Git-r-carded

For those of you who don't know, I volunteer with Get Carded, a student group that promotes organ and tissue donation. (The name comes from the organ donor cards we used to hand out, but these days there's an online database for that sort of thing.)

Anyway, I've always been good about going to their events until recently, so when they asked for volunteers for their next event, I obliged. With this one, they decided to branch out from their usual target group of students at the university. Instead, they were going to have a table at a charity concert in Levy County.

Today, three of us went out to Bronson (which, despite having less than 1,000 residents at the last census, is the county seat). The concert was the third annual "Bark-N-Purr" Charity Concert, put on by the county humane society on some field. We had received a map showing us where exactly to set up. We were shown on the map as "Get Corded!" In fact, the letter and everything else they sent were made out to "Get Corded!", including the exclamation mark.

It was raining a bit, and we didn't have our tent, so we called one of the co-directors of the group and asked him to bring it. He did after a little while, but he didn't stay. Then we set up. We were near booths for the Army, the Future Farmers of America, and a John Deere dealer. We were next to the Tupperware booth.

In general, there was a carnival-like atmosphere, with some bounce houses for kids, a sort of choo-choo train, and a few games. There was also a stage that had been set up, for the actual concert. They started with a prayer, I think, and then the national anthem.

Oh, and there was food. Hamburgers, hot dogs, corn dogs, wings, pulled pork sandwiches, french fries, other kinds of french fries, and... fried Oreos. I had to try some. They were surprisingly delicious: warm and breaded, with the Oreo inside kind of melted. I liked them so much that I got some more. That wasn't actually a good idea.

I spent most of the time manning the booth. The other two spent some time checking out some dogs that they had doing tricks in an area near the stage. The police also showed off their dogs, apparently. I didn't see. Ironically for a concert to benefit animals, pets weren't allowed, but I could see where they were coming from. I wouldn't want to have to clean up the field.

What we were really there to do was to talk to the people about organ donation. They were people with trucks, people wearing various types of camouflage, people with Confederate flags, people with American flags sticking out of their pockets. They were old, middle-aged, and young. One was even a beauty queen, the Clay County Miss Outstanding Teen or something like that. (She had a sash thing and a tiara.) They were also nice, for the most part (the Tupperware man helped us set up our tent).

We ended up giving out lots of swag. We even gave some to the Future Farmers of America for them to use as a door prize at their upcoming dinner. And before the headliner, some country singer, came on, we packed up and left.

I had been thinking of staying here after I graduate, but I'll have to think about it some more.

With Google phasing out support for the horrible Internet Explorer 6, a mock funeral is planned for Thursday. (Via Lifehacker).

Yahoo! Answers is full of stupid people asking stupid questions. Here are 20 of the dumbest. (Via J-Walk Blog)

And finally, a parody of Rachel Ray's show 30 Minute Meals.

Mr. Kalilich goes to Washington

Last week, I mentioned that I'd be going to Washington, DC for the weekend to attend Free Culture Conference 2010 with other members of my school's chapter of Students for Free Culture. Well, I'm back, and here's how it went.

On Friday, I had to skip my classes and go into work early. It was raining, and I had brought a duffel bag with some warm clothes (and a camera) borrowed from my parents. As I waited for the bus, a pink Porsche SUV limo pulled up to the bus stop. One of the other people at the bus stop turned out to be in on it; she said our apartment was giving free rides to campus in the limo, presumably as a gimmick to get people to renew their leases. I was expecting to see a camera crew at any moment, like I'd end up in one of those commercials where they surprise random people by going to their house or whatever.

Anyway, we all got inside the limo, where they had granola bars, Rice Krispies treats, and bottles of water for breakfast. I expected to be lectured to about the benefits of renewing my lease, but nobody said much. It was kind of awkward, actually. The limo followed the route that the bus would have taken and dropped us off at the usual bus stop on campus. I thanked them for the ride.

