Senior Day

I went to Saturday’s football game since I had a ticket that no one wanted to buy. Well, that wasn’t the only reason. It was Senior Day, the last home game of the year, when the seniors on the team are honored for all the effort they’ve put forth over the past four (or more, or fewer) years.

It was also my Senior Day, so to speak, since I’m a senior too. By the time the next home game rolls around, it’ll be next September, and I will have graduated. Never again will I sit in the student section at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, better known as the Swamp. I figured I should take in the gameday atmosphere for what could be the last time in a long time… or ever.

My seat was only a few rows behind the famous “Work ‘Em Silly, Gators” sign that the same guy tapes to the same wall at every game. It’s such a fixture that if you play a game at the Swamp in NCAA Football 08, you’ll see it there too. I know that because my roommate from freshman year played the game a lot.

After the Gators worked Appalachian State silly, I tried to take a picture of the sign as someone (presumably its caretaker) was starting to remove the tape. Suddenly, a girl a few rows below us asked him to stop for a minute so she could take a picture of herself in front of it. I was able to get some pictures too.

I can’t believe that I’ve gone to my last football game as a student. I know that I’m going to be graduating in the spring, but I’m having a hard time actually realizing it. It’s just hard to imagine what my post-collegiate life will be like, I guess. I’ve gotten used to college, and soon, everything is going to change.

Here’s a six-minute cartoon about what Mormons believe (or believed). There’s lots of polygamy and racism. The description of the video contains citations for everything.

Memorable

Yesterday I was at Turlington Plaza on campus, signing some petition, when one of the guys behind the table said he recognized me. He said he’d taken a class with me, a biology class a few years ago, and pointed in the general direction of the building where the class met. I didn’t recognize him at all, but he had to be right. I’ve only taken one biology class; it was BSC 2008 in Spring 2008. I was dumbfounded: How could anyone have remembered me, especially after all this time?

“I remember everyone I’ve ever had a class with,” he said.

Psh. I sure don’t. Even though our class wasn’t very large (or not many people showed up every day, I can’t remember which), I only remember two of my classmates because they were, well, memorable. One was a big guy who, with his Southern accent and ever-present baseball cap, would contribute to class discussions by mentioning something vaguely relevant about his family’s fish-farming operation. The other was a olive-skinned, short-haired brunette who would smile at me whenever our eyes met in class. She looked a few years older than me, so I feel like she should have graduated by now, but I swear I saw her pass by me on her bike a few months ago, and I think she even said hi.

That’s not what this post is about.

Today, I was eating lunch outside the library when a guy sitting nearby struck up a conversation with me. Using my name.

He said he remembered my name and face from this web site, which he had found while looking for information on how to connect to popular IRC servers from the dorms. (I used to have a small collection of information on the subject, but I took it offline because I thought no one cared. I was wrong!) He even remembered the URL, which he proved by showing me my home page on his iPad.

We started talking about my site, blogging, computers, clubs, and classes. We seemed to get along well. All the while, I was amazed. Sure, this kind of thing has happened before, but it still knocks my socks off. I’ve always dreamed of being a blogging celebrity, or blogebrity, and if a few people on this campus of 50,000 students know who I am because of this site, then who knows how many others recognize me but don’t bother to tell me?

And why does this happen? I guess I’m just a memorable-looking guy with a memorable name and a memorable web site that also has a memorable name. Like Southern Fish Guy and the girl I never talked to, I am memorable in my own way. That’s the only explanation that makes any sense.

Apparently it’s pretty common for college students to cheat by ordering custom-written essays on the Internet. One writer in the biz pseudonymously spills the beans about his shady profession, with details changed to protect the guilty.

Yes? What? Yes?

Kate is back home, but I haven’t made it to my apartment yet. In the meantime, here’s a skit I wrote when I was in the sixth grade. As I recall, my friends and I actually acted it out for a class. According to the script, which is dated March 17, 2001, Brian played the narrator, Mark played Brian, Sean played Yes, Nick played What, and I played You. Abbott and Costello were duly credited.

