Category - Language

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."

The weekend was nice. I "chillaxed" and "took it easy," as they say.

Friday was Gator Growl, the homecoming pep rally. I didn't go. It's apparently known for humorous, pre-recorded skits. Apparently one of them poked fun at those of us living in Hume Hall. Do "Humies" really prefer video games to sex? That's an unfair characterization.

I managed to get a ticket to the homecoming game after 25 minutes on the phone. It turns out that my seat (Section 23, Row 43) was way in the back of the lower level of seats behind one of the goal posts, so the section above me was giving me shade. It was good that I didn't get sunburned or even hot, but it was bad that I felt like I was watching the game through a letterbox. Plus, I was behind the handicapped section. The handicapped section! Way to sort out your priorities, ticket office. But I did have a full view down the field if I stood up, so I stood for much of the game. I also tried looking into the camera when the ball was kicked into the goal post. It was fun seeing a live college football game even if I couldn't see the yellow first down line or watch the commentators show pictures of the quarterback when he was 10 years old. I was just glad that we won the game, beating Vanderbilt 49-22.

Sometimes I get annoyed by really trivial things. Some people are apparently getting bored of the same smileys or emoticons day in and day out, so they've come up with some creative extensions, some of which I find annoying. I swear I've seen all of these in the wild.

<3 - A heart. This one is pretty common and not annoying. But it leads to...
<3333 - Many hearts. I assume they're stacked one on top of the other or something.
E> - A heart that goes the other way. Also, it's apparently been retouched with the Sharpen Tool.
XD - Your eyes are closed and your mouth is wide open, so you're presumably laughing. Hard to read as anything other than "X.D."
XDDDD - You have multiple mouths (or 56,797 in hex).
:] - You are a happy robot.
[: - You are an upside-down robot.
:B - You're a hillbilly?
>< ;; - I don't know.
:< - You're a cat. An indoor cat that eats Fancy Feast.
;_; - You're crying because you can't torrent your fansubbed anime episodes.
:3 - You have a cleft palate.

A guy decided to listen to Abba's song "Dancing Queen" non-stop during a multi-hour, solo road trip. Here's a video of the highlights.

There are "plenty" of examples of quotation mark abuse at The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks.

Check out Verizon's style book for deploying the "Can you hear me now?" guy. It's pretty detailed.

So yesterday was Halloween. Halloween is fun if you're a little kid because you dress up in a costume and get free candy. Halloween is also fun if you're a college student because you party. But that's not generally true. I mean, I didn't party. I don't like to party -- I don't, I don't like to party. So I didn't do much last night other than try to forget how much money I owe. But in the afternoon, my sister and I went to see The Nightmare Before Christmas in 3-D. Wait, didn't I do that last year? The answer is yes. It was so cool that I wanted to see it again. It is pretty amazing that they can convert 2-D films to 3-D. In fact, I first heard about the technology a while a back when Guess Who showed interest in using it on his old films. That's right: George Lucas.

As is the way of these things, the festivities leading up to the holiday were probably better than the holiday itself. Every year, each floor in Hume Hall makes a haunted house for local kids to enjoy (?). My side of the floor wasn't really interested, so the other side used their common room (and their hallways) for the haunted house. We decided on the theme "Haunted Hospital." I checked it out on Tuesday, and it was really cool. It wasn't like people jumping out and shouting at you, but it was like people lying around on stretchers and bleeding. It was cooler than I made it sound. I would be scared if I were a little kid. The only other haunted house I checked out was a haunted summer camp where people come out of nowhere with giant guns or something. I think it was voted the scariest. Why do we put so much effort into frightening children, anyway?

Today, as my friend Ashley and I were walking back to our dorm from the library, we ended up walking next to a family. There was a mom and a dad talking, and a boy and a girl not much younger than we (or us). I couldn't help but hear that they were talking about the honors program. Then, since we were right there, the dad asked me and Ashley if we lived in Hume Hall, the honors dorm. We said yes. They were from Atlanta, and the dad introduced everyone to us. I don't remember their names, except that the wife's was Nikki (or however you want to spell it). They had just come from a campus tour and wanted to check out Hume, where the dad had lived in 35 years ago. We explained how Hume had recently been demolished and rebuilt, so everything was nice and shiny. They asked if they could possibly have a look at our floor and were very grateful that we obliged. They asked to see my room, and when I said they probably wouldn't want to, they assumed it was because it was messy. It is, but the real reason was because of the posters we have (my roommate has) on the wall. Anyway, they looked in Ashley's room, asked some questions about the honors program and meal plans and the like, and made their way out. They were very nice.

I'm done with class for the week. Oh yes, it's like high school again. (My high school had no classes on Fridays, a fact I took for granted so quickly that I don't think I even mentioned it here very much.) There are no classes tomorrow because it's homecoming. Gator Growl, The World's Largest Student-Run Pep Rally, will be tomorrow, and I'm not going because I really don't care about seeing a guy from MADtv and a group that claims to be Lynyrd Skynyrd, but the guy who always shouts "Free Bird" will be happy. No, instead, I'm going to try to get tickets to the homecoming game. I haven't been to a football game yet, so I need to fix that. I do enjoy football, you guys. Since I have to reserve a ticket by phone, it'll probably take quite a bit of calling. I hear the phone lines get jammed right away.

