Category - TWoS

Continued from last time...

Sometimes, people violate your copyright. Maybe they think they can get away with it or that it doesn't matter, or maybe they just don't care. I take violations of my Creative Commons licensed work seriously; I could (and should) be getting credit for the use of my work, and I'm out to make sure that it happens. The Creative Commons licenses aren't out to undermine copyright; copyright is what makes them work. Otherwise, I'd have no power to say, "You must attribute this work and any derivative works to me in the manner that I specify and release any derivative works under the same license." Without copyright, the most I could do would be to say, "Uh, like, I know you don't have to, but could you please try to put my name in there somewhere or something?" And we all know what happens when people don't have to follow the rules.

Fortunately, I haven't found too many cases of people copying my work and passing it off as their own. But it has happened. A few months ago, with the help of Copyscape (yet another site I could have sworn I linked to once -- ah, there we go), I discovered that a keyboard company lifted several paragraphs from The Dvorak Keyboard and You for a sort of press kit they were distributing online. The document acknowledges that it contains information taken from some other web sites, and even makes an attempt to credit some of them, but there was no credit toward mine. I sent a somewhat harsh-sounding e-mail:

After waiting a week for a reply, I looked up their web site's IP address and e-mailed the ISP in charge of it about this copyright violation. No reply there either. Rather than go up one level further, I just decided to do nothing.

I had another whack at it just the other day, when I went to Copyscape again and found that a non-profit was also using several paragraphs from The Dvorak Keyboard and You in violation of the license. I wondered what I could say that might be taken a little more seriously. I poked around to see if anyone had written form letters for responding to Creative Commons license violations, but I could find no such thing. But I did find some GFDL violation form letters on Wikipedia, so I ran with one of them. (Incidentally, my Creative Commons BY-SA license is pretty similar to the GFDL, so there wasn't much, conceptually, to change.) I liked the approach that some of those letters took. Instead of being threateningly pseudo-legal-sounding, they were warm and fuzzy: "Yes, it's okay to copy my work! Just please give me credit and let other people adapt your new work!"

So, I sent this to both the non-profit and the aforementioned company:

I decided to make it easy for them to comply by telling them exactly what they should say. It was hard to figure that out, though, because that meant I had to go past the summary of the license and actually read the legalese myself. I think the manner I suggested should comply with the license or be darn close: you have to cite the original title (if any), include the URL of the original (if any), credit the author (if one is given) in a manner that they specify, preserve the original copyright notice (if any), and make clear that your work is a derivative work of the original. I asked someone at Creative Commons about proper attribution, and while he was helpful, he tried to use the standard disclaimer that his answer wasn't legal advice and "should [sic] be taken as such." Maybe if something goes wrong I can sue him. (Turns out I could have read the FAQ. Bad me.)

Anyway, in suggesting a proper copyright notice, I had to take a whack in the dark (there's two metaphors that don't go well together) because I scoured the web up and down looking in vain for someone who attributed someone else's CC-licensed work in such a formal (read: license-abiding) way. In the few cases where I could find someone using someone else's CC-licensed work, they would just include a link to the author and a link to the license. Even Creative Commons themselves have done this. (Although it's possible that in those cases, the works are untitled, have short copyright notices, and aren't being modified enough to be considered derivative works. Then I guess it would be okay. If I were a lawyer and worked with this stuff for a living, my head would asplode.)

And what of the replies to this friendly letter? Three hours after e-mailing the company -- the one that had ignored my previous letter -- I got a friendly response from them thanking me for letting them use my work. They also said they'd get their webmaster to add the proper copyright notice. Though I've gotten no word from the non-profit yet, maybe it is true that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

One final word on this: I hereby dedicate the above quoted letters to the public domain with the hope that other Creative Commons licensors will find them useful. But I am not a lawyer, and they should not be interpreted as legal advice, etc., etc.

The Wall Street Journal has a graph of Presidential approval ratings from 1945 to 2006. During that time, the only president who had a higher approval rating upon leaving office than upon entering was Bill Clinton. Also, Truman was a man of extremes. His highest approval rating was higher than George W. Bush's after 9/11, and his lowest was lower than Nixon's upon the latter's resignation. If the graph is right, that is. It's pretty close in both cases.

