Category - Music

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.

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

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

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

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

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

And now, the links.

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

Scientology kills. Read all about it.

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

I got to spend a weekend with my suitemates. On Saturday, Adam, Cameron, and I went with Evan to his house in Tampa, and we went to this post-Gasparilla parade. Actually, we left kind of late from Evan's house (having been treated to steak), so we only arrived in time to see the last float. After that, people were just sort of... reveling, I guess you would say. They were throwing around beads and stuff. Evan, who was in New Orleans a few weeks ago, says it was much more tame than Mardi Gras. Biggest excitement: we went into a cigar store, and Adam bought a cigar. It was either that or seeing the hippie-types with their tie-wearing dog.

So, no, we didn't get drunk, pass out, and wake up in Nevada a week later. We left around 11 as things seemed to be dying down. We went back to Gainesville the next day after having breakfast. It was cool getting to spend a weekend with my suitemates. I wish we could do stuff like that more often.

I've been getting into Ekiga lately. Do I really need a phone/videophone program on my computer? No, but it's awesome. Speaking of which, I've found a webcam that works. Since it was so terribly hard to find information about which webcams worked with Linux and which didn't, I want to spell it out here for you, me, and Google:

The Logitech QuickCam for Notebooks (model #961404-0403, USB product ID 046d:08ae) uses the gspca driver and therefore works out-of-the-box with Ubuntu 7.10.

And here's the proof:

Ekiga is available for Linux and Windows (the latter being beta). The only programs whose audio and video are compatible with the latest version of Ekiga (2.0.11) are XMeeting (Mac), NetMeeting (Windows), and Windows Messenger (not Windows Live Messenger). But many others have compatible audio, and better video compatibility will be included in the upcoming 3.0 release. See this page from the Ekiga wiki for more details on compatibility.

So, does anyone want to say hi? I'm sip:jordon@ekiga.net.

Last Wednesday, one of the men standing in the background on the cover of the Beatles' album Abbey Road died at the age of 96. His name was Paul Cole, and he was visiting London with his wife. Since he was tired of visiting museums, he waited on the sidewalk outside one while his wife was inside. That's when he happened to observe some young hooligans being photographed crossing the street. He didn't realize he was on the album cover until about a year later, when he saw the family's copy at his home in Deerfield Beach, Florida. Yes, a resident of my hometown was on the cover of a Beatles album. Who knew? (Here's the full story).

RSS is pretty handy, but RSS feeds can be annoying. Maybe there are some things you'd rather not see in an RSS feed, or maybe you'd like to combine several feeds into one. That's where Yahoo! Pipes comes in handy. You can use it to make mashups of RSS feeds. Here's one I use for reading the J-Walk Blog. It excludes posts that mention banjos or bacon.

Ever notice how some celebrities look like crosses between other celebrities? It's celebrity math(s).

I've long enjoyed the reasonable prices that my web host, NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, offers, not the least of which has been their $1/GB bandwidth rate. But as my bandwidth has slowly but steadily increased, my costs have slowly increased as well, to the point that a significant amount of my charges are for bandwidth. Here's a graph showing the breakdown of my hosting costs for the past year:

At this rate, I'd just keep paying more and more for my site, and the pay-for-what-you-use pricing model would no longer be worth it. Not without some big change, anyway.

That change has arrived.

The folks at NFSN have long been aware of the relatively high costs that its popular sites incur, and now that they've gotten some savings on bandwidth, they've decided to pass it on to the customers who need it the most. Now only your first gigabyte of bandwidth costs $1: from there, the cost per gigabyte will go down logarithmically. Once your sites have accumulated 10 GB worth of transfers, you'll be charged $0.50 per gigabyte. By the time you hit 100 GB, it'll be $0.33. Of course, the decrease is smooth at every value in between, so, for example, you can expect correctly to be paying about $0.62 per gigabyte once you've racked up 4.13 GB worth of transfers. The savings continue until you've accumulated 10,000 GB of transfers, when the cost per gigabyte will be fixed at $0.20.

For the more mathematically inclined, the cost per gigabyte as a function f of gigabytes transferred x is as follows:

I've been playing with my graphing calculator to see what my savings will be. Of course, it helps to have some real numbers. I know that the bandwidth cost for my site during the past year was $53.72, which works out to 53.72 GB of bandwidth. Now that this new pricing plan is in place, my next 53.72 GB will cost $24.39, and the 53.72 GB after that will cost only $18.55. (I knew calculus would be helpful in real life.)

I've fallen in love with NearlyFreeSpeech.NET all over again, and I recommend them to basically everyone (except people who need stuff like SSL and e-mail, which they don't offer).

Super Bowl XLII is tomorrow. Have a look at Super Bowl logos from the past.

This is pretty cool: The Freecycle Network is all about giving away and reusing stuff so it doesn't go to waste.

And, to finish this post, something you've always wanted to know about but have never been able to because you didn't know what it was called:

Shave and a haircut, two bits!

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!

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.

