ZOMG XKCD

I heart xkcd. It could quite possibly be the webcomic to end all webcomics. I have this comic taped to my door. But I can't even remember how I found out about xkcd—probably between reading Slashdot comments and... adjusting my pocket protector or something. Snort. No, it was actually probably from my friends, a lot of whom read the comic. It's also practically a requirement for being a computer science major.

Anyway, xkcd mastermind Randall Munroe criticized the Dvorak keyboard layout in a recent comic and linked to my very own The Dvorak Keyboard and You in a follow-up blag post. It's so satisfying to see "xkcd linked here" on my Incoming Links (pictured above). This probably the best or most awesome publicity my site has ever gotten. So, when do the geeky girls start flocking to me?

Sheesh, I'm kidding.

I myself used to draw a lot of cartoons, some on paper, others on my computer. I drew stick figure comics with a friend. Weird superheroes too. I also had a whole series going that I did in MS Paint. No one has ever seen it. The characters were various flowers (with names like Flo Wer) and a rock. I don't remember too much about it, except that one time they got abducted by aliens.

I have a few examples of my work handy. This was supposed to be for my church youth group's newsletter in 2003:

I did another one, also intended for the newsletter, that had two kids taking a test. One says to the other, "What's the answer to the one that says 'Name'?" What a gem, I tell you.

And are beepers and pagers the same thing? I still don't know.

What do you do when you're trying to play Mozart on the guitar but you fail epically? Record one note at a time and splice the whole thing together. (Via J-Walk Blog)

Oh, those news anchors: What News Anchors Do During Commercial Breaks. (Via The Presurfer)

Someone found out about every street in the world and made a list of the ten most amazing ones: Top 10 Most Amazing Streets in the World. (Via The Presurfer)

Spring broken

Spring break was fun even though I was sick for a few days. On Tuesday night, I went out on my dad's boat, which was fun. I miss the ocean sometimes, so it was good to be back. Toward the end of the week, I hung out with Nick, Mike, and TJ more. We ate at a lot of restaurants, and I discovered that Hooters has delicious chicken wings. I wish I had hung out with more people and eaten more wings, but spring break must come to an end.

And so it did. After over a week away from school, I was actually... ugh... missing it. I mean, it's good to be back to being (supposedly) productive. People are counting down the weeks until the semester ends. (I think it's five or six? Oh no, I'm a bad college student because I don't know!)

Also, everybody got a haircut during spring break. Seriously, lots of people. I was going to get one myself, but I ended up not feeling like it. What is it about going home that makes college students want to cut their hair? I don't know about anyone else, but when I go home to get a haircut, my parents pay for it. And they know how much to tip.

Speaking of other people, I've decided to bridge the gap between The World of Stuff and a little web site you may have heard of known as Facebook. Some of my friends read this blog religiously, and some stop by once in a while, but a lot of them aren't blog-reading types. Still others don't know I have a blog at all. I think my friends and acquaintances would like my blog. How do I show it to them?

As it happens, Facebook allows you to import RSS feed items as "notes," which are what it calls blog-post-type things. Facebook will check back on the feed every few hours and post any new items as your notes. You can't edit them, though. To maintain control over my posts and keep comments in one place, I disabled commenting on my notes and imported a custom RSS feed (created with the help of Feed Wrangler) that just shows the auto-generated summary for each post followed by a link to the full post. Welcome, new readers who I'm already friends with!

A blog with tips on spotting Canadians: How to Spot a Canadian. (Via The Presurfer)

One year in the past, I discovered I could take 10 five-year-olds in a fight. Now I've found out how many ninety-year-olds I could take in a fight with this quiz called "How Many 90 Year Olds Could You Take in a Fight?" at howmany90yearoldscouldyoutakeinafight.com. Turns out I could take 14 ninety-year-olds in a fight. (Via The Presurfer)

I sometimes enjoy listening to Internet radio stations or radio stations on the Internet. So I was pretty pleased when my friend TJ told me about Split Infinity Radio, which apparently features DJs who work from their homes and pick a wide variety of tunes to spin. It's fun to tune in and see what they've got going.

