Category - Weird

It's been a week since my 1,000th post, but all is not quiet. I just like to rest on my laurels.

I went home for the weekend. My friends Nick and Cristi were having a Halloween party on Friday night, and I couldn't figure out what I should be. At the eleventh hour, I had an idea.

In seventh grade, Nick and I (and our friend Sean) dressed as (three of) the Beatles. We had light brown suits and black turtlenecks, which (I think) were supposed to be reminiscent of the Beatles' Shea Stadium garb. We had cheesy wigs too. It was pretty funny.

So I dug through my old stuff and found the original coat and shirt (not the wig, alas, but my hair was long enough that I wouldn't need it). It was a blast from the past... from the past. Oh, and the party was cool too. I spent the rest of the weekend mainly hanging out with Mike, Nick, and TJ. I wish I could have stayed longer, but Thanksgiving is just around the corner.

Okay, who isn't sick of hearing about the election? Election Day is today, and I voted today. Yay democracy.

No, I didn't vote early. I made the time to do it today, and there was hardly a wait at all... probably because everyone else voted early. It was smart of Obama to push early voting; clearly he knows that some of his strongest supporters are college students who are usually too lazy to go to the polls. (At least, that's what I think the rationale was. A friend told me today that Obama was tacitly telling people to vote twice. What the heck?)

Obama has been leading by a significant margin in all the national polls, so it looks like he's going to win. If he does, I will be happy.

Deletionpedia is an archive of articles that have been deleted from Wikipedia.

Grapes with an EULA (that is, an End-User License Agreement, like the one you agree to when you install some software).

Do you hate prunes? I Hate Prunes.

Toward the end of my senior year of high school, all of my teachers knew about my blog. They all happened to mention it to me out of nowhere. I had told a few of them about the site when it was relevant, but I didn't expect the word to get out as much as it did.

I've just learned that this blog was being cited at my high school's faculty meetings since at least my junior year. They apparently found it useful to get an unwitting student's perspective on their policies and the school in general. That's what Ms. Phillips, an assistant principal, assured Mr. Bell, the principal, when he found out that I had said something about his well-known propensity to talk a lot. Don't get mad, it's good information.

It's kind of odd to go back and look at all the stuff they've read about me. They read that I dismissed the new principal's motto as a platitude. In the same post, I said, "It's sometimes fun to see what policies are enforced at the beginning of the school year; usually, the dress code is on the administration's collective mind for a few weeks, and then they forget that you're showing too much skin, young lady." I also described the new tardy policy as "draconian."

Oh my God. Did I inspire them to enforce the rules more strictly? My peers would have been so mad at me if they had known.

During my junior year, one of my teachers puzzledly said to me, "Cruel Joke Soup for the Gloomy Soul"? And Mr. Gordon, the principal during my senior year, sent me an e-mail praising me for my "very fair and accurate assessment" of his reaction to the infamous food fight. But there must have been more than that. The teachers and administrators must have read my rants about their lame field trips and propoganda campaigns. I pointed out their glaring lack of knowledge of teenage slang and blamed them for things they didn't do (incidentally, a fellow student was responsible for that). There are hundreds of other examples. I was full of criticism.

Oh my God. Maybe that's why I wasn't valedictorian??

??????? !!!!

Is it too late to go anonymous? This is only my 988th post.

Oh well. Time for some Ask Jordon.

Tallie Hoe: So if I'm Christian, and I know that the Bible doesn't teach that there is a burning hell, does that make me not a Chrstian?

I don't know. It's all very confusing about who is a Christian and who is not. Everyone has a different definition. "He says he's a Christian but he's actually not. She says she's not a Christian but she actually is." Or maybe... "I'm a Christian, he's a Christian, she's a Christian, we're all Christians, hey!" To answer your question: don't worry about it. Just go out and help some people.

Here's the rarely told story of the Chicago Tribune's "Dewey Defeats Truman" issue.

