Category - School

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).

Tonight, Jack Kevorkian is speaking at UF. As an advocate (and erstwhile practitioner) of physician-assisted suicide, he's pretty controversial. Over the past week or so, the debate has been heating up around campus. As I walked past the facility where the former doctor is due to speak, I saw that there were seemingly makeshift "free speech zone" signs posted around. My sister reports that a plane is currently flying over campus with a banner saying that Planned Parenthood kills babies and Jack Kevorkian kills parents. I think we can expect about as much protest as there was when Alberto Gonzales spoke a few months ago. That is to say, a lot. Difference is, I'm actually going to this one.

Opinion: Terminally ill people in a sound state of mind should be able to put themselves out of their suffering. And why is it any of your business?

(Let the flames begin!)

From the Why-Don't-You-Join-a-Club Dept.: I went to the first few meetings of Gator Freethought hoping to have some intelligent discussion with freethinking Gators. But the meetings got increasingly boring as they tended to focus on yawners like philosophy. I didn't even go to the last few meetings, which were about morality and Nietzsche and things. Luckily, the student organization's "new year's resolution is to have more fun," and they're going to start the fun with a meet-and-greet on Thursday night at a local restaurant-type place.

The meeting after that will be just before Florida's presidential primary and will deal with how our religious beliefs (or lack thereof) will affect our choices in the polls. The next meeting will be around Valentine's day and will be a discussion on religion and dating. This is an issue that affects me (in fact, I've been meaning to complain about it here), so I'll be sure to attend... unless I have a date. In fact, I've figured that going to Gator Freethought meetings is probably the best way to meet a sweet atheist (or agnostic -- I'm not that picky) girl, so it should be really interesting to see what other people in my situation have done or are doing.

If you're a freak who notices every single little change I make on this site, you'll know that last week, I changed the Creative Commons license for this site to allow commercial use of my content. (Previously, commercial use without special permission was prohibited. Attributing to me and sharing alike -- that is, releasing the derivative work under the same license -- are still required.) Here's a brief summary of the old license, and here's a summary of the new one.

Why the change? I've occasionally gotten requests for commercial use of my images, which, because they were prohibited by the old license, had to be approved by me on a case-by-case basis. To give a recent example, the Piute County (Utah) Chamber of Commerce asked to use my image of a $1 bill signed by former U.S. Treasurer and Piute County native Ivy Baker Priest. I decided to allow their use of the image as long as they credited me and my web site. Every time someone asks for special permission to use my stuff commercially, I allow them to do it, so I figured I'd change the license to allow it in general.

Some people might be concerned about this apparent display of flip-floppery. Most of the content that was under the old license is now under the new one. Which license applies? It depends on when you accessed the content. If you saved an old copy of an article or post from this site, that copy still falls under the old license. But if you access that same sexy article today, the new license (which has fewer restrictions) applies.

You've probably heard a lot about the OOXML standardization debate, but it's all very confusing. Here's an overview of the ISO standardization process that OOXML is attempting to go through.

Read some stupid essays by some guy. They don't look like they were really printed out and graded by an actual teacher, but they're still funny.

Here's a film from 1967 (confirmed authentic by Snopes) reporting on what technology would be like in A.D. 1999.

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.

I've known about geocaching for a long time, but until recently, I'd never actually done it. Basically, geocaching is where you hide a small box with little things in it and post its coordinates on the Internet so people can try to find it. People who find your cache can sign a log in the box and swap out whatever little trinkets you have in there. It's for people who like treasure hunting and going out into the wilderness and things like that.

My suitemates Adam and Cameron recently found out about geocaching, and one of the first things we did together when we got back from winter break on Sunday was to look for some caches in the woods next to our dorm. Cameron had seen on the geocaching web site that there were two there. With their coordinates programmed into his GPS, we set out to find them. Adam found the first one in a tree that had fallen over. That one was pretty easy. Searching for the next one was pretty interesting because it took us to an area we didn't even know existed; it was pretty scenic, like a park.

The spot where the cache was supposed to be was near a boardwalk, so we looked over and around it and in the surrounding woods, but to no avail. Finally, Cameron found a hidden container with a few things in it -- but it wasn't a geocache. It was a letterbox; letterboxing is similar to geocaching, but this wasn't the cache that Cameron had found out about online. The notebook inside indicated that it had been placed earlier that same day.