Narrator: It was a dark, gloomy, bright, sunny day at the McFlooglebooglesnoogle house. Two people named What and Yes walked up to the door and rang the doorbell. Brian McFlooglebooglesnoogle opened the door.
Brian McFlooglebooglesnoogle: Yes?
Yes: What?
What: Yes?
Yes: What?
What: Yes?
Brian: You guys are confusing me. What do you want?
What: Want what?
Brian (to himself): Yes, you’re nuts.
Yes: Pardon?
What (to Brian): Don’t worry, he’s always like this.
Brian: Like what?
What: He’s not like me at all! We’re two different people.
Brian: Yes, you are.
Yes: I’m what?
(You walks up to the door and listens in.)
What: You’re not me, you’re you!
You: He isn’t me!
(pause)
Brian (to You): Who are you?
You: Yes.
Yes: What?
What: Yes?
Yes: Yes?
What: You are Yes.
You: Once and for all, I’m not Yes! (looks at Yes) I’m You!
Yes: I’m yes, no?
Brian: What?
What: Yes?
Yes: What?
Brian: Will you stop that!
You: Stop what?
What: I’m not doing anything!
(pause)
You: I’m getting confused.
Brian: Who’s getting confused?
Yes: Hey, leave Who out of this. He’s a nice guy.
Brian: Who’s Who?
What: I’m What (points to Yes), this is Yes (points to You), and this is You.
Brian: I’m right here.
Yes: We know. You’s over there.
What: Yes he is.
Yes: I know he is!
(pause)
Brian (to Yes): What’s your name?
Yes: No, Yes.
Brian: What?
What: Yes?
Yes: What?
What: I don’t know!
(pause)
Brian: Okay, okay, let’s start over. What did you want to say?
What: Want to say what?
You: You wanted to say yourself?
Yes: I’m baffled. (to What) Are you baffled?
You: I’m You, and my name isn’t Baffled!
Brian (to himself): But your name is baffling.
(pause)
What: Where were we?
Yes: I don’t know.
You: What about him?
What: Me about him what?
Brian: Stop it!
You: Stop what?
What: But I’m not doing anything!
(pause)
Brian: Alright already! The man’s name standing on the left is…?
Yes: What.
Brian: His name.
Yes: What.
Brian: The man’s name!
Yes: What.
Brian: The fellow standing next to you!
Yes: What.
Brian: You call him what?
You: Yes, and so does Yes.
Yes: What?
What: Yes?
(pause)
Brian: Now, stop that. Who’s there on the right?
You: Which right?
Brian: My right.
You: That would be my left, right?
Brian: Right. What’s his name?
What: Yes.
Brian (points to Yes): No, his name is Yes! So what’s your name?
What: Yesiree.
You (to Brian): His name is What!
Brian: Apparently, it’s Yesiree.
You: No, What!
Brian: I don’t follow.
What: He lives down the block.
(pause)
Brian: That fellow in the back, what’s his name?
Yes: I told you (points to What), What is over here!
Brian: I don’t know.
What: He lives across the street.
(pause)
Brian: What is the name of the person behind you?
Yes: What is over here, and there’s no one behind You!
Brian: I know!
You: That’s I Don’t Know’s sister.
(pause)
Brian: So, why did you come here in the first place?
You: To accompany Yes and What.
Brian (to Yes and What): Well then, why are you here?
Yes and What: To accompany You.
Brian: Me?
What (pointing to You): No, him.
Brian: You make up your mind!!
You: About what?
What: Me?
Brian (angrily): GO AWAY!! (Slams door on You, Yes, and What.)
You (yelling to Brian): That’s my next-door neighbor!

