Category - Language

Oh hi.

On Wednesday, I studied for my programming exam with this girl. We had a friend in common, and I had been helping her study and work on projects. "Thank you so much," she probably said. "Do you want to unwind and have dinner tomorrow night?" I asked. "Sure!" "Like a date?" "... We'll see!" "Okay, call me." Note to self: never say "call me." Nobody calls you. I should write a list of things not to say. It would be a very long list.

On Thursday, shortly after I wrote my last post, my parents came over and helped me pack stuff up from my dorm room. That took about an hour and a half. I spent the night at my aunt's house nearby, and the next day, I was due to check out. I cleaned up a little bit, and the RA came to make sure that I left my side of the room reasonably clean and didn't forget anything in the drawers. She told me that by the end of that day, Friday, only three people on our floor would remain. She had me sign a form, and then she left.

It was just me and my roommate, Adam. After I took my room and mailbox keys off my keyring, we exchanged goodbyes, I thanked him for being a great roommate, and I left. My other remaining suitemate, Evan, wasn't in his room. So I went down to the lobby and returned my keys. It was over. That evening, I was home.

As I was taking boxes from the rented van in the driveway, a familiar car stopped in front of our house. It was my friends Nick, Mike, and TJ. They were headed to Clamsters to shoot some pool and have a bite. After filling my entire room with boxes, I joined them. I had a good time. We might have done something after that, but it all runs together in my mind. I forget. See, since I got home, I've probably spent more time with them than I have at home.

I definitely know what we did yesterday, though. Nick, TJ, and I started by seeing Iron Man. Nick had already seen the movie the day before, but he couldn't see it enough times. After that, we went to his house and played video games. Then we went to Hooters, where Mike met up with us. After standing around in the parking lot and wondering what to do, we decided to go to Clamsters again. Nick and TJ wanted Mike to talk to a waitress-acquaintance who he was apparently talking to the day before. He stalled until she left; then they got her phone number from another waitress. He wouldn't call her, so they texted her, and eventually, he left her a message apologizing for their stupidity. We drove around for a little while longer and then went home.

Nick had a little birthday get-together today. Mike, TJ, and I were there, along with a few other friends and family members. It was pretty crazy, actually. There are a lot of kids in his family -- mostly boys -- and they're wild. It's funny, though. Surprisingly, we didn't see Iron Man today, although I would have been willing to. Nick said he needed a break from it so he could forget some of the plot points and be surprised when watching the movie again. Probably not going to happen. Anyway, after that, we went to the Pompano Bowl to bowl for an hour. Then we had to split, and I went home.

I haven't been home for a while, so I've been noticing things that have changed both in my house and in the surrounding environment. Some are subtle: we got a new phone with a built-in answering machine and caller ID, or they painted this building over here some other color. Some are more drastic. They totally redid the interior of the Pompano Bowl. They installed blacklights, got some new artwork, and painted the walls purple. They put screens between the lanes, some of which were showing videos from the new video jukebox thing. And I don't remember a drinking section being there before. But so it was, in the lanes right outside Joey's (formerly Gary's) Sports Bar and Grill.

Things change. Some things never change. I'll admit that I was heaving a Hail Mary on Wednesday -- a date on my last night at school? Hardly a chance, and I knew it. If my personal ad doesn't work, I give up. And now, the links.

I put the "laughter" in "slaughter." You have to be pretty bored to notice some Words in Words.

Here's an interactive, visual introduction to black holes: Anatomy of a Black Hole (Flash).

From the Songs Everyone Knows But No One Knows the Names Of Dept.: "Powerhouse" is the "assembly line" music used in cartoons.

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.)

To my surprise, the Esperanto article I was supposed to be interviewed for was published today. The reporter interviewed my friend Andy at my suggestion and never got back to me. I'm glad for him, anyway. Plus, our hopefully-soon-to-be-launched Esperanto club got a mention. From the article:

Here's the full article: Esperanto fans in S. Florida cling to idealistic language.