Happy new stuff

Happy new year. It's the last year of the 2000s or whatever we're calling them. Notice anything different? That's right: The World of Stuff has a new look.

First of all, if the layout looks like a garbled mess, press F5 to force a reload of everything. That should work in most browsers.

Now, you may be asking why I made this change, the fourth major update to the design of the site. The previous layout was introduced three years ago, on January 1, 2006. Back then, I said,

Bearing in mind some of the feedback I've gotten and some observations I've made, I'm going to record a general overview (for the me of the future and the you of today) on what to expect in TWoS 4.0: it'll have the fun feel of TWoS 2.0 and the navigation design of TWoS 3.0 combined with the web standards adherence and universal accessibility of TWoS 5.0.

And that is what you see here today. Certain aspects of this design, such as the color scheme, are taken from the second layout (screenshot), which was in turn based on the first layout (tiny screenshots here). One of the things people missed the most from TWoS 2.0 was the random slogan displayed on each page. So I always intended to bring them back in the fourth layout, and here they are. I have most of the same ones to start with, but I would add new ones and remove old ones regularly.

Now. Why the change? Frankly, it's long overdue. The first layout lasted a year and a half; the second was around for not much more than a year. The third layout persisted for a whole three years. In that time, computers and the Internet have changed. The third layout was fluid to accommodate small (less than 1024x768) resolutions. I realized that things wouldn't look so great on bigger resolutions, but I thought it wouldn't matter. I didn't expect that wide screen resolutions would become the standard in only a few years. This layout is fixed-width to keep pages from being unreadably wide.

I also want to put this site on par with more popular blogs. This new design is modern and shiny, but you can see that it still has my own special "what-was-he-thinking-and-does-he-really-know-what-he's-doing" touch. And because the design is so Web 2.0, I'll say that this layout is in "beta." Not because it's not tested (oh, trust me, it's tested) but because it's open to suggestions for improvement. Think something needs to be placed somewhere else, or maybe some style doesn't look quite right? Bring it to my attention, and I'll weigh in on it.

One exception: the navigation bar is not open to criticism. You do not know how long it took me to test that thing. I do not know how long it took me to test that thing. But it was somewhere on the order of days. Days and days and days. In fact, I spent a ridiculous amount of time making sure everything looked perfect or at least pretty reasonable in every browser and on every OS that people are likely to use. You don't know frustration until you've designed for Internet Explorer. (At this juncture, I would also like to give CrossBrowserTesting.com another plug. I should buy those guys a pizza.)

Since people lamented the loss of the random slogans last time, I suspect that some people will lament the loss of the photos this time. The photos had a good run, though. It's the slogans' turn to come back, and they're always different. If you don't like the new layout or if you find it hard to get used to, don't worry. You will like it or get used to it soon enough.

Besides updating the design of the site, I've also tried to make it easier for you to follow along with the blog. For those of you who use a feed reader, your browser will now discover relevant feeds if you're viewing an individual post or a category listing. If you don't use a feed reader, I recommend signing up for e-mail updates. That way you'll be notified instantly when there's a new post! You can sign up under the "Subscribe" section on the sidebar. And of course, your e-mail address is safe with me.

So I guess that's all I wanted to say. I hope you enjoy the new layout as much as I do, and I hope you're having a great new year.

I've got class

Classes are pretty demanding. At least, the latter half of this week has been pretty demanding. Before that, I was taking it easy, so I guess that just evens out.

Tuesday was Veterans Day, so we had no classes and I had no work. So I went with some friends to Lake Wauburg in the afternoon. The lake and the surrounding area are reserved for UF students and staff. I had never been there, but I found out that it's a nice getaway. It's far outside of town, and there are cool things to do. I kayaked. It was fun. We had a picnic too.

Wait. Is that really the only thing that's been going on? Not really. I have been busy with classes, as I said. I gave a presentation today for my Indian Ocean class. It was, um, within the time limit? And I have a physics exam on Monday. And a tech writing project due Tuesday. And probably other stuff.

