Smile

Sometimes you meet someone and the thinkable happens.

It starts out perfectly simply. You get along well and become friends. But then there's something else: their laugh, something in the way they move, or their general outlook on life really gets your attention. They don't have to be around to make you smile.

You see and talk to them often, and you want to let them know just how you feel. What do you do? Do you become a creeper? No. You just talk openly about it when you feel the moment is right. If they're really your friend, they'll listen.

And what if they say they don't feel quite the same about you? Do you stop being their friend? That's childish. At this age, you should know it's hardly the worst thing in the world. The truth is that you still have a good friend.

Like any friend, you want them to be happy, and the best way to help is to set an example. Smile: a good friend is forever.

And now, the links.

One of those sites that concisely answers the a question posed by its domain name: howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com. (Via J-Walk Blog)

Apparently, baseball used to be pretty crazy. Here are the 10 Craziest Baseball Rules. (Via The Presurfer)

Get databased

As you may know, I volunteer for Get Carded, a student group that raises awareness about organ donation on Florida college campuses. It's my third year with them, and this time, some things are different. One of the two co-directors of the group has graduated, and his would-be replacement is no longer around due to some drama that apparently occurred over the summer. It's unfortunate because we'd all been a friendly bunch for as long as I'd been a member.

But that wasn't the only big change to happen the summer. Get Carded's parent organization has been put in charge of Florida's organ donor database, and it's now taking registrations online. In the past, we distributed organ donor cards, but now we just tell people to go to the web site (or to mail in a form). Our first tabling event was last week, and I had to update my spiel.

The tabling was part of a week-long PR blitz for homecoming week. It started on Monday night when we painted the 34th Street Wall, the only place in town where graffiti is tolerated. Our tabling was Wednesday, and the group also made itself present at the homecoming parade on Friday, although I pulled out of my commitment to that one due to unforeseen circumstances. (I'd been at probably every event for the past two years, so I felt I had the privilege. Also, the co-directors didn't care.)

Incidentally, the new database makes the name "Get Carded" go from confusing to completely inaccurate. We were told that there was a strong push to change the name, but one of the better-established chapters wouldn't have it. Branding, y'know.

Are you a Florida resident? Are you an organ donor? (Check your driver's license if you're not sure; it would say "Organ Donor" under your signature.) If you're not, go to donatelifeflorida.org to sign up right now. It just takes a minute, and you'll be able to edit your personal details whenever they change. (For the question "How did you learn about Florida’s donor registry?" we ask people to select "College campaign" and then specify "UF." It make it sounds like a cheesy competition, but that's really how the state organization judges our success.)

And if you have any questions about becoming an organ donor, just ask me.

Remember when people used more than one search engine? A lot of those old ones are still around. See Popular Search Engines in the '90s: Then and Now. (Via The Presurfer)

For the people who are older than I am: Old Operating Systems Don't Die.

Brain damage

My right brain and left brain need to sit down and have a chat sometime.

Sometimes I'm caught having to choose between what's logically sound and what feels good. It doesn't have to be anything big; even little things can tear me to pieces.

For a while now, my parents have been giving me scratch-off lottery tickets as small gifts. Playing the lottery is a bad idea if you want to win. It is a system designed to make money; otherwise, it wouldn't exist. As I've been more and more concerned about saving money, I asked my parents to stop buying me lottery tickets and to maybe give me the money they would have otherwise spent on the tickets instead. Of course, I regretted it as soon as the words came out of my mouth.

But scratch-offs were fun, they said. They didn't sound too happy, so I backpedaled. I had wanted to categorically reject all gambling because it's a bad idea that makes people lose money, but I compromised myself because my emotions got the better of me. I feel like I should be able to say, "Please don't buy me lottery tickets, do something useful with your money instead," but on the other hand, I want my parents to be happy. Also, seeing if you've won can be entertaining, and the proceeds of the Florida Lottery fund education.

There are always two sides to every issue. Why do they both have to have merit? It only makes life more difficult for those of us who want to make principled decisions.

And then there are the Hare Krishna types who serve lunch at my university. Krishna Lunch is considered an institution because they've been doing it for many years. People like the food, and it comes at a competitive price. Every day around lunchtime, students line up on the plaza to be served while Hare Krishnas play their Hare Krishna music and chant Hare Krishna.

I've had Krishna Lunch once or twice. It was pretty tasty. I might like to take advantage of their cheap lunch offers more often, but I'm concerned about who I give my money to and what it says about me. I'm obviously not too keen on giving my money to a religious organization because then they have that much more of an ability to spread their religious nonsense.

In my research, I've found that Krishna Lunch is a nonprofit, which puts me at ease somewhat. But there's still another issue that I think is important. I feel that if I'm caught with one of their paper plates full of unidentifiable food, there should be some kind of disclaimer above my head stating that I don't necessarily endorse the beliefs or practices of the organization.

