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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who's ready to rock and roll?!

Well, too bad. You're reading a blog post instead.

Ubuntu 8.10 (code-named "Intrepid Ibex") came out last Thursday, but I didn't make the time to upgrade for about a week. I was a bit hesitant as I usually am, especially since my friend Mark told me that the update messed up his computer quite a bit. I forget what it did, but it was something scary.

Like last time, I decided not to rely so much on the servers for the upgrade because I figured they would probably still be smashed due to the traffic. While I was home for the weekend, I downloaded the alternate installation CD image via BitTorrent (which I can't do from my dorm room). When I was ready to upgrade, I mounted the CD image as a CD (details here), thus eliminating the need to burn a physical CD. This saves me time and makes Mother Nature happy.

Still, upgrading your operating system is a little scary. I fear for the safety of my computer and my data the same way a parent might fear for his or her child. The horror stories, like Mark's, do nothing to help. But usually, everything turns out fine, and things seem to have turned out fine this time. Each release of Ubuntu has a few annoying bugs that are (hopefully) fixed in the next release. Fortunately, Intrepid seems to fix more than it introduces.

First, the new quirks. Intrepid relies less on the xorg.conf file, so when it reset my default keyboard layout, I had to look up how to change it. There's a semi-graphical way to do this sort of thing now. You have to enter sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup, go through every screen, wait while the computer thinks, and then reboot. Well, maybe you just have to restart X, but I usually reboot when that's called for. I also wanted to edit my actual keyboard layout file. It had moved from /etc/X11/xkb/symbols/us to /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us.

GNOME has a new "guest session" feature that creates a temporary account that doesn't have access to anything important. This would be handy if someone needs to use your computer real quick. Unfortunately, it doesn't work for me. Good thing people don't need to use my computer real quick very often, I guess.

Recently, I figured out how to enable gapless playback in Rhythmbox. In Intrepid, this gives me a problem when I'm listening to albums or playlists. Rhythmbox stops playing the last song of the album or playlist just before it's over. The only solution I've been able to figure out so far is to turn gapless playback off.

During the upgrade, I was prompted about overwriting several files. They had to do with the fixes I implemented for this nasty hard-drive killing bug that I thought should have been fixed now. It turns out that the bug hasn't been fixed, so I tried this fix suggested on the Ubuntu Forums. It seems to work.

And now some good things in Ubuntu 8.10, in no particular order:

• There's an option to allow sideways scrolling with the touchpad. I don't know if this is new, but I've never seen it before.
• Ubuntu 8.04's infamous Adobe Flash/PulseAudio bug is no more. Now I can watch Flash videos without worrying about Firefox crashing. This is really, really, really good. Really.
• The new version of GNOME puts less space between lines when listing things such as files. This saves space in a lot of places, including Pidgin's "Buddy Details" view.
• Keyboard controls: I'm once again able to change the volume (I don't even know when that stopped working), and some of the sensitivity in changing the screen brightness that was lost in Ubuntu 8.04 is back.
• The Wi-Fi light once again lights up if a signal is detected.
• Audacity isn't at all sluggish or uncooperative like it was in 8.04.
• For the first time, the desktop effects actually seem to work. My graphics driver hasn't been up to the task in the past, but things seem to be going pretty smoothly with this release. I haven't had a freeze yet.

Overall, it looks like 8.10 is a big improvement over 8.04.

On Flickr, here's a photoset of Barack Obama before, during, and after his election night speech. The behind-the-scenes photos are especially interesting. I like this one of Obama watching McCain's concession speech on TV. The photos aren't very large, but they're licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

A probably out-of-date link from our own reader Daniel: Will You Go To Homecoming With Me? Aw, how cute.

Advice I should follow: How to Be Interesting. I already do two of those ten things, so maybe I'm 20% interesting?

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Man, a thousand posts. Crazy.

Today is homecoming, a university holiday. That means there were no classes, and (since I work for the university) no work. Tonight is Gator Growl, the aforementioned less-than-spectacular pep rally. It's going to be in the football stadium, which is down the street from my dorm. In fact, if I open my window tonight, you'll probably be able to hear me not care!

So how have I spent my homecoming day? First I slept. A lot. I went to bed relatively early last night and woke up late, for a total of 10 or 11 hours. I can't remember the last time I slept that long. It was amazing.