Man, this post is short. Maybe it's the result of a historical trend. November 13ths 2003 and 2005 were similarly unremarkable.

These 100 Very Cool Facts About The Human Body are very cool.

Here are 12 Vintage Cigarette Ads They Would Never Get Away with Now.

From Reason Magazine, a 2.3-megabyte chart explaining the simple process of US immigration: What Part of Legal Immigration Don't You Understand?

1,000th post

This is my 1,000th post. What a milestone. What a crazy, awesome, and crazy awesome milestone. This blog has been a big or semi-big part of my life. I've written 560,791 words (that's including this post) by my own count. I've met some awesome and amazing people (you know who you are). The site helped me land my first job. 1,000 posts is a lot for anyone, and it's taken me five and a half years to reach, so it's a milestone worth observing.

For the occasion, I went back and looked at every post I've ever written. Man, did that take a long time. Looking back, I can see that I haven't changed very much. Sure, my early posts were written differently. They weren't as long, and they tended to rely on quotations and images (especially borrowed images). And I was only starting high school. But it is still me.

September 15, 2003: "Sure, I keep to myself a lot, but I think I should try to be more outgoing."

July 5, 2008: "I need to be more attuned to whether [girls] like me and not rush to date them. So that leaves a few simple steps: ... Actually contribute to a conversation, including talking to her. Be outgoing."

I thought that for my 1,000th entry, I would list some of my favorites from the past. (It's old-school to call blog posts "entries," but it's classy at the same time. Peppering your speech old-fashioned but still technically acceptable terms can make you sound authoritative, like when sports announcers refer to a football team as a "club" or a "squad" or when they call a game a "contest." Yes, I have been watching too much college football on TV, but in the early days of this blog, I used "post" and "entry" pretty much interchangeably. In fact, the permalink for each post still says "permanent link to this entry.")

Anyway, I thought that for my 1,000th entry, I would list some of my favorites from the past. But what really makes a post great? How do you separate the memories from the posts themselves? I don't think it's possible. Many of these posts are my favorites because of the notable events that they describe. And of course, they're in top-ten format, because is there any other way?

Without further ado, here are my top ten favorite posts of all time.

