Category - Computers

For the past few days, I've been studying for exams (and taking them). Now I'm done. So are a lot of other people. Over the past week, trucks, vans, and SUVs have been buzzing about and parking outside the dorms. People are moving out.

My differential equations exam was on Monday morning at the ungodly hour of 7:30 A.M. I couldn't get much sleep beforehand. I studied a lot, but I could have studied more. I needed a 56 on the final to get a B in the class. I estimate that I got the equivalent of 4 out of 7 questions right; if that's true, then I got a 57. Anyway, it's going to be close. I'm glad I did the optional assignment that will only be invoked if you're on the border between grades.

I had my last biology exam yesterday. It wasn't a cumulative final, which was good. I hadn't been doing as well as I wanted on the tests, whose average makes up the entire class grade. I needed a 100 on the last test to get an A in the class and an 88 for a B+. I just found out that I got a 90. B+ in the bag.

Also yesterday, I found out how I did in physics. Amazingly, I got a B+ in the class somehow. I received a breakdown of my grade. They gave me full credit for the in-class response questions (5% of the grade) even though I got some of them wrong. I did get an 85 in the final exam, as I had guessed. Even then, I still should have had a B, according to my calculations. They must have rounded up, which they said they weren't going to do. Oh well. I would have been happy with a B, but a B+ is welcome.

And today, I had my last exam: programming. I'm all but certain that I'll be getting an A in the class.

Last night, I visited my friend Andy, one of the people I'm starting the Esperanto club with. I didn't have to go very far because he lives down the hall. He plays the piano, and he wanted to know if I wanted to rock out with him. I had a lot of fun. He's really good at improvising on the piano. Besides discussing music, we also talked about computers. He said he needed an office suite to run on his Mac, and I suggested NeoOffice, which I recommend to all my Mac-using friends. For everyone else, I recommend OpenOffice.org. Both are free as in price and free as in freedom.

So, in short, good times were had by both. It reminds me of all the interesting things I've done that I haven't mentioned here. As I begin to pack up all my stuff and leave my dorm for the summer, I reflect back -- in no particular order -- on some Things I Apparently Didn't Mention.

1. As part of my college orientation over the summer, I had to spend the night in a real dorm room with a real roommate. My one-time disposable roommate was even quieter than I was, which, if you know me personally, might be hard to imagine. I had to do the talking. Anyway, his name was Amer or Ahmer or something, and he lives in my current building, so I see him every once in a while. Invariably he has earbuds in his ears. I don't know how people can walk around listening to music all the time. Open your ears, folks. You can do without your Fall Out Boy for ten minutes. (Seriously, it's getting bad. When I would volunteer for Get Carded in crowded areas, I would marvel at the proportion of people who listen to music while they're walking. At least one of my professors did it on his way to class.)
2. There was an old woman in my programming class. When I saw her on the first day, I assumed that she was doing a write-up or something to judge the lecturer, but she kept coming back every day. She looked like she was over 70. Way to go for her, taking a computer class in college at that age. Eventually, she stopped going to class, so I assume she dropped it.
3. At the beginning of the year, our RA, Shannon, made little name-tag-type things and put them on everyone's door. Although it took me about 6 months to realize it, each one was supposed to look like a little iPod with a different album cover where the screen ought to be. I had the most random album ever. Every day during the fall semester, I had this on my door, printed by a color printer without yellow ink:

   

   So random. When we got a new RA in the spring, she replaced our iPods (as I still didn't know they were) with blank CD-Rs with our names and hometowns written on them. Have you ever tried taping a CD to a door? Those things are heavy. Few of them lasted very long without falling. After a month, I gave up on trying to stick mine back on the wall and substituted my and my roommate's iPods, which had been placed inside the room when they were taken down. They've been up ever since. (My roommate's album was the Virgin Suicides soundtrack).

