Category - Movies/TV

It's summertime in The World of Colleges. All of my friends are either taking summer classes, traveling Europe, pursuing research opportunities at national laboratories, getting married, or working. Yes, working. I'm home for three months, so I figure I'd try to get a job that's close enough to walk to and that I could work at, say, most days of the week. I could always use the money.

I searched the Internet for extremely local job listings and found a place close by that was looking for someone to do easy but tedious work on their web site. As it happens, I love doing easy but tedious things, and I have experience with web sites. I got the resume ready (thanks Kirsten), wrote a cover letter, and shot them an e-mail. Response: "I have found someone for that position. Thank you." I told her to take the ad off the freaking web site so other people wouldn't make my unfortunate mistake of wasting time trying to apply. I did not use the words "freaking" or "wasting," but that's how I felt.

So I went around to some local businesses to see which were hiring. Then I went home and called them to see what positions were available. The pizza place wanted a chef, and the Thai restaurant wanted a delivery boy. Nope and nope. I haven't tried calling the others because I can't decide which one I would want to work at the least.

Ah, getting a job. It's totally worthwhile, even necessary. It can bring you security and happiness. But finding one is tough. You will get burned a lot, especially if you have little to no experience. And the longer you wait, the harder it gets. Good thing nothing else in life is just like that.

I need to come up with a clever idea to make money. One that doesn't involve writing a cover letter. Something really stupid yet clever that no one has thought of yet. Maybe I could just play the guitar on a street corner. Maybe I can start a business and Be My Own Boss™. I also need an outlet for my near-constant frustration. I mean, besides this blog. Something that doesn't involve complaining. I wish I could make art. Angry art. Sad art. Luckily, anything can pass for art these days, so I guess I could throw paint on a wall and call it art. But art isn't really my thing. I want to smash things or blow stuff up in a field. And I want to not clean up after it.

Maybe I can make a business out of smashing things. Send me $50 or the iPhone gets it.

On a completely random note, no one has ever bought anything from the World of Stuff Store.

By the way: Justin is in Rome for one of his classes, Adam is going to pursue a research opportunity at a national laboratory, and Jennipher is apparently engaged. I don't know her that well, but we're friends on Facebook.

This is cool if you're an independent artist: TuneCore distributes your music and videos to Internet music stores. You keep the rights to your songs and and all the money they make.

Big-time Jeopardy! winner Ken Jennings has interviewed a former Jeopardy! writer. Carlo Panno reveals all the secrets about how the show was made, as well as some amusing anecdotes. Here's the interview: parts 1, 2, and 3.

Because you've always wondered: The Stories Behind 10 Famous Product Placements.

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.

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.

For the past year or two, my hair has been pretty long. Now it's really long... for a guy. It's at my shoulders now, which I think is a little excessive. I know I need to get it cut. But I'm not sure... how.

I've had this hairstyle for almost six years. Simply put, I part it slightly to the left and let it do its thing. (The part has drifted closer to the center over the years.) Originally I kept it pretty short, but I've let it grow longer and longer, and now it's at my shoulders. It's getting kind of annoying, and I don't think it looks very good. Most girls wouldn't like it either.

Since it's this long, I wonder whether I should cut more of it than usual and try a different style. Before this 'do, I had a plain and simple buzz cut. Before that, when I was a little kid, my hair was just kind of normal. At least, I think so. What I mean by that is that it radiated out from a point on the back of my head. That's the normal cut for a guy. Or, at least, I thought so as I looked around.

I've been looking at other guys' hairstyles over the past few days, and I have realized that everyone's hair is different. It depends on their style and what sort of hair they have. So this has become a little more complicated than I thought. I want to look good, but I don't want to wear someone else's haircut. I want to have something that works well with the color and texture of my hair as well as the shape of my face (respectively: brown, fine, and -- I've been told -- diamond). It also has to be easy to maintain. If I have to do more than comb it, I won't consider it. I'm lazy, and I'll never buy or use any kind of gel.

That sounds like a lot to ask for, but hopefully a hair specialist can help. I think I'll head to SuperCuts soon (either tomorrow or this weekend; probably on the weekend due to my aforementioned laziness and hesitation). In the meantime, how about some suggestions? Come on, guys, I know you can recommend something. Here's an up-to-the-minute photo to help you out.