After working at my job on campus, it was time to go. Kris, Jennifer, and Mark picked me up, and we drove to the airport in Orlando. It was the same airport that Mark and I flew to Europe from last year, so it brought back some memories. I didn't have much time to reminisce, though, because we were almost late. We hurried through everything until we made it past security, when we had a few minutes to get some food.

The flight was slightly delayed, but we got on eventually. I was seated between two people in the emergency exit row. It wasn't very comfortable, but I didn't mind much. I spent most of my time thinking about the trip and reading that day's issue of the Alligator. I didn't even get to finish it before we started our descent into Baltimore. I strained to look out the window. The clouds parted, revealing an endless, twilit landscape of barren trees and little neighborhoods covered in white. I had never seen snow before, and there it was—lots of it.

We landed at the airport. The runways had been cleared, but everything else was covered with a thick layer of snow. I became giddy. I didn't have much time to be giddy, though, because we were almost late. We hurried out of the airport to catch a bus to the nearest train station. We made the bus with a few minutes to spare, and then we made the train with a few minutes to spare. In the meantime, I did notice that the cold was a different, more tolerable kind of cold than what I was used to in Florida. It just felt like being inside a freezer. I guess there was no humidity.

The train took us to Washington's Union Station, where we took the DC subway out to Arlington, Virginia, where we met up with Gavin Baker, the founder of our chapter. He had graduated and moved to the DC area, and he let us stay in his apartment for the weekend. We made our way to the apartment (I also tried to run around in the snow and throw snowballs) and got settled in. Then Gavin took us back into DC to have dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant called Lalibela. Apparently there are a lot of Ethiopians and Ethiopian restaurants in the city.

It was a small place, and a lot of the table/booths were right next to each other. I was sitting on a bench next to another group of people. Still, it was pretty cozy, and Gavin had a suggestion for what to order. We got a communal dish consisting of some portions of various meats and vegetables served on a type of flat, doughy bread. We each had our own piece of flat, doughy bread, which we tore pieces off of and used to pick up the meats and vegetables. It was fun and delicious.

During the meal, Gavin surreptitiously showed us a Wikipedia article on his iPhone. He was almost certain that the guy I was sitting next to was Vivek Kundra, Chief Information Officer of the United States. I had read about him on some of my nerdy news web sites, so I was pretty pumped. I couldn't help but try to pick up on the conversation he was having. His friends were talking about his past job as CTO of DC and how he had been on the cover of a magazine. Definitely Vivek Kundra. We decided not to talk to him, though. More often than not, public figures want to be left alone.

We went right back to Gavin's, where we wound things down and went to bed. We had a couple of big days ahead of us tomorrow.

Speaking of going to bed, I'm pretty tired, so I'm going to continue this story next time. Soon, probably. In the meantime, here are some links:

Here's a spectacular NSFW animated short in which almost all of the scenery and characters are logos and mascots: Logorama. (Via waxy.org)

The webcomic xkcd is pretty funny, but I don't think anybody ever gets the punchline every time. Fortunately, we have Toby, Dave & Ian Explain XKCD, a blog in which the humor behind every comic is explained.

How to Buy A Space Shuttle With Duct Tape

I'll be back to a regular posting schedule soon, but in the meantime, here's another guest post from Peter Hurford. Are my "Links At The End of the Post"^TM really that famous?

It's me again; the Greatplay.net Peter Guy. Jordon is busy "entertaining" -- whatever that might mean -- so he told me specifically to, and I quote, "[f]eel free to be TWoS's first repeat guest poster." So, while Jordon may be coming back on Tuesday, I can sneak this guest post in before he gets back.

But what should I blog about? I warn you that it's very dangerous to blog without "A Concrete Idea"^TM beforehand. Otherwise you end up with rambly posts like this one, instead of cool things like Monkeys on Typewriters.

-

So, instead I'm going to tell you a little story. Here you go:

How to Buy A Space Shuttle With Duct Tape
by Peter Hurford

First, head down to your basement and into your time machine. The reason the time machine exists in your basement will be explained later -- you should not actually need a time machine to complete this journey. You only need Duct Tape.