4. I was poking around the web site of one of my physics professors one time when I came across a link to a picture of his "famous sister." One of my physics professors, it turns out, was Sally Field's brother. And not the one I liked, either. I thought that was pretty weird. I did some Googling to make sure it was true, and I found some sites saying that Sally Field had a brother named Rick Field who was a physicist. I also found a university library catalog mentioning a video of Sally Field visiting her brother Rick at the university in 1982. Almost everyone I talked to about this hadn't heard of Sally Field or referred to her as Sally Fields. Sucks to be you, Sally Field. But I like you, I really like you. As for your brother, meh.
5. I took up a form of exercise called shovelglove in November, but I didn't really explain why. I did hint at it, however. There's this girl Ashley who lives on my floor, and she would come by to talk to my roommate, Adam. Adam works out a lot and would often hang around without a shirt on. She mentioned how she always seemed to encounter him while he was shirtless. So, one time, I had gotten out of the shower and I had a towel wrapped around me while I was combing my hair. There was a knock on the door, and I saw through the peephole that it was Ashley. Oh, no problem, I thought, since she sees Adam without a shirt all the time. So I opened the door, and she averted her eyes and said, "I can come back later!" Come to think of it, maybe it was the towel. I am not a fat guy, and I wasn't then, but it got me thinking about how I should probably work out.
6. In January, one of my suitemates apparently tried to overdose on pills. He had to go to the hospital for a while and withdraw for the semester. What I didn't mention was: he came back to the dorm to visit a few months later and seemed to be his same old self. He spent a few nights sleeping in the common room, and then I think he got kicked out.
7. Evan moved in to take his place as he had wanted to be roommates with Cameron. Evan really livened things up around this here two-room/one-bathroom suite-type thing. I already mentioned how he had a jacuzzi party by buying a kiddie pool, putting it in the bathroom, filling it with hot water from the shower, and inviting his friends. One night, he happened to catch Die Hard on TV, and after that, he started posting a "Die Hard Quote of the Day" in the bathroom. After he, Adam, and I rented Die Hard: With a Vengeance, we all got in on the act. They're still hanging up there. My contribution:
   Jeremy Irons: My only problem is that I went to some trouble preparing that game for McClane. You interfered with a well-laid plan.
   Samuel L. Jackson: Well, you can stick your well-laid plan up your well-laid ass.

My first year of college is over, and tomorrow, I'm going home. I've done pretty well in my classes. I've had fun. I've made a lot of friends, and I've learned some things. But I honestly don't mind not having classes for a few months. I could use a break. In fact, except for a friend's birthday on Sunday, I have absolutely no plans at all this summer. I think I'll try to get a job to make back the money I spent this year. I've already started working on the old resume. I'm also looking forward to sleeping in and not getting irreversibly awoken two hours early by someone singing in the shower or having a loud conversation in the hallway. The time for those things is no more. It's summertime.

But first, it's time to pack.

And throw crap away.

JungleCrazy.com lists some crazy Amazon deals. This is great for people who buy random cheap stuff online.

If you get an automatically generated e-mail with a return address at donotreply.com, do Chet Faliszek a favor and don't reply to it. He's the owner of DoNotReply.com, and his site gets innumerable e-mails every day.

From Lawrence Lessig, creator of Creative Commons, comes Change Congress, "a movement to build support for basic reform in how our government functions." He's trying to have politicians and citizens pledge to support increased honesty and transparency in Congress.

Final exams have begun. I had my first one today. Physics, it was. I did pretty well, too. I got an 85. According to my calculations, this means I'll have a B in the class, which is good. I didn't even have to study that much. Now I need to study for Differential Equations, which I also spent time studying for last night. I'll need all the studying I can manage to make myself do.

Last night, my roommate, Adam, was reminiscing about Nickelodeon's Super Toy Run, the annual sweepstakes in which the winner would go to Toys 'R' Us and have a few minutes to fill a shopping cart with anything they wanted. I mentioned how it reminded me of "Supermarket Sweep," a '90s game show which was about exciting as it sounds. For old times' sake, we watched an episode on YouTube. Check out the description for the video. The uploader (who appears as a contestant in the episode) says that the audience consisted of paid extras who were only present for the taping of the beginning of the show. So the rest of the applause throughout the show is canned. We noticed how strange it was that the contestants would clap for themselves when they got a question right; it's because no one else was actually clapping for them.

Boring technobabble follows.

The latest version of Ubuntu (8.04 or "Hardy Heron") came out on Thursday. I suppose the difficulty of downloading updates when a new version is released is a testimony to Ubuntu's growing popularity. This time, I couldn't get through the download. It took about three hours to get a third of the way done, and then it stopped. What's more, I couldn't re-connect, so I had to wait. But in my Googling, I found out that you can download the alternate install CD, mount it as though you've burned it to a CD, and use that to upgrade. So I tried downloading the CD. It was just as slow, if not slower, until it timed out.

By that time, a number of other mirrors had come online, so I was able to choose one that was a lot closer (and less overloaded). I downloaded the CD image from Georgia Tech at a rate of 4 MB/s. Yes, four megabytes per second! The 700 MB download was done in a few minutes. (I'm going to miss having a university Internet connection, but I wouldn't have had to resort to such drastic measures if they allowed BitTorrent traffic in the dorms.)