In the afternoon, I went to the student gym. "Whaaa? Jordon going to the GYM??????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" !!!!! Don't worry, I wasn't there to exercise. I was meeting with some people from my Tech Writing for Engineers class. We have a project where we have to pretend to plan an expansion for the gym, so we thought we'd go there to check out the place. I don't think I'd been there since my tour of the campus two years ago. I remember the building being about twice as big and the parking lot in front of it being at least four times as big. But all my memories of that tour are messed up. I had no idea where I was. Plus, I saw some places then that I've never seen since, and I have absolutely no idea where they might be.

Anyway, after that I was due at Flavet Field, which is this field near my dorm. That's where they were attempting to break the record for the world's largest water balloon fight. Get Carded, the organ donor awareness organization I volunteer with, had their tent there, so I had signed up to help out. We were also invited to participate because they needed as many people as they could get (the previous record was 2,800 people or something like that). It was definitely a big deal. ABC was taping it for Good Morning America.

Anyway, they had the field divided in two. Each side had a huge crowd of people and a seemingly endless supply of water balloons. There was a "no man's land" in between. After some waiting, the fight began. I was toward the back of the crowd, so I didn't get many balloons, but I threw a few and got hit by a few. Nate from Get Carded was able to scramble into the pile of balloons and get some for himself and me.

So what does the world's largest water balloon fight look like? Imagine a colorful hail of watery bullets being shot across a large field for several minutes. There were a lot of water balloons; people had spent all week filling them up, I think. To break the record, they had to have more people and more balloons. They said they definitely had broken the balloon record with something like 57,000. They were still counting the people at the time of the fight. Even if the record wasn't officially broken, the event was for a good cause (breast cancer awareness). And it was crazy fun.

This is pretty cool. DOTGO allows you to read some web sites by text message. For example, text "theworldofstuff" to DOTCOM (368266) and you'll get a listing of the posts on the main page of this site. Each one is numbered, so you can text "theworldofstuff 1" to read the first post, and so on. Well, you can start reading it, because it cuts off after three text messages. This might be useful if you don't have Internet access on your phone but you do have unlimited texting and you want to read the first few sentences of my blog posts. You can also text DOTNET, DOTORG, DOTEDU, and DOTGOV as appropriate. Here's an online version if you want to try it without using your phone.

Poe's Law states, "Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is uttrerly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won't mistake for the genuine article."

Really awesome: Hubble Finds Unidentified Object in Space, Scientists Puzzled.

There are three of us working in the IT Support room in the Dean of Students Office. One is me, one is my friend Mark, and the other is Laila, the graphic designer. Her name is pronounced like Lila, but it hasn't stopped the song "Layla" from getting into my head whenever I go to work.

We're halfway through the fall semester. More than halfway, I guess. But in any case, it's been a while, and I don't think I've yet met anyone I really fancy. (This term is British but appropriate.) It makes me wonder how people move somewhere and boom, they're dating someone. Just like that. Boom. Like a cannon. I guess it's because they go out and do things, and I don't. I have resolved to fix this problem. I wanted to go out on Friday night, but everyone is going to the homecoming pep rally, which I have already elected not to go to. I don't want to pay money to see a band I don't like that much and a comedian I've never heard of.

"omg jordan," you say, spelling my name wrong, "u dont like steve miler band????" To which I reply, you don't like Jon Reep or whoever he is? Game, set, match. UCF's homecoming will have bands (as in, multiple bands) that college students (and I) like, and it's free. FSU had Stephen Colbert at their homecoming a few years ago. Who doesn't like Stephen Colbert? Answer: no one. I would pay dozens of dollars to see him.

Anyway, I solemnly resolve to go out and do something, preferably with some people, once a week or at some other interval. Or something like that. I guess I should just ask my friends or acquaintances where they go and ask to tag along. Except this week, when everyone will be going to the lame pep rally that's probably already sold out.

I listen to music with Rhythmbox, and it rox my sox. One relatively recent update added the ability to play tracks without any silence in between, but I was still getting a gap. I finally found the solution, which I'll post here in case other people don't find it obvious. You have to go to the Preferences, click the Playback tab, and select "Use crossfading backend." Set the crossfade duration to 0.0 seconds and check the option to crossfade between songs on the same album. Restart the program, and you're good to go. This makes listening to many albums (including Abbey Road and The Dark Side of the Moon, two of my favorites) much more enjoyable. (As an added bonus or annoyance, tracks fade out or fade in when you pause or unpause them, respectively! I choose to view this as a fun feature.)

This probably would have been useful a few months ago: Stormpulse provides information about, and maps of, active hurricanes.

Here's the answer to the question everyone has been asking: Is Barack Obama Muslin?

Yeah, more political stuff. Here's a video debunking some lies from John McCain's campaign ads.

Psst... go here and look at that number!

I'm baaaack!