Security at casinos is pretty crazy. Here's (almost) all about it.

Remember that TV show St. Elsewhere? Okay, me neither, but it was from the '80s, and its last episode was famously cheesy. It turned out that the whole series had been dreamed by one of the characters. But other shows referenced it and its sister show, Homicide: Life on the Street, as being set in the same fictional universe. Other shows have referred to those shows. And so on, to a staggering degree. So it must be true that all those dozens of shows were also part of the dream. See the whole chart at Tommy Westphall's Mind - A Multiverse Explored.

Okay, I just used "dozens" in a sentence, but I don't agree with the Dozenal Society of America which advocates a base-12 numeric system. In base 12, I'd only be 16 years old. Also, 12 would be 10. (It's one of those things that you just kind of have to be good at math to get.)

You know how you loved making a fort out of your bed when you were a kid? And you know how you always talk about making another fort so you can relive the magic?

My roommate, Adam, has been talking about making a fort lately. Today, he decided to do something about it.

You can tell he put a lot of love into it. (Incidentally, he's an engineering student.)

The entrance:

His mattress is inside, and there's plenty of room for other stuff. He even put his TV in there, but the cables wouldn't reach all the way.

First the pool party in the bathroom, now this. I love college.

You now know about my dream of appearing on Jeopardy!, but did you know I've always wanted to be on The Price Is Right? Yes, even though I've met Drew Carey, the host, it isn't enough. The Independent Florida Alligator reports that a fellow UF student is living the dream. While she was on spring break in LA with her friends, they went to a taping of the show, and she got called down. Unfortunately, she's not allowed to say how she did until the show airs tomorrow, but it's an incentive to watch.

If you have a web site or anything of that nature, you have a lot of copyrighted material. Under US copyright law, no one can do anything with your copyrighted work until 70 years after your death. If you'd like to make a difference, consider becoming a public domain donor by allowing all your original copyrighted works to enter the public domain upon your death. Pretty clever.

From yet another one of those sites that does nothing but make lists of things for other blogs to link to, 25 of the Most Ridiculous (and Ineffective) Popular Diets. You've probably heard of some of them. (Instead, I recommend the simple, sustainable, common-sense No S Diet.)

A few years ago, some guy erased Garfield's thought bubbles from Garfield and called it Arbuckle. He got a cease-and-desist and had to cease and desist. Now someone's taking out Garfield entirely, leaving just Jon. It's called Garfield Minus Garfield, and it's quite a bit funnier (than both Arbuckle and Garfield).

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.

Okay, so you know how I got a 15 out of 20 on my last physics test? (I mentioned it last time). Anyway, that was an unofficial score based on me comparing my scratch work to the answer key, which was posted online. A few days later, I got my actual score and it was... 13 out of 20. Something happened on the answer sheet, like I bubbled in the wrong answers, or maybe I forgot to bubble them in at all. You can be sure I won't let that happen next time.

In less disheartening news, I had a programming test yesterday that I think I did well on and a biology test this evening that I think I did very well on. We'll see soon enough, but I'm not going to make any guesses.

Last week, Sarah, a girl I asked out a few months ago but then she never talked to me again and I think she has a boyfriend, texted me, asking me to go to her orchestra concert. I thought it would be fun, so I told her I'd go. It was Thursday night, and the theme was Oscar-nominated film scores. Listed on the program was another member of the orchestra that I knew; the president of the club I'm in was a violin. (Yeah, he was actually a violin.) I got to talk to him during the intermission. I didn't actually talk to Sarah, but I waved to her, and she saw me and pointed me out to whoever was next to her. (This was before the concert, not during it.)

Speaking of which, have you ever wondered what orchestra members do before they make that nice tuning-up sound? They practice. Individually. Think of that bit from "A Day in the Life," but for twenty minutes solid. (Also, how do orchestra members applaud if they're seated with their instruments? They slap their legs and stamp their feet.)

The orchestra played music from Gone with the Wind, Braveheart, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and Goldfinger, plus others I had never heard of. (Just so you can make fun of me, let me add that I have never seen any of those movies! No, not even [insert your favorite one here]! I know, I'd better go to Blockbuster and rent it right this minute. 'Cause I totally rent movies all the time.)