A guy decided to listen to Abba's song "Dancing Queen" non-stop during a multi-hour, solo road trip. Here's a video of the highlights.

There are "plenty" of examples of quotation mark abuse at The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks.

On Friday night (Saturday morning), my sister and I got Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows the instant it came out. Getting the book at midnight was easier than I thought it would be. We had already bought a voucher, so when midnight rolled around, my sister and I went to Books-A-Million to pick up our copy. Looking in the window, we saw that there weren't many people there. Once we got inside, we could see that there was a small crowd at the front of the store. Then we saw the line. It went along the side wall. It went along the back wall. It went along the other side wall. That's where we got in line. But just as we entered, it was 12:01 A.M., a choice of time no doubt born of the confusion as to whether the day starts at 00:00 or 00:01. Since all people were doing was exchanging pre-purchased vouchers for books, the line moved quickly, and within 10 minutes, we had our copy.

I finished reading the book today. I must say, it's pretty good. I won't post any spoilers here, but I'd say that the series ended on a satisfying note. Loose ends were tied; old questions were answered; new questions were raised and then answered. If you've read this blog for any length of time, you can tell that I'm pretty sucky at reviewing books and movies, even when I feel free to give important plot details. That said, I really don't have much else to say about the book itself. If you want to read the book without paying for it, spoil everything for your friends, or simply recap the story, here's a lengthy, sarcastic summary of the entire book that I'd say is worth a good laugh. For instance, Yaxley talks like a lolcat. (Of course, it contains pretty much every spoiler, so reader beware.)

Once I finished the book, I came out of Harry Potter emergency anti-spoiler mode (that is, I started communicating with other people again). I found that, in a week's time, my friends didn't try to spoil the book for me at all. Maybe I overreacted, but since they had pretended to spoil it for me before, I figured it was worth it. I'd still say it was, although I should probably have my paranoia checked out. I was half-expecting Luke and Brian to show up at my window shouting out spoilers. Looks like I'm the crazy one. I could still go for some butterbeer, though.

Sorted Books: Stacking books so that their titles form interesting phrases.

Wikipedia has a list of snowclones. What's a snowclone? Look at the list and you'll get the idea.

Well, graduation has come and gone, so now it's summer and it's time to party. Seriously, I've been going to a lot of parties lately. But the best graduation gift I could receive is to go on a cruise. I've been on three cruises: to Key West and Cozumel in 2000, the Bahamas in 2002, and nowhere in 2003. So it's been a while since the last one, which is a shame because they can be a lot of fun.

In my opinion, the best way to celebrate graduation is to go on a cruise. In fact, whether your tooth today, finally got an A, or starred in your school play, you should go on a cruise. For the uninitiated, cruise ships aren't boring places where you'll be rocking back and forth all the time and getting seasick. There's so much to do that you might not even want to get off for the beautiful destinations. Since this is starting to sound like a third-grader's "What I did over my summer vacation" essay or a brochure, I'll just cut to the chase and say that we're going on a cruise to Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, and we're leaving tomorrow. It sounds spontaneous, but it's been in the works for months now.

We're taking the Carnival Imagination, which is the ship I went on for my first cruise. What's nutty crackers is that this is my parents' third time on the ship; they also went on it for their anniversary. And it's not like Carnival has only a few ships, either. There are a lot. It's kind of a shame that I threw away the deck plan of the ship whehn I was cleaning my room a few months or years ago. So you see, that's why you don't throw things away. I could have just whipped that out and said, "I know my way around. I was on this ship seven years ago." I don't actually remember where anything is, but it'll probably all come back to me. That would be cool.

Since I'm pretty much an adult, I had to get a passport for this trip. My sister did too. We filled out the paperwork and had our pictures taken and stuff a few months ago, and they came a few weeks ago, about a month later than they were supposed to. I guess it's a busy time for applying for passports, with everybody traveling over the summer. In their haste (they being the Department of State or whoever issues passports), they misspelled my first name, which I got very, very upset about. I wrote it the right way and everything, and then they went and spelled it wrong. I wanted to get my name corrected on the passport because I am carrying a passport that does not have my name on it, but it's apparently too late to get it fixed, which, as they say, sucks. If I have kids, I will give them names that people can spell.

Anyway, I return on Saturday. In the meantime, you'll be treated to a pre-written post from me and a guest. I'm not sure if I'll have Internet access (it's kind of expensive -- or, at least, it was years ago), so I probably won't be around to check my e-mail or anything until I get back on Saturday. So you guys will have to hold down the Internet while I'm gone, okay? Good. Have fun! I mean... I'll have fun!

The American Heritage Dictionary presents 100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know. I knew about 75 of them.

"A site's he/she ratio is measured by counting the number of pages on the domain containing the word 'he', then searching for the number containing 'she', and then looking at the two numbers in comparison." As of writing this, The World of Stuff's he/she ratio is 56%/44%.