Yeah, it was a busy week. Probably the busiest week I've ever had. I stayed up late. I accidentally skipped a meal. Almost all of my time was spent studying, doing schoolwork, or promoting my Esperanto club's first event. Of course, I also went to my first Florida Free Culture meeting, which was very cool. I also had a Get Carded meeting. Basically, I did all the things I said I was going to do, except that the deadline for my programming project got moved to Monday. Otherwise, I would have been spending much of tonight working on it. I finally have a break.

I worked hard, though. I got a 7 out of 10 on my physics exam, which was higher than the class average and the same score I got on the first exam. At this rate, I can squeak by with a B+ in the class. I think I'm right on the line. I spent many consecutive hours working on my Indian Ocean take-home test, and I did well. I know that because the professor said everyone's responses were probably good before he saw them.

Of course, the elephant in the room is: "Jordon, how was your new Esperanto Club's first event, 'Esperanto: The Solution to the World Language Problem,' that you were promoting like crazy?"

Okay, I promoted this presentation every way I knew how. I invited friends on Facebook (only two said they would come), I sent a blurb to various mailing lists (some of which actually ran the blurb), I contacted the major student newspaper (they didn't write back), I contacted a vaguely related club (they didn't reply), I advertised at other club meetings (okay, one), I handed out and posted flyers (which got covered up by other flyers almost immediately), and I even spoke in a class (of ten people, and not everyone was there).

At first, I had no idea how many people to expect. I wanted a room for 150 people, but I was told flat out that I wouldn't be able to get one at night. (They tend to be used for exams.) I settled for a room seating about 100. Yesterday, 19 people on Facebook said they would go to the presentation. I expected some more than that because I didn't just promote the event on Facebook. 20-30 people sounded pretty reasonable. I would be happy to have that many.

I got to the classroom extra early to make sure the computer and projector worked. Someone was already waiting outside. "Esperanto Club?" I asked. "Mission meeting?" she asked. Uh-oh. Could they have double-booked the room? She was very convinced that there was another meeting there at that same time, but she went over to the computer to double-check the e-mail. Turns out she missed her meeting by a week. Close call for me.

By the magical time of 8:00, only a handful of people were there. I figured the others would be coming shortly; you know how no one's ever on time. At 8:15, there were still only a few people. I decided the show must go on. Present were three of the four club officers, our faculty advisor, and seven others (five of whom were friends with one or another of the officers). Seven people. Actually, really only two.

I decided I couldn't let that put a damper on my enthusiasm. I presented the presentation, and even though I hadn't had any practice with the vocal delivery, I think I did quite well. It's probably because I'd been working on it bit by bit over the course of several weeks. I familiarized myself with it that way. Anyway, if you're curious, here's the presentation as a 5.6 MB PDF. Yes, I am actually hosting a large file here, believe it or not!

It was kind of discouraging to have only seven people come to the presentation, but at the end, when I asked how many people would be interested in learning the language, my spirits were lifted a bit. Almost everyone raised their hand, even our faculty advisor and the other officers, who don't know Esperanto very well yet. It seems that of the seven people in the audience, almost all were very interested. When I showed the information about our recommended textbook, several people jotted it down.

If I could have a small core group of people for this club who will stick with it for the long term, that would be great. And it would give the group room to grow. I use Gator Freethought, whose meetings I usually attend, as a sort of model for my own club. Their meetings draw about 50 people, so they've already reached critical mass. They have enough momentum to go on forever, even when the officers graduate. My vice president and I have three years to build the club up so that it can outlast us. Can we do it? I think so.

The World Names Profiler has surname statistics for several countries. Enter a surname and see which countries it's most common in.

With some creative folding of US paper money, you can spell out some interesting messages.

How do you securely store files remotely? Apparently there's a mathematical method that makes it possible to easily store small pieces of files (encrypted, of course) on a large number of computers.

I have

• a Free Culture meeting Monday night
• a tech writing assignment due Tuesday
• a Get Carded meeting Tuesday night
• a massive physics test Wednesday
• Indian Ocean reading assignments and a take-home test due Thursday
• my big Esperanto presentation Thursday night
• to promote it
• Get Carded tabling on Friday
• a programming project due Friday night
• work Monday-Friday
• a cold

See you next weekend?

Here's a reading assignment while I'm gone. Noisome Beasts is the first novel by one Robert Chatham, and you can download it for free. I can't explain it better than the author himself: "It's a short novel that tells the compelling story of Todd, a young rapper who is determined to seek out Reginald Vel Johnson, the man who played Carl Winslow in the hit TV show Family Matters. Aided by several bags of cheese puffs and his mathematician-historian friend Edgar, Todd travels to Wichita in hopes that he can discover his true father and, in doing so, compose a rap song that will haunt history for all of eternity."

