Category - Science

It's getting pretty hot these days, so I've been trying to keep my room as cool as possible. I'm running the fan on full blast and keeping the door open to the rest of the house; for some reason, my room doesn't get very well ventilated. I also tend to keep the blinds shut so it's darker. My parents have their own strategies for the house, including the selective use of air conditioning. Sometimes it's windy, so it doesn't feel hot enough to warrant putting the A/C on. Instead, we have all the windows in the house open for a few days until it gets hotter.

It was windy on Friday. The windows in my room were open, but the blinds weren't, so they were banging and clanging around. It was also hot. So yesterday, my mom turned on the air conditioning, and I closed my windows. The blinds were still closed. Without the heat and wind, it was a more peaceful day.

When I woke up this morning, it was still a nice, air-conditioned, indoor day, even though it was a little hot in my room. As I lay on my bed after Sunday brunch, I heard a buzzing sound at the window next to me. I opened the blinds for the first time in who knows how long and saw what looked like a bee. I looked closer. There were two of them, and they were between the screen and the window. I wasn't worried, because unless they could rip through the screen, there was no way they could get to me. They must have been trapped when I closed the window yesterday. Unless I hadn't closed it all the way.

I thought I had closed the window all the way, but now that I had the blinds open, I could see that I hadn't. And why not? There was something caught in the window.

A snake.

I took about as brief of a look at it as I could bear. It had snake skin. It had a little snake head. Its mouth was open. It was dangling, caught between two window panels. Its head was between the window and the screen. Some huge flies that I had mistaken for bees found a good spot in its side to lay their eggs. Disgusting? Yes. But it was also pretty funny. How long could I have gone without noticing it?

My dad had a look, and then he went around the other side to get rid of it. I couldn't have gone much longer, apparently. It smelled pretty bad, but mostly the smell was outside. It does, however, explain why my room smelled slightly funny this morning. After I was able to close my window fully again, I sprayed down my room with an air freshener.

In keeping with the popular dictum, "Pics or it didn't happen," I have one photo here that I managed to snap before the snake was delivered to its final resting place. The picture's rather large because you need a long shot to appreciate how close this thing was to my pillow. Have a look. It's not graphic, but if you look closely, you can see the large, dark spot on the body where the flies were. Also, notice the festive pattern of my bedsheets.

So, what did you do last night? I slept next to a maggot-infested snake!

And now... the links:

Yesterland is a site that's all about stuff that used to be at Disneyland but isn't any more.

If you ever model for stock photography, be careful. You might end up everywhere, like the Everywhere Girl.

Here's a video of a real-life Rube Goldberg machine, apparently for some sort of contest.

I'm back from my weekend vacation in Fort Pierce. Not much has changed, I see. It's the same old world with the same old problems. Same non-problems, too.

The trip was pretty nice. We'd never before brought our Italian greyhound, Speck, so it was interesting to see how he'd react to the ocean. We've established that he's afraid of the pool, but he approached the ocean with interest... until some cold water reached his little paws. That was it for him. Although he was on a leash, he tried as hard as he could to run away. Later, my parents took Speck on a walk, and he got used to the incoming splashes. So my dad decided to carry him into the water. Then he placed him in. Speck tried to swim out of the water, and he had a pretty good go at it. But my dad helped him, and he tried to run back to the umbrella and beach chairs. He was shivering and wet, so he warmed up and dried off in the sun. That was Saturday.

On Sunday, we decided to be nicer to Speckie by not having him go in the water (which actually was pretty cold). So he was just chillin' there in his beach chair under the beach umbrella on the beach. What a good sport. And actually, he didn't make a mess in the condo at all, which is surprising because he's gone through some phases of being pretty non-housebroken (housefixed?).

On our way out on Sunday afternoon, we took a drive north to Vero Beach where we ate at the ice cream store we always make a point to go to. But instead of going back south, we went north to check out Sebastian Inlet. We just took a peek, actually. We continued to go north on A1A, and there weren't many chances to get back to the mainland. Around those parts, the island (whatever it's called) is very narrow and has little more than the road and houses on the beach. It looked like more of the beach houses were for sale than weren't.

We didn't get to turn around till Melbourne, where we could see clouds of smoke rising from what appeared to be a brush fire. As we headed south on I-95 and I thought about how many Wikipedia links I would include in my forthcoming post, we had to take a detour because of the fire. It took a while, but after that, we could get back on 95, and it was smooth sailing (driving) home from there.