Oh, I lied. I did see Lawrence of Arabia, which the orchestra performed a piece from. For the occasion, they brought out the actual Oscar statuette that the film won for Best Picture. It was being guarded by a huge guy with a baseball bat. After the show, people lined up to have their picture taken with the Oscar. I think a lot of people thought that the Oscar wasn't real (probably because the fat guy was so comical, pointing his bat at anyone who got near the thing, including the conductor, who, at the end of the show, could no longer resist the urge to go over and pick it up), but in the program, they thanked some collection in California that the statuette was on loan from.

Anyway, the concert was really enjoyable. It's pretty cool to actually see an orchestra playing. I can't remember if I had ever seen one before, but now I can say that I have. Also, I've seen an Oscar.

Now, a quick Ask Jordon:

Alexis: Okay I was wondering if I was going to go out with this guy i like when spring break is over?

I could give the standard Magic 8-Ball answer, but I'll try to be a little more helpful this time and offer actual advice. You sound like you're asking for a prediction, but you needn't be. Here's a tip. Take matters into your own hands. That way, you have a chance of getting the outcome you want.

With the war in Iraq entering its sixth year, I just want to know why the hell this hasn't happened yet: ImpeachBush.org.

This is similar to a link I posted four years ago. (I can't find the original post; maybe I didn't actually post it here.) Anyway, this news article lists some of the more famous extended family members of the presidential candidates. For example, Barack Obama is related to a number of Presidents; George W. Bush is his tenth cousin once removed. He's also related to Brad Pitt. Hillary Clinton is related to Celine Dion, Alanis Morrissette, and a few people who aren't Canadian singers. Do you have to be half-WASP to have such extensive family records? I want to run for President just so they can tell me I'm related to Chuck Norris.

Worst idea ever: Ten Cent Beer Night.

A lot has happened in the past week.

I had a physics test on Tuesday. I needed to study a lot for it, because I got only 12 out of 20 right on the first test. Luckily, my physics professors know how hard their class is, so a 60% is only a C+ (at my junior high it would have been a solid F). Still, I don't like C's or even B's. (Maybe I should mention here that you're allowed to have a handwritten cheat sheet for each test. I got a 60 with a cheat sheet.) So all the time I spent copying formulas and the answers to common problems paid off, because I got a 15 out of 20 - a B. I now have a B in the class. Yay.

I had a date planned for two Fridays ago, but it got postponed. A few minutes after sending off my last post, I rescheduled. We agreed Friday night.

On Wednesday, I did the whole "Are we still on for Friday?" thing. You know, where you... ask if you're still on for Friday. She said yeah, and that she'd like to bring a friend along. Oh crap. I try so hard to make my intentions made clear without looking like a jerk or a fool, but apparently I don't try hard enough. So I'm like, well, I think it should be just you and me... And she's all, oh, so it's like a date? And I'm, well, yeah... And she goes, oh, sorry, I'm not... whatever whatever. So I'm like, that's cool, you can bring your friend. And she's all, okay.

I was very disappointed about that. I've been trying all year, and I've still never been on a date. I talked about it to my friend Daniel, and he sent me some e-books on how to pick up girls and communicate with people and things like that. The one about girls caught my interest. It was from a guy in the seduction community, which I had only ever heard of on Wikipedia. Basically, it's a loosely-knit group of people who practice the art of picking up women. This one guy's recommendation was that you stand out and play hard to get. Well, everybody tells you to do that, but he explained it in detail. According to him, you have to say something crazy to get her attention, tell lots of interesting stories, and then act like you don't give a care about her. I mean, there's more to it than that, but that's basically it. If you do it like he says, then she's supposed to be begging for your phone number as you come up with excuse after excuse not to give it to her, only to divulge it finally after she's practically grabbing your arm. Or whatever.

Besides being awfully manipulative, it requires you to act like someone you're not, which is not only dishonest but also a lot of work. Although, I have to say, acting like myself isn't working well at all. There's got to be some sort of middle way where I can still be myself, but in a better way. I hope I can gleam some valuable information from the other e-books, which I haven't read too much of yet. The other one I've read most of is about body language. I find it interesting because I can't read body language at all. I'm hardly ever aware that someone may be using body language to convey feelings other than what they're expressing verbally.