The timeless bestseller A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates is back in print, and it can be yours from Amazon for only $81. You can preview a few pages from the book to make sure that you like it. Be sure to read the reviews too.

And finally, we have a video of a wind turbine exploding during high winds.

Last week, my friend Mark tipped me off to a job opening at the Dean of Students Office. They were looking for a webmaster. Mark had been filling in for the job in addition to doing his own job there, so he was pretty busy. I thought I'd send my resume.

My interview with the Interim Dean of Students was today. To be honest, I had been pretty nervous. In my tech writing and speaking class, we're starting to go over resume and job interview skills, so it was pretty timely. I read up on the stuff we're going to cover about job interviews, so I had that stuff in mind today as I went in. Actually, the interview went more smoothly than I could have imagined, and I was hired on the spot!

I look forward to maintaining the Dean of Students Office web site with Mark, who's the database guy, and the graphic designer. Of course, it'll also be great to get to know the friendly faces at the DSO and to learn about some of the inner workings of the university. I also should mention now that opinions expressed herein are not those of my employer but are pretty awesome.

(Frequently asked question: How much does this job pay? I am pretty sure I know, but I don't want to tell you before I find out for dang sure. As with most discussions of salaries, this would be a faux pas.)

Here are some links to hold you over till next time.

From 2004: Top 10 Secrets They Don't Want You to Know About the [U.S. Presidential Candidate] Debates.

Ever wish there was a phone number you could call that could broadcast your voice from a megaphone overlooking a fjord and a village in Norway? Well, now there is: Telemegaphone Dale.

In Germany, 3,000-year-old skeletons found in a cave have had their DNA matched with several living members of the local population. Some families just never move.

Last night, as I was trying to go to bed, my heart was racing. I wasn't sure why.

There could have been a lot of reasons. It might have been the cheeseburger, french fries, cookie, brownie, and Gatorade I had for dinner. It might have been that my roommate was getting sick and I was trying to fight it off. It might have been that somebody took the dry erase board off my door and chucked it at the bike rack outside. Who would do such a thing? I suspected everyone at first. I thought someone might have something against me, but the consensus around here is that it was a random act of drunkenness by a stranger.

It might have been things in the future, too. I was anxious about having to give an impromptu speech in my tech writing/speech class. I would have to choose one of three topics presented to me, and I would have three minutes to come up with a three-minute speech. I was also nervous about teaching people simple phrases in Esperanto, a language I'm not entirely fluent in. (Both of those things are tomorrow, by the way.)

I felt like a wreck. Actually, I just felt really awake. I lay in bed for an hour or two, trying to figure out how to calm my nerves. I got up for a drink of water. I played the guitar a little. Finally, I decided to go out to the common room and hang out there till I got tired. I was chatting it up for about 45 minutes. Since I had class at the asscrack of dawn, I decided I should finally go back to bed. And when I got there, I didn't feel my heart pounding.

Why did it happen?

Incidentally, the class was my physics lab. I didn't think there was anything worse than having physics lab at 7:25 A.M. on Mondays. But when I got back to my room after the lab, I realized that there was. The fire alarm had gone off right after I left.

I think I'm going to write a column for the student newspaper as I said that I might. I'll send them one, and I guess they'll run it if they like it. Another follow-up from my last post: equal time. Fraternities and sororities do good things. They work toward charitable causes and provide strong friendships for their members.

BugMeNot is a convenient site where you can submit (and look up) login information for sites that require free registration (usually newspapers' web sites that make you register before you can read the articles). Even though BugMeNot does not keep logins for Facebook, Facebook censors mentions of BugMeNot on its site.

Here are 10 mispronunciations that make you sound stupid. Of those, I'm only guilty of mispronouncing "jewelry."

Unfortunately, some people suffer from the delusional belief that photographing buildings from a sidewalk is a crime. Here are the details of just one encounter between a photographer and an irate security guard.

If I seem a little sophomoric lately, it's because I'm now in my sophomore year of college. I haven't felt this way in four years.