After mounting the CD image (sudo mount -o loop ubuntu-8.04-alternate-i386.iso /mnt/) and running the upgrade utility (gksudo "sh /mnt/cdromupgrade"), I was good to go. Or so I thought. Apparently you still need to connect to a server to verify the upgrades or something like that. Since I couldn't connect to the servers at all, it wouldn't work. But then I thought of going to System -> Administration -> Software Sources and choosing a different mirror. I let the system choose the fastest one to me, but it didn't seem to be working well. Russia? Belgium? I couldn't connect to either of them. I tried a third time. Georgia Tech. Aha.

Now that the upgrades could be authenticated or whatever had to be done, the upgrade went smoothly. After the reboot, I surveyed the virtual territory. There were the inevitable annoyances. For one, my default system font (DejaVu Sans Condensed) was uninstalled, but it was no problem to reinstall the ttf-dejavu-extra package. Another annoyance was that I would get a system beep whenever the computer booted up. I managed to turn this off by adding the line blacklist pcspkr to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist. I've also noticed a couple of times that the bootup process gets to a plain black screen and stops with no hard drive activity. A perusal of the system log suggests that this is a network problem.

The main issue (unless I'm forgetting one) is that I couldn't have two applications using the sound card at the same time. If I were listening to music in Rhythmbox and I paused it to watch a YouTube video in Firefox, I wouldn't get any sound from the video. After some digging, I found that installing libflashsupport fixed this problem, but I still couldn't use Audacity if another application was playing sound. A friendly person from the Ubuntu Forums suggested I install libasound2-plugins. After doing that (and rebooting, just for kicks), I would be able to use OSS with PulseAudio, which is new in Hardy. So I set Audacity to use OSS, and when I run Audacity with padsp audacity, as suggested in the forums, it won't want to have the sound card all to itself. Problem solved... mostly. This doesn't work for Ekiga because I can only set Ekiga to use ALSA, not OSS, but it's a start. I haven't used Ekiga much lately anyway.

(Standard disclaimer: I don't know that much about computers. I learned the above information by searching the Internet and asking people.)

The Ubuntu developers made a pretty controversial decision when they decided to make Firefox 3 Beta 5 the default browser in Gutsy. Beta software in a release that's touted to be especially stable? It doesn't add up. I did my homework and found that some of my favorite extensions wouldn't be compatible, so I made a copy of my Firefox profile folder (~./mozilla/) before upgrading. It's a good thing, too. While Firefox 3 did seem to use less RAM, I noticed that it almost froze a few times. It did have some cool features, like the new location bar with its frecency algorithm, the new download manager, and the ability to zoom in and out of entire pages like IE 7 (I think). But the lack of useful extensions was the show-stopper for me. I uninstalled Firefox 3, reinstalled Firefox 2, replaced my profile folder with the copy, and all is well again.

Except for the fonts. Now in Hardy, Firefox equates displays the clones of Times New Roman and Helvetica/Arial whenever those fonts are called for. Previously, it would just show the default serif and sans-serif fonts (DejaVu Serif and DejaVu Sans), which I think happen to look better. They scale better, for one, and I think they better suited for the screen. I don't think this font thing is specific to Firefox, and I don't know to change it, but I've changed this site's stylesheet so DejaVu Sans precedes Arial. It shouldn't make a difference to anybody except certain Linux users (or anyone else who has DejaVu Sans?), but if it has caused the sky to fall on your head, please let me know.

So, what's actually new in Hardy? Updated versions of all (well, most of) my favorite programs, like Rhythmbox music player, Pidgin instant messenger, the GIMP image editor, and the OpenOffice.org office suite. Some of the more basic default programs have been replaced with more sophisticated ones; the BitTorrent client and the CD burner come to mind. Plus, this new Tracker search tool seems pretty handy although I haven't needed to use it yet. I'll probably discover more new and exciting additions as I continue to use the operating system.

Wikipedia has a list of pigs, although it also includes hogs and wild boars.

For your entertainment, here's a slow-motion video of a tomato in a blender.

And here are some cool photos of striped icebergs that apparently look like some British candy. I wouldn't want to eat one, though.

Today was the last day of classes of the spring semester. Tomorrow and Friday are "reading days" to study for final exams. On Saturday, exams begin.

I can't believe how fast this semester has gone by. But I'm more surprised by the grades I've been getting. I was a straight-A student in high school (except for one B), and I'm on track to get 2 A's and 3 B's this semester. I guess I could have studied more. But I have to study more now. I have my physics exam on Saturday, differential equations on Monday, biology on Wednesday, and programming on Thursday. Luckily, my bio exam isn't cumulative, but the rest are.