Okay, this is something I really can't figure out for the life of me. Why do a few of my blog posts attract so much comment spam? This old post, "Where's my trailer?", gets upwards of hundreds of spam attempts a day. (No comment spam actually gets through thanks to the two anti-spam measures I've had in place for about a year.) "Really bad Rita" is another eternal favorite for spammers, as are "Where's my trailer again?", "Tornado waste of time", "Here's to 16 more", "From the song files of Jordon Kalilich", and a few others. I find it interesting that they were all posted in 2005. Other than that, I can't find a common link. I haven't done a word analysis of those posts, but it's not like I'm talking about mortgages, ringtones, gambling, World of Warcraft gold, or prescription drugs. (Am I asking for it here?) What's the deal? I challenge my other blogging readers to find (if possible) their most frequently spammed entries. What do they have in common that's so attractive to spammers?

As I was writing this, I heard a voice call out in the hallway. That's funny, I thought in italics, that sounds like Shannon, our RA from last semester who has since graduated. Then I heard another voice: "Shannon!"

It was Shannon indeed. She was her same old bleach-blonde self with her same old Midwestern accent, though she was looking tanner than ever. She's been applying to moderately prestigious law schools throughout the country, but, frustratingly, she's been waitlisted by most of them. Since moving back home to Chicago, she's been thinking about retaking the LSAT, and she's gotten a job (at a tanning salon). She said she's here in town with her friends till Saturday, and that she'll be around to hang out with her (not so) old floormates.

And now, the links.

Read about the Curious Histories of Generic Domain Names.

Dot-com days are here again? Check out some Web 2.0 Workplaces.

In this quiz, you're presented with six paintings. You have to guess whether each was painted by an artist or an ape. My roommate got four right.

On Saturday, I got an e-mail from a reporter from my local paper, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. She got my contact information from Esperanto-USA, which I recently joined for 2008, and wanted to interview me by phone for an article on Esperanto, which I've recently gotten interested in again.

Now time for the obligatory aside. Longtime readers may have a hazy recollection that I was interviewed and photographed by the Sun-Sentinel for an article on blogs in 2003, and interviewed and photographed again by their indie-style paper's more cynical article on blogs in 2004. So I'm no stranger to being interviewed by the Sun-Sentinel. In fact, I rather enjoy it. I find that when I'm talking to reporters, I become more eloquent that usual, even profoundly so. But that was when I was being asked about myself and my blogging. This time, I expect, I'll be asked about Esperanto, which I don't know as much about as I could.

Anyway, I gave her my number and told her when I was free, and she asked if I knew of any other Esperanto speakers in specific Broward County cities. I said I did know my friend Andy, a fellow Browardite up here at college who was familiar with the language, although I didn't know what city he was from. (He's one of the friends I'm starting the Esperanto club with.) So I hooked them up, and yesterday she interviewed him by phone. She asked him for further details on Teach Yourself Esperanto, the textbook I used to teach myself Esperanto, and on Pasporta Servo, the worldwide Esperanto hospitality network, so I gave him the info. He also joined Esperanto-USA. He said he's getting really excited about the whole Esperanto club thing, which is great, because it's enthusiasm that we're going to need... since we still can't find a faculty advisor.

So she hasn't called me yet, and I'm not sure if she will. But even if not, I'm glad Andy got a chance to represent Esperanto to our local paper. Now if only the local paper up here -- or even a campus newspaper -- did a story on Esperanto, it would really be great for our nascent club.

And Friday is February 29, that once-in-every-four-years leap day. Four years ago, I thought it would be cool to document the day in photographs, and I sort of pledged to do the same every leap day afterward. I don't have the photos online anymore 'cause they're kinda dumb, but I'll probably put them back online along with the photos from February 29, 2008. It'll be interesting to see how I've changed in the past four years.

This video is from The Onion, but it may as well be true: Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early.

We've all heard of people who will do anything that scammers tell them to, but did you know that it also works the other way around? This guy conned a Nigerian scammer into copying Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by hand.

This is what passes for police blotter in Bozeman, Montana: The Best of the Bozeman Chronicle Police Reports.

It's been a busy week. Last night I had a biology test. Tomorrow I have a differential equations test, and on Monday, a physics test. I wish all my tests weren't concentrated in such a short amount of time, but I guess it's better that I get them all over with within a week... only to be struck by another wave of tests a few weeks later.