But seriously, my first day of classes wasn't so bad. Well, the classes weren't, anyway. There are no labs the first week, so I didn't have to wake up at 6:45 for my Monday Morning Physics Lab from Hell. (That's right, I said "hell." HELL!) My first class was physics at 12:50. Right after that, I had programming, and then I was done for the day. Both are continuations from classes I took in the spring. I have the same lecture hall for physics and the same lecturer for programming. The lecturer is cool. After a long weekend (or a summer), he asks the class how they spent their time away. He spent his summer not shaving, and now he has a cool beard.

It rained a lot last week. Like, a lot. I had to do some walking around, and I got pretty wet. My tennis shoes (sneakers) also got pretty wet. I thought they would dry out eventually, but they didn't after a few days. They also stank like whoa. My roommate and I decided that I should toss them in the dryer, but as I was leaving with them, I caught a glimpse inside. Now, I'd never looked at the insides of my tennis shoes before, but I'm pretty sure they weren't supposed to be bright yellow with black spots.

Today I had to get up early for my technical writing class. After putting on my only remaining pair of shoes (a pair of sandals that aren't comfortable for walking long distances), I made my way toward the class.

"Excuse me. Do you know what you have to do to get to heaven?"

I'd had a year of mental preparation for this, but I was surprised that they were just stopping passersby rather than just talking people who were sitting around and doing nothing. Last year, I took the bait to avoid being confrontational and to get a sense of the guy's argument. Since then, I've decided that I'd be more frank in future meetings.

"I don't think heaven is a real place." The bespectacled, well-dressed young man smiled knowingly. "But," I added hastily, "that doesn't mean I think people should go around doing bad things. I think people should do good things for the sake of other people."

"So you don't think people should go around killing each other?" he said with a chuckle.

"No, no." I shared the laugh. "People should be good to each other."

"Do you know what the Bible says about what you have to do to get to heaven?"

"I think so." Last time, I had been quoted to, chapter and verse.

"It only takes a minute, and I could walk with you."

"Sorry, but I'm going to be late to class," I said. "Thanks anyway."

I was early to the tech writing class. It was an honors class for engineering majors, so I wasn't surprised when my former floormates Cameron and Jason showed up. (Also, they had told me they'd be taking the class.) Then class started. The professor was a woman; I've never had a female professor. She went over the basic rules: no cell phones, no tardies — and at that point, someone came in late. Then a co-worker came in to tell her something, and she asked to use someone's cell phone. She had to call the other professor, who had gotten into a car accident on her way to work. After that, she went over the course material with us. This was a tech writing class, but it was also a speaking class. She would be teaching us the speech component, she said. She had a slight lisp.

We did an ice-breaking activity where we each wrote facts about ourselves on a piece of paper and then swapped with other people and initialed by the things that we had in common with them. By that time, the other professor had come in. She said she was still shaken and that the other driver was "an illegal Nicaraguan who didn't have a driver's license." She spent the rest of the class giving us some basic rules of writing. I think I've probably broken about ten of them in this post. We already have an assignment: to write about a scientific topic in a way that a junior high school student (11-14 years old) can understand. It should be about something we already know; researching isn't the point. I wonder what I could write about.

Here's this year's Beloit College Mindset List for the class of 2012, describing the world as it is to incoming college freshmen who were born in 1990.

You've probably seen some of these hilarious exam answers before, but I got some big laffs out of the new ones.

It's hard to believe that students are still harassed at school due to their sexual orientation. At one Florida high school, the perpetrator was the principal. Here are details from the court ruling on this criminal activity.

I remember what it was like starting at college last year. It was tough. I hardly knew anybody, and I was shy about talking to the people who lived on my floor. Now, living in a dorm with mostly freshmen, I see that they're having the same anxieties as I was having, and I'm now in a position to help them out.