As I was reading the book, I couldn't help but think that it would make a pretty cool movie. Since the book has been released under a Creative Commons license that allows derivative works, even for commercial purposes, I very well could be the one to adapt it. The songs in the movie would have to be under an identical or more generous CC license, but that wouldn't be a problem; there's lots of great CC-licensed music (see Jamendo).

Part two of the assignment: post a comment stating which character you would like to play.

Here's a probably overgeneralized map of baby naming trends by US state. Note that Sarah Palin comes from a part of the country where bizarre names are common.

Here are 10 creative responses to junk mail.

I've been wondering when someone would make this. It's finally here: a Google Maps-based pedometer.

Yesterday morning, I was reading articles at the Alligator's web site when a headline caught my eye. Student... club... language... hm... sounds like me. Oh wait, it is! I immediately went downstairs to pick up a hard copy.

A month ago, my friend Mark and I were teaching Esperanto phrases at a "language cafe" on campus. Rebecca Deely, a journalism student, was there looking for a story. She was very interested by Esperanto and interviewed both of us. She suggested that she could submit the story to the Alligator, and that's all I heard about it for a month. I kept thinking about what quotations of mine she would use — we talked quite a bit — and the only one I could remember was "It's not a word game." I couldn't really remember the context, but it stood out in my mind, so I thought it could end up as the all-important article-ending quotation.

Ooh dang. Who called that?

I thought the article was good and positive, and it apparently did get a few people interested enough to join our Facebook group. It was also apparently Rebecca's first publication. Everyone wins! (By the way, the entire article can be found here for however long.)

Throughout the day, I was watching people read the Alligator to see if they would read our story. The placement could hardly have been better. It was an important issue, being the day after Student Government elections, so probably more people were reading it than usual. The front page story jumped to page 10, where it took up the whole page, and we were at the top of page 11. That's almost like being on page 2.

I got two copies for myself. I cut the article out of one and posted it on the door of my dorm room. More promotion for our upcoming event. And in fact, on my way home from class, I actually did see someone reading the story. I wanted to start talking to her, but that would have probably freaked her the heck out. "Hi, I'm the person you're reading about in the newspaper!"

Another Ask Jordon!

Cody - Natashas BFF: Why, on your Faq, do you have somebody set up us the bomb?, its someone set up us the bomb! =) Zero wing Rules

Sorry, but it's definitely "Somebody set up us the bomb." I know what I doing.

Check out this Multicolr Search Lab. Select some colors, and you'll get some photos from Flickr that contain those colors. It's pretty mesmerizing.

When you've got a word on the tip of your tongue, use Tip of My Tongue to get it out. You can enter some letters of the word, synonyms, and more.

And here are, according to someone, the Top 10 Amazing Prison Escapes.

I've been busy with my new webmaster job. I started it on Monday, and it's been pretty nice. It's pretty easy so far, and I like it. If I ever get stuck on something, I can talk to my friend Mark, who works there as well. He's already been showing me the ropes quite a bit.

I've also been busy promoting my Esperanto club's first event, which I mentioned in my last post. That's taking a lot of my time. We had an executive meeting last night where we went over the presentation and some ways to promote it. My ultimate goal is for us to be featured in the main student newspaper before our event. That way we could get the word out to tens of thousands of people.

I hardly get any Ask Jordon questions anymore.

diana: why i am lefty?

This one comes from an IP address in Pakistan. But anyway, I have a whole book about this subject since I did a psychology paper on it in high school. It's The Left-Hander Syndrome by Stanley Coren, and it's quite revealing about why people are left-handed. I forget now, but I think he said it had in part to do with early brain trauma like a stressful birth. That's the book where he advances his controversial finding that left-handers die nine years earlier on average than their right-handed counterparts.

All political links today. Less than a month till the election, though.

A while back I blogged about Change Congress, the new initiative started by Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig (founder of Creative Commons). Change Congress aims to have politicians, candidates, and other citizens state their support (or lack of support) for four key issues that they believe would help improve fairness and end corruption. They've sent a letter to every Senator and Representative as well as every Congressional challenger too. You can see their progress on their iPledge campaign page. Change Congress is looking to improve their low response rate by having citizens pester their members of Congress. Click "Pester Now" next to the name of your member of Congress to find contact information, a phone script, and a form letter.

News coverage about things that don't matter: Presidential Physiques of the Modern Age.

I've saved the best for last. John McCain Gets BarackRoll'd.