I've been worried about physics all semester, but now that I got an 85 on the last test, I've got a B in the bag (after having a C+ most of the semester). Diff. Eq. has become the new enemy. I didn't do very well on the last two tests, so what might have been an A can now be no more than a B+ (if I'm lucky). So I've really got to hit the books. In fact, the only book I really don't have to hit is for programming, and not just because we don't have a textbook. I'm doing so well in that class that I haven't even checked to see how the grade is calculated. Programming really is my thing, y'see.

So, I talked to the latest girl today, and guess what? We're going to dinner tomorrow night!

Just kidding. She said it was a "bad time of year," with her having "three exams" in "two days" and all.

I would have asked her last week, or the week before that, or the week before that, but I was working up the nerve and I didn't want to get rejected. My careful planning has brought about the very situation I planned to avoid. This would be funny if it weren't so sad.

Moving on to important things, the next version of Ubuntu, my operating system of choice, is coming out tomorrow. It includes a lot of updated programs, including Firefox 3.0 beta 5. I just hope the update goes without a hitch. The last time I upgraded Ubuntu on my dad's computer, there were some hitches of unknown origin. I think the system managed to fix itself, but it was quite a scare, and I don't want it to happen with my computer. The alternative is to do a clean install and probably lose stuff like wireless and sound. Also, I'd have to put all my personal files and settings back on. I guess I'll just take the risk of upgrading, but I'll do a backup first in case things go awry. Wish me luck.

Here are some fun facts you probably didn't know about living in space.

I think I've posted something like this before, but in any case, here's another password strength checker.

The Pirate Bay, the world's largest BitTorrent tracker, gets a lot of nasty letters for facilitating the unauthorized downloading of copyrighted movies and music. They've posted a few of the many letters they've received, along with their responses.

On Friday night I went out to dinner with some people from Get Carded, the organ donor awareness organization I'm in. After we put on our end-of-the-year concert, there was nothing left to do but celebrate. So we went to On the Border, a Mexican place that I went to once about 5 or 6 years ago.

Not everybody was there, but some people I knew were. After we ate (good food, by the way), there were the obligatory photos. Michael, one of the co-presidents, had an award to give out. Printed on his computer, was the "Volunteer of the Year" award, and it was given to... me! I couldn't believe it. Actually, I kind of could, but it was still a little hard to believe. Apparently I was the only person who helped out at all of Get Carded's events this year. I also got a gift card for Moe's, which is this extremely popular Mexican-type place. Many people would envy the $10 in Moe's cash I now wield.

But anyway, I really appreciated the award (even though Michael and Jehan, the other co-president, forgot to sign it before they gave it to me). I have it hanging on the fridge now. Hopefully there will be some competition for the award next year. That would be great for the group.

UF's spring football game was yesterday. It's called the Orange and Blue Game after the school colors. The Gators split into Orange and Blue teams, and they played each other. They get a chance to show off their talent, and the fans get their football fix until August.

I figured it would be a pretty big thing, but I didn't know it was going to be on ESPN. Actually, by the day of the event, I did know. I had planned on watching it on TV, but I decided to go instead because it was going on about a block away and, as my roommate said, 50,000 fans would be mad at me if they found out I didn't go.

The game was pretty informal. There were 44 minutes of play, with no penalties or anything. (A referee did throw a flag once, but I think it was due to force of habit. He just picked it up without saying anything.) The coaches were just chilling there out on the field, watching each play closely. The players went pretty easy on each other, and there was no tackling the quarterbacks. (The team doesn't want to get hurt playing against itself, you know.) After each field goal or extra point, the kicker would try it again at varying distances, just for giggles.

The atmosphere was likewise relaxed. Even though the stadium wasn't packed to capacity, there were still a lot of people there, and I saw some people I knew. Everybody had a good time, although some people left early. I can't blame them. The sun was bright. Even though I was wearing a hat and the game lasted less than two hours, I got sunburned like whoa. But I'm glad I went. I had a pretty good time.

The final score was Blue 28, Orange 14. Also: The Sun 1, Jordon 0.

Yesterday evening (actually more like the late afternoon), I got inducted into the Phi Eta Sigma honor society. It wasn't anything big, really. They had a room that was way too small for all the inductees and their guests. Fortunately, the whole thing didn't last very long. They said a few words, and then they called each person up to get a pin. Then it was a free-for-all as people lined up to get their certificates. My family came to the induction, and then we had dinner. I had lunch with them again today (at Moe's) before they left.