It's still hard for me to talk to a bunch of people I know. How do I know we'll have anything in common? I think about things like that. But sometimes it helps to stop thinking about things and start doing things. People can introduce themselves to me, like this one girl Vicky who I ran into three times as I was moving in, but it's better if I take the initiative. As I was passing by the common room, I did introduce myself to someone named Jon. Last night, as I was at the dining hall by myself, I saw Jon there by himself, so I went over to talk to him. We went back to his room, where I met his roommate, Cory.

Later, Jon and I went back to the common room, where I got to meet a bunch of people, viz. Michael, Patrick, Holly, someone else who I think was named Michael, and more. (I should mention now that I'm normally pretty bad at names. I seem to be doing well, but I'm using this blog post to practice.) The one whose name I know was Michael had a lot of questions for me about his upcoming chemistry class, the one I took last year. The others also had questions about what things would be like. Last year, I was wondering the same things, and I had to find the answers from experience. I'm glad I can use that knowhow to make people breathe a little easier.

Today, the Student Honors Organization put on its annual year-beginning barbecue. It wasn't actually a barbecue as much as it was a huge line of people waiting to get some food that was catered by Sonny's. I went with some of the gang from my floor, and I saw Jason, who lived across the hall from me last year but has moved off campus. Later, I distributed flyers for Get Carded, the organ donor awareness group I joined last year. In spite of a sudden downpour, I covered a lot of the dorms along with Roy and David, who were new members. I talked to David about Ubuntu and such things. He's a fan.

I've been wondering when my roommate and I would get to meet our suitemates. As I was writing this post, they knocked on the door to properly introduce themselves. Their names are Michael and Cory, which seem to be common names around here. They're freshmen. I wasn't sure if they'd pair freshmen and non-freshmen in the same suite (they try not to do it in a room), but apparently they do.

Classes start tomorrow. I only have two. They're in the middle of the day, back to back. Not bad.

Stuff White People Like is a blog that lists stuff white people like. I think it should be called Stuff White Liberals Like.

In England, the Avon and Somerset police have taken to an unusual step to curb the number of dumb calls they get on their emergency line: they're posting them on YouTube in an attempt to shame the callers. Will it work, or will it just inspire others to imitate them?

A poorly titled but useful Wikipedia article: metric yardstick. It gives approximate practical equivalents of metric units.

My last post might have been a snoozer for many of you, but hopefully not. I try to make things interesting around here. But as evidenced by the break from my usual form, I have a lot of things to write about right now. In fact, I have a long list of topics to get to, which is a good thing. If you look back at the archives, you can see that I posted more during the first few years than I have during the past few years. Recently, the occasional brief lull has crept in. I'm not proud of that; I've always striven to post regularly. I can't say that when I started blogging, I did it for the lulls.

Readers, I am outraged. My friend Luke informed me that Sunday's South Florida Sun-Sentinel stole the title of my blog post from Saturday. Just look at that headline. Like mine, there isn't even a comma to set off the subject of address!

Okay, so a quick Google search reveals that I wasn't the only person to think of this clever headline, but is it even appropriate for a newspaper? The Sun-Sentinel seems to be more style than substance these days. Case in point: see the headline at the top? "A Bold New Sun Sentinel." They've apparently redesigned the paper to look less newspapery and more short-attention-span-y. Now, the title of the newspaper can intuitively be found in tiny letters under the giant "S" on the side of the front page.

In any case, this weather has put a damper on some of my plans. I might be leaving for college on Thursday rather than Wednesday. And I was going to play baseball with my friends Nick and TJ today, but that's not going to happen because we're starting to get hit by the tropical storm right now. It's not too bad right now, and maybe it won't get too much worse.

Fortunately, I did get to hang out with Nick and TJ on Saturday night. We went to South Beach, looking for some fun. Because we were checking out the nightlife, I naturally brought my new sunglasses. But once again, we didn't plan far enough ahead. Apparently there's nothing to do there if you're under the drinking age, which is a puritanical 21. We learned an important lesson: being over 18 isn't a big deal if you're under 21.

Yet another Jeopardy!-related link: a contestant describes his recent experience on the show.