So the search continued. Eventually, I found a box that was hidden along the side of the boardwalk; it was the same color as the wood, so it was camouflaged very well. That was the geocache we were looking for. According to the log inside, numerous people had found it over the past few years.

It only goes to show how popular geocaching and letterboxing are. Maybe I should get into it. I do have a GPS receiver at home that I never found much use for. And if we were able to find two (actually three) caches in such a small area, I can't even imagine how many there must be all over town. (Actually, if I went to the geocaching web site, I could look it up, and then I would be able to imagine it.) And, of course, it would be cool if I hid my own cache somewhere and checked back to see if people had found it. It's a cool idea.

Buying textbooks is kind of crazy. Luckily, my purchases were covered under my financial aid, but that doesn't mean that things had to go smoothly. As I picked up my order from the bookstore on Monday, they gave me the wrong Physics books; I was supposed to get parts 1 and 2 of the textbook when instead I got parts 3 and 4. Unfortunately, I didn't notice till I had gotten back to my dorm, so going back and trying to explain the situation was a big hassle. I got the books I needed, and to give back the ones I didn't, I was redirected to the return and exchange line, which started outside the door of the store. My new books set off the anti-theft alarm. Lovely, right?

So I'm trying to explain to the security guard why it seems like I'm stealing these books. I don't think he really suspected that, but when you have a store security guard saying "Let me get this straight..." to a long-haired college kid in a Rolling Stones t-shirt, it tends to look suspicious. Once I managed to explain that I paid for parts 1 and 2 and needed to return parts 3 and 4, they held the new books for me (standard procedure, y'understand) while I waited in line to give back the books I didn't need. Finally, when I got the cashier there to understand what was going on, he deactivated the bar code on my new books, which a staff member had brought over, and took back the books I got by mistake.

I should have kept them for next year.

I haven't had much luck selling my books. I managed to unload my chemistry book, but my calculus book is now out of date, and nobody wants the old edition. I did sell my course pack for Social Geography, though; I pulled it off by standing outside the class as it got out on Tuesday and asking if people wanted to buy it. I was asking $50, but the guy I was talking to only had $45, so I took that. Not bad for a $63 book.

New feature: when comment on a post, you can now choose to be notified of future comments on the post via e-mail. I've tested it out, and it seems to work, so give it a try. With each e-mail, you'll be provided a link to manage your subscriptions and even change your subscription e-mail address. As usual, your address is safe with me; it won't be given to anyone ever in any way. I enjoy this feature when it's employed on other blogs (such as mcgees.org and now All About Me - And Then Some), and I think you'll enjoy it on The World of Stuff. Hopefully, it will encourage commenting, discussion, and "first post" comments. That would be awesome.

If passed by the House of Representatives, H.R. 888 would be a grave insult to non-Christians and everyone who cares about separation of church and state in America. Joshua McGee says it better than I ever could.

Diamond-encrusted gadgets are always tacky. Here's Wired's list of The Worst Diamond-Encrusted Gadgets Of All Time.

Here's a pretty cool periodic table.

Adam saw me updating the old blog and said, "Hey Jordon, tell the world that I said 'Hi.'" Everyone: my roommate, Adam, says hi.

Joey, from down the hall, wondered what he meant. Adam explained about the blog. We're watching the BCS National Championship Game in my room, and in the third quarter, I'm losing my attention span.

Joey said, "Tell them I said, 'Surrender or die.'"

"It's not blogworthy," said suitemate Cameron.

Well, you know what that means: I'm back to school, and I'm still alive.

I got back to school on Saturday, but I just dropped off my stuff in the room and then went to my aunt's house. While I was here briefly, I saw that my door didn't have my and my roommate's names on it -- instead, it had the name of the guy across the hall. The new RA got our rooms mixed up when she was putting the names on the doors, apparently. I wrote a note to my roommate on the whiteboard: "Don't worry Adam, this is still our room."

So I spent the night at my aunt's with my family. On Sunday morning we took a hike... literally! Even though our dog, Speck, lives up to his name, he was able to keep up with the big dogs. We were mainly in O'Leno State Park, but we also spent a few moments in River Rise Preserve State Park because they apparently border each other. Overall, the hike was about five miles or something like that. It took us about two hours, it seems. I enjoyed it.

In the afternoon, it was back to the dorm for reals. I got settled in and everything, and my roommate had already settled back in.