I guess I might as well go through with it; I don't think anyone would judge me. I should be more concerned about whether I would judge myself. And I did eat at a Chick-fil-A recently, which is like giving money to a church (and getting a crappy sandwich and delicious fries in return). But what would you do if you were me?

Less money, mo' problems.

Slate asks: Why Do We Call Galileo Galilei by His First Name? (Via J-Walk Blog)

This chart could be handy for me now that I'm dabbling in buying perishable food: The Table of Condiments That Periodically Go Bad. (Via All About Me - And Then Some)

Hello September

Things have been going here in Gainesville. Over the summer, my friend Evan decided to get a band together with me, my former suitemate Cameron, and one of his other friends. We got together for a practice last Tuesday (except for Cameron, who was getting ready to go somewhere). We tried to decide on a song to play and picked "Hotel California."

I brought my Epiphone hollow-body guitar, a low-end version of a Gibson. The other guitarist, the guy I don't know too well, had an actual Gibson hollow-body. Now I think I know how a girl feels when another girl wears the same dress as her to a party. But this guy has mad guitar skillz, so it's all good.

I haven't been in anything that could be loosely termed a band since some of my junior-high buds and I played in public for the last time four years ago. I've been in some fruitless and abortive attempts to start or join bands since then, so I'd like to see things turn out differently this time.

By the way, this new group has a name: Rubber Band. Evan doesn't care if the name is already taken, which, given my past experiences, is an admirable quality.

For one of my classes, I have to use a program called MATLAB (I guess you're supposed to shout it). You may have heard of the program. Turns out it's proprietary and expensive. Actually, I don't have to use MATLAB!!! per se, but the code I write has to work with it. I know that free alternatives exist, but to be absolutely sure, I really should use Matlab. What to do?

The professor suggested going to the university's computer labs because Matlab is installed on the computers there. But I don't have the time for that. I wondered if it might be installed on the so-called CPU servers, which I already had remote access to. (These things come with taking computery classes, of course.) It turns out that I can log in to one of those computers and use X11 forwarding over SSH to run Matlab. In English: I can run the program on a different computer and have its window show up on my computer as if it were any other program of mine.

Running Matlab this way is slow because the remote computer has to handle a bunch of other people's stuff at the same time, but it's definitely better than having to go to the labs whenever I want to do my homework. And it makes use of a cool feature that will make Windows users salivate even though it's been available on Unix-like operating systems for 20 years. To top it off, I made a launcher for Matlab in my Applications menu (the command is "ssh -CtX [my user name]@[server] matlab") so I can access it about as easily as program I actually have installed. I am clever.

Here's a mesmerizing video of the Milky Way rising over the Texas sky. (Via J-Walk Blog)

The New York Times has a graph showing sales of different music formats between 1973 and 2008. Looks like the music industry's sales are down. Yes! Maybe now they'll get some common sense. But probably not. (Via J-Walk Blog)

Do you like baseball or statistics? I like at least one of those, and I find these baseball-related graphs to be interesting. Example: How often have the Canadian MLB teams played a game with "O Canada" as the only national anthem? (Via waxy.org)

Yawn

Besides being a blog, The World of Stuff is a bunch of stuff. Over the years, I've added new pages that defy categorization. Nonetheless, I've been trying for a long time to keep each extraneous page one of a few neat, little boxes. It's not working.

Currently, the navigation links are Blog, Archives, Geek, Writing, Video, Fun, Store, and About. Of these, the Blog, Archives, and Video pages are worth leaving alone. They do their job well. It's the Geek, Writing, and Fun pages I'm most concerned about. They're not very intuitive. (Would you expect to find Ultimate Cool Characters in Geek, Writing, or Fun? It's in Geek.)

I'm thinking of splitting up those three categories into the following four categories. (The current category for each page is in parentheses.)

Articles:

• Free Your Computer with Linux (Geek)
• Finding the Day of the Week (Writing)
• Courtesy Autographs on US Currency (Writing)
• Tredici (Fun)
• Being Left-Handed (Writing)
• The Dvorak Keyboard and You (Geek)

Fiction or Creative:

• PLEASE READ THIS!!!1 (Writing)
• The Prisoners (Writing)
• Romeo and Juliet: A Sock Puppet Adaptation (Writing)

Reference:

• Using IRC on UF DHNet (Geek)
• Kalilić/Kalilich Family Genealogy (Writing)
• Donation Information for Free Content Projects (Geek)
• Fix for Ubuntu Hard Drive Problem (Geek)
• "Click Here" Around the World (Fun)
• Minor Scale Chart Thing (Fun)
• Ultimate Cool Characters (Geek)

Interactive:

• RTS-SMS (Fun)
• From Canada with Love (Fun)
• Fake Cyrillic Generator (Fun)
• Greasemonkey User Scripts (Geek)
• Ask Jordon (Fun)

If I were going to change up all these organizational things, which I probably will, then I'd also change the name of the About page to "Meta" at the risk of alienating the 98% of the population who don't know what "meta" means. It's because I have not only About Me, About the Site, and Donations, but also press coverage of the site.