There's just so much I have to think about. I could probably follow that one book to the letter and take a girl home every night, but I wouldn't like it. I probably should make a habit of approaching random girls -- I'm sure not meeting many as it is -- but how do I go about it? Should I continue to act the way I am even though it frustrates me in ways you can't possibly imagine? Should I pretend to be something I'm not? Should I actually change? Why should I even have to read these books anyway? It makes me feel like less of a man that I can't do these things myself. It's like I was born not knowing how to engage in social interaction.

Once I read an article or something that said how smart children are treated differently by adults. They don't spend as much time fostering the children's emotional and social development as much as they do with other kids because they think that the smart kids are just so precocious that they don't need their help. But it's not true. The result is that you have smart, neglected kids who can't do anything. So the article went. I wonder if I can find it.

So, maybe I need to practice reading body language and doing things like that. Actually, while I'm at it, why don't I go off on this tangent: Kissing sucks. Actually, I don't know whether it sucks, but here's what sucks about it. Being a good kisser is a great thing, and if you're not, everyone you ever love will hate you. That's a given. There are good kissers, and there are bad kissers (so I hear). But the thing is, you can't practice. I've never slipped anyone the tongue. How will I know what to do? Oh, easy, just read a book about it. Okay, but I'm thinking of the stereotypical comparison of learning to ride a bike. Imagine that you only learn how to ride a bike by reading a book. Then one day, the local volcano erupts, and you need to use your bike to make a speedy escape. You'd better make damn sure you read that book thoroughly.

Okay, so, I decided to go on the non-date which we still had scheduled. I got to restaurant in about half the time I thought it would take, so I was just sitting at a street corner for a while watching the cars and people go by. Behind me was the university, and across the street was the Outside World. A car came out of the university and slowed down as it passed me. The car was full of girls, about four of them. It looked like they were going to ask me for directions, so I got ready to point.

The one in the back on the passenger side spoke: "Excuse me, which way is UF?"

"...It's right behind you," I said, pointing backwards, but they didn't want to hear. They just kept going. Then I said something that they definitely wouldn't have wanted to hear.

Girls, man.

What is it about me that makes me like a human punching bag?

So, anyway, tonight we went to Tijuana Flats -- a "fast casual" Mexican place that I love -- for dinner, with the girl's friend, who I had seen around. We ordered, ate, and had some light conversation. It was rather uneventful, and I had a good feeling that I could have pulled off a nice evening without the extra friend there.

They said they were going to go to a concert afterward, and I didn't really want to do that, but when they said it was on campus, I figured I'd go along. It was at the student union, where there's an amphitheater in front of a lake. It's pretty nice. The first guy had a loud guitar, and he played drums with foot pedals. Other than his singing, he sounded like the White Stripes. The next guy was a little more talented; he played the acoustic guitar and was very rhythmic with it. Finally, there was the headliner: she was the woman who did a lot of the soundtrack for Juno, a movie I actually saw. So some of the songs, sung with her distinctive voice, were familiar. But they were all captivating and entertaining. Her name was Kimya Dawson.

She was very funny, and it turned out that the tour was a family affair: the first guy playing was her husband, and the second was a good friend who got a namecheck in one of the songs in Juno (which prompted his local newspaper to publish a story saying that an area songwriter's name would be mentioned in a song in an upcoming movie). At one point, she had people in the audience raise their hands to request songs. A big group of people raised their hands together, and they requested a song of hers and asked if they could go down and dance to it. She let them. There were about twelve of them, and as she did this moderate-tempo acousting number, they were swing dancing and generally flailing about randomly. Then she asked anybody who had ever dreamed of auditioning for Annie to come down and sing "Tomorrow" with her a cappella. A lot of people did. Finally, a huge number of people came down to dance to her final number, and they continued to swarm around her and give her hugs long after her set ended.

During the set, my non-date and her friend had gotten about four other people to meet up with them, so I was now in a large group. There were a lot of things going on at the student union (they have a whole program of things to do on Friday nights to keep kids from going to parties, I guess), so a few people decided they wanted wax hands. I don't know if you've heard of them, but it's where they dip your hand in wax and then it hardens and you buy it for ten dollars. After waiting in line for an hour even though I didn't want a wax hand, I realized that the night was winding down, so I decided to leave right then. My non-date seemed to understand.