I was a little nervous for today, the first day of the spring semester, because I would have to face not two or three but four new classes in one long day. Yeah, that's the way my schedule worked out, but it was the best I could do, and I don't want to mess with it. My classes don't really seem that bad, but it's hard to tell because all the professors try to scare their new students. It's the same everywhere. Here's the breakdown.

• Physics - They tried to scare us with facts: statistics about how last semester's class did.
• Differential Equations - The professor's funny, but I hope the subject matter isn't that bad. Calculus 3 isn't necessary to understand the course, and I took it, so I should be good if only I can remember the Calc 2 material.
• Programming - Not sure about this one. It turns out that we'll be using Java. This'll be a good chance for me to learn programming the right way, though.
• Biology - This one shouldn't be that bad. I'll have my sister to study with. It sounds like it'll be boring at first with the details about cells and stuff, but the rest, like evolution, should be cool.

Anyway, my Tuesdays are much better because I have no classes. Tomorrow I plan to sell my chemistry book (the only one I've been able to get rid of) and try to hawk my Social Geography course pack after the first meeting of that class ends.

It's too early to say how this semester is going to be. Before my first class, I thought that the hardest part would just be carving out a routine. Now I realize that that isn't so bad; you just have to let things fall into place. (Routines sure do make life easy, though; there's not much thinking involved.) The hardest part, at least at the beginning, will be studying for my classes to make sure I don't fall behind. At least, I think so.

Check out some peculiar streets around the world.

It's now an election year, and that means it's time to go over some flag pin etiquette.

Here's an old list of officially recommended telephone exchange names (as in PEnnsylvania 6-5000). In an earlier time, my cell phone number might have started with SYcamore 8. Also, I wouldn't have had a cell phone.

Tonight's my last night home for winter break, but I'm not returning to the dorm just yet. I'll be staying with family tomorrow, so I'll be back to school on Sunday. Class starts Monday. I see here that the UF bookstore is closed on the weekends, which kind of stinks because I've ordered books there, and I need to pick them up. Hopefully, they'll be open on Sunday. Considering all of the students coming back this weekend, they'd better... or I'll give them a knuckle sandwich.

Overall, the break has been pretty nice. I did most of things I wanted to do. But all good things must come to an end. I guess I should focus on all the good things about the coming semester: having no class on Tuesdays, having 150 dining hall meals and $330 to spend on other food and stuff, chillaxing in the dorm with the suitemates... stuff like that. You know, the things that don't involve thinking or going to class.

I had a good time today, as it happens. I had lunch at a Chinese restaurant with some friends from high school: Ed, Allison, Allison's sister, and Susann. Ed was nice enough to give me a ride; we live near each other. It was good to see everyone. I wish more people had been able to go, but that's how it goes sometimes. At any rate, I know I'll be back here for spring break (March 8-16), and possibly the Martin Luther King Day weekend (January 19-21). I never have time to do anything when I'm home for three-day weekends, though, so it looks like fun plans will have to wait for spring break. Those are the only two holidays of the spring semester.

When I wrote The Dvorak Keyboard and You to promote awareness of the Dvorak keyboard, I had no idea how many people would come across the site and switch to Dvorak (or at least consider it). Now I sort of have an idea: a lot. That's the great thing about having articles on your web site. You can say what you want people to hear, and people will find them. I don't need to promote Dvorak very much because the article does it for me.

When I started using Linux last year, I knew that having an article about it on my site would be a great way to make people aware of Linux-based operating systems. I figured I should allow myself at least six months of Linux experience before writing about it in such a way. I passed that mark in August, so over the past few months I've been working on the article intermittently. Actually, I wrote about half of it on a bus in October, and I resolved to finish it at home during winter break.

And after having my Linux-using friends look over the page, I decided it was ready. Late last night, I finished it, except that I hadn't come up with a title. I spent quite a while trying to think of a good one. Finally, in a sudden stroke of inspiration, I came up with a catchy phrase that I felt best summed up the article. With that, I invite you to Free Your Computer with Linux.

J-Walk of the J-Walk Blog plotted the results of yesterday's Iowa caucus against each candidate's estimated campaign spending. It's interesting to see the correlation between campaign spending and votes received. He also gives the "cost per vote" for some of the candidates.

Think pollution isn't a problem? Read about the huge agglomerations of plastic waste in the Pacific Ocean and how they might affect you.

Here are ten fun facts about dreams.