Dayum. If you Google "lefty," Being Left-Handed is currently #7. How long will that last? I don't even know how it -- I mean, my lefty page -- is so popular. It's by no means extensive, and virtually no sites link to it. Come to think of it, I should probably add some information I read in Stanley Coren's "The Left-Hander Syndrome" for a high-school psychology paper in '04... which shows how recently I've updated the page. (I don't think I ever have, other than to remove some clip art and an animated GIF of my left hand in various annoying colors. If you remember that, I'm sorry.)

A few months ago, someone e-mailed me about an online quiz that they suggest I take. I checked it out, decided it was worthy of posting, and linked to it here. The other day, I got a surprisingly similar e-mail, addressed first to "Jordan" and later to "you guys," suggesting I take a similar quiz from the same site. The author says, "I thought would be perfect for your site. Especially in your geek section." The e-mail was from a live.ca address, and I think the first one was too (although it's not uncommon, being Canadian Hotmail and all). I don't have the text of the original e-mail handy, although I probably have it in one of my weekly system backups if you really, really care. (You don't care.) Well, I just thought that was weird. Does this quiz site employ manual spammers, or is it just a coincidence?

Enough asking questions. People have questions to Ask Jordon. Well, one person does, anyway.

Laura: what is your favorite restaraunt?

If we're talking about worldwide chains, Taco Bell can't be beat. I mean, beaten. I love Taco Bell and enjoy having one right on campus, a five-minute walk away.

"Washington Crossing the Delaware" is a poem in which each line is an anagram of the title. It rhymes and makes sense and everything. Pretty impressive.

Music these days is way too loud. Record producers want their songs to be the loudest, so they compress the sound, making the quiet parts as loud as the loud parts. Every valley is being exalted, and every hill made low. The result is music that's boring to listen to because there's no variety. Luckily, the Turn Me Up campaign is working to reverse this trend.

Check out the Secret Word of the Day web site every day to see what the secret word of the day is. When you hear the secret word, scream real loud!

Esperanto. It was created to be a second language for the whole world. The number of speakers is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands, at least. I took up Esperanto briefly in 2003 and again in 2005. To prove how into it I was, I still have the category of Esperanto-related posts. But I haven't used it much in the past two years. I got somewhat bored with it because I had no one to talk to. (If I were in a sitcom, this is where the audience would say "Aww...")

Last week, I made a new friend and got her interested in learning Esperanto. (She has a boyfriend, by the way; I left my last post open-ended because I wasn't sure.) Anyway, I haven't gotten a chance to meet with her again, but we've been talking online quite a bit. As I was talking about her to Joey (from down the hall) and Adam (my roommate), Joey mentioned that his roommate Andy knew Esperanto. Sure enough, he said he'd studied it recently, and he was familiar with some Esperanto web sites, books, and authors. He also said it would be cool if we started an Esperanto club.

Do you hear that? It's opportunity knocking.

I'm thinking that such a club would eventually consist of both Esperanto classes and social events. I've been trying to find information about other college Esperanto clubs to see what they do, but I can only really find two: one at UT Austin and one at Rochester. I guess it's better than none.

I've been looking into the process for starting a student organization, and it doesn't sound too terribly difficult. You have to have a president and a treasurer, three student members in all, a faculty advisor, and a constitution. Finding a faculty advisor will probably be the hardest part. His signature is required for you to start your club, but you can decide what his duties should be. Andy mentioned that the guy who teaches "The Tao of Star Trek" (it's an actual class) might be a good person to ask, but I'd rather not promote the idea that Esperanto is only for freaks 'n' geeks. It's a real language used by real people in real life, so I'd rather have a foreign language professor helping us out.

As for a name, I tried to think of one that would have the same initials in English and Esperanto, but eventually, I came up with "Esperanto@UF": that way, it would be the same in both languages. I think it'd be good for other Esperanto speakers who will get the idea that we're representing our university (the University of Florida) in the Esperanto community, and it'd be good for our fellow students who will find that "Esperanto@UF" implies that Esperanto doesn't exist just at our university but also elsewhere. Plus, the @ is reminiscent of technology and the future.

The three of us will have to get together and talk about it this weekend. There's a lot to plan.