Operate your time machine and travel into the future until you get to an era where time machines have been invented. Use your $1 million to buy your own time machine. Send this time machine back in time to your basement, present day. This accounts for the time machine in the previous paragraph. Like the time machine, the $1 million will be explained later, and are not needed to start the journey.

After you have your time machine, go back in time to 1920 and open a bank account. Find someone and offer to trade your duct tape for a penny. They will definitely accept, as duct tape had not yet been invented, and thus is an unseen wonder. Deposit your penny into an account with 3% interest, compounded annually. By the time you get back to 2010, you should end up with $0.14 in 1920s money, which, due to interest, is now worth $1.44. Offer to buy money dated before 1920 on ebay, using your new $1.44.

Now that you have $1.44 in 1920s money, go back in time and redeposit that in your account along with the penny you found on the ground. Going back to 2010, you should now have $167.39, with interest and adjusted for inflation. You will have to repeat this process two more times to get $1 million -- specifically, you'd have $3,610,088.83. You can then use to buy the time machine in the second paragraph, which will account for the time machine in your basement in the first paragraph.

NASA says that a space shuttle costs about $1.7 billion. Assuming the time machine costs $1 million, you should have $2,610,088.83 left over. Going back and forth between 1920 and 2010, starting with $2,610,088.83, you should need to make two trips to get $1.7 billion -- specifically, you'd have $56,291,504,222.13.

So buy the space shuttle. You lose your duct tape in the process, but you get a space shuttle, and you should have enough money left over to launch it. If not, one more trip with your remaining $54.6 billion should net you an additional $7.9 trillion.

-

Since this is the website that requires "Links At The End of the Post"^TM, here's the compounding interest calculator and the inflation calculator I used for the math in my story.

If Jordon were writing this post, he probably would have linked to stuff off of The J-Walk Blog. The comparison of the Big Mac and Burger King Burger seems interesting, seeing if that commercial is really true. And here's a picture of the world's tallest man and the world's smallest man.

If I were writing for the World of Stuff, my go-to link site would probably be Digg -- today there's this picture of a door, this failure at the FBI, this retrospective about buying drinks for girls at a bar, and how to spot bogus user reviews.

Well, with that, I'm off.

See you around, stuffers!

Thanksgiving Eve

'Twas the day before Thanksgiving, and all through the university, people started putting up Christmas decorations and saying "'tis" and "'twas" a lot.

On Monday, I and some other folks from Get Carded (the student organ donor awareness group I'm a part of) went to some sorority houses to talk briefly about the benefits of organ donation. I had never wandered around Sorority Row, which is actually more of a neighborhood than a row, so it was all new to me. Also, I didn't know that sororities (and probably also fraternities) allow just about anyone to come in and make an announcement during their weekly dinner. Yay for captive audiences.

Right after that, I accompanied my co-workers, Bonnie and Mark, to Wal-Mart Walmart to buy some toys for a needy child (and a gift card for his parents), as we had decided to do last week. A little boy is going to be very happy with the new toy trucks he asked for.

I think my professors should get into the spirit of the season by canceling classes the day before Thanksgiving. I mean planning not to have class in the first place. I e-mailed all of my professors last week, and they all said they would hold class as usual. On Monday, two of them changed their minds after finding out how many students were going to be there. Meanwhile, I had already made plans to get picked up on Wednesday afternoon. Le sigh...

Anyway, in a little while I'm going to my grandparents', where I'll be spending the holiday. I'll get home either late Thursday night or on Friday.

Here's a pair of Ask Jordon questions from my friend Justin.

Justin: Would you be willing to go on (another) expansive trip throughout Europe? I wish to backpack around the Mediterranean.

Not for a while. Though I had a blast this summer, my bank account also had a blast. As in, it, like, blew up. Okay, that didn't work. I spent a lot of money is the point.

Also Justin: Would you consider telling Luke that I miss our friendship?