The End

Seven links

I don’t usually participate in these memes, but I thought I’d take the 7 Link Challenge (thanks, Kirsten). These answers aren’t necessarily authoritative since I’ve written over a thousand posts and can’t be bothered to go back and look at all of them except in special circumstances.

1. Your first post: The World of Stuff Opens, April 6, 2003.
2. A post you enjoyed writing the most: [sic]. You could say I started writing this one in junior high, when I would keep track of my teachers’ many slips of the tongue. In the post, I listed some of my favorites.
3. A post which had a great discussion: Tough one. We usually don’t have those around here. The discussion on Brain Damage went on for a while, though.
4. A post on someone else’s blog that you wish you’d written: That would have to be The Ultimate “0.999… = 1″ Guide over at Greatplay.net.
5. Your most helpful post: My Sony DSC-H55 Digital Camera Review seems to have helped a fair number of people so far.
6. A post with a title that you are proud of: Man, what post title am I not proud of? Half the time they’re clever as hell. Sometimes I think of them ages in advance. I was going through some old titles, and this one made me chuckle: A Turtle (And Also the Meaning of Life).
7. A post you wish more people had read: Any post with no comments. Seriously, I think if my every post generated a huge discussion, it would compel me to write more often. Not that I don’t write a lot, but I used to write more often than I do now. One post I like that seemed to go under everyone’s radar was By the Way… It brings back a lot of memories for me.

I guess this post should be called “Nine Links” because here are TWO MORE LINKS!!

Here are some Useless Fliers. (Via waxy.org)

Here’s a pretty extensive article about the guy Nintendo named Mario after.

Let them eat cake (and let me eat pie)

You know what I have done in a while? Some Ask Jordon!

Kate: What are the main problems of the US, which really affect people’s lives and need to be solved as soon as possible, in your opinion?

Well, we finally got universal health care (or health insurance, or whatever), so check that one off the list. I’ll admit that I’m having a hard time thinking of other things. A lot of the things I care about don’t have a direct impact on people’s lives.

Are they still giving tax cuts to rich people? If they are, that’s going to have to stop. If anyone needs tax cuts, it’s the people who, you know, have nothing.

Eh. I don’t know. Obesity, maybe? We have a lot of fat people here. But there’s not much you can do about that. You can tell people that they ought to exercise, but you can’t drop them onto a treadmill and make them run all day. You can tell them they should eat more vegetables, but you can’t tie them up and force-feed them brussels sprouts. And anyway, it doesn’t bother me that other people are eating however they want, and it shouldn’t. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg, as they say.

I hate brussels sprouts, by the way. I would empathize.

So, I guess I don’t really have a good answer to your question.

Kate: What do you like most for dessert? :)

What don’t I like for dessert? I’ll eat pretty much anything. That said, I like pies. I think pecan pie is my favorite. My mom made one for my birthday, and it was great. Blueberry pie is also good too.

I had no idea green screens were used so much in TV and movies. Here’s a four-minute video showing many a green screen scene. (Via The Presurfer)

Some guy spent 24 hours in a Super Walmart. (Before you get too confused, he replaces profanity with other random words.) (Via The Consumerist)

Falling with style

It’s been a while since my friends decided to participate as Team Kiss in the Red Bull Flugtag in Miami. The big day was Saturday, and I went down there just to see them. (Well, mostly.)

I took the train to Bayfront Park and got there a little late but before Team Kiss went on. During this time (I found out later), they and some of the other groups were posing for photos with audience members. My friend Nick (a.k.a. Gene Simmons) said that they were probably the most photographed team, a fact that didn’t escape the notice of the other teams: “You guys know they’re not really Kiss, right?”

After a series of silly dances, impressive flights, and epic fails, Team Kiss with their giant flying bass guitar had their moment in the spotlight. After a brief introduction in which the guys pretend to chug some Red Bulls and then pretend to rock out on fake guitars, they pushed their craft over the edge with one of them staying on as the pilot. He actually got pretty good distance. The rest of the guys jumped into the water for good measure.