How do you know when you've been procrastinating too much? I'll tell you how. Last week, rather than doing some homework, I figured out how to get the Java Runtime Environment (necessary for running Java applets on web pages) working on my computer. Even though I installed the sun-java6-jre package from Ubuntu's multiverse repository, Firefox wasn't recognizing Java applets. So I referred to some documentation that explained everything. All I had to do was the enter the following commands:

cd ~/.mozilla/plugins
ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.03/jre/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so

One of the things that makes a neighborhood good is its walking distance from important places. Find your home's Walk Score to determine how walking-friendly its location is. My house has a score of 43/100. My dorm gets a 37/100.

This guy tried to get the most expensive drink at Starbucks. It cost him $13.76 (after tax).

I visited my suitemate in the hospital on Thursday along with some other people. His mother and his brother were there. He was asleep at first, but very slowly he woke up and we tried to make small talk. We stuck around for about two and a half hours. It was a little awkward, but I hope he enjoyed our visit. I can't imagine whether he would have or not.

He lives near me, and it turns out that we went to the same mom-and-baby-type place when we were little. Maybe we played together. Maybe our moms remember each other.

I don't think he'll be back for a while.

Thursday night was the spring kickoff meeting for Gator Freethought. It was at this place called Tim and Terry's, which is a house-turned-restaurant with just enough room for a little live music. The main dining area was the former backyard, so that's where I made my way. There were a lot of people from the group just chatting, which was the point of the get-together. I sat away from everyone else at first, but then someone beckoned me to join in, so I sat between a girl and a guy. The guy introduced himself to me, and we made a little small talk. What's your name? What's your major? What year are you? Where are you from?

I decided to initiate similar small talk with the girl next to me. We talked for a while. Then we were both hungry, so we ordered some food at the counter inside. When we brought it back outside, we found our own table and talked some more. Did we ever. She's a first-year student who lives alone in an apartment. She hardly has any friends in town. She goes home on the weekends to work, and she has a job in town during the week. She doesn't like to go to parties. Sometimes when she's bored, she makes up math problems in her head and solves them. She loves learning languages, and when I told her about Esperanto, which I studied a few years ago, she said she'd want to learn.

Almost four hours after saying hello, we were still talking as she was walking with me back to my dorm even though her apartment was really close to the restaurant. Now that I'm home for the long weekend, I'll be able to bring my copy of Teach Yourself Esperanto for her to learn from... or for us to go over together.

It's not often you can say with certainty that something is going to happen at a specific time in the future. But 30 years from today, on Tuesday, January 19, 2038, there's going to be a Y2K-like problem that will affect many of today's computers -- if they still happen to be running.

Unix-like operating systems (such as Mac OS X and Linux) internally represent dates and times as the number of seconds since midnight on January 1, 1970. On 32-bit computers, the most common kind in use today, these operating systems store the time in 32 bits. But on January 19, 2038, the number of seconds will get too long to be stored in 32 bits, so the extra digits will be ignored, and these systems will think it's December 13, 1901. In other words, it would be like Y2K, but on a smaller scale.

Don't panic, though. Not every computer runs a Unix-like operating system, and anyway, the problem is slowly being fixed with the introduction of 64-bit computers, which allow twice as many bits for storing the time. This should serve us well for about 290,000,000,000 years. But because computers can and do last for more than 30 years, there will probably be some around that will experience the bug. Hopefully, though, they'll be historical curiosities by then and not repositories of important data. Wikipedia has some more information about Y2K38.

If the text of this blog post survives 30 years, I wonder if people will read and laugh at it. I'll probably laugh. Hey 2038 people, do you guys have flying cars yet? Does everyone use Linux? Are there still ice caps? Are we in a cold war with China? Oh, the questions I would ask the 48-year-old me. Where do I live? Am I married, and do I have kids? How much money do I make? (In 2008 dollars, please, so I can understand. 2038 Chinese yuan would be okay too.)

Rolling Stone presents The Almost-Impossible Rock & Roll Quiz. I got 30 right out of 58. That's over 50%. I made a lot of guesses.

Do you know what Congress is up to? Now you can keep track at GovTrack.us.

Find out how many five-year-olds you could take in a fight with this quiz called "How Many Five Year Olds Could You Take in a Fight?" at howmanyfiveyearoldscouldyoutakeinafight.com. Turns out I could take 10 five-year-olds in a fight.