10. "To blog or not to blog?" (July 25, 2003)
    Few readers remember that The World of Stuff wasn't originally a blog but a bunch of random pages with a common home page where I kept track of updates. In one of these early entries, I proposed the much-quoted question, "To blog or not to blog?" (with the equally memorable answer "I mean, come on, who's going to want to read about a 14-year-old kid?"). Of course, I decided to blog, and it didn't turn out to be a bad idea.
9. "Election Day" (November 7, 2006)
   In 2006, Florida Senate minority leader Ron Klein was running for the US House of Representatives, and former President Bill Clinton campaigned for him at my high school. I was glad just to be able to write about being there, but in this post, I included some of the pictures I took. They really are worth a thousand words each. My favorite is the one of Clinton saluting the cheering audience as the band plays behind him and Klein beams off to the side. Klein went on to unseat the 13-term incumbent.
8. "Constraint in writing, fun in spring" (April 14, 2006)
   I wanted to see if I could write a post without using the letter "e." I came up with this post almost 500 words long. Besides lacking the most common letter in the English language, it was completely typical. I wrote about what was going on with my life as well as including some links and the usual "One year ago, two years ago" flashbacks I was doing at the time.
7. "[sic]" (February 25, 2006)
   In junior high school, I had a number of teachers who were prone to slips of the tongue. They often went unnoticed, but I wrote them down as I heard them because some of them were really funny and bizarre. When I got into high school, I expected the same thing of my new teachers, but there were no verbal goofs to be heard. After sitting on my old list of "teacherisms" for a while, I decided to post some of the best ones. They're still funny.
6. "Some more details" (November 30, 2004)
   Not all of these posts are my favorites in a good way. In my sophomore year of high school, Mr. Laguerre, a new teacher, died unexpectedly. Mr. Firestone, my psychology teacher, had become friends with him during his short time at Pompano High, so he decided to spend his next class explaining the psychology of death. He talked about his mother's failed battle with cancer, and many of my classmates broke down in tears as they shared stories of their own family members and friends who had died. It was so terribly sad and therapeutic at the same time. Just before graduating, I won a scholarship in Mr. Laguerre's honor.
5. "Things work out" (September 16, 2005)
   This might be my most referenced post of all time. At the beginning of my junior year of high school, I felt ready to start dating. I asked a girl named Nacole if she would go to a football game with me. The game was canceled due to Hurricane Katrina, so she changed the venue to her house and then to a hotel. My nervous feelings got worse when she announced her love for someone else and dated the guy. Finally, I approached her about the apparent misunderstanding. It turned out she hadn't considered our thing to be an actual date. Fortunately, it didn't hurt our friendship, and I still talk to her every so often. As first (non-)dating experiences go, it was pretty memorable and taught me some valuable lessons. We never went on the date.
4. "Day One (and Day Two)" (August 25, 2007)
   I thought my first few days of college would be like day one and day two of high school, but they weren't. When I started high school, I was nervous and just plain confused. But when I started college last year, I was more enthusiastic, and I managed to learn a lot in a short time. After less than a week on campus, I had prepared some advice based on my observations. I still recommend them to my friends who are starting college. I ended the post with my mailing address and a shameless plea for support that ended up receiving one generous reply.
3. "Where was I?" (March 22, 2008)
   My first year of college was an annus horribilis when it came to dating. After two rejections in the fall, I asked an acquaintance out to dinner and was excited that she said yes. But we had to reschedule, to my frustration and embarrassment (I had already postponed a visit to my family). As the date finally drew near, she asked if she could bring a friend. She... wait for it... didn't know it was a date! And when I told her it was, she said she wasn't interested in dating. I caved and let her bring her friend to dinner. It went smoothly. Later we went to see Kimya Dawson and friends put on a great show. So even though I was sorely disappointed, the night went rather well. It was another learning experience as well as the closest I've ever been to being on a date.
2. "The interview" (March 15, 2006)
   Another painful memory that has to be shared. During my junior year of high school, the school contacted me about participating in Boys State, a prestigious summer leadership program in the state capital. After much preparation, I went to the advisor's office to be interviewed by members of the American Legion, who immediately rejected me for not being religious enough. Having only recently come out of the atheist closet, I felt helpless, humiliated, and miserable. The only consolation came from my teacher, Mr. Miller, whose few words I will never forget. I wrote to Americans United for Separation of Church and State but received no reply. My readers in the school administration evidently didn't care either; they let the practice continue.
1. May 2007
   My final month of high school was jam-packed with so many unique experiences that it would be impossible to pick just one. First, I helped lead my school to an unexpected second place finish in the countywide high school programming competition, and the programming team landed a spot on the school's morning announcements. The school put on a carnival for the senior class. I helped give a disastrous speech for some BS technology thing. At the senior class awards, I won a scholarship while two of my friends sneaked out to streak at a football game. On the second to last day of school, there was a food fight in the cafeteria. At the senior breakfast, I was named class salutatorian. I danced with a hot girl at prom and then delivered a speech at graduation. So many things happened one after the other, but I captured them in as much detail as possible, knowing that nothing like this would ever happen again. And the memories are all there.

One of my favorite parts of blogging is sharing cool links that I find. Over the years, I've posted untold numbers of links, so I thought I'd present my favorites, excluding the ones that are now broken. (Honorable mention goes to season one of the BBC series Look Around You, which I linked to on July 5, 2006. Several of the links to individual episodes have died, but the rest are still riotously funny.)

Here are my top ten favorite links from the last 1,000 posts.