I often attend meetings of Gator Freethought, a club for students to evaluate religion with a critical eye. We're a motley bunch; although there are a lot of atheists and agnostics, there are also theists who may be questioning their own religion or who just want to see how other people think. A few weeks ago, I ran into a guy I recognized from the first meeting of the year. We've talked to each other a bit since then, and we've gotten to learn a lot about each other. He's a Christian, and he wanted me to check out this lecture called "If You Could Ask God One Question." It was supposed to be about what one guy thought God's answers to big questions would be. I thought it was interesting, so I decided to check it out.

The lecture was Wednesday night. I didn't give any consideration to the kind of group that would be putting it on and the kind of agenda they might have. Turns out it was hosted by Campus Crusade for Christ, which likes to refer to itself less confrontationally as CRU. The first half of the lecture -- one hour -- consisted of the speaker offering various arguments for the existence of a supreme god. At first, these were framed in a general theistic context, but then the arguments took a decidedly Christian turn. Here were some of them:

1. If God didn't exist, life would be meaningless.
2. That sounds really depressing.
3. Therefore, God exists.

1. The Bible says Jesus is the Son of God.
2. Bible scholars say that the Bible is true and that the discovery of Jesus's empty tomb is a historical fact.
3. Since the Bible is true, then it is more likely that Jesus is the Son of God than other explanations such as, for example, that the disciples stole Jesus's body.
4. Therefore, Jesus is the Son of God.

1. The Bible says that if you try hard enough, you can feel God's presence.
2. Therefore, God exists.

1. If God didn't exist, there would be no absolute standards of morality.
2. If there are no absolute standards of morality, who's to say that the Holocaust was bad?
3. Therefore, God exists.

Couldn't morality be genetically hard-wired into us as a mechanism of survival? The speaker brought that up but scoffed at the idea. However, he had no problem presenting the following argument:

1. If God existed, he would want us to believe in him.
2. New evidence shows that god-belief tends to be hard-wired in humans.
3. Therefore, God exists.

Amusingly, he compared hard-wired god-belief to object permanence -- the understanding that objects still exist even after they have disappeared from one's vision. Although he didn't use the term itself, it happens to be the only thing I remember from high-school psychology. He said that babies are born with object permanence, when in fact, they are not. They acquire it over time.

Getting back on subject, I think it's clear that while morality is beneficial to the survival of a species, there are no totally absolute moral standards. Interestingly, the speaker mentioned discrimination as being an absolute moral wrong. While I agree that discrimination is immoral, it seems to me that morality varies from time to time, from place to place, and even from person to person. In the recent past, discrimination was considered perfectly moral.

Allow me to present another example. Throwing rocks at gay people till they died was once considered virtuous by everyone, and to some people it still is. Why the change? People have discovered that being gay does nothing to harm society. Thus, our society's morals are changing before our eyes, and they fortunately seem to be converging on the doctrine that "If it harms none, do what you will." If morals are absolute, I would think that they should be based around that idea; that's what I feel would be best for society. I think that a sign of maturity is recognizing that there are few (if any) absolutes. We'll probably always be trying to perfect our morals and keep our selfish human nature from getting in the way.

So, anyway, I found the speaker's arguments pretty weak overall. They seemed to reflect what he wanted to believe rather than what logic would lead him to. (The second half of the presentation, in which he answered questions from the audience, is outside the scope of this post. I don't have much to say about it anyway.)

I've found more evidence that people tend to believe what they want to rather than what makes sense. Gator Freehthought's meeting last night featured James B. Twitchell, a professor who recently wrote Shopping for God: How Christianity Went from In Your Heart to In Your Face. He described the premise of the book, which is that people tend to buy things for the feeling they get when they buy them, and that advertising serves to create that feeling. He extends this idea to Protestant Christianity, namely megachurches, which have offered people basically the same doctrine but with a more satisfying church experience. (I was going to say "worshipping experience," but apparently these churches extend beyond improving that. For example, with their diverse social clubs, they try to replace the fraternal organizations that were popular in the early 20th century, according to Dr. Twitchell.)

Fox News makes a lot more sense when there's a laugh track added. Here's a Bill O'Reilly interview that's suddenly a lot more entertaining.

30,000 speech bubble stickers were printed. They were placed on top of ads all over New York City. Passersby filled them in. Later the results were photographed. It's The Bubble Project.

Here are 10 Incredible Old Computer Ads. They're pretty credible, actually.