From the BBC: a British perspective on baseball. It's a captivating account written by a complete outsider to the sport. I mean, this guy knows even less than I do. Here's what I found especially interesting: With many linguistic examples, the author notes, "So pervasive is American culture that we Brits have a complete arsenal of phrases for more or less every aspect of human activity, all drawn from a sport that none of us play and few of us understand."

Here are the Top 10 Awesome Nostalgic Foods We [meaning whoever made this list] Want Back. I remember some of them. Actually, just one of them.

My old high school's prom was this past weekend. The photos have started to come in on MySpace and Facebook. It looked like everybody had a good time. And of course, it got me thinking about my own prom, which was last year. I could go on for a while about how great it was. I could mention more details that I didn't add to the original post. For example, one of the songs I remember dancing to was "Hey Ya!" Everyone went crazy immediately upon hearing the count-in. I could also mention how the only regret is that I didn't get the nerve to talk to Jannike sooner. But I won't. I just hope the Class of '08 had as good of a time at their prom as I did at mine.

Anyway, what I really wanted to talk about today was copyleft. What's that, you ask? Before we answer that question, we have to ask: What is copyright? Mr. Webster says:

For example, the above quotation is from the 1913 edition of Webster's dictionary, which is no longer protected by copyright. As such, I can quote as much of it as I want in this blog post, and everyone in general can do anything with it that they please. If it had been copyrighted, I wouldn't have been able to quote very much without first requesting permission from the copyright holder and likely paying a large fee.

Over the years, copyright protection has become much more widespread in several ways. First, it is much easier for works to be copyrighted. Instead of having to file a form with the U.S. Copyright Office and include a copyright notice in your work, anything you create in a tangible form is instantly copyrighted whether you include a notice or not. Second, the control that copyright holders have over their work has been extended to include not only copying but also adapting, performing, translating... basically everything but quoting brief passages. Third, copyright terms have been extended drastically, from 56 years in 1975 to 120 years or more in many cases today. The effect of all this is that it's getting harder for people today to follow in the footsteps of generations of innovators in science, business, and entertainment, who advanced our culture by building upon material that had little or no copyright protection.

Enter copyleft. First devised for computer software in the 1970s, "copyleft" refers to any form of copyright licensing in which the copyright holder revokes some of his exclusive rights to the work and requires anyone who modifies the work to do the same. So you can be sure than any work that is covered by copyleft will always be free for other people to use, no matter how it is changed. (Until the copyright expires, at least.)

Maybe you've heard of the GPL, a copyleft software license. It's the license under which Linux-based operating systems are distributed. The GPL and similar licenses allow a group of people to collaborate on software, and that's part of what has made Linux so popular. Software development under the GPL advances rapidly because it allows people to adapt and extend other GPL-licensed programs. And there are many thousands of them. It's exciting stuff. What's more exciting (if you can believe it) is the recently released version 3 of the GPL, which closes a lot of loopholes that companies have discovered in the previous version in recent years.

Recently, it's become easy for people to apply copyleft to other works. This is largely due to Creative Commons, an organization that provides licenses for people to "easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry." These licenses can apply to most anything you create, whether it's a web site, a book, a painting, a song, or something else entirely. Say you took a photo and posted it on the Internet, and you'll let anyone use it for any purpose as long as they give you credit. Just say it's licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. Then, if somebody uses your photo without attributing you, they've violated the legalese of the license, and you can sue them. Other licenses prohibit making derivative works and/or using the work commercially. There are fun mix-and-match combinations to suit just about every need.

You may notice that these requirements themselves do not constitute copyleft; that is, someone who modifies someone else's work and just gives credit or uses it non-commercially can declare "All rights reserved" in their new version. But several Creative Commons licenses require users of the work to "share alike." I used to have this site licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, meaning that anybody could use my work for noncommercial purposes if they gave me credit and released their new version under the same license. Then, I got some requests to use some of my images for commercial purposes. I had to give them permission explicitly because the license forbids it in general. But I thought about it, and I realized that I wouldn't really mind if my works were used for commercial purposes. As long as they remain under copyleft ("ShareAlike"), it doesn't harm me or the general public. So recently, I re-licensed the content of this site under an Attribution-ShareAlike license. (Check out the sidebar and the footer to see those links you've never noticed!)