10. Internet '96 (July 29, 2006)
    Remember what the Internet looked like twelve years ago? Neither do I. Luckily, one netizen (does anyone say that anymore? did anyone ever say that?) provides snarky commentary on how major companies' sites looked in the early, amateurish days of the World Wide Web.
9. New and Improved Stereotypes (January 1, 2008)
   A collection of made-up stereotypes, complete with illustrations.
8. Mr. Roger Lord Mortimer's Neighborhood (March 26, 2006)
   A rich guy rips off Mister Rogers' Neighborhood... sort of. Hilarity ensues. This was the second YouTube video I ever featured.
7. Redefined: A Cappella Nintendo Medley (April 16, 2005)
   An a cappella group called Redefined sings and acts to a medley of old Nintendo theme songs. Very funny and impressive, considering that the Super Mario Bros. theme song is very hard to sing (and is accordingly one of the most butchered melodies in the history of music). Be sure to watch as well as listen. These guys are great!
6. 5 Men and a Limo (August 28, 2005)
   Do you ever wonder what those gravel-voiced movie announcers do in their spare time? Here's a video featuring five of America's top voice-over artists in one car, including the late, great Don LaFontaine.
5. Spamusement! (July 21, 2004)
   Poorly-drawn (but all the funnier) cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines. The site is apparently no longer updated, but there are over 300 cartoons and active forums.
4. "Office Space" Recut (June 2, 2008)
   How about Office Space recut as a thriller? There are a lot of crappy recut trailers, but this one's pretty good. I promise. (In fact, it's amazing.)
3. Minesweeper: The Movie (March 10, 2008)
   Continuing the long tradition of movies based on video games, it's a movie based on everyone's favorite game to play when they're bored. Seriously, I played me a lot of Minesweeper in the spring, prompting my roommate to take notice and show me this video.
2. Back to the Future: The Enchantment Under the Sea Dance Revisited (August 9, 2006)
   What would it look like if the dance scenes from Back to the Future and Back to the Future Part II were synchronized? They actually fit together really well.
1. Dinosaur Comics (December 13, 2005)
   A webcomic that features the same panels every day, but with different dialogue. It's an example of constrained writing, but it hardly seems constrained at all. In fact, it's more like the author's random musings as projected through the main character, T-Rex. I've been reading Dinosaur Comics for three years now, and it's seriously hilarious. It's #1 because it's the cool link that keeps on giving.

Of course, this blog would be nothing without you, the readers. Whether you're a friend or a stranger, I enjoy interacting with you. Many of you have been reading for a long time. And of course, any subjective top ten list like the ones I just posted is subject to debate. (Am I absolutely insane for not including Post X?!) So comb through the archives and share your favorite posts and links with everyone. That is, if you have any favorites. If you don't, that's cool too. I'll just be over here celebrating.

Man, a thousand posts. Crazy.

Good migrations

More metablogging: in my last post, I mentioned that "for reasons that are outside the scope of this entry, my posts from 2003 and 2004 have never been loaded into WordPress." It's a topic I want to go into a little more, so it's the scope of this entry.

Before I moved to WordPress on January 2, 2005, I wasn't using any particular blogging software to blog. I was manually writing posts on the main page, moving old posts to the archives, and adding items to the RSS feed one by one. It got tedious after a while, which is why I made the switch. But I never moved my old posts (except the post of January 1, 2005) to WordPress, where they could each have an individual URL and be tagged and commented on. That left 346 posts from 2003 and 2004 that don't quite fit in with the rest.

The most obvious reason for not adding the Original 346 was the issue of permalinks. They are supposed to be, as the name implies, permanent. Back then, I found it most convenient to use a permalink scheme unlike any known to man. Each monthly archive was on a single page (for example, /archives/200312.html) with each post's "permalink" being specified by a different fragment (the part after the #). The fragment was originally in the numeric format YYYYMMDDHHMM, but I later changed it to dDDHHMM. The letter "d" was added to the beginning because fragments should be specified by unique element IDs, and IDs may not begin with a number. I updated all the old permalinks and the posts that linked to others. Sounds pretty impressive, but it was just a matter of doing search-and-replaces in HTML files.