So now I have an official-looking Phi Eta Sigma certificate and pin. I can wear the pin whenever I want to look important, and people will think I'm in some fraternity that secretly rules the world. They probably won't know that it's just an honor society that does community service every now and then.

Here's an Ask Jordon question.

Carol: Is it possible for you to see when someone is visiting your site? Like me right now?

As with most web sites, accesses to files on this site are logged, mainly for statistics purposes and my own amusement. I can tell which IP addresses have visited the site, and what browsers and operating systems they correspond with (although all of that information can be faked). When you submit an Ask Jordon question, your IP address and browser/OS information are sent as well. I can tell that your ISP is Verizon and that you're using IE 7 on Windows XP (if your browser isn't lying), but that's about it.

With regards to the story I posted last time about Illinois state representative Monique Davis, she has apologized -- though not publicly -- for her bigoted tirade.

Can't decide between Clinton or Obama? Here's a Democratic Primary Quiz (Flash).

Here are photos of 10 Interesting Abandoned Places.

Scheeze, April already? Back in January, I had the idea to start an Esperanto club on campus, and I got some of my friends interested. I haven't mentioned it much since then. What happened, you ask? Well, I certainly wasn't just sitting around, that's for sure. We've been trying to find a faculty advisor, which is required for starting a club. I've been e-mailing professors in the foreign language departments, but the few who have replied did so in the negative. People might find the job interesting but are frequently too busy. It was discouraging.

Andy came up with the great idea to ask the linguistics professors. Ah, linguistics. Odds are, they've all heard of Esperanto, so maybe they'd be interested in the idea. I e-mailed them and struck gold. Within days, e-mails came sort of pouring in. Not one, but two linguistics professors expressed interest in being our advisor. A third said he'd told the others in the department and that he'd get back to me with a good candidate. A fourth said that if we couldn't find anyone in the linguistics department, she would help us look for someone. And a lecturer from the Romance languages and literatures department sent me a reply, six weeks late, saying she would also be interested in being our advisor.

Not all responses were positive. One guy said Esperanto was a useless waste of time. But I didn't let that get me down. Instead, I worked out times to meet with the faculty members who thought that Esperanto was a useful non-waste of time. Andy and I met with the first professor on Monday morning. He's an African guy whose main interest is the extinction of languages, and he seemed to recognize Esperanto's potential for saving the many tongues around the world whose speakers are dying out. I'm supposed to meet with the other professor on Friday. It should be interesting.

Unfortunately, we probably won't have time to officially start our club this year; we'll have to wait till the fall, which means we might have to get off to a small start. Well, I was figuring we'd get off to a small start anyway, but the club approval process supposedly takes four to six weeks, and there are only... four weeks left in the semester? Well, maybe there's some time. It's worth a shot, anyway, if we can name a faculty advisor by next week. I'll have to ask the people who deal with approving clubs and see if there's time to squeeze in the approval. Then we can hit the ground running next year.

That's not the only thing I've got going on this week, though. Get Carded, the organ donation awareness group I'm a member of, is having its second annual Lifeapalooza event tomorrow night. A pretty well-known local band called Umoja Orchestra will play a free show, along with a couple of opening acts. There will also be organ recipients talking about why organ donation is so important. It's going to be at a cafe on campus called the Orange and Brew (because our school colors are orange and... blue... ha ha?). Anyway, we're also going to give everyone a free t-shirt and have them form a human ribbon outside (because every cause has to have a ribbon, you know). It should be a great way to end the year.

To help get the word out, I've been passing out flyers (actually cards) on campus. If you walk around college campuses a lot, people probably hand you a lot of glossy cards, about the size of a large index card, that tell you about upcoming concerts or parties or what have you. I'm passing out those. I spent about two hours Monday and Tuesday doing it, and I have a few more to give out tomorrow. Hopefully I've gotten some people interested. Although a lot of people avoid me as I stand in the middle of a foot thoroughfare, most people take the cards I put in front of them, and a few even come up and ask for one. It all adds up. I think the turnout at Lifeapalooza tomorrow will be great.

The call to End Software Patents is pretty common among the nerdy set. Find out what it's all about.

Want to celebrate your next birthday with class while trying to hide your age? Get Roman Candles for your birthday cake, so you can party like it's MCMXCIX.

Someday, I'm going to get a job. I want to work for a company that's friendly to Linux and related software projects. Here's how a number of major companies stand.