After a few more teams’ flights and a finale that involved a flyover by a Coast Guard helicopter, the crowd thinned, and I found not only Team Kiss but also the rest of their posse. We stuck around for the awards ceremony (they didn’t win), and then followed the team up to their room in the swanky InterContinental Hotel, just footsteps away from where the Flugtag was.

In their room, we congratulated them on a job well done and then left them to rest. They deserved it.

I was busy recording a video, so I didn’t get to take pictures of their actual flight, but I’ve found some on Flickr: 1, 2, 3. Check ‘em out.

Via Andy: Some guy gets really, really inappropriately excited about a double rainbow.

New house

I’m coming off the tail end of a long Fourth of July weekend. I guess I’ve never thought about it, but it seems that we get a long Fourth of July weekend more often than not: whenever the day falls on a Friday, Saturday, Sunday, or Monday. That’s a majority of days! (This is the first July I’ve ever gone to school, which is why I’ve never realized it before.)

On Saturday, Andy and I went to a fireworks show on campus. As we got there, it was drizzling, and the community orchestra had just started playing the national anthem. When they finished, it was raining harder, so we turned around and left. We had dinner at a Singaporean restaurant called Merlion before going back home. I hadn’t been to one since I was in Berlin last year. Good stuff!

This weekend, my parents were looking at houses in the area (since they’ve sold theirs). On Sunday, I met up with them, and they took me and my grandmother to see the one they liked the most. They called the real estate agent, who let us in to look around. It’s a portable, but it doesn’t look like one inside (or outside, for that matter). An enclosed porch has been added on in front. It’s sort of secluded, with tall trees and stuff all around. It’s near Fort White (pop. 531) and the Santa Fe River, so my dad would still be able to go boating.

Today, my parents told me that their offer on the house had been accepted. Within a month, the place will be ours. Well, I’ll have a room there, but I don’t know if I’ll make it my permanent residence after college or what. That’s something I’ve been trying to think about. I’m graduating in less than a year, but it seems like a long way off.

Vittana is similar to Kiva in that it allows you to make microloans to people around the world. The difference is that with Vittana, the loans are used to help people go to college. I can’t vouch for the service, but it’s a cool idea.

I wish all my lectures were as interesting as this April Fool’s Day prank. (via waxy.org)

Here are some fun facts about Nintendo in cheesy infographic form. (Via The Presurfer)

No direction home

South Florida is vast and crowded. For years and years, my parents have wanted to sell our house and move someplace quieter. A while back, for about a year, they had the house on the market, but no one bought it. They’ve spent a lot of time fixing things up and recently put it up for sale again. They gave me the news yesterday: there’s an official buyer. We have to move out by July 29.

Well, it’s more them, really. Since starting college, I’ve only spent about 20% of my time there. According to this year’s census, I don’t live there; I live here at my apartment in Gainesville. But I only intend to have this apartment for as long as I’m in college, and I’ve always considered my home in South Florida to be my permanent address. In my heart, I do live there, and I’ve already planned to go back at least a couple more times.

Since my parents have made their intentions known for so long, I’ve had a lot of time to come to terms with the move. Still, I can’t help but feel a little sad that my permanent address will be no more.

We moved in on December 6, 1997. I was eight years old. We were only moving across town, and we were able to keep our phone number, but I was still pretty distraught. I had lived in our old house for my whole eight-year-old life, and it was everything I knew. My parents had taken my sister and me along on dozens or hundreds of “house hunting” trips. I remember seeing for the first time what would eventually be our new house. I remember seeing the old big-screen TV in the corner where we would later put our Christmas tree.

I remember us having a garage sale—the only garage sale I think we’ve ever had for as long as I’ve been alive. And I remember the last time I was in the old house, when it was completely empty. We had to get rid of our dog because our old house closed in October and we couldn’t move in to the new one till December, and we would be living in a condo in the meantime. Also, at the new house there wasn’t a fence around the backyard.