Anyway, to move the old posts to WordPress, I'd have to change these permalinks a second time, and it seems like the best way to do this would be to do 346 find-and-replaces on the database with PHPMyAdmin, a la these instructions. That doesn't sound too hard. I've done more tedious things. As for redirecting the old links, I wouldn't create hundreds of complex .htaccess rules to redirect old posts to their new permanent (?) URLs, but it would be simple to redirect them to their new monthly archive pages.

Those issues are technical. They can be solved relatively easily. But there's an editorial consideration that arises from technical conditions. WordPress allows you to set a single time zone for your blog. I have it permanently set to Eastern Standard Time, UTC -5. In the pre-WordPress days, things were different. From April 2003 to October 2004, I dated my posts with UTC because I was dumb. This means that I had a different definition of "today" than my environs indicated. I would write a post just after "midnight" describing the events of yesterday, but yesterday was actually that same day because "midnight" was 7:00 P.M. I thought that people in other time zones wouldn't understand EST but would understand their offset from UTC. Yeah, really.

The question remains: should I edit my old posts to reflect my local time? Should I change those old yesterdays to todays and the todays to tomorrows? This could have interesting consequences, such as having posts move from one month to another. It would also throw my old flashback "One year ago, two years ago" links out of whack. But it would make the old posts consistent and less confusing for readers.

There are a few other issues associated with moving the Original 346 to WordPress. The only one I can think of off the top of my head is that I'd have to remove the occasional formatting from post titles (example) as well as the "Plus:" subtitles that I used to use. No big loss there.

If I do move the Original 346, which sounds increasingly likely, I'll probably convert the blog's categories to tags and re-tag each of my posts. Categories are pretty hierarchical, and you tend not to create new ones except once in a great while. Tags are created on the fly and can be for the nonce, although they're most useful if they're used at least a few times. They can touch upon things that would be too trivial to merit creating a category. For example, if I wrote a post about going to a steakhouse with my friends, I could tag the post "friends," "dinner," "steak," the name of the restaurant, and so on. It sure would be interesting to look back on all my old posts that had to do with steak.

From the BBC: How not to do an American accent.

Here's a recipe for chocolate cake in 5 minutes. I haven't tried it. It might be disgusting.

More about Legos: A rare glimpse inside the Lego factory.

Upgrade

If portions of this site were unaccessible with strange error messages for about 45 minutes yesterday, it's because I was upgrading WordPress, the blogging platform that this blog runs on. It's something I don't do very often due to the sheer complexity and (for some of you who tried to read the blog yesterday) inconvenience of the upgrade process. (I liken it to pulling out some of your own teeth and putting in new ones according to a manual. It is actually deleting some of your own files and putting in new ones according to a manual.) The process of being told to delete lots of important files but not others gives me such a sinking feeling that I only upgrade every six months or so even though running an old version of WordPress puts me at risk of known security exploits.

So I jumped up from Wordpress 2.3.2 to 2.6, skipping the entire version 2.5 in the process (there was no version 2.4). With each upgrade, it's pleasant to see the dashboard — what I see when I'm writing posts — subtly or not-so-subtly redesigned, even though it takes me a little while to get used to it. There are some new features back here that I like too. I like that WordPress shows me my word count as I'm typing this post, and how it seems to automatically save the post more often. And it gives me more fun facts at a glance, such as the following:

(The number of posts is not quite accurate; for reasons that are outside the scope of this entry, my posts from 2003 and 2004 have never been loaded into WordPress. The actual count of posts can be found on the archives page.)

I had been vaguely aware that when you mark a comment as spam in WordPress, it disappears from your blog but isn't deleted. Thanks to my ingenuity, I never get comment spam anymore, but WordPress 2.6 alerted me to the fun fact that thousands of old, nonsensical offers for home loans, online casinos, and V1a-gr--@ were taking up room in my database. There were also a few legitimate comments that were automatically marked as spam even though I had no anti-spam plugins running at the time. Sorry, Evan and Kirsten. Your comments are posted now, six months to a year late. There may have been others I didn't catch, so if you've been waiting for two years to see your comment posted, you'd better stop now.