Hello, Saturday. This has been the most boring day on record. I woke up around 10:00 as my roommate, Adam, was helping his girlfriend, Xandra, get ready to leave. After doing my weekly backup of my system, I went to the dining hall to eat, but there were tons of people lining up to get in there, so I went to Taco Bell. There were also tons of people in line there, but it was Taco Bell, so I stayed. I think all the people were in tour groups. Adam went fishing, and now he's apparently somewhere with some buddies. I don't think I'd want to be there, though.

Back up your files regularly. I cannot stress this enough. I use sbackup, which has a GNOME user interface. It's probably available in your Linux distribution's package manager... if you use Linux, that is. But seriously, invest in an external hard drive, and that's half the battle right there.

I've been reading Hamlet quite a bit lately. I can't get enough of that Hamlet character. Such wit he has. Even his first line, "A little more than kin, and less than kind," speaks volumes or at least sentences. Then there's this bit in Act 3, Scene 2:

Hamlet: Lady, shall I lie in your lap? [Lying down at Ophelia's feet.]
Ophelia: No, my lord.
Hamlet: I mean, my head upon your lap?
Ophelia: Ay, my lord.
Hamlet: Do you think I meant country matters?*
Ophelia: I think nothing, my lord.
Hamlet: That's a fair thought to lie between maids' legs.
Ophelia: What is, my lord?
Hamlet: Nothing.

*Sylvan Barnet says Hamlet is making a pun here. What a rogue, that Hamlet. A rogue and peasant slave is he.

Who here thinks Hamlet was actually mad? I can't help but think that he kept his wits all along. He just got a little stressed out by the whole thing, though. I do think Ophelia actually went mad, though. Is it an unfair characterization of women that they can so easily snap? Gertrude seems to have a good head on her shoulders, though, once Hamlet clues her in on Claudius's doings.

Last month, I chose my dorm room for next year: it'll be on the same floor in the same building as my current room, but on the other side of the floor. Turns out that this guy Ryan, who was one of my lab partners last semester, picked the same room. Pretty cool. But today he let me know that he changed his room to the building next door because his current RA is going to be over there. Dude must be a pretty awesome RA if he induces that kind of behavior. I never see my RA around, but that's okay. Anyway, Ryan said I could still live with him, but I think I'd rather be in the building I'm in now. It's a little closer to everything that's worth going to. Hopefully Mystery Roommate Selection will work out as well as it did the first time.

In slightly more comforting news, I might have housing secured for the year after next. My current suitemate Evan is getting a place practically across the street from campus, and if he has 3 other guys with him, it'll only be $150 a month each. If I collect, find, or steal $5 a day, I'll have it made in the shade. Not bad, I say. In fact, it meets the three C's, my criteria for an off-campus housing arrangement: close, cheap, and having cool people. I just made that up.

Thanks to everyone who commented on my, uh, little dilemma regarding the opposite sex. The general consensus is, "Jeez, Jordon, you can't learn how to talk to people by reading a book, so cut it out!" For some reason, I disagree. Actually, it's because this one book, How to Talk to Anyone, has some good pointers on making good conversation and getting people to like you. Granted, a lot of it has to do with meeting businesspeople at parties, but a lot of the tips are good in general use as well. I'm already starting to internalize a few of the simpler ones.

Luke gave me something good to chew on: "You are Jordon. Jordon is pretty interesting, but sometimes he forgets to tell people that. You shouldn't be someone else but less ashamed to show people who you are, which is not a list of _what_ you do but more _why_. For what does the history of Jordon serve as preface?" (Usenet-style emphasis in original.)

This site apparently grew out of a thread on Joshua McGee's web site: myhamsterdied.info, a "support group for hammie lovers."

41 Hilarious Science Fair Experiments. At least a few are digitally manipulated, but they're still funny.

The ACLU is keeping a running estimate of the total number of people on US government's "no-fly" list. There's also a list of some notable names on the list. Apparently the government thinks almost a million people -- including dead people, small children, and Ted Kennedy -- are terrorists. (Insert joke about Ted Kennedy's car accident here.)

It's always been my life's dream to appear on Jeopardy!. Yesterday, I got my chance... sort of. Okay, not really.

They had a Jeopardy!-type game going on at my dorm (the nerd honors dorm), so I decided to check it out. Everyone was split into three teams: one had four people, one had about five people, and mine had three people. Not very fair, I know. But I played like a pro. (We scored as a team, but other than collaborating on the Double Jeopardy and Final Jeopardy questions, we played individually.) I had the whole confident attitude down, too. We played a whole game, right down to the Final Jeopardy. Up to that point, my team had a big enough lead to win no matter what. But we got the final question right anyway, thanks to my ingenuity.

