'll see her again soon.

And now, the links.

The text of Wikipedia is made available under the GNU Free Documentation License because that was the only major free license in existence when Wikipedia was launched in 2001. Since then, Creative Commons licenses have become favorites in the free culture movement, leaving incompatibly-licensed Wikipedia out of the loop. Now, the greater Wikipedia community is voting on the possibility of dual-licensing Wikipedia and its sister projects under the GFDL and the CC Attribution-ShareAlike license, which is identical in principle but more practical for a wiki to use. If you had at least 25 edits on an account for any Wikimedia project prior to March 15, you can vote! Find out more at the CC blog. (Also, vote yes!)

The so-called EURion constellation is a pattern of circles that has appeared on banknotes around the world in recent years, apparently to help computer programs determine whether an image is of a banknote or not.

Finally, Thomas the Tank Engine Rap Remixes. Some of them are pretty good. (Via The Presurfer)

A minor problem

Last semester, I found out that I had to take 15 credit-hours' worth of "interdisciplinary electives," with two options: "all courses must be at the 3000 level or above in the same area (advisor approval required)" or "all credits must be applied toward an official ... minor." Well, I know what that means. I'm taking up a minor. In my studies, I mean. You know.

I have thought about it a little bit, and I've decided to minor in business. It seems pretty interesting and not too incredibly difficult. (I think business is stereotypically considered an easy major and a backup for pre-law students who are failing their pre-law classes.) With a business minor, I'll be taking such classes as microeconomics, accounting, marketing, and other stuff. Five classes, five semesters remaining: it just works out well.

Actually, the minor offers a choice between microeconomics and macroeconomics, but I've already decided which class I want to take. For micro, the lectures are taped and posted online, so you don't actually have to go to class. I overheard my roommate watching many a micro lecture last year, and I have to say... they were funny. The professor makes his lectures entertaining, mainly by engaging in a neverending mock feud with the unseen videographer, whom he simply calls the Director.

But one thing that's even better than dumb Director jokes is the schedule I picked out for myself for the fall semester. I usually don't look forward to picking out future class schedules because it's often too hard to find out what your best possible schedule might be. But recently, I found out about a site called Coursetopia that makes picking the perfect schedule pretty easy. You just tell it what classes you want to take, and it presents you with every possible schedule. You can also fine-tune the results, of course. And it's all done with AJAX-y magic that can remind you how slow your browser is at handling JavaScript.

Coursetopia saved me a lot of time that I otherwise would have spent making lots of spreadsheets. It currently only has class schedules for UF, FSU, and Rutgers, so if you go to one of those schools, check it out. The service is free, and you don't have to register unless you want to save your results for later.

Anyway, my cool schedule. I'll have no classes on Tuesdays or Thursdays. On other days, my first class starts at 9:35 and my last one ends at 2:45 (3:50 on Mondays). Not bad. I don't know what I'm going to do with my two free periods in a row, though, since I'll be living off campus. I could probably go back to my apartment between classes, but I don't know if it would be worth the bus trips. I'll have to ask my apartment-dwelling friends how they've tackled this question. Hey, apartment-dwelling friends, how have you tackled this question?

In the meantime, I'll have to get the signatures of the deans of the College of Engineering and the College of Business Administration to get this minor approved. Hopefully it won't be as much of a hassle as changing my major seemed to be.

For those who thought that we already know everything about our past, this will come as a big surprise: the discovery of mysterious stones in Turkey in 1994 has changed the way we think about human history. (Via The Presurfer)

Apparently, it's common for rock drummers these days to keep a consistent beat by drumming along to a click track. Some guy analyzed the time between beats in various songs to see which drummers used a click track. (Via waxy.org)

And finally, a photo gallery of crappy balloon animals. (Via The Presurfer)

From Hogtown to Cowford

On Thursday, Get Carded held its third annual Lifeapalooza concert at the Orange and Brew, a coffeehouse on campus. It was similar to last year's, which is to say that a lot of people signed up to be organ donors. 52, in fact.