Evan's comment mentioned the word "porn" (a running joke from bash.org). I wonder if certain keywords or patterns trigger(ed) the automatic spam-marking of comments. Folks, why don't you talk about porn and we can see if your comments show up?

A final note: each version of WordPress seems to be getting more and more bloated. Please, stop the bloat. I don't want static pages, post revisions, widgets, link categories, or a media library. I don't even use tags. I probably should, but I don't want to tag all my old posts, and I don't want to convert my old categories to tags because there are undoubtedly some extra tags I could assign to each of them. I could spend a week doing that. Why does anyone need categories and tags, anyway? I mean, I think I understand the subtle differences between them, but they're pretty similar.

Another Lego-related link: Classic photographs restaged in Lego.

Something else about porn: Why ISPs' "Stand" Against Child Porn Is Actually Not a Stand Against Child Porn.

I've long been wondering what web browser Richard Stallman, the iconic head of the Free Software Foundation, uses. He's a principled man who would never use a browser that didn't meet his definition of free software. Even Firefox isn't free enough for him. But I was surprised to learn that Stallman does not use a web browser at all:

That's hardcore. Now I just wonder what e-mail program he uses.

The archives

I'm pleased to announce that the Great E-mail Scare of '08 has been resolved. My e-mail client is again able to download e-mail from the server. It must have been a server issue in the first place.

While the scare was ongoing, I had to check my mail on the web, which is something I rarely do unless I'm traveling without my computer. Before I switched to Thunderbird in 2004, I used webmail exclusively. After I switched, the old e-mails I had saved on the webmail interface had to be left behind. There was no option for me to move them to the inbox, where Thunderbird would be able to access them. And so, they stayed. But recently, all this webmailing got me wondering whether they had added that really obvious option — and alas, they have.

So, I sifted through a few hundred e-mails from 2000 to 2004 and decided which ones I would want to move to the inbox, and thus to Thunderbird. Actually, it was pretty amazing to look back and see reflections of myself as I was between the ages of 10 and 15. I had written e-mails to people I'd forgotten about things I've forgotten. And I'm usually someone who remembers a lot of things.

I decided to save a lot of e-mails not for their content (some of them are extremely short) but by the very fact that they exist. For example, if someone sent me a link, it doesn't matter if it's dead now; it's just interesting to look back and see that they thought I would find it interesting in the first place. But a lot of the e-mails are really interesting to read. I found e-mails my friend Kevin sent me when he spent the 2001-2002 school year in Honduras. I found the first e-mail that Daniel, The World of Stuff's #1 fan, ever sent me. I came across lots of discussions from my friends about our band, including what to name it.

I also came across this:

(I didn't discover the words that spell other words in rot13; I just put the sentence together.)

What's more, I found a lot of e-mails I had saved from my time at Where's George?. I was a big part of that community even though I was pretty young. I mean, I had a lot of enthusiasm for it, and I made a lot of friends. I no longer talk to most of them, and now I'm wondering how they're doing. Some of them helped me out a lot. One time, I wanted to create my own web site, and this one guy recommended a free host. It actually cost a dollar, and the only interface was a Unix shell. So here he was, describing Unix commands for me years before I would ever need them again. He also taught me how to use pico. In some later e-mails, I was talking to a "Georger" about her web host, which I soon signed up with myself and still use today.

It's pretty interesting to see how those events have shaped the way things are for me today. Now if only I had access to my first e-mail account, which I got in '98 or '99. But alas, it's long gone. And yeah, I just said "alas" twice in this post. And now it's three times.

Mailbox Map is a cool Google Maps mashup that shows you the locations (US only) of post offices, mailboxes, and UPS Stores.

The movie industry is adopting Blu-Ray as its next-generation high-definition home video format. And if the movie industry does something, it probably sucks. Find out why Blu-Ray Sucks.

Here's an article about people who attempt to master the art and science of picking locks.

Copyright now redux

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.

All rites reversed

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.