Dorm life just got interesting. (Well, more interesting.) We have a new RA this semester. I didn't get to meet her until Wednesday, when we had a mandatory floor meeting. Her name is Zannia (rhymes with "mania," although she's not particularly manic), and she was apparently told that she had to plan lots of activities for everyone to do. Shannon, our RA from last semester, never did anything like that, so when Zannia asked us for some ideas for fun activities, we were a little confused. Someone (I won't name names) continued to draw inevitable comparisons to Shannon whenever Zannia said anything, leading to the outburst, "Do I look like Shannon to you?"

I suggested we have a Super Bowl party. "Right here," I said, referring to the common room. I don't know why everyone laughed.

Since it's the beginning of the semester, there have been inevitable shakeups in the dorms. Besides having a new RA, a few people have moved out. Several have yet to be replaced. Other than that, everything's been pretty much the same. People playing cards in the common room at every possible opportunity... a bunch of people in the next room being loud at 2:30 in the morning... and, of course, doing fun stuff or just hanging out -- "bro-in' out," as my suitemate Cameron would say.

Programming class is pretty awesome, even though we haven't really done anything yet. It just gets me pumped. The lecture hall only has one computer (for the instructor), so we've just had to write down his instructions or follow along on our own laptops. (I haven't brought mine to class yet.) Since we'll be programming in Java, we were supposed to download JDK 6 from Sun's web site, but I found it as sun-java6-jdk in Ubuntu's "multiverse" repository. The teacher showed us how to write a "hello world" program in Java, and I managed to write and compile it on my own computer.

Lots of people have brought their laptops to class, and, as a Linux user, I've found it interesting to note the share of operating systems. This is Programming I for Computer Science Majors or something, so we're talking about computer people here. The distribution doesn't seem much different from your average randomly selected group: mostly Windows and a few Macs. Yesterday I happened to see that someone was dual-booting Vista and Ubuntu. (He chose to boot into Vista.)

Using Linux does have its advantages for this class, though, and not just because the JDK was easy to install. The teacher had to explain how to get the "java" and "javac" commands to work outside the directory where java.exe and javac.exe were located. I didn't have to do that on Linux. And while the teacher was going over Windows command-line basics, I already knew how to get around with the command line on Linux. It turns out that I won't need to use Windows at all because the computer labs, where we'll meet once a week, use Linux. So I won't need to pay much attention to the Linux command-line lessons either. I can show off my relatively mad Linux skillz.

On Monday, we'll be counting in binary, which is something else I know how to do. (One of my crowning achievements in high-school programming was making a program that converted numbers between binary, decimal, and hex while everyone else was having problems just going from decimal to binary.) In fact, the other day, I converted numbers from decimal to hex on paper because I had showed up to a class early and was very bored.

Strictly No Photography features pictures of places where photography isn't allowed.

What does it feel like to be lashed? Find out.

In Croatia, there's a sea organ, a unique musical instrument played by waves that flow into the organ and push air through different holes. That page has a beautiful sound clip; here's a short video with more.

My sister and her friend Lisa had been planning to go to the beach in Key Largo. They set the date for Thursday, December 27, and asked if I wanted to go. I said heck yes I would and asked Justin to come along too. Lisa brought her friend Allie. I think her name is actually Allison, and I'm not sure how she would spell Ali/Ally/Allie/Alley?, but I'll call her Allie. It sounds good, but it's probably wrong.

So, it was just the five of us. Lisa drove. And drove and drove. It's a long drive to the Keys, but eventually we were in Key Largo, the first key. We were also hungry. We decided to stop at a Japanese place called Sushi Nami. It looked kind of deserted, but certain people in our party were really desperate to have sushi. They regretted it when they realized that their sushi wasn't very good. My sushi (and the rest of my food) was fine. I got a lot of it for a pretty reasonable price.

We decided to go further and look for a beach. Eventually we got to Anne's Beach, where Japanese tourists took a picture of my dog on my last Florida Keys trip. The water was still really shallow like last time, and the surface was covered in sea grass. That was a no go. So we kept going.

Update (Fri Dec 28, 2007 22:04 EST): As requested by reader Kirsten, here's a photo I took while we were on the road.

I had figured there'd be a 50-50 chance that we'd go all the way, and now that we had failed to have any sort of enjoyment at a beach, there was one thing left to do: keep pushing along. We decided it would be a waste if we didn't go to Key West, so after a few hours of driving through, by, and between islands, we found ourselves on Whitehead Street at the marker for the Southernmost Point in the Continental United States.

Throngs of tourists were lined up to take their picture at the buoy-shaped marker, so we decided to take pictures with the holiday displays that were set up nearby. I now have pictures of my friends with the Southernmost Christmas Tree in the Continental United States and the Southernmost Menorah in the Continental United States. After that, we moseyed down Duval Street until we got to a place that had henna tattoos. Allie got one. Was it a Chinese character on her lower back? Yes.