But I have to admit, folks: I haven't always been this attentive to copyright issues. I wrote The Dvorak Keyboard and You almost 6 years ago, when I was 13. When I needed an image of the Dvorak keyboard layout to illustrate the article, I searched the web and found high-resolution scan that someone had made from an MS-DOS manual. I prettified it, and other people copied it when they linked to me. That's no way to respect someone's copyright, even if it is Microsoft's. Yesterday, I finally decided to correct this indiscretion. I searched Flickr for a diagram of a keyboard that I would be able to use under the terms of the Attribution-ShareAlike license. I found one with an Attribution license, modified it for my own needs, gave the author credit according to the license, and relicensed the new work under the Attribution-ShareAlike license. (This is allowed because the original author is still being attributed and has not restricted the right of others to require sharing alike down the line. At least, that's what this table says.) Now, if someone comes along wanting to use my modified image, they'll have to give me and the original author credit and allow others the freedom to modify it for their own purposes. That's copyleft.

Lawrence Lessig, the founder of Creative Commons, has some interesting things to say about copyright in his book Free Culture, which I'm currently reading. It's pretty cool stuff, but I'll hold off on it until I've finished reading it. Besides, this has been enough for one post. And now, the links.

Here's an Animated History of the NYC Subway. It's an animated map that shows each line in the order it was built.

Math humor: 36 Methods of Mathematical Proof. This reminded me so much of my differential equations professor (what with his ingenious math tricks and all) that I sent him the link. I'm not sure whether he liked it or not.

Firefox Logo Spied in Deep Space? Okay, the image is a little modified from the original, but there's still a resemblance if you look at it the right way. At least it doesn't look like a woman wearing long robes or a guy with a beard.

Yesterday, I went tubing on the Ichetucknee River at Ichetucknee Springs State Park. In case it sounds moderately exciting, "tubing" just means floating on an inner tube. Which is not to say that it's boring. In fact, it's fun in a relaxing way. It's "chill," as the young people say. I was with some friends (including my roommate, Adam) and friends' friends who were girls. We had bought our own inflatable pool rafts (Adam got a giant seahorse), while the girls rented a large inflatable raft from one of the many tube rental places near the river.

We meandered down the river at a rather lazy pace except when we were paddling out of the way of fallen branches and things. The girls in their little boat decided to lie back and not pay much attention to where they were going, so they bumped into a lot of things and often fell far behind the rest of us. But they sang. They sang "Aura Lee" in serene three-part harmony. I asked if they knew anything by the Beatles, and they tried out a few lines of "Because."

After conquering the river, everyone left except Adam, his friend Stephen, and me. We were going to go to Ginnie Springs for even more tubing adventures, but it's privately owned, and the admission was more than we were willing to pay. Instead, we ate at Conestogas in Alachua and then got back to campus.

Hm... what else? Oh yeah. The World of Stuff is five years old today.

Don't look at me like that! You know I wouldn't forget. I've been looking forward to the day, actually. It's a milestone. Five years. Half a decade. It's pretty big. Of course, I can't forget about the chain of events that led me here.

In February 2003, I was a thirteen-year-old eighth-grader, and I had a problem. I didn't have a single web site. I had two: The Dvorak Keyboard and You and flipacoin.net. I decided to create a new site of which both would be a part. (flipacoin.net never fit in well and was finally spun off two months ago.) Since the new site was just going to be a collection of random pages, I thought the very general name "The World of Stuff" would be funny.

The original home of the site was free, ad-supported Angelfire space that my friends and I had used to advertise our two-off comic book series, The Superbuddies (hence "superbuddies" in the original URL). They weren't too happy about me wiping over the Superbuddies site, but I think they can agree that my site has been more successful than our photocopied comics that we had trouble selling even to our friends. (I still have a few copies of both issues; I found them recently, and they're pretty good. I should put the scans online here. Full circle??)

On Sunday, April 6, 2003, I decided the site was ready. After writing an introductory note on the main page, I made the following announcement on the "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Forum!" Forum at Where's George?:

Two days later, I e-mailed the link to five friends. And that was about all the publicity I had for a while.

Over the next few months, I made note of occasional updates on the main page. During the summer of 2003, the site moved to its own domain name and -- to keep people coming back -- evolved into one of those newfangled "blog" things. Over time, I found my style, and my posts eased into the format that you're familiar with today. But it became tedious to manually add posts to the main page, maintain archives, and update the RSS feed. On January 2, 2005, I started using the WordPress blogging platform, which automates those tasks and allows readers to comment on each post. I also strove to give the site a polished appearance. The layout was redesigned on October 16, 2004, and again on January 1, 2006.