Another year has slipped away. And this was a big one. Between graduating from high school and starting college in a faraway city, I've faced things I've never had to face before. And, by all accounts, I've managed pretty okay. But that's not all that happened in 2007. Let's take a look back and see just how wild and crazy this year has been.

• January 3 - I get Christmas gifts from my pen pal Natasha in the mail.
• January 9 - I become a TA for Mr. Mumtaz's Web Design II class.
• January 23 - My transition to Linux begins as my dad and I try unsuccessfully to install Ubuntu on a spare PC.
• January 24 - The first printing of The Easiest Best Thing Is Be Kind, edited by my friend Luke and containing a poem by me, is delivered.
• January 28 - I accompany Luke, Michelle, and Megan at a rally against the genocide in Darfur.
• February 4 - Beowulf 2: This Time It's Personal, starring Nick, Mark, Justin, and me, is released on the Internet.
• February 10 - I go to the St. Elizabeth Spring Festival.
• February 14 - I switch from Windows to Ubuntu.
• February 28 - I go on a completely pointless school field trip to a prescription filling facility and an outdoor mall.
• March 6 - Having been assigned by an assistant principal to produce fire exit maps of the school gym and auditorium, Joe and I present our work.
• March 8 - The fire alarm goes off at school.
• March 23-25 - Vacation at my great-aunt's condo in Fort Pierce.
• March 27-28 - Two bomb threats at school in as many days.
• April 6 - The World of Stuff is four.
• April 11 - First edition of From Canada with Love.
• April 18 - I become an emo kid for a day.
• April 21-22 - Grad Bash at Universal Studios.
• May 5 - I help bring my school to second place at the annual computer programming competition.
• May 9 - I take the AP Calculus BC exam and get a 5 (the best possible score).
• May 17 - I accompany members of my programming class in making a disastrous technology-related presentation to half the school.
• May 17 - I take home an $800 scholarship from the senior class award ceremony. (The streakers at the concurrent football game were Andrew and Tyler, who had slipped out from onstage at the award ceremony only to return unnoticed!)
• May 18 - A third drive-in outing with Andrew, Tyler, and pals.
• May 22 - Food fight on the second-to-last day of school.
• May 23 - Last day of high school.
• May 24 - At the senior breakfast, I find out that I'm the salutatorian of my class.
• May 25 - Prom night!
• May 29 - I graduate from high school.
• June 4-9 - Cruise to the Cayman Islands and Jamaica. Yeah mon!
• June 13 - Luke, Brian, Michelle, and I meet with our former history teacher, Ms. Vazquez, two days before she moves to Texas.
• June 16 - My graduation party.
• June 19 - I help welcome a friend arriving home from a year in Italy.
• June 27 - I get a laptop (christened daytripper at Luke's suggestion) with Ubuntu pre-installed.
• July 5-6 - My sister and I attend Preview, the freshman orientation at University of Florida.
• July 9 - I join the 2000s and get a Facebook.
• July 13 - My 18th birthday.
• July 21-23 - I read the last Harry Potter book.
• July 29 - TWoS's first ever contest begins.
• August 11 - The Change Contest ends. I guess I'll contact the runner-up about that guest post...
• August 15 - Fun trip with friends to South Beach!
• August 17 - Last day of work.
• August 18 - I move into my dorm at UF.
• August 23 - First day of college classes.
• August 31-September 3 - First weekend home from college.
• September 5 - I join a club on campus: Get Carded.
• September 17 - A fellow UF student speaking out at a John Kerry forum colloquially entreats not to be stunned with an electroshock weapon. I am disturbed by the video.
• September 18-19 - I attend two protests against the tasering, skipping a class for the first one. (Later, in a sudden outbreak of common sense, I apologize for giving a care.)
• September 26 - My sister and I go to a new chiropractor for the first time.
• October 3 - I vote in the Student Government elections.
• October 24 - The Dvorak Keyboard and You makes the front page of del.icio.us and the second page of Reddit.
• October 25 - Honors registration, man... it's crazy.
• October 31 - I enjoy Halloween by going to see The Nightmare Before Christmas in 3-D and checking out some haunted houses in my dorm.
• November 3 - I go to UF's homecoming game against Vanderbilt. We win!
• November 6 - I see childhood hero Bill Nye (the Science Guy).
• November 12 - I go to a concert on campus, which my friend Sean goes from his own college to see.
• November 13 - Two years after quitting, I start shovelglove exercises again.
• November 16 - The WoS Store opens.
• November 17 - Some friends from FAU come up to UF for the first meeting between our football teams. Then we hang out.
• November 30 - My aunt takes my sister and me to a restaurant and art galleries in downtown Gainesville.
• December 5 - Last day of classes for the fall semester.
• December 8 - To celebrate our RA's graduation, a bunch of us from the floor take her to her favorite restaurant.
• December 14 - Finished with my exams and a final paper, I head home.
• December 18 - It's official: I have a 4.0!
• December 25 - Christmas.
• December 27 - Fun trip with friends to Key West!