The secret of Jeopardy! is that it's a learning game. The answers are things you don't know about things that you do know. If you can guess what the answer is trying to tell you about some very obvious thing, you will get the question. That's how I figured out the Final Jeopardy, which was: "This term still had 'work' on the end when Vinton Cerf & Robert Kahn, two of its creators, used it in a key 1974 paper." I guessed "Internet." And we were right. It's something you didn't know about something you know.

Even though I didn't win anything, it was still cool. And it turns out that the questions were taken from an actual episode of College Jeopardy!, so maybe I'd have a chance on the show.

Now, for your enjoyment, here's the video for "Weird Al" Yankovic's 1984 song "I Lost on Jeopardy."

Recently, a friend whom I mainly contact online asked me to be in his will. In the event of his death, I would be given the task of maintaining his web sites (with compensation). There would be an option for his son to take control of the sites when he turns 18, but that's something like 14 years away. Say he dies in 10 years. How are the lawyers going to contact me? I won't have the same address (I'm in college, plus, my family is moving), and I probably won't have the same phone number. What's more likely to stay the same? An e-mail address.

I've had my main e-mail address for 9 years now. My e-mail service is from company that I don't know much about. I pay them for premium service by the year, but when I renew early, the next year of service starts immediately. I don't think I can trust them to be around another 9 or 10 years. But I have to have some e-mail address for this will. What's the solution? E-mail forwarding.

My web host doesn't offer e-mail, but it does offer e-mail forwarding. So, I begrudgingly switched on e-mail forwarding for my domain name at a cost of $0.02 per day. I've used it before, but I never liked it. You send me an e-mail to a beautiful-looking address that I can't reply from. You expect me to reply from that lovely address, but you get a reply back from my ugly one. It's unprofessional. So what do you do?

At first, I wasn't sure you could do anything about it. Now that I have a compelling reason to use e-mail forwarding (lest I can't be contacted and my deceased friend's sites turn into a barren search-keyword wasteland), I decided to look into ways around this mess. My first source was to refer to my web host. Their FAQ says that if you want to send e-mail that appears to be from your forwarding address, you have to configure your e-mail client to do it.

Since I use the pretty amazing Thunderbird for my e-mail, I thought that there should be a good way to do it. I tried an extension that managed to get the job done, but it wasn't pretty. I could send e-mail "from" my forwarding address, but I had to type it in manually every time unless I was writing a reply. (The extension author's English also wasn't pretty.) I figured that Thunderbird should have something like this built in... and it turns out that it does.

Say you have a forwarding address that forwards to your real address. Adapted from instructions here, this is how you can send e-mail from your real address that looks like it's coming from your forwarding address:

• Go to the account settings for your e-mail address.
• Click "Manage Identities..."
• Click "Add..."
• In the "E-mail address" field, enter your forwarding address.
• Hit OK, OK, OK, etc. You're done.

Now when you write an e-mail, you can select either address from the "From:" drop-down menu. If you reply to an e-mail that was sent to your forwarding address, the forwarding address will be selected by default for you to send from. I'm not very good at deciphering e-mail headers, but it appears that your actual address isn't visible in messages that you send.

Now that I don't have any worries about using e-mail forwarding, I'm phasing in a nice-looking theworldofstuff.com address. Problem solved!

(I eagerly await the barrage of people saying, "use gmail use gmail use gmail.")

Fitna, the controversial film by Dutch politician Geert Wilders, has just been released on the Internet. Watch it here to get an idea of the things religious extremism can do.

I don't think I get enough e-mail for this to happen: e-mail apnea.

National Geographic has a cool article on this new particle accelerator thing: "The God Particle." It's funny how many of their articles have nothing to do with geography.

Spring break is over, and now it's back to school. There are no more holidays till the end of the spring semester -- the end of my first year of college. It's gone by so fast, I don't even know what to think. But it's not over yet.

On Friday, I did manage to go to the beach with my sister and our friends Yamilee and Austin. We only stayed for about an hour. I think I like the idea of going to the beach more than I actually like going to the beach. The sun's unbearably hot, you have to put on sunscreen which is kind of icky, sand gets all over you, there are lots of people around, and, in our case, the water was freezing. I managed to get about halfway in, but that's the best I could do. It'll be warmer in the summer.

After the beach, we ate lunch and went to Whole Foods so Austin and Yamilee could shop.