It's Christmas Eve, and you know what that means. Tomorrow's Christmas. It's a time when a lot of people go to church who otherwise wouldn't. As an atheist, I have to make this decision. Should I go because it's a family tradition, or should I not go because it would be dishonest on my part? Or: should I be a pushover or a jerk? About.com has this to say:

The people at church are pretty nice to me, and I would enjoy hearing the music and seeing the kids put on the Christmas pageant (if it doesn't get severely abridged like it did last year). If I go, I will feel really awkward like I did last year. I wanted to shrink away to nothing. I saw people I used to see all the time and expected them to say, "And where have you been?" If I don't go, I'll still feel really awkward because I did go last year. It's a no-win situation for me. But I guess I'll go along to watch because I feel as though I need some good humiliation now and then. It's the Catholic in me.

The Christmas season is a time that reminds us to be generous. To that end, I've decided to make some small donations to non-profit organizations that are responsible for providing the world with free knowledge and software. Actually, I forgot to bring my checkbook home, so it'll have to wait till I get back to school. But I plan to donate to Wikimedia and the Free Software Foundation. I'd donate to Ubuntu, but they don't seem to take donations by check. Does anyone have any other ideas?

So I took this elaborate personality test. Here are the results if you want to read them, but I thought I'd make a note of the recommendations it had for me:

• Appreciate that your skill set can be useful in many ways; your attention to detail and your familiarity with the inner-workings of things are valuable assets.
• Try looking beyond the earthly qualities of things in order to expand your perspective, without losing your grounding in reality.
• Because other people would benefit immensely from your understanding and insight, you should try to be more outgoing in social situations, even when they make you uncomfortable. Others will want to hear what you have to say!

A guy spent 30 minutes watching CNN Headline News and decided to make a pie chart with a breakdown of the content. Not much of it was actually news.

Read ultra-condensed versions of classic books: Book-A-Minute Classics. There are also similar collections for sci-fi/fantasy, children's books, and movies.

Some taste-testing experiments demonstrate the subjectivity of wine. In one test, the same wine was put into both a cheap-looking bottle and a fancier bottle. Wine critics thought the expensive-looking wine tasted much better. In another test, critics praised a red wine for its fruitiness even though it was actually a white wine dyed red.

On Monday night, I went to see Less Than Jake play a show on Flavet Field, which is a short walk from my dorm. I'm not that big into ska, but my friend Sean is, so he came all the way up from UCF to see them for the seventh time. Since Less Than Jake was the headliner, I first listened to the opening acts, which were The Expendables, Reel Big Fish, and Pepper. Of those three, I had only heard of Reel Big Fish, but they all put on a good show. Between the second and third acts, I got hungry and went to the dining hall for a bite to eat. I didn't miss much, though.

But yeah, Less Than Jake was a real crowd-pleaser. Sean was up in the front the whole time, and he almost got to go onstage. They were picking out a random single guy and girl from the audience. They asked the guy and the girl to make out while they were playing a song, and the two strangers obliged. Then the girl pulled another girl onto the stage and they started making out. Such is the power that ska has over people. I must say, it does get the toes a-tappin'. I really had a good time, even though I didn't skank. I'd probably see Less Than Jake again.

Speaking of bands that I really don't know that well: about a year ago, a waitress at Chili's said I looked like Gerard Way from My Chemical Romance... "when he had dark hair." Not like I was familiar with the guy anyway. And what's stranger is that a few other people I met also thought I looked like him. Have a look for yourself:

The other day, I was walking back to my dorm from class when a guy on a bike stopped beside me and said I looked like Adam Jones of Tool. He said that with my long hair and everything, I could pass for the guy's brother. I didn't know who Adam Jones was, but I mentioned that some people thought I looked like the guy from My Chemical Romance. He didn't know who Gerard Way was either. But I do kind of look like Adam Jones:

(Oh yeah, and there's a picture of me on the About Me page.)

The people have spoken! Just in time for the holidays, you can get World of Stuff gear at the World of Stuff Store. Available for purchase are T-shirts, tank tops, and sweatshirts with the "Property of" design I posted recently, but if people will actually buy this stuff, maybe I'll think of some other things to add.

And for your information, here's how the store works. It's run by CafePress. You order through them, and they fill the order -- I have nothing to do with it except that I get a cut of the profit. All the money I make will go toward running the web site. So check out the World of Stuff Store and see what I currently have to offer.

Here are 20 weird English words with their definitions. I had heard of about three of them. Number 7 should be "limerence."