Sure. Luke, Justin misses your friendship.

Kind of cool, kind of creepy: a piano that "talks" by playing a bunch of notes that are extracted from a recording of human speech. (Via J-Walk Blog)

Every Beatles fan must hear this: analyses of the multitrack tapes of "She's Leaving Home," "A Day in the Life," and "Come Together." They're originally segments from a BBC radio program(me). Hear different tracks isolated and even some stuff that didn't make the final mixes.

Wuffles

Seen in my apartment this week:

Reboot

My Halloween was good; thanks for asking. I went to my friend Andrea's to watch the football game with her and some of her friends, and we hung out for a good while afterward. No one yelled at me for not wearing a costume! Now that's what I call a good time.

I upgraded to the new version of Ubuntu on Sunday. I'm always a little wary of upgrading because there's the possibility that something could go wrong and screw up your system. It never happens to me, though.

Well, it never did until this time.

To finish the installation, I rebooted. During the boot process, a certain daemon was being turned on and off in an infinite loop, and I had to kill the power to turn off the machine. I was able to get to a root terminal with networking in safe mode, and I made it to the login screen by booting with an older kernel, but I didn't want to go farther than that.

I used an old live CD to get on the Internet and ask the Ubuntu Forums people (and anyone who saw my status on Facebook) for help. Ultimately, I decided to reinstall Ubuntu; I didn't think I could diagnose the problem, and this would have been my fifth successful upgrade in a row, which any sensible person would tell you is too many.

So, I downloaded and burned a CD from the command line and then reinstalled Ubuntu from that. Next, I spent six hours trying to restore from a backup I had made the day before (back up regularly, and always before upgrading!). For six hours, tar was dominating my CPU without extracting anything from the archive I had made. It turned out that I had an option wrong. The main argument that tar takes isn't the directory where you want the archive extracted; it's the file(s) you want from the archive. Doesn't explain why it would take so long to extract /, which wasn't even in there, though.

Since I had backed up my home folder, all of my personal files and most of my settings remained intact, so it was a relatively painless process getting back up to speed. Now it's almost like I had upgraded, except that I'm enjoying the benefits of a clean installation. This new version has some minor annoyances, but it's a lot quicker to boot up (and shut down), and the new default icon theme is pretty slick.

Overall, I am pretty pleased. I just don't want it to happen again. To that end, I created a separate /home partition during the installation. That means I'll be able to do a clean install in the future without having to restore my home folder.

From Wired: Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine.

Hot dogs come in packs of 10, while hot dog buns come in packs of 8. Some guy got fed up with that decided to take matters into his own hands. (Via J-Walk Blog)

The Gainesville experience

My parents came to visit my sister and me for the weekend. I hadn't seen them since the start of the semester two months ago, so it was nice. We had a good time going to some restaurants and doing some shopping. Usually, I'm the one who's visiting them, but they like Gainesville. It's a unique place.

Yesterday, I was walking through Turlington Plaza when a guy tried to get my attention. He was dressed like an extra in a biblical epic. I had seen him standing there many times before, and other UF students will probably know who I'm talking about. I wasn't really sure what his deal was, but I was about to find out.

The first thing I noticed about him was that he had a British accent. Next, I realized he was a Krishna guy. I wanted to be on my way, so I let him say what he wanted to say and get it over with. He said he only talked to the smartest-looking people. And so he told me, a smart person, a little bit about why his Hare Krishna beliefs made so much sense.

He said that people place too much importance on their physical bodies, and that even though I'm a good-looking version of George Harrison, I won't always be. He asked for a donation, and I couldn't think of how to get myself out of giving him a dollar. In exchange, he gave me, now a smart and attractive person, a book on meditation that had interviews with George Harrison and John Lennon.

With that, I had a chance to continue on my way. If his religion is so great, couldn't he have tried to win me over without schmoozing? In any case, I need to work on saying no.