This year, rather than keeping track of how many people were entering the building, I mainly concerned myself with talking about organ donation to people as they made their way in. Unlike at our general tabling events, the people who weren't already organ donors were all willing to sign up.

Like last year, we were planning to have the attendees hold green glow sticks and stand in a ribbon shape to make a human green ribbon for organ donation, but that didn't happen. I think it was because the weather was fickle (it was very windy and it rained for a little while). Still, the turnout was good, and the music was good too. I think everybody had a good time.

I had a pretty boring day on Saturday. Around 8:00 at night, I was just pondering how boring my day had been when my friend Evan called. He wanted to go to Jacksonville in search of mozzarella sticks and live music. He had never been there, and neither had I for any significant amount of time, but I didn't need much convincing to go along.

After chatting about all kinds of things during the 90-minute drive, we parked downtown and went to the Landing, a place I had heard of. There was a band playing, and we found an American-type restaurant that had mozzarella stars, which were actually kind of triangular. After those and some chicken strips with french fries, we were satisfied. We took a few pictures to remember the trip by and went back to Gainesville.

Also, The World of Stuff is 6 years old today. Happy birthday, TWoS!

Yet another cool list from Wikipedia that will probably be deleted within six months: List of inventors killed by their own inventions.

Apparently, Microsoft's Steve Ballmer has always been crazy... and bald. See him pitch Windows 1.0.

Radio broadcaster Paul Harvey died recently. He was known to deliver amusing stories that no one else covered... because they were made up. He also put a misleading spin on some of his stories. That's what a reporter found in 1997 after investigating some of his fishy tales.

A grammatical interlude

Today in one of my classes, we did something I haven't done since high school: we peer-reviewed each other's research papers. And no, I'm not talking about fact checking; I mean basic stuff like proofreading. We split into groups of three, and each person proofread the others' essays and offered comments. I bet I was the only one in the class to use proofreader's marks, which I'd been taught in sixth or seventh or eighth grade.

But anyway, I'm not a big fan of peer review in classrooms. The process is fundamentally broken; it assumes that each person knows more about writing than someone else, which is just not true. For example: a classmate marked my use of the Latin phrases per se and status quo as clichés and said not to use them because they weakened my argument. De facto just seemed to confuse the hell out of her. Maybe I won't italicize my Latin phrases in the final draft.

But the biggie came when I saw her scrawling a note in the margin saying not to start a sentence with "because." What the heck, guys.

Schoolteachers tell schoolchildren not to start a sentence with "because" to prevent them from writing incomplete sentences:

Because I like cookies.

This sentence has no main idea; "Because I like cookies" is a subordinate clause and must have a main clause or whatever it's called to go with it. (Excuse me; it's been a while. I hope this doesn't, ahem, weaken my argument.) Now let's consider another sentence with the word "because":

I bought extra milk because I like cookies.

No one can deny that that is a grammatically correct sentence. But if all our sentences looked like that, the world would be a boring place to read stuff, and we'd probably just watch more TV. So what do good writers do? They shake up their sentence structure by reversing clauses!

Because I like cookies, I bought extra milk.

"Oh noes! It starts with 'because'!" Chill. It's okay. There's a whole idea in there, see? There is absolutely nothing wrong with this sentence (except that liking cookies too much might make you fat). It's just like the last sentence. There's a main idea ("I bought extra milk") with a supporting idea ("because I like cookies") backing it up.

To be fair, my classmate made valid criticisms of my 3 A.M. writing. I can't really blame her for not realizing her mistake. Not everyone is a grammar whiz, after all.

No, I think the problem ultimately comes down to English teachers. They tell kids not to start sentences with "because," a sweeping and inappropriate generalization. To make matters worse, they hardly ever seem to "unteach" it later on by saying that starting a sentence with "because" is okay if you do it right. So this "rule" remains in students' heads, standing as an artificial impediment to their self-expression.

So, English teachers, can you please stop saying that a sentence can never begin with "because"? You'd be doing your students a favor, and the rest of us would really appreciate it too.