You may be a bad speller, but be glad you're not as bad as this newspaper that misspelled its name on the front page.

Getting around on a bicycle in the United States seems to be a real inconvenience. A reluctant Walmart customer describes her experience having to take her bike into the store because there was no place to keep it safe outside.

It's now less than a week until I go back to school for my second year of college. At the beginning of the summer — it seems so long ago now — I unpacked all of the boxes that pretty much filled my room. Now I have to fill them up again. I haven't really, uh, started that yet. But I still have my list of things to bring from last year. I typed it on two sheets of paper and left space to write in the many things that didn't come to mind right then. Ultimately, it was very comprehensive. I think the only things I forgot to bring were chip clips.

Back-to-school time is clean-up-your-look time, and I'm still deciding what I want to do with my hair. As you may recall, it's long, and I might want to cut it short or at least style it in a different way. I've been asking my friends for their opinions, but I was surprised to receive an unsolicited opinion today. I was standing at the counter at the library with my mom when I smelled cigarettes. A middle-aged woman with dark, leathery skin moved in next to me. She had blonde hair. It was probably dyed that way, but I couldn't bring myself to look long enough to know for sure.

"Someone who still has long hair," the woman croaked. She was impressed. She rasped that she was a child of the '60s — although pretty young then, she assured me — and grunted about how awesome the times were back then, as well as how bad today's men look with their "square heads." The one-sided conversation had begun without warning, and I was trying to figure out how to get out of it while providing an occasional "yeah" or "oh" in acknowledgement. The woman gravelly imparted to me that she turned down a man because he didn't have long hair. Or something like that. Just then, my mom was leaving, so I had a good reason to abruptly end the most awkward conversation ever.

I was kind of flattered that someone took time to point out how much she liked my hair, although I would have enjoyed the conversation a lot more more if she were thirty years younger and didn't have a cloud of tobacco smoke floating around her.

Questionable accolades from frog-throated ex-hippies notwithstanding, I do think I look good with long hair, and I worry that I wouldn't look as good with short hair, which might throw my newly unburied facial features into high relief. Maybe parting my hair almost right down the middle isn't the best thing, but most people are shorter than me, so they shouldn't see too much of it anyway.

I have decided to get new clothes, though. I recognize the need to replace my uniform of plain t-shirts and jean shorts. Last weekend, I got some new patterned shirts of the polo persuasion as well as new shorts that are non-jean. Most of them are khaki, but the ones I'm wearing now are like fake corduroy or something. Anyway, I plan to phase out most of the plain clothes I've been wearing at least since I started high school. The simple way to do this is not to bring them with me to college. I'll still have them, but I can't wear them all the time. Hopefully, my new clothes will advertise me as interesting; the supporting act will be my long jeans and T-shirts that have things on them.

Sometimes, the media gets things wrong, and the results can be embarrassing. Here's a long list of premature obituaries.

In the US, we make a big deal about the President and Congress. But that third and ever-so-important branch of government, the Supreme Court, often flies under the radar. But they're still there, all right, and they've been holding on to some quaint traditions.

A blog featuring poorly chosen photos from real estate listings: It's Lovely! I'll Take It!

This is a tale of two e-mail accounts. I have one for personal use and one (from my university) for academic use. I use their corresponding POP accounts with Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0.0.16 on Ubuntu. The server settings are identical. Thunderbird is set to download new messages whenever there are any new ones. But starting a few days ago, Thunderbird started telling me I had no new messages in my personal account even though I could log in to the web interface and see that I did. Thunderbird still connects to the server quickly and successfully, but it has been saying "There are no new messages on the server" when there are.

Since Thunderbird is getting mail from my school account just fine, I have to assume that it's a server problem. But I've exhausted just about every option that I can think of. Well, I've run Thunderbird in safe mode, compacted my folders (hey, you never know), and deleted all the mail from the server, but Thunderbird still doesn't acknowledge any new mail. The only thing I can really think of, except for some esoteric e-mail server bug that I'd never understand, is that the port might have changed. But port 110 (the default for POP) has worked fine for me for years, and I don't feel like making thousands of guesses in the unlikely event that they suddenly switched ports.