I’m going to miss that backyard. I was so excited to have a real pool, even though I take it for granted now. I remember jumping into it with my sister in February and then jumping right back out again. I remember my friends and I wandering around the backyard with our guitars, my sister supervising the photo shoot with a disposable camera I bought with some money I had somehow managed to scrounge up. I remember having birthday parties there. A pool party early on. Was that the one with pie fight? Well, whipped cream in pie tins. And later, the infamous birthday dance parties on the patio. I think we had them four years in a row.

I remember the band practices in the garage or sometimes in the living room, the Driveway-A-Thon, and our secret spot at a juncture of fences behind the house. I remember the lake across the street that’s not actually a lake but part of a canal. I remember getting pushed into the lake, and I remember getting other people to run into the lake. I remember playing video games with the neighbor with the two-story house, and my other neighbors’ mom leaving a pitcher of water on the front porch overnight to make it North Pole water.

I remember sitting at the old computer, my dad and I composing an e-mail to Geocities asking how to sign up for an account. I remember declaring my latest web site ready for the world on a Sunday. I remember being lighted by artificial light as I wrote a post for a camera. I remember the wall getting painted red and the computer moving to the opposite one.

Dishes broke. I dropped taco meat on the kitchen carpet. The tiles detached themselves from the living room floor; we moved out for a week. The house weathered more hurricanes than I can try to remember. Georges, Frances, Jeanne, Katrina, Wilma. My room was repainted. My sister’s room was repainted. More carpets were replaced. Our next dog made that necessary.

But there’s still a spot on the inside of the front door where I would place my greasy, pubescent nose as I tiptoed to look through the peephole. There are still lots of holes in my bedroom walls that my dad drilled so I could hang up random stuff. And there’s still the sad-looking concrete lawn flamingo with rebar legs that we found on moving in and that I for some reason find irresistibly charming.

I remember packing up and leaving for vacations and being thrilled to come back. I’ll miss the place.

The “someplace quieter” that my parents want to move to is the same general area I’m in now. But they still haven’t found the right house. In the meantime, they’ll be living with my grandmother in her house. And I’ll be changing my address for everything.

A fake movie trailer: Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. (Via waxy.org)

Another list: 7 Totally Awesome and Totally True Ways People Quit Their Jobs. (Via The Presurfer)

Attack of the parasites!

A few months ago, my sooth-seeking friend Andy took in a stray cat. He named him Tucker and kept him in his bedroom in our apartment. I would go in once in a while and see Tucker there. He was affectionate but unfortunately never very healthy. After about a month, Andy and his vet decided to let Tucker go to the great scratching post in the sky.

Three weeks later, Andy and his friend Scott, who was visiting, discovered that Tucker had left something to remember him by: fleas.

They took swift action, vacuuming and flea-bombing Andy’s room and the living room. They asked if they should do my room too. I said not to worry about it. Mistake of the Century. Shortly after that, I said:

Andy and Scott left on Wednesday, and I’ve been alone in the apartment. It hasn’t been so great, but not for the reasons I would have expected. I’ll go into that later.

I was left to fend off the fleas by myself. On Thursday afternoon, I went to the front office to ask for pest control to come, and I was told that they only come on Thursdays and that I had just missed them. Andy, who took responsibility for the whole situation, gave the office a call and got the pest control people to maybe come on Monday.

It was a long weekend. I called a vet’s office, and they said to put Borax onto the carpet and vacuum a week later, but I couldn’t find Borax at the grocery store. (Is that something you can get at the grocery store? I don’t want to waste my time again.) I did buy some insecticide for fleas, and it seemed to get rid of them after a few days of spraying. I also did some vacuuming to (hopefully) get rid of the flea eggs.

