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.

5 years of The World of Stuff

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!

Cautious optimism

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.)

The flipping goes on...

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.

Stream of consciousness V

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.

The savings!

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!