As for the store... the store makes me sigh. No one's ever bought anything from it. Looks like I'm going to need another way to effortlessly make money while promoting my blog.

By the way, all of the above is up for discussion; that's why I'm posting it here. Let me know what you think. Ideas for effortlessly making money while promoting the site are particularly welcome.

Awesome video: a complete Goonies reunion. (Via waxy.org)

Roomba + camera + time = Roomba time exposure. (Via J-Walk Blog)

Here are some rare and interesting mental disorders and illnesses you've probably never heard of. (Via The Presurfer)

I should be working

I've been to the movies a few times lately. I saw Star Trek with my friends the Friday before last and again just this Sunday night. I'm proud to say I'd never watched any of the shows or the other movies because otherwise I'd be someone who watches Star Trek. Anyway, from the perspective of a complete outsider, the movie was good enough for me to see twice without getting bored. My friends and I also went to the midnight showing of Angels and Demons on Thursday night/Friday morning. It was pretty fast-paced, and I liked it. I didn't read the book.

In my last post, I talked about getting a new memory card for my digital camera. Well, I've discovered another benefit of having a large memory card. If you've seen my videos, you've seen the handiwork of my digital camera. The quality is pretty good, but it only records at something like 16 frames per second, so any motion looks pretty jerky. (Mmm... jerky.) I recently remembered that my camera has a higher-quality video setting that I couldn't use with my old memory card because it didn't have enough space. My 1 GB card can hold over 12 minutes of high quality video at 30 frames per second. It looks like it's from an actual camcorder. I could reach 8 GB sooner than I think.

For my upcoming trip, I've got a computer, but the keyboard is pretty small. This would be a problem for picture-taking because I name all my digital photos and videos to include the date, the number in the sequence for that day, and a brief description. After years of doing this manually, I wrote a Bash script to help me automate the task. It prompts me for a description for each photo or video and then moves it to the proper folder. Here's the script if you're interested.

11 Extinct Animals That Have Been Photographed Alive. (Via The Presurfer)

Ah, Area 51, a favorite subject of conspiracy theorists everywhere. Some goings-on at the base have recently been declassified, so several people have gone on the record to talk about what it was like to work at Area 51 and what some of those "UFOs" actually were. (Via waxy.org)

Welcome back, Conky

For a relatively long time, I used Conky as a system monitor on my desktop. It's pretty popular among Ubuntu users and other Linux types. Eventually, I switched to Screenlets, mainly because they look snazzy. But since my Screenlets have been acting up lately (spontaneously losing their configurations when I log in), I decided I'd have enough of that. I've gone back to Conky and all its powerful features. To that end, I've spent hours on what I believe is a pretty sexy Conky setup. Click the thumbnail for the full-size version.

The wallpaper is from InterfaceLIFT. The semi-transparent background for Conky is actually part of the wallpaper. I made a transparent image with a black stripe down the side in the GIMP and overlaid it on the original wallpaper with ImageMagick, which will make things easier when I want to change the wallpaper later. As for the Conky configuration itself, it's pretty self-explanatory. Here's my .conkyrc, and here's a Bash script I wrote to make audio metadata from Rhythmbox look pretty whether you're playing a song, a podcast, an Internet radio stream, or nothing at all.

And now, the not-so-boring links:

The difference between Pixar's and DreamWorks' animated films explained.

Wrong Tomorrow documents predictions made by public figures and keeps track of whether they become wrong or right. (Via waxy.org)

NPR did an interesting story recently on how ants know when their fellow ants are dead. As with many such things, it has to do with a chemical, which you can use to really confuse them.

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)

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)

Title that will make you want to read this

To no one's surprise, the Unite Party basically swept the Student Government elections, winning the executive and treasurer tickets as well as 42 Student Senate seats. The Progress Party picked up 8 seats, while the Orange and Blue Party won none.

Also, 61% of students voted to ban SG funding for facilities that require biometric data for entry. Recently, the main student gym announced plans to install hand scanners at the entrance because they thought that showing your student ID card to an attendant would be too slow and inexpensive. In the fall elections, something like 84% of students expressed their disapproval of this incredible waste of money and arguable invasion of privacy in a non-binding referendum. This semester's initiative is binding.

The turnout was 19%, which I think is considered high. Kind of a shame, if you ask me.

Um, what else? Spring break is in a week. Yay. Um, that's it, I guess. Talk amongst yourselves.

Tupper's self-referential formula is a certain formula whose graph looks like the formula itself. The Wikipedia article makes the rationale sound simple, but I still think it's pretty wacky.

Bhutan, the quiet Himalayan kingdom that got television and the Internet at the same time, is now the world's first non-smoking nation. (Via The Presurfer)

At howoldareyou.net, you can see pictures of people and guess how old they are. You can also submit a picture of yourself... if you dare to find out what people think. (Via Atheist Revolution)