When blogging was still new and exciting, The World of Stuff was mentioned in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in September 2003 ("Blog Stars") and by City Link Magazine in April 2004 ("Meet the Bloggers"). In the past four years, there has been a significant lack of press coverage. But news articles don't really matter. In fact, they did absolutely nothing to increase the popularity of the site. But it has become more popular. People have found the blog somehow (probably from here), and they've kept reading. They've post comments and e-mailed me, and I've responded. So we have this cool two-way dialogue going on, me and you.

While we're going meta, here's an Ask Jordon question.

natasha: What is the purpose of the numbers beside the months in your archives?

The archives page has a link to each month's posts followed by the number of posts made in that month.

And one more:

Carol: I'm new here but I'd like to know what you are majoring in.

Computer science.

Now, as I was saying, having a community of readers is a really cool thing. Sometimes I ask myself who I write for -- that is, whether I would still write if I didn't have an audience. I'm not sure whether I would. Knowing that other people are reading this gives me a sense of fulfillment. I like to entertain, inform, and provide a window on my life to others. I'm glad I've been doing it well enough that people are coming back for more.

Thanks for your continued readership and support over the past five years. I love you guys!

On Sunday, I asked a girl out to dinner. It was not the first time. I always get blown off, so the date never happens. Tonight, the tradition continues. Yesterday this girl said she couldn't have dinner Friday night because her ride was picking her up for spring break on Thursday afternoon. She offered to reschedule. We will reschedule later.

I want to have a normal love life so nobody thinks I'm a retard. Seriously, 18 and I'm going on my first date? And then I shout it from the mountaintops to all my friends, and they're all, "Congratulations, Jordan, for finally doing something we managed to do at the age of 13!" And my parents would be all, "We met in high school and got married a few years later!" If I weren't embarrassed enough before, now I have to tell everyone that I've gotten worked up for nothing. Yeah, moping in seclusion till Saturday sounds good.

Tomorrow is the last day before spring break, and unlike people who have already left, I shall be going to all of my classes as usual.

In other news, what's up with selling out? One of the things that attracted me to the No S Diet was its noncommercial nature -- one average Joe came up with this extremely simple diet plan (14 words long) and made a web page about it to promote it to other like-minded Joes and Janes. The site says, "You wouldn't take diet advice from a fat person, why take it from a fat book?" Well, the guy accepted a book deal that fell into his lap, and perhaps we can say that he has "sold out." His 14-word diet has become a 208-page book with some random nutrition expert for a co-author. If I hadn't been happily practicing the No S Diet, I might be turned off by this. What is the deal?

I sure hope I'm not a sellout because that's not cool. If there's anything sellouty about this site, it might be the store. But since no one's ever bought anything from it, I'm not sure whether it counts. On the other hand, today I rejected the umpteenth advertising offer to come my way (actually, it's probably closer to the umpth). I hate advertising, so the last place I would want to see ads would be my own site. Hooray for principles?

Okay, I want to ask you something, so I'm going to resurrect Jordon Asks You. This is a question I've been thinking about quite a bit, and I'm not sure how I would answer it myself. The question is: Would you date someone with different religious beliefs from you? Why or why not?

This might be of use to someone: this Reverse IP Domain Check shows web sites hosted on the same server as a given site.

Here's a video with a tip for shutterbugs: how to make a $1 image stabilizer for any camera.

Another one of those videos: Are Americans Really That Stupid? (Answer: It's probably just selective editing.)

If you've hung around The World of Stuff for a while, you might be vaguely aware that one of its component pages is actually a separate web site in itself: flipacoin.net.

The oldest part of TWoS, predating the site itself, flipacoin.net was released to the world on August 21, 2002, after I thought it would be cool to have a web site where people could virtually flip virtual coins on the virtual web. It soon became boring to maintain. Over the years, I added coins infrequently. I figured it would never integrate well with TWoS since its catchy name happens to be based on its separate domain name, among other reasons.

Although I still thought it was a cool idea, I decided it was time for someone else to keep the dream alive because I really wasn't doing a very good job. In December, I posted a notice on the site asking for a new webmaster. Recently, an Australian named Brandon Zubek decided to take up the offer. Effective today, flipacoin.net is no longer under my ownership or control. Wish Brandon the best of luck, and keep flipping those coins!