I listen to music a lot, usually through headphones. My laptop's speakers aren't very good, and I tend to be self-conscious about the music I like to listen to. Last week, I was using my headphones a lot, and my ears started to hurt. So I did the sensible thing, which was to stop using the headphones. In fact, I stopped listening to music altogether. Only the pain hasn't entirely gone away. It was pretty unbearable at times last week, but my ears seem to be getting better. Either that or I'm getting accustomed to permanent hearing damage. I guess it's less of a hearing impairment than a feeling that I need to pop my ears. I really, really hope it does go away because it's made me think about the things I take for granted as well as my own mortality. It's one thing to say "I am made of meat and chemicals; when I die, my flesh will rot," but it's quite another to be confronted with the risk of losing the amazing ability to hear sounds in one's environment. Okay, ears, I get the message. I promise I'll never abuse you again.

Here's a site about the Pagan Origins of the Christ Myth. Pretty interesting stuff.

Have you ever wanted your own island? They're for sale at Private Islands Online. I checked out the page for Florida. There are a lot of keys you can buy.

One of baseball's most legendary records is (apparently) Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak in 1941. But how likely was it to happen? Researchers at Cornell University used historical baseball statistics (and a computer) to create 10,000 digital simulations of the entire history of baseball. In each "alternate universe," the players hit and missed randomly, but according to their batting average for that year. So, just how likely was it that Joltin' Joe set this record in our own particular universe? Find out.

This weekend, I'm going with my family to our usual vacation spot on North Hutchinson Island in Fort Pierce. I haven't been there since last March, so I'm looking forward to it. We go at least once every year. A typical trip to the condo entails going to the beach in the morning, playing games in the rec room, eating coffee cake for breakfast, relaxing by the pool, and going to Vero Beach to have ice cream at Cravings. The beach is the best part. While it's true that I live near a public beach, the one at the condo is private, so there's usually nobody there. I'll try not to get sunburned this time.

This is the first time I've gone there since I've had my laptop, so there's no precedent here. I'm not going to bring it because it sort of ruins the idea of having a vacation. We're also bringing the dog for the first time, presumably because we can't find someone to look after him. He's been good lately, so I don't expect any trouble. But we'll see.

Though I just said that the beach is the best part, I'm also looking forward to some good, old-fashioned R&R. I'd been kind of sleep deprived, living in a college dorm, so I was hoping I'd be able to catch up on sleep at home. I've been back for a week, and I haven't noticed an improvement. For one thing, it's bright in my room in the morning, and it's usually hot too. I could open the windows so it's not as hot, but then it would be noisy. To be able to sleep, I need to be stored in a cool, dark place with lots of quiet. What I need to have at home is one of those masks that ladies wear when they need to get their beauty sleep. I need my resting sleep.

Anyway, I'm leaving tonight, and I'll be back on Sunday night. Au revoir.

Scary stuff from Wired: FBI Targets Internet Archive With Secret 'National Security Letter', Loses. This is one of a few such cases to have come to light. Who knows how many others there have been?

Researchers have recently decoded the earliest known sound recording, made in 1860. It was scratched into a piece of paper as part of an attempt to record sounds visually rather than to play them back. But thanks to modern technology, the grooves have been converted to sound in much the same way that a stylus reads grooves on a record. This article has more, including the sound clip itself.

And finally: When you're a reporter doing a spot for the TV news, you've got to make sure you're standing out of harm's way. Such was not the case for this reporter, who got owned by a sled.

I went to a French restaurant for today with my sister and our friends Yamilee and Austin. The place was called Rendez-Vous, and it was located in Fort Lauderdale. I'd never heard of it, but then, I don't go to a lot of French restaurants. It was actually part bakery, as those sorts of places tend to be, and the atmosphere was pretty relaxed. (No snooty waiters who take offense at your butchering of the French language.) I had a crepe with chicken, spinach, and mushrooms. It was good. Apparently Yamilee and Austin eat there a lot. I think I should go back at least a few more times to try all the things that looked good on the menu, not to mention the desserts.