Where do I see myself at the end of 2008? I'm glad you asked. I don't really know, actually. I don't things could change as drastically as they have in 2007. I'll still be in college, hopefully, and I'll probably be working on that computer science major. I hope to be in a relationship, or at least to have been in a relationship. Actually, just to be dating would be nice. We'll just have to see, I guess.

Just one link today: Top Ten Astronomy Pictures of 2007.

With that, I wish you a great '08. See you next year!

My calculus professor wasn't very timely in grading my class's final exams, so for a little while I had to wait after all my other grades had come in. Now I know I got an A in the class. I didn't do as well on the final as I wanted to, but I somehow got an A anyway. That means I have a 4.0 GPA right now. Needless to say, I'm very glad and surprised. I didn't think I'd do that well in my first semester of college.

I've been planning to visit my old high school for a while, and yesterday I actually went there with Justin. We got there an hour after school ended. The Green Team, a popular club, was having a party because it was the last day before winter break. You should have seen the welcome we got from some peolpe. I mean, seriously. We were greeted like heroes. I spent most of the time catching up with them. Besides Class of '08 people, Ruan, who graduated with me and Justin, was visiting too. Everyone I talked to told me how much they liked both Beowulf movies that Justin, Mark, Nick, and I made. Since our English teacher now shows them to her class every semester, they've attained cult status in Pompano Beach High School. Beowulf 3 is coming... someday!

Anyway, some people who were planning on going to see Sweeney Todd invited Justin and me to come along, so that's where I'll be later tonight. It should be fun.

You have to watch (or read a transcript of) this Democracy Now! interview with a Yemeni man who was kidnapped by the CIA, held without charges, and tortured.

Malcolm Nance knows waterboarding is torture because he's done it -- and he's had it done to him.

For a while there, I was in transit, but now I'm home. Home for the holidays. I got home on Saturday, and I've been settling back in. We got a Christmas tree the other day after going to about four places looking for the perfect one. This one is so tall that it almost touches the ceiling. We haven't put the star or angel on top yet. Soon enough...

Yesterday I went to the mall with Nick, Mike, and Mike's girlfriend Ashley. They've been together for over a year now. Down the hall in my dorm there's a girl named Ashley who has a boyfriend named Michael. FULL CIRCLE??

Anyway, I haven't really thought about Christmas shopping that much. I did send a gift to Natasha (a.k.a. Jordon's Canadian Friend), though. But now that there are two Poor College Students™ in the family, we've decided it's going to be a rather giftless Christmas. Which is fine. I've been telling them for years that I really don't want that much, and only now is it okay. As for the rest of my friends, I have gifts that I'm going to make. If I told you what they were, it would spoil the surprise. Although I already kind of blew it for Nick because he was asking me what he should buy me for Christmas, and I wasn't really sure.

Last night was the Pompano Beach boat parade. There weren't very many boats this year, probably because it was cold and windy. It was still nice, though. My family has been going to the boat parade every year since time immemorial. It's nice to do all these things that I thought I'd never do again because I'd be going to college.

And this evening, my final grades for the semester were posted. I got A's in all of my classes -- I actually got an A in America in the Fifties, the class I had to write a long paper for -- except that I got a "GRADE NOT REPORTED" in Calculus III. The prof is probably still grading the exams. We only took them on Thursday, and it takes him a while just to grade the regular tests. I hope I don't have to go through some sort of rigamarole because my teacher didn't submit the grades on time. I really want to know how I did, and I can't be held in suspense for too long. I'll get all stressed out. Calc III counts the most toward my GPA.

Take the Fake or Photo quiz to see if you can tell photographs from computer-generated images. I only got half of them right.

Watch a map showing anonymous edits to Wikipedia in almost real time with WikipediaVision.

Find out what people are saying about their neighbors at RottenNeighbor.com.