(And yes, I realize that I've started a sentence with a coordinating conjunction seven times. Oops. Make that eight.)

I thought it was obvious, but there's a long Wikipedia article about it: the evenness of zero.

The Pac-Man Dossier consists of everything you ever wanted to know about Pac-Man, all on one page. (Via The Presurfer)

The price of a first-class stamp is going up so often that by the time I remember what it is, it's changed again. So I guess I'm not the only person who had this idea for a simple web site: priceofastamp.com. (Via The Presurfer)

Tubin'

This week, I helped out with Florida Free Culture's "Free Your PC" event, in which volunteers installed antivirus software and free software on people's computers. It was pretty satisfying to spread some free software love by installing Audacity, the GIMP, OpenOffice.org, and other programs for people who needed them. "But Jordon," you ask, "why not tell people to download this software themselves? It's all available on the Internet anyway." The antivirus was our main draw, and people went for the other software because we were already installing stuff for them anyway. Plus, it was a great chance to explain our philosophy. Also, a lot of people don't know how to install software or use Google or anything like that. Don't hate.

On Thursday night, I wrote an eight-page research paper. I started around 10 or 10:30 and finished at 4 in the morning. Then I learned that I can function pretty well for a whole day on just three-and-a-half hours of sleep. But I wouldn't do it all the time. Oh, no. I love me some good sleep. Also, procrastination is bad. Don't do it, kids.

The people on the floor of my dorm are a pretty tight bunch. Roxy recently planned a two-day celebration for her birthday. Yesterday was part one. A lot of us went to Leonardo's 706, a restaurant I had actually been to with my dad when I was 9 or 10 or 11. I didn't remember much of it except what I wrote in my journal, which was that they had "the best darn garlic rolls in town" or something else a 9-, 10-, or 11-year-old would say. They still have the rolls, it seems, but I didn't order any. Also, I was the only one who didn't get a personal pizza. "What did you get, Jordon?" This pasta thing. I don't like pizza that much.

Today, we went tubing at Ichetucknee Springs State Park. I went with other friends about a year ago, and the weather was similar this time: cold and cloudy with some rain. It was still fun, though.

In response to the recent "three strikes" laws against illegal file-sharing that certain countries have passed, the excellent music download site Jamendo is offering a "three thanks" campaign to promote its free and legal music downloads.

I've probably talked with my friend Luke or someone about the idea of microcredit, or making providing small loans to entrepreneurs in developing countries to help them (and their countries) succeed. Through Kiva, you can make small investments in these up-and-coming enterprises. (Via Dinosaur Comics)

If you agree that digital cameras are cool, you might want to read 8 Pioneering Moments in Digital Photography. (Via The Presurfer)

Just say no

Here in Gainesville, a debate is raging. On Tuesday, voters will decide whether to pass Charter Amendment 1, which would end the city's prevention of discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Unfortunately, some people still aren't aware of the fact that our sexual orientation and gender identity come from within us and aren't choices. Some still aren't aware of the tremendous suffering that many people go through due to exclusion and outright hatred from others.

The folks who got this amendment on the ballot say it's to keep men from claiming a female gender identity so they can go into women's restrooms and assault women. Sounds pretty tenuous, doesn't it? A fellow student points out that one of the pro-1 advertisements is self-defeating. It uses actual security camera footage of a man entering a women's restroom to spy on a woman. The ad doesn't mention that the perpetrator didn't actually claim to be transgendered. The real message here is that unsavory types will do what they can to go after women whether it's legal or not.

Actually, early voting has been going on, so I've already voted no on 1. The anti-1 group was providing rides from campus to the city's early voting location, so I took advantage of that on Friday. On the way to the polls and back, I met a number of kind folks who were in favor of civil rights for LGBT individuals. I just hope these people outnumber the others. We'll find out on Tuesday.

Yesterday was a nice day, so I went out and took some panoramic photos around campus. My magnum opus was a photo of the football stadium, which I've uploaded to Wikimedia Commons for use on Wikipedia.

When you search for other people's names on the Internet, you can find out a lot about them. Today, while I was Googling my name, I found out something about myself.

In my junior year of high school, I was told that, based on my PSAT score, I had been recognized as a National Merit Scholarship Semifinalist. But my school never contacted me about any further developments, so I never had a chance to win the scholarship. Even so, I mentioned my National Merit Semifinalist status on this blog (multiple times, actually) and even in my resume. Thanks to Google, I've unearthed an issue of my high school's newsletter that says I was recognized as a Commended Student by the program. The National Merit people say:

Commended Students are named on the basis of a nationally applied Selection Index score that may vary from year to year and is below the level required for participants to be named Semifinalists in their respective states. ... Commended Students do not continue in the competition for National Merit® Scholarships ...

Funny that the school administration was reading this blog the whole time but never bothered to correct me.

The length of each dashed line on each road in the United States is mandated by the federal government. How long are those lines, anyway? The answer may surprise you. (Via J-Walk Blog)

I've always thought about doing this, but I'm afraid I'd creep myself out: Sleep Talking on the Mic. (Via waxy.org)

Since Google sends its Street View cam out to so many places, there's a good chance that it'll capture lots of crazy moments. (Via The Presurfer)

Computers 'n' sports

As you may know, I'm the webmaster for the Dean of Students Office at my university. This week, I got a bit more experience with running a web server. The techie higher-ups wanted to move the website from a server at the DSO office (redundancy, anyone?) to a new server that they could have physical access to. Which isn't a bad idea, really, as they know more about this kind of stuff than I do.

Also, the old server runs Mac OS X 10.3 (redundancy, anyone?). That in itself is a reason to move. Do I really need fancy graphics on a web server? Think of how much more RAM and how many more CPU cycles the server software would have if windows didn't slither away as I minimized them. Do I need a graphical interface at all? And who thought shipping servers with GarageBand was a good idea? Why?

Anyway, the techie higher-ups gave me some pointers on moving the web site to the new server, which runs FreeBSD, a free operating system that deservedly enjoys wide usage among servers (including the one that brought you this page). In short, I learned a bit more about transferring and manipulating files via the command line in a Unix-like environment. It was a bit odd at first because I wasn't sure how much the guys would let me do with their machine. But before long, my co-worker Mark and I were editing configuration files, adding users, and changing the system's time zone.

And so the switch to the new server was made. A real test came yesterday when the formatting of the site started displaying incorrectly for some people. Internet Explorer 6, which some people unfortunately still use, was displaying pages on the new server wrong. For the technical types who are curious, I pinned it down to an XML declaration I had removed from the site on the new server because it conflicted with PHP's short opening tag syntax. (Yeah, you know PHP's short opening tag syntax, right?) So I edited php.ini to turn off short opening tags and added the line back, and IE 6 was placated.

For those of you who like sports, I saw Tim Tebow today. Who is Tim Tebow? He's possibly one of the greatest college football players of all time, having won the coveted Heisman Trophy between leading the Florida Gators to two national championships, all before his senior year. Men want to be him; women want to be with him. And probably vice versa in some cases. I wouldn't doubt it.

Anyway, he was on the North Lawn of the Reitz Union, where some girls were talking to him. I think they wanted to take their pictures with him. It's about the fifth time I've seen him around campus, but I never say anything to him. All I would really say is, "Hi, Tim Tebow, you're a great football player," but he's heard it all before. Still, whenever I see him, it brightens my day. Squee?

Audiobooks are awesome. Last month, I pointed out a collection of ridiculous soundbites from Barack Obama's autobiography, as read by the author. Well, it turns out that Bill O'Reilly wrote a novel and narrated the audiobook version himself. Why should you listen to these clips? Because you want to hear Bill O'Reilly describe various sexual acts, or just to hear him say, "I wish I were a lesbian." (Via waxy.org)

Fifty years ago, Buddy Holly died. Yeah, the guy mentioned the Weezer song. Anyway, he had a popular song called "Peggy Sue," which was apparently based on a real person.

Those of you in North America will probably find this familiar: Please stand by. (Via waxy.org)