Later, I missed my bus home and had to wait for the next one, which was, of course, late. It was dark by the time the bus arrived. I had already read most of the newspaper and done the crossword puzzle, so there wasn't much to do on the bus except look out the windows. I couldn't even do that because it was too dark, so I had to be content with listening to people.

During the ride, a guy started talking to the woman sitting next to me. He said he had been to one of her poetry readings on campus a few weeks before and wanted to compliment her on her work. She mentioned that she had one book out and was working on a second.

I was pretty sure that she was a particular woman I had read about several times in the newspaper, a local resident who had turned to a career as a poet to lift herself out of poverty. As soon as I struck up a conversation with her, I knew. She was missing some of her teeth, a detail I remembered from the articles. She had a pleasant demeanor.

I had wanted to buy a copy of her book ever since I had read about her, so I asked if she had any copies with her. As it happened, she did, so she signed one for me, and I gave her the money. Not long afterward, the bus reached my stop, so I thanked her and left.

Here's a browsable map of London from 1868. (Via The Presurfer)

See the first cell phone, digital camera, digital music player, and more: World's First Gadgets. (Via The Presurfer)

Homegoing

It's that time of year again. Homecoming, a university holiday, was yesterday, so I had no classes (or work, since I work at the university). I took advantage of the opportunity to have some fun. As I said last weekend,

I'm going to Howl-O-Scream at Busch Gardens with Andrea and friends on Thursday night. I haven't been there since I was too short or wimpy to ride the brand-new Montu, and I've never been to a Halloween-type event at a theme park (omg omg omg so awesome how could you not ahve ever been).

So we set off on Thursday afternoon. Once we got to Tampa, we had dinner at Friday's, where Andrea's friend Billy met up with us. Next, we headed to Busch Gardens. It was dark by the time we got there.

For Howl-O-Scream, the rides that aren't rollercoasters turn into haunted houses and the rides that are rollercoasters turn into rollercoasters at night. The haunted houses have different themes like haunted prison, haunted sorority house, haunted house, etc. I didn't think they were too scary, but some people in line behind me begged to differ. A lot. But as long as you realize that people are going to be jumping out at you and screaming at every turn, you can prepare yourself for it. (Actually, they seemed to single out the people who looked like they would be scared the most; most of them didn't jump out at me.)

Also, rollercoasters. I finally did ride Montu (and Kumba as well). The rollercoaster enthusiasts of us also wanted to go on SheiKra, but it would have taken an hour and a half to wait in the line, so we decided to go to some more haunted houses instead. Maybe next time. Rollercoasters are awesome at night.

The lines seemed to get longer and longer as the night went on; Andrea said it was much more crowded than it was when she went last year. At 00:30 (yeah), the park started closing, so we headed out. After parting ways with Billy, we headed to Andrea's house in Lakeland, where we spent the night.

The next morning, we enjoyed some doughnuts (courtesy of Andrea's parents) before setting off for Gainesville. The traffic in G-ville was terrible, probably due to the homecoming pep rally, Gator Growl, which was that night. I didn't go, as usual, but at least they got a comedian I had heard of. Today's football game is designated as the homecoming game, which doesn't really mean anything (I think) except that we're really supposed to win.

Anyway, I had a good time with Andrea and pals, and I'd be glad to go on some kind of trip like that again.

Here's a funny letter (supposedly) from John F. Kennedy. (Via J-Walk Blog)

The BBC has an interesting article on Samuel Johnson's influential dictionary of the English language.

The information superhighway

Once in a while, I post ridiculous things I wrote during the pre-World-of-Stuff days. Sometimes I've found them written on posters or in notebooks, but quite often, they're sitting right here on my computer. My "documents" folder has tons of old things, some of which I don't even remember writing.

In the year 2000 (as opposed to, you know, the color 2000 or something), my school, St. Elizabeth's, still didn't have a web site. This document, dated March 7, 2000, provides a solution that was apparently dreamed up by me.

Why
Saint Elizabeth
Needs a
Web Site.
|-------------------------//-------------------------|
An Essay by Jordon Kalilich, Fifth Grade.

