Moving!

I have transferred my blog to http://quantumbogosort.blogspot.com . Since I haven't posted in so long, I'm giving myself a fresh start on that one.

I'm going to try and start focusing particularly on the geek-related material (math, science, computers, gaming, shameless romanticism) rather than my day-to-day routine. Besides, I can always make another blog for that other stuff.

A quick note

This whole two-google-accounts thing is getting on my nerves, and I can't figure out how to switch this blog over to my gmail-base account rather than keeping it on my old computermail.net-based account.

Anyways, I may end up starting a "new" blog on my other google account, and "ending" this one. Stay tuned.

Network Neutrality Confusion

As many of my (computer geek) friends know, I'm very opinionated on the issue of Net Neutrality. (Forgive me for my computer nerd posts. Feel free to skip over this post if you don't really care about this sort of thing.) What I've realized recently, from reading online and such, is that this is not an easy issue to explain to someone not technically-oriented. As a result, people get confused, and mistake the issue of Net Neutrality for something else.

If I have to hear one more person say that they're against Net Neutrality because they think it's the ISP's right to charge anyone what they want for internet access (which is absolutely NOT what Net Neutrality is), I'm going to puke.

I connect to the internet through Time Warner Cable's Road Runner ISP. Say, for instance, that the server for JoeShmoe.com connects to the internet through the ACME ISP. (Yeah, I'm really winging this, so forgive me.) This means that I pay for usage of cables and routers that connect my computer to the internet, and JoeShmoe.com pays for the usage of cables and routers that connect their server to the internet. What Net Neutrality says is that Time Warner Cable cannot charge JoeShmoe.com money in order for them to send data from JoeShmoe.com over the cables that connect to my house faster.

Net Neutrality is not about ISPs charging everyone the same amount for internet access, or giving everyone high-speed internet. Remember, the issue is about (for example) Time Warner Cable charging JoeShmoe.com extra money for faster access to my house, not about how much I pay for my internet service.

Net Neutrality is not some "Mumbo Jumbo" that is designed just to make you pay more for your internet service (as a certain commercial from some cable companies states). Net Neutrality is designed to protect the consumer from companies that want to do unfair business practices, not as a "scheme by multi-billion dollar tech Silicon Valley tech companies to get you, the consumer, to pay more for their services."

Net Neutrality is not some unnecessary legislation to make the government step in and regulate something that should be kept free (as a certain fake grassroots website perpetrates). There are several examples of ISPs, especially in places like Canada, charging other companies to send their sites faster on their networks. I won't enumerate examples, but google "net neutrality violations" if you want them.

Sorry if I'm getting too political today, but Net Neutrailty got mentioned on the bus ride back from Envirothon today, and it's been sticking in my head all day.

Can I have my life back, now?

Ok, so I turned my paper in this morning. (Actually, my brother turned it in. I was feeling really sick this morning - must have been the two cups of coffee last night and two hours of sleep.)

I really don't think it's that great. It's certainly way shorter than I would have liked - only about 2100 of the maximum 4000 words.

But, it's done. They can't fail me out of the IB. (well, so long as I do at least mediocre in TOK, where I'll probably do much better than that) Besides, as Coach Ru pointed out, the extended essay is only worth bonus points towards the diploma.

It's nice, not having this burden hanging over my head any more.

4000 to go

Ok, we're one week out from the extended essay being due. I've pretty much got a topic, but not much more than that.

One week. Four thousand words. I can do this.

I've had the mentality over the past few weeks of just trying to make it to the Charelston trip next week with the Charlotte Math Club. There's a finite and constantly decreasing amount of time between now and when I get to relax.

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On a side note, I finally figured out how to convert my blog to the new blogger. Forgive my lack of posting over the past few weeks/months.

Light?

I really need a vacation.

Not some crummy one-day off with twice as much work. I need an honest break from my schoolwork.

I still have to finish up my extended essay, still have to be catching up on reading for English, still have to do hours of notes for History.

But it could be worse.

We're moving out of Heart of Darkness in English and into Japanese literature. We're moving out of the civil war in History and into the Industrial Revolution.

The year is over half over. And if I could survive the first 90 days of IB, what's to say I can't survive the second 90?

To quote Mr. Fisher, there's finally a light at the end of the tunnel. And it's not a train.

Don't Order Tea at Starbucks

A few friends of mine and I went out for sushi a few months ago, and stopped by a Starbucks right afterwards. (Mind you, I have three independant groups of friends. This is not the group with Roshan or the group with Clare in it. Although I still wouldn't mind them taking me out for sushi.)

I didn't feel like coffee, so I ordered hot tea. And I got my horribly expensive tea. From a teabag.

That tea from Starbucks was probably the same cost as ordering a cup of tea from Tea ReX. Ironic how that water-and-a-teabag cost just as much, if not more, than a really great cup of real tea.

Well, I've learned that you just shouldn't order something like tea or black coffee at a Starbucks. Why spend a horrendous amount for something you can make yourself at home? Better to order something like caramel frappacino (which is really good, mind you.)

Horrors of the DMV

My dad told me a few days ago that he thought that if a gubernatorial candidate was to promise to reform the DMV, he would get elected without a doubt.

I think he's right. (And isn't gubernatorial a fun word?)

I spent about two hours at the DMV a few days ago waiting to take the test for my driver's license. It was crowded and cramped, and quite a few of the workers obviously didn't want to be there.

But I survived. I now have my driver's license - hooray for driving to the writer's club meetings on my own!

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Okay, forgive me for not posting for a while. IB is a horrible monster come 11th grade.

Stupid blogger isn't letting me upgrade to the google-based blogger with my current google account