When I upgraded my operating system a few weeks ago, I got a new version of Rhythmbox, my media player. In the new version, a plugin is enabled by default that allows you to stream and download music from Jamendo, a site that allows artists to distribute their music for free and receive donations from fans. So I poked around and found some albums that I liked. Here are a few of my favorites. All are downloadable for free.

• Demo by MoOt. Though it's a demo, its six songs are more polished than some of the other tracks on Jamendo. This album consists of nice pop-type numbers that are -- dare I say it -- Beatlesque. Very catchy, imaginative, and well-done.
• I Don't Know What I'm Doing by Brad Sucks. The artist's name and the title of his album both suggest a lack of self-confidence, but this album of moody-sounding semi-electronic numbers has managed to capture my interest -- an achievement to be proud of. I think I'd actually heard of Brad Sucks, even, and his music sounds like stuff that may or may not have been on the show with zefrank.
• I've saved the best for last: The Heavens by The Heavens. It's a professional recording by experienced musicians -- and it shows. This new British group's four psychedelic rock songs show that kickin' it old school is cool. The final track, "Echo Serena," is -- dare I say it -- sublime. (Or at least lime. I'm daresaying a lot of things today.) Highly recommended.

Although I've run out of the space I've allotted for myself, I will continue to go on about The Heavens for a minute. Their songs are cool. Their album cover is cool. (Seriously. Look at it.) A reviewer on Jamendo says of "This Beautiful Machine" that its stereo separation is "straight out of 1966." The drums and bass on either side, with guitars in the middle, hearken back to the days before record producers decided they should always be the other way around. "Echo Serena" is one of the better expressions of love ever committed to tape. And The Heavens the first and only band (not counting my friends' bands) that I've friended on MySpace. That is no small thing right there. I look forward to acquiring their next record, whenever it comes out, even if it involves paying money.

And now, the links.

If all the humans on Earth died, our buildings and cities would fall into a state of disrepair. Here are some lovely pictures of what it might look like.

Here's a fun read: "40 Years in the Future," from Mechanix Illustrated, November 1968. According to the article, the world of 2008 will have such advances as computer-guided cars, vacations in space, the four-hour workday, domed cities, and plastic silverware. Big-screen TVs will allow us to shop and take college classes from our own homes. We'll also be able to get new hit movies on demand!

Wikipedia has a list of common misconceptions.

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.

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.

Today was the last day of classes of the spring semester. Tomorrow and Friday are "reading days" to study for final exams. On Saturday, exams begin.

I can't believe how fast this semester has gone by. But I'm more surprised by the grades I've been getting. I was a straight-A student in high school (except for one B), and I'm on track to get 2 A's and 3 B's this semester. I guess I could have studied more. But I have to study more now. I have my physics exam on Saturday, differential equations on Monday, biology on Wednesday, and programming on Thursday. Luckily, my bio exam isn't cumulative, but the rest are.

I've been worried about physics all semester, but now that I got an 85 on the last test, I've got a B in the bag (after having a C+ most of the semester). Diff. Eq. has become the new enemy. I didn't do very well on the last two tests, so what might have been an A can now be no more than a B+ (if I'm lucky). So I've really got to hit the books. In fact, the only book I really don't have to hit is for programming, and not just because we don't have a textbook. I'm doing so well in that class that I haven't even checked to see how the grade is calculated. Programming really is my thing, y'see.

So, I talked to the latest girl today, and guess what? We're going to dinner tomorrow night!

Just kidding. She said it was a "bad time of year," with her having "three exams" in "two days" and all.

I would have asked her last week, or the week before that, or the week before that, but I was working up the nerve and I didn't want to get rejected. My careful planning has brought about the very situation I planned to avoid. This would be funny if it weren't so sad.

Moving on to important things, the next version of Ubuntu, my operating system of choice, is coming out tomorrow. It includes a lot of updated programs, including Firefox 3.0 beta 5. I just hope the update goes without a hitch. The last time I upgraded Ubuntu on my dad's computer, there were some hitches of unknown origin. I think the system managed to fix itself, but it was quite a scare, and I don't want it to happen with my computer. The alternative is to do a clean install and probably lose stuff like wireless and sound. Also, I'd have to put all my personal files and settings back on. I guess I'll just take the risk of upgrading, but I'll do a backup first in case things go awry. Wish me luck.

Here are some fun facts you probably didn't know about living in space.

I think I've posted something like this before, but in any case, here's another password strength checker.