By that time, we had missed the opportunity to watch the sunset in Mallory Square (a popular pastime probably only for tourists), but we were hungry again. We eventually found a sports bar and grill called Jack Flats (509½ Duval St.). It wasn't very crowded, but that's because we were there early. The food was great. We did a little more looking around at stores and left Key West at 8:30. The drive back was pretty dark quiet. It didn't seem to take as long to go through all the islands in reverse. The traffic was better. I could see more stars.

About four hours later, I was home and tired. Even though we probably spent about 10 minutes at beaches of any sort, it was a big day and a fun trip. It was my fifth trip to Key West. I hope to go back there soon.

Today was less eventful (and it seems like it's been much shorter). I went with Nick and TJ (not that TJ) to the Pompano Beach golf course. They were going to practice their driving because they're going to play some holes tomorrow. I had never golfed before, so I had to learn how to swing a golf club and everything. Since Nick and TJ didn't have left-handed equipment, I had to do it right-handed. I wasn't able to hit the balls very far, and they usually stuck pretty close to the ground if they didn't roll the whole way. In short, I was pretty bad, but I'd try it again with better equipment.

I've been involved in distributed computing projects (think SETI@home) before, but I haven't participated in any lately. My friend Luke made me aware of World Community Grid, a collection of projects that runs on the BOINC framework. It turns out that you can use the BOINC client to participate in any project that uses the BOINC infrastructure. I've just signed up with World Community Grid for now; it should be enough to keep me busy because it consists of several sub-projects. I've joined a few of them, so now my computer has been assigned to crunch one unit for FightAIDS@Home and one for Help Conquer Cancer.

The BOINC client is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS. Conveniently for Linux users, it's in the repositories of some distributions. In Ubuntu, it's located in the Universe repository as boinc-manager and boinc-client. Awesomely, the client is free software.

Find out about the Real ID Act, the national ID law that was signed into law by President Bush in 2005.

The University of California marching band recently did a halftime show featuring songs from video games. The video is the best six and a half minutes you will have today.

It's Christmas again.

I did go to church with my family yesterday, and I didn't feel that bad, but I won't make a habit of it. I gave gifts to my friends that I saw there. The Christmas pageant, as it were, was pretty short. Some of the kids in it were way too young; they didn't seem to know what they were doing. One girl who had a reading still had a Homestar Runner accent. "A weading fwum the lettow of Paul to..." Just no. Did she even know what she was saying? The Cowinthians wouldn't have taken her seriously. Sewiously.

I got mostly guitar-related gifts: strings, cables, and a practice amp that's small enough for me to take to my dorm. It packs a punch, though. But what else would you expect from a Vox? Okay, maybe I only like Vox amps because the Beatles used them, but my friend Sean had a Vox mini-amp that I liked. Other than that, I'm a Fender amp guy.

For the second year, my pen pal Natasha and I exchanged gifts for Christmas. I got her a plush gator that says "Go Gators" and plays UF's fight song. I also included a video greeting where I showed her my dorm and the alligator in the pond across the street. This afternoon I called Natasha to wish her a merry Christmas and see if she got my gift to her. (She did, and her gift to me should be coming any day now.) I love to hear her voice. We both agreed that we need to talk on the phone more often. I'll hold up my end of the bargain, long-distance charges be damned. Ooh, I said damn. Maybe I'll get a phone card. That probably would have been good to ask for for Christmas. Oh well. I got money that I can buy phone cards with.

And now, a not particularly holiday edition of Ask Jordon.

Justin: Did I ever explain to you my theory on the communist santa?

I think so, but I don't really remember. Let's see what I can make up: He wears red. He distributes toys equally to practically everyone. People are urged not to question him. He doesn't live in the West. And what else? I bet he has pretty tight control over the elves.

Justin: Also, do you think there may be an "Answer Jordon" component in the future?

I did have Jordon Asks YOU!! about a year ago, but I haven't done anything with it since then. It's probably because I gave a schedule to work with (ask a question every Saturday), and anyone who reads this blog knows that I don't adhere to schedules when blogging. (Remember the monthly interview series that only lasted one month?)

In Soviet Russia, Santa writes letters to YOU!!

New at The World of Stuff: Do you use Wikipedia? How about Creative Commons? Or Linux? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you should consider giving a monetary donation to the organizations involved. I came to that conclusion yesterday, and to make it easy for people to donate to free content projects, I've created this page with Donation Information for Free Content Projects. As a student without a credit card, I'd like to know which free software projects I can send a check to. Hence the list. I hope you or somebody finds it useful.

Classical music is everywhere these days. We hear the same classical pieces all the time as they've become associated with a particular aspect of popular culture. Enter Kickass Classical, a list with information about popular classical tunes. Incidentally, I found this site when I was trying to find the name of the repetitive, escalating piece they use in movie trailers to indicate mounting chaos. I couldn't find it there, but I bet somebody knows the name of it.

If you grew up in the '90s, here's a present for you: a memorable sketch from All That.

Here are some vintage Images from the Tobacco Industry Campaign to Hide the Hazards of Smoking. Did you know that more doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette?