Esperanto in the USA

Last year, just before Andy and I left for our European vacation, Andy made a quick trip to St. Louis for Esperanto-USA‘s national congress (convention). At the time, I said,

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 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 evil eye

In one of my classes last week, a girl I study with passed me a note. I was a bit confused until I opened it up and read it. It said that a particular guy in the class was creepily staring at her and that she was going to leave class early if he didn’t stop.

I felt really bad for her. No one should have to choose between being able to pay attention in class and not feeling used or threatened. I wanted to do something to help, so I positioned my chair so that he (hopefully) wouldn’t be able to see her. I don’t think he bothered her again.

I was glad that I could try to do something, but at the same time, I felt bad about myself. I look at young women too, and while I don’t intend for them to notice, they probably do sometimes. In fact, I’m sure of it, because there are sometimes the awkward moments when they see that I’m looking. I don’t mean anything bad by it, but they have no way of knowing that.

I don’t have much of an idea of what it’s like on the other side. Once in a while I hear female friends talking about creepy guys staring at them. It seems therapeutic for them to discuss it together, even if they’re seemingly just laughing it off. One friend once told me she’ll stare back at a man’s wedding ring until he realizes it and averts his glance, visibly embarrassed.

Along with this article I linked to recently, last week’s incident made me slightly but painfully more aware of some of the things that women have to deal with all the time. I’d like to get some more perspectives so I can try to understand what’s really going on here and what can be done about it.

With that in mind, I have some questions for my female friends and readers: How often do people stare at you? How does it make you feel? What do you do about it? Do you ever ogle anyone yourself? Is it ever okay? Leave a comment. Discuss. I really want to know. (And let’s not make it heteronormative; anyone may chime in.)

You know what I haven’t done in a while? Answered an Ask Jordon question, that’s what. And look, it comes from Kate. Yes, that Kate!

Kate: If you could get a free ticket to any country (any city, any place) of the world, what would you choose and why?

That’s a tough question. In the past, I probably would have answered London or some other big city in Europe, but I’ve already been to Europe, so I think I’d try something new. Since money is no object here, I think I’d want to go somewhere I’d never otherwise be able to go to, like the South Pole. That would make a great Facebook profile picture.

If we’re talking about actual cities in actual countries, then I’d probably consider Tokyo as well. My impression of Japan, which comes mainly from Lost in Translation and the kinds of people I hung out with in high school, is that it has a very different society from ours and is far ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to technology. That’s something I’d like to see for myself.

Interesting video: a British doctor explains the placebo effect and its practical consequences. (Via Pharyngula)

Happy birthday, The World of Stuff

I’ve become one of them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The BBC talks to people who never forget a face.

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

The endgame

It’s March, and that means it’s time to start picking classes for next fall. People who plan to take classes over the summer also pick them during this time. This year, I am one of those people.

If I’m going to graduate next spring as planned, I’ll have to take summer classes to catch up. That means I won’t be able to do America with my friends, but there are few other downsides. I would be home for the rest of the summer. That’s how I spent the summer of 2008. It was kind of boring.

The College of Engineering requires its students to meet with an advisor before registering for classes. So, on Thursday, I made the most important advising visit of my college career: the one in which all of my remaining questions would be answered. I had come with a long list of questions about the classes I would have to take in order to graduate, many of which are high-level electives. The advisor answered them with ease, and now I have a list of summer and fall classes to sign up for, as well as an idea of what my spring schedule will be like.

I had been hoping to take an elective called Programming Using C over the summer, but the advisor said it wouldn’t count toward my degree because I had taken too many programming language classes previously (two of them, both Java classes). It’s kind of a shame because I’d really like to learn what is probably the most widely used and influential programming language ever, especially since another class I’ll be taking over the summer sort of requires it. I guess I’ll just have to try to do it myself.

I’d also really like to take an elective called Unix System Administration, but they haven’t offered it recently and aren’t doing so in the foreseeable future. This sucks because I think I’ve finally decided What I Want To Be When I Grow Up™: a Unix system administrator.

For a long time, I wanted to be a programmer, but I wasn’t exactly raking in the necessary experience. I’ve never done any real programming, like in a big “open source” project. The thought overwhelms me; there’s so much I don’t know that it’s hard to get started. I have a class now where we’re starting to develop a program collaboratively, but I can hardly get interested in it since I have so little experience with anything (and because it’s a program I’ll never use in real life). It seems more like a nightmare than a fun challenge. My fun challenges are dinky little scripts I hammer out from time to time. I can’t get paid to write those.

There are also ideological roadblocks. I believe in the ideals of free software, which state that people are essentially free to do whatever they wish with their software. This idea isn’t extremely popular in the corporate world, and I doubt I could get paid to write such software or even maintain it (one of my professors says that everyone who starts out in the software business is tasked not with writing new programs but instead with being a “software archaeologist”).

Meanwhile, my webmaster job has opened me up to the world of system administration. I’m in charge of web sites, which reside on servers, which need care and feeding. Now, it’s not actually my job to make sure that the servers are secure and up to date, but I don’t think I’d mind doing it. The thought of being in charge of a network of computers at some organization—a virtual catcher in the rye, if you will—kind of fascinates me. The servers at work run FreeBSD, which is basically similar to Ubuntu, the OS I use on my own computer, so I know my way around. Those and many other Unix-like operating systems are free-as-in-freedom software, and they’re widely used on web servers everywhere.

Interestingly, it was the summer of 2008 when I wrote, “I’ve decided that working on software would be pretty cool…. I don’t want to be a sysadmin.” People change.

I think that’s enough for now. The point is that I’m planning to bring my college studies to an end and that I’m thinking about what I want to do after that. It feels good to have some sort of idea.

I haven’t tried these out, but they may be worthwhile: tips for Reducing Junk Mail.

Here are some interesting maps made out of NASA’s topographic data: Reading the World in Braille. As a topographic anomaly, the garbage dump near my house gets a shout-out.

Tons of vintage ads arranged by category and decade: Vintage Ad Browser. (Via Lifehacker)

This is different

The UF police department shot a student last week. I was immediately reminded of this, which happened during my first month as a student. As you hopefully don’t remember, I took part in the ensuing protests, which I soon realized was an idiotic thing to do. Since then I’ve been wary of appearing to stand up for crazy jerks or people who just happen to have done crazy, jerky things.

The Sun and the Alligator have provided an overview of last week’s incident. To make a long story short, the student had been threatening people and was getting violent, so the police shot him in the head with an assault rifle after other attempts to subdue him failed. I’m not going to pass judgment on this one for fear of coming up on the wrong side of public opinion. I just hope it gets resolved before it can tarnish the value of my yet-to-be-earned degree.

I went in for an eye exam on Monday. I had been scheduled for one over the summer, but I missed it due to my trip to Europe, so I was overdue. The last time I went, the doctor said I was slightly farsighted and wrote me a prescription for glasses in case I felt I would need them. I knew my vision could only get worse, so I wasn’t looking forward to this visit.

Imagine my surprise when the doctor said that my farsightedness had corrected itself. Apparently that’s possible at my age. Another crisis averted… for now.

For your viewing pleasure, here’s the archetypal Academy Award-Winning movie trailer. (Via waxy.org)

I had no idea that our governor was such a jerk. Here’s how Charlie Crist deals with atheists. (Via Pharyngula)

Enter a number, and Number Gossip will tell you some fun facts about it. (Via J-Walk Blog)

I don’t get e-mail

After spending the weekend at my grandparents’ house to celebrate my mom’s birthday, I am home. Waiting for me here was a package my friend Natasha sent me for Christmas. It came back to her when she sent it the first time, so she sent it again, and it arrived a couple of weeks ago. She got me some cool Vancouver 2010 swag (a sweater and a planner), some of her favorite pens, and some notebooks reppin’ her college. It’s too bad that they came so late, but I’m glad they didn’t get lost in the mail.

Speaking of things getting lost in the mail, my current e-mail setup is not working, and I’m tired of it.

My personal e-mail account is one that I’ve been using for about 10 years now. Last year (actually, two years ago… jeez, it seems like last year), I had e-mail forwarding set up at my web host so that I could have a permanent and easy-to-remember address at my own domain name. That’s all fine and good, but my e-mail provider’s spam filters often bounce messages back to my web host, where they’re kept in a “spam quarantine” for me to view and delete.

By not checking my spam quarantine religiously, I’ve missed out on correspondence from long-lost relatives, notifications from web sites, e-mail newsletters, plane ticket receipts that I needed to print out, and more. My e-mail provider thinks all of this is spam (probably in part because it’s been forwarded through another server), and I don’t have control over their spam filters… even though I’m paying $20 a year for their service. It’s time for change.

I’d like to switch to an e-mail provider that meets the following requirements:

• I must be able to use my domain name with their service.
• Spam filtering must be very accurate, or I must be able to fine-tune it (or turn it off altogether).
• Must be cheaper than my current e-mail and forwarding costs of about $27 per year.
• Must have a POP server. (I prefer it to IMAP. I know, I’m a weirdo.)
• Not Google. (They already know what I search for; that’s enough for them.)
• Not Microsoft. (I’m basically against everything they stand for.)
• Not my ISP. (I travel back and forth between home and school, ISPs get swallowed up by bigger ISPs, etc.)

I’ve come across a service that fits all of these requirements: it’s Lavabit, which I think I had previously heard of (it used to be called Nerdshack). It was founded as a reaction to Google including targeted advertisements in Gmail. Or, as they put it on their history page, they “felt it was possible to create an e-mail service that was fast, reliable, feature rich and didn’t achieve profitability by prostituting its user base to marketers.” Their freedom-loving, no-nonsense philosophy is similar to my web host’s. I like it.

Other perks are that they have an SMTP server; allow SSL connections to their POP, IMAP, and SMTP servers, as well as their webmail interface; and encrypt your e-mail on their servers if you have a paid account. I would have to have a paid account; they said I would have to have a $16/year personal account or a business account if I wanted to use my own domain name with their service. It’s more than I’d like to pay, but it’s less than I’m paying now.

I’ve been researching them online, and there are some criticisms of their service. Some people claimed that their support was limited. I can live with that, I guess. I think the benefits outweigh the costs. Has anyone else used their service? I’d be interested in hearing what people think. Unless somebody has a better suggestion, I’ll probably sign up with Lavabit in a few days.

What do blind people see? The answer is more complicated than you might think, and there’s hope for people with certain types of blindness. (Via The Presurfer)

In the past, I’ve considered using Amazon’s online music store, but their downloader (which is required to get discounts on buying whole albums) is not free software. Now there’s pymazon, a free replacement, so I might reconsider.

Back in the day, Soviet scientists tried to domesticate foxes. After 10 generations, the foxes were not only completely docile but also had colorings not seen in the wild. Humans may have domesticated dogs just as quickly.

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)