I am tired of other private schools being on the Internet when we are just here, moping around. Highlands Christian and Pine Crest are leaving us in the e-dust. There are several items to consider before making a Web site for a school, and I will dicuss some of them below:

I. Convenience
A Web site is very convenient, especially for a school. Instead of having to phone the school and pay for the costs, one could log on to the Internet and find information there. Aside from saving money, it's quick and memorizing long phone numbers is not needed.

II. Cost
Creating a Web site is usually free. There are Web sites that allow individuals and orginazations to create Web sites. One such service is at http://www.angelfire.com . To make a URL (Web site address) easier to remember, a domain name can be bought. Most domain services charge the first year free, the second year $70, and $35 each year thereafter. Of course, most schools wouldn't have a hard time getting that money. One of the most popular domain name services is at http://www.register.com .

III. Advertising, Etc.
One cannot just make a Web site and expect a thousand people to come. Web sites need to advertise to be visited. One such Web site, http://www.safe-audit.com , works with banner ads and advertising. Search engines are another key to popularity. Registering on search engines will help boost any Web site's visits, especially when you can register to 30 of them at one Web site. This can be done at http://www.addme.com .

IV. User-Friendliness
If one could name anything, it could be put on the Internet. Many things can be customized on a Web site. Using HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), things that could be customized include, but not limited to: Font, text color, text size, background color, hyperlink colors, and things concerning images. A Web site with basic HTML tips is at http://www.htmlgoodies.com and http://www.htmlclinic.com .

That is why we need a Web site, how we can get one, and what we could do with it. Let this be brought to the attention of the principal, the staff, the student council, Ms. Ewing, and the entire student body. Thank you all and have a nice day.

I don't remember ever delivering that address (if that's what it was supposed to be). Eventually, the school did set up a web site. The URL was a third- or fourth-level domain name that was impossible to remember because it had nothing to do with the name of the school and, in fact, no apparent meaning at all. The site was also private; each family had to create an account and log in. It was not ideal.

And almost ten years after writing that, a lot has changed about the way people run personal web sites. We let Googlebot find our new web pages. CSS makes styling pages easier. theworldofstuff.com costs me $7.99 per year. And I hate advertising.

Nowadays, my old school has a new web site that uses a customized version of MediaWiki. And it's open to the public, so I can see which of my teachers are still there! It's kind of interesting to see how things have changed in the six years since I was a student there.

Thank you all and have a nice day.

The Katzenklavier is a theoretical musical instrument that's a sort of piano with cats inside. Instead of strings, each hammer strikes a cat with a different tone of voice. It sounds like something out of a cartoon, but it was described in the 18th or 19th century by some guy who thought it would be a great way to cure people of ADD. You can't make this stuff up! I wonder if anyone's ever built one.

From mental_floss: 10 Secret Menu Items from restaurant chains around the US.

Bed

My new apartment came furnished, and my bedroom has a full-size bed. It's been kind of hard to get used to. I've been sleeping in a twin-size bed for as long as I can remember, and I can't imagine why a normal person would need or want a bed wide enough for two people. Well, I can, but still.

I have two pillows on my new bed, so there's a potential for an ever-raging debate over which side I should sleep on. I've decided to sleep on the side of my nightstand when I have to wake up at a specific time in the morning and on the other side when I don't. It makes a sort of sense. Still, I feel like I shouldn't have to make that decision every night.

Also, every day without fail, I've made my bed upon waking up, which is something I never used to do. Is this the beginning of OCD?

But seriously, I guess it is nice to live in a reasonably clean-looking space. That's a good attitude for me to have since I'll have to keep this place reasonably clean.

39% of Americans want the government "to stay out of Medicare." In other words, 39% of Americans don't know that Medicare is a government program. It has a cheesy name, so what do they think it is? (Via J-Walk Blog)

Here are 21 Oddly Named Places and the Stories Behind Them. I live near the first one (Boca Raton, Florida). (Via J-Walk Blog)