Possibly useful note: I have Thunderbird set to leave old messages on the server for 90 days. The ones it has downloaded are marked as read on the web interface, while the ones it hasn't are marked as unread (unless I read them online, in which case Thunderbird will still download them at the next opportunity). When I checked my inbox on the web yesterday, the first three or so e-mails that Thunderbird hadn't downloaded were marked as read. The subsequent messages were all marked as unread, as they should have been. I think Thunderbird might have choked on them, but shouldn't it be unchoked now? Is there some file in the profile that I could delete that would regenerate itself and fix everything?

I sent a support request to my e-mail provider last night, but they haven't replied yet. They'd better soon, since I pay for their service. Maybe I should point out how much money I've given them for their quality service over the years.

And yes, I still put the hyphen in "e-mail." Always.

[Edit Tue Aug 5, 2008 7:52 UTC -5: This problem has fixed itself, lending further evidence that it was an issue with the server. I haven't received a reply from my mail provider.]

Speaking of problems, I tried the pidgin-facebookchat plugin for the Pidgin IM client. It allows you to use the Facebook chat feature from within Pidgin. It was pretty cool except that you couldn't get your whole buddy list (friends list) at once; they would simply appear as they signed on. And if you deleted someone from your buddy list, it would defriend that person on Facebook. I found that one out the hard way. Imagine my surprise when I eventually discovered that I had 90 friends missing. Luckily, I was able to add them back quickly, and I think some of them didn't even know what happened.

The price of first-class postage in the US is going up more and more often these days, and the USPS claims that they're just following inflation. It turns out that they're right. Here's a chart of the US first-class postage rate from 1885 to 2008, adjusted for inflation. Although the nominal cost of a stamp has more than doubled since 1981, the actual cost in 2008 dollars has remained between $0.40 and $0.45. By comparison, it has varied between $0.20 and over $0.50 in the past.

Typographers are responsible for making the fonts that we see all around us in our daily lives. Some guy wondered: what does a typographers' handwriting look like? Of the typographers he asked, all have pretty cool handwriting. One guy's handwriting looks like a familiar font because he made a font out of his handwriting.

In October 2003, I "suddenly became obsessed with the metric system," as I put it at the time. I mentioned plans for writing an article called "The Metric System: Ten Times Better or Inching Toward a Metric America." Well, that didn't happen. A fragmentary draft exists on my computer, last modified on October 19, 2003:

Convincing, ain't it?

As I may have mentioned, my parents have had our house for sale for almost a year now. On Saturday, we had a small garage sale. This is kind of a big deal because the only other garage sale we've ever had (as long as I've been around) was before we moved into our current house. It's a way of having less stuff to move. I couldn't think of anything I wanted to sell, mainly because I threw/gave away a lot of my stuff before heading off to college last year. The stuff I have left I want to keep, give away, or sell for a reasonable amount of money. I can't think of anything that I'd want to unload for a token price. Here are some things I actually have in my room:

• A metal detector
• Records
• 400+ issues of National Geographic Magazine
• A sledgehammer
• A lava lamp
• An inflatable pool raft
• World War II ration stamps
• An old lady wig
• A snapshot of an old Irish man playing the accordion (thanks, Luke)
• An uncut sheet of $1 bills
• A large stuffed penguin wearing a Santa Claus hat

...and much more. Man, I have a lot of stuff. But the garage sale didn't do very well, from what I hear. (I was asleep during much of it.)

Here in the United States, we're lucky to have some freedom. The same can't be said of the Top Five Most Censored Countries in the World. (Disclaimer: I am friends with the author.)

This is actually interesting, with nice pictures: 10 Very Rare Clouds.

One Post Wonder is a blog that features old blogs that have only one post. It would be funny if it were itself a one-post wonder, but it's not.