That night, my sister and I got to hang out with our friends Nick, Mike, and Jarian. They've apparently discovered this Brazilian restaurant/pool hall, so we went there to shoot some pool. A lot of pool, actually. We stayed for about three hours. I'm not very good at pool, but I have my moments. It was pretty discouraging how bad I was, though. Another thing I noticed was that there were a lot of couples there. Mike and Jarian each brought their girlfriends. I also had my attention turned to a hot girl who was playing pool with her boyfriend at a nearby table. Every once in a while, they stopped to suck face.

There was some kind of party going on in the restaurant portion of the place, so there was live Brazilian music that was extremely loud. I mean, it was just two guys, but the volume was immense. I left with a headache, which continued to plague me throughout the next day.

Soon, my date will be rescheduled. Maybe right after I post this...

On Saturday, we left to stay at my aunt's house, and today, I got dropped off at the dorm. And here I am. I've been dreading coming back because I have a big physics test on Wednesday, but once I got settled back into my dorm room, it felt kind of nice. I just wish I didn't have to go to class tomorrow, though. Oh well. I don't have any classes on Tuesday.

And now, the links.

Unicode has some crazy Miscellaneous Symbols.

It's pretty interesting to see what Europeans think of each other.

This Visual Trace Route Tool might be of use to someone who wants to see where a web site is physically located. It shows theworldofstuff.com as being on Florida's space coast, even though it's hosted in Arizona. I'm not sure why there's a discrepancy.

Has anyone used Amazon MP3? The idea of having an online store with DRM-free music from all four major labels and many independent ones is big. Really big. I want to know what people's experiences with it are.

I quit eMusic a few months ago. It wasn't really for me. Between its monthly pricing scheme and narrow selection, I found myself in a rush to get my monthly allotment out of the way. I had the cheapest plan: $9.99 a month for 30 tracks. I'm not a voracious music fan who buys two or three albums a month; I just get a catchy song stuck in my head once in a while and feel the need to add it to my collection. Therefore, paying for individual tracks would be better for me. And, of course, no DRM. That's a must.

Unless you're downloading a whole album, Amazon MP3 charges by the track. They seem to be in the range of $0.89 to $0.99 (USD). Albums typically go between $5.99 and $9.99, but to get that pricing, you need to use Amazon's downloader, which is now available for the most popular Linux distributions as well as Windows and Mac.

(The only issue I would seem to have is that to get the special album pricing, you need to use a program that probably isn't free software. But I don't think it's that much of an issue because I'm already using proprietary wireless and graphics drivers as well as a proprietary BIOS. To shun Amazon's downloader would be hypocritical.)

So, have you used Amazon MP3? Did they have everything you wanted? Did you use it to discover new things? How is it on your wallet? Did you run into any technical problems? I want to know.

And now, the links.

Check out The Evolution of Tech Companies' Logos. Microsoft's original logo was groovy!

Scientology kills. Read all about it.

Here's a New York Times chart showing the adoption of new technologies over the past century. It's plain to see that people pick up on new technologies faster than they did 100 years ago.

I'm on spring break. Woo spring break!

Now what?

Well, I'm home, for one thing, after spending a weekend at my grandparents'. Now that I'm back in South Florida, I'm looking to visit the old school. I dropped by after school one day in December, but I haven't been around while classes were in session, so I've missed out on seeing a lot of people. The teachers, especially. I have all the answers lined up for them:

"Not too bad."
"It's nice."
"Yeah."

Maybe I don't have that much to say to some of them. But I'm sure a lot of them would appreciate it if I stopped by to say hello! I'd also like to see a lot of people who I no longer see except on MySpace. Good times will be had... if my sister and I can get there in the first place. It's that darn not-having-a-car thing. Also that having-too-much-pride-to-take-the-bus thing? Complicating things is the fact that they're having standardized testing in the mornings for the rest of this week, so we'd best not interrupt. It'll have to be in the afternoon, then.

I customarily go to the beach with my friends at least once during spring break. (I only go about twice a year despite living relatively right next to it.) But many of my spring break beach buddies now go to school at nearby FAU, which had its spring break last week. Hopefully we can do something, anyway.

In Oklahoma, the recently proposed House Bill 2211 would allow schoolchildren to express their religious beliefs in just about any way possible without being penalized. Students taking science tests would be able to answer with their own beliefs rather than actual facts, and they would have to get a good grade. The child who says that the earth was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster would have to get just as much credit as the student with logic and reasoning on his side. Disgusting. Worse yet is that Texas already passed this law (which was written not by politicians but by a group of fundamentalist lawyers), and the state's schools are suffering for it.

This would be totally cool as a real movie: Minesweeper: The Movie.

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