I don’t like spraying chemicals all over the place. It’s not due so much to my concern for the environment as it is to my tendency to accidentally spray myself (which did happen, as usual). So I made a flea trap by setting a bowl of soapy water on the floor and angling a desk lamp over it. Fleas are attracted to heat (this ordeal has made me a damn flea expert), so they jump toward the light bulb and fall into the water, where they get stuck. It’s also a fire hazard, so don’t try this at home. I won’t do it again.

Needless to say in a world where “yes” means “maybe” and “maybe” means “no,” pest control didn’t come on Monday. They called me on Tuesday and asked if the whole place had been vacuumed up because apparently they wouldn’t even come if it weren’t. I said no and asked them to come on Wednesday. They didn’t. They were definitely supposed to come on Thursday, as usual, but they didn’t even appear then. They finally showed up on Friday, but by then they could tell I had already gotten rid of the fleas, so they didn’t do anything.

(Before you say anything: no money was lost here. The management of my apartment complex hires said company to do free pest control work for residents. We had considered hiring another company, but it would have been too expensive.)

I haven’t seen any fleas in five days, so I think they’re gone for now. Then again, they hid for at least three weeks, between the time Tucker died and the time anyone noticed them. Hopefully they’re not like an STD that pops up from time to time and can never go away. I’ll have to do some more vacuuming.

This is why software is awesome. Someone wrote a Python script that does some time-stretching and -compressing on a song to change the beat. The result: everything swings. Sample tracks include “Every Breath You Take,” “Enter Sandman,” “Around the World,” and “Don’t Stop Believin’.” (Via waxy.org)

Here’s a breakdown of cable subscription fees by network, showing how much you’re paying for channels you don’t watch. (Via The Consumerist)

American kids don’t have a monopoly on stupidity: 10% of British children surveyed thought that the Queen invented the telephone. Some also thought that Luke Skywalker was the first person on the moon and that Isaac Newton discovered fire.

Seeking validation

I have a web site. (No, wait, I know that’s really obvious. There’s more.) I also run several other web sites as a job. At work, I spend a lot of time making sure that the sites adhere to web standards by using HTML tags properly and the like. On my personal site, not so much. I don’t check it quite as compulsively, and for a long time I was content for this site to be invalid XHTML due to the Creative Commons licensing bit at the bottom.

Well, no more. I actually changed each page’s doctype from XHTML 1.0 Strict to XHTML + RDFa 1.0 so that each page would validate. But there was more to it than that. By historical accident, the doctype and head tag for each page was on the page itself rather than in the header file common to all pages, so I had to create a new header file and update almost every page on the site to use it. At the same time, I decided to switch each page’s character encoding to UTF-8 wherever feasible (most were ISO-8859-1). The blog posts in WordPress (all posts since 2005) remain ISO-8859-1; that’s a task for another day.

Among the dozens of pages I had to update were the blog archives for 2003 and 2004. Digging back through my old (X)HTML, I found some interesting things. For example, a November 2004 post titled “Is Blogging Old Hat?” had a paragraph tag that wasn’t closed. The interesting part is that the sentence contained in the paragraph wasn’t even finished:

TWoS can be found on the first page of the search results, which just goes to show you

Show you what? Such a cliffhanger! I thought that this error might have been introduced by a later edit to the page, but the Wayback Machine’s archived version from a week after the post was written also contains the error. (If for nothing else, check it out to see what the site looked like back then.) Anyway, I just closed the tag. I wasn’t making editorial changes, after all. As much as I would like not to have bandied about phrases like “old hat,” it just wouldn’t be right.

An infographic about the Internet: The State of the Internet. (Via J-Walk Blog)

30 Bizarre Examples of Defacing Money. There are a lot of nerdy references there; cool points for not understanding them. Also, I have to point out that it must be more fun to deface British money because the Queen is, like, alive and stuff. (Via The Presurfer)

And finally, find out what it was like to be Helen Keller with the online Helen Keller Simulator.