The Pirate Bay, the world's largest BitTorrent tracker, gets a lot of nasty letters for facilitating the unauthorized downloading of copyrighted movies and music. They've posted a few of the many letters they've received, along with their responses.

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.)

Hello, Saturday. This has been the most boring day on record. I woke up around 10:00 as my roommate, Adam, was helping his girlfriend, Xandra, get ready to leave. After doing my weekly backup of my system, I went to the dining hall to eat, but there were tons of people lining up to get in there, so I went to Taco Bell. There were also tons of people in line there, but it was Taco Bell, so I stayed. I think all the people were in tour groups. Adam went fishing, and now he's apparently somewhere with some buddies. I don't think I'd want to be there, though.

Back up your files regularly. I cannot stress this enough. I use sbackup, which has a GNOME user interface. It's probably available in your Linux distribution's package manager... if you use Linux, that is. But seriously, invest in an external hard drive, and that's half the battle right there.

I've been reading Hamlet quite a bit lately. I can't get enough of that Hamlet character. Such wit he has. Even his first line, "A little more than kin, and less than kind," speaks volumes or at least sentences. Then there's this bit in Act 3, Scene 2:

Hamlet: Lady, shall I lie in your lap? [Lying down at Ophelia's feet.]
Ophelia: No, my lord.
Hamlet: I mean, my head upon your lap?
Ophelia: Ay, my lord.
Hamlet: Do you think I meant country matters?*
Ophelia: I think nothing, my lord.
Hamlet: That's a fair thought to lie between maids' legs.
Ophelia: What is, my lord?
Hamlet: Nothing.

*Sylvan Barnet says Hamlet is making a pun here. What a rogue, that Hamlet. A rogue and peasant slave is he.

Who here thinks Hamlet was actually mad? I can't help but think that he kept his wits all along. He just got a little stressed out by the whole thing, though. I do think Ophelia actually went mad, though. Is it an unfair characterization of women that they can so easily snap? Gertrude seems to have a good head on her shoulders, though, once Hamlet clues her in on Claudius's doings.

Last month, I chose my dorm room for next year: it'll be on the same floor in the same building as my current room, but on the other side of the floor. Turns out that this guy Ryan, who was one of my lab partners last semester, picked the same room. Pretty cool. But today he let me know that he changed his room to the building next door because his current RA is going to be over there. Dude must be a pretty awesome RA if he induces that kind of behavior. I never see my RA around, but that's okay. Anyway, Ryan said I could still live with him, but I think I'd rather be in the building I'm in now. It's a little closer to everything that's worth going to. Hopefully Mystery Roommate Selection will work out as well as it did the first time.

In slightly more comforting news, I might have housing secured for the year after next. My current suitemate Evan is getting a place practically across the street from campus, and if he has 3 other guys with him, it'll only be $150 a month each. If I collect, find, or steal $5 a day, I'll have it made in the shade. Not bad, I say. In fact, it meets the three C's, my criteria for an off-campus housing arrangement: close, cheap, and having cool people. I just made that up.

Thanks to everyone who commented on my, uh, little dilemma regarding the opposite sex. The general consensus is, "Jeez, Jordon, you can't learn how to talk to people by reading a book, so cut it out!" For some reason, I disagree. Actually, it's because this one book, How to Talk to Anyone, has some good pointers on making good conversation and getting people to like you. Granted, a lot of it has to do with meeting businesspeople at parties, but a lot of the tips are good in general use as well. I'm already starting to internalize a few of the simpler ones.

Luke gave me something good to chew on: "You are Jordon. Jordon is pretty interesting, but sometimes he forgets to tell people that. You shouldn't be someone else but less ashamed to show people who you are, which is not a list of _what_ you do but more _why_. For what does the history of Jordon serve as preface?" (Usenet-style emphasis in original.)

This site apparently grew out of a thread on Joshua McGee's web site: myhamsterdied.info, a "support group for hammie lovers."

41 Hilarious Science Fair Experiments. At least a few are digitally manipulated, but they're still funny.

The ACLU is keeping a running estimate of the total number of people on US government's "no-fly" list. There's also a list of some notable names on the list. Apparently the government thinks almost a million people -- including dead people, small children, and Ted Kennedy -- are terrorists. (Insert joke about Ted Kennedy's car accident here.)

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.