In other news: My suitemate never came back after his suicide attempt last month. I haven't seen him since he was in the hospital. He's withdrawn from his classes for the semester, and Evan from down the hall has moved in to take his place. Evan didn't like his roommate very much, so he decided to move out without telling him. That's pretty funny, if you ask me. He's a cool guy, and I'm glad to be one of his suitemates. (My dorm is like this: two roommates go in one room, and two rooms plus a bathroom make one suite.)

Here's a video that zooms in on a part of the Mandelbrot Set, a well-known fractal. It's at least worth listening to for the catchy tune, which is also about the Mandelbrot Set.

Use the Weird Converter to convert between weird units of measure. Did you know that a newborn baby weighs as much as 20 hockey pucks?

Here's a page by a high-school student who was unhappy with the job the photographer did on his senior picture (including changing the color of his eyes) and decided to take a self-portrait that he thought was a lot better: Rip-off Photography.

I am sick, so nobody can kiss me today. Sounds like it's time for some stream-of-consciousness action.

I had some tests over the past few days. Last Wednesday, I had a test in my biology class and I did well. On Friday, I had a test in differential equations and got a pretty good grade. On Monday, I had a test in physics, and, well -- it counts as a C on their own special grading scale. Let's leave it at that. (Leaving it not at that, I just want to say that I'm glad that a B+ is between 80-90%.)

I've actually been sick since I woke up Monday. (Great way to start a Monday, isn't it?) Monday and yesterday it was a throat thing. Today it was a nose thing. There are no more tissues around here.

Random thought (I'm writing stream-of-consciousness-ly, so I'm allowed to inject random thoughts): If this is my fifth "Stream of Consciousness" post between November 18, 2005, and today, and the Super Bowl has occurred annually since 1967, then in what year will I write a stream of consciousness post that has the same Roman numeral as that year's Super Bowl? Express your answer as a year in Roman numerals.

(Note: I just want to test the idea that if a site has a sufficiently large fan base, then its loyal and devoted readers will do anything you ask them to. Or, at least, one of them will, anyway.)

How about that Super Bowl, anyway? I had an inkling that it would be the most-watched Super Bowl ever, and I was right. In fact, it was the second most watched TV program in American history, behind only the last episode of "M*A*S*H." (That's fun to type.) But anyway, I knew it would be an exciting game, no matter who won. What an upset for the previously undefeated Patriots. They'll be talking about that one for years to come. (And my poor roommate, who's originally from Massachusetts, wasn't very happy.)

Speaking of roommates and rooms, today was my day to sign up for housing for next year. I decided to stay in Hume Hall, and luckily, I won the lottery to stay. I even got to pick what room I could stay in (from a selection of a few). I chose a room on the opposite side of my same floor. I like being on the second floor. I don't have to spend too much time walking up and down the stairs.

Ah, there's nothing like a detailed entry about your web host's new bandwidth pricing policy to attract zero comments from readers. I'm starting to feel the savings now, though. I can actually watch my bandwidth costs go down. $0.9837 per gigabyte and falling, baby!

My sister's going home for the weekend, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to. Well, for one, I go away a lot as it is, and I think it's important for me to spend time here and socialize with my dorm-mates. Also, since I'm paying $tons to stay here, I might as well get my money's worth. On the other hand, it is nice to see my family. I'll probably still be sick on Friday, so I don't think I'm going to go home. (It's bad enough being sick and feeling awful, but being sick and feeling awful in a car for five hours? Bleah.)

And for those of you keeping score at home, this is my 899th post.

I guess the Oscars are coming up or something, so read about 6 Odd Moments in Oscar History.

More about that friggin' Super Bowl: If you watched the Super Bowl (I accidentally typed "bowel" there -- good thing I allow myself to correct typos in these kinds of posts), then you probably noticed a lot of advertising from Bridgestone, the tire company. Well, it turns out they're just trying to clean up their image in the face of a human rights lawsuit.

Science education in Florida's schools rather sucks. I should know because I was subjected to it for a few years recently. Okay, my school in particular wasn't so bad, but it could have been better. Anyway, there's a petition you can sign that aims to change that.

Now, time for some hot soup (of the ramen-like variety) and probably some rest. Ah, that sounds good. Oh, and a hot shower, too. Yeah. But not in that order.

As I write this, my bandwidth is now $0.9829 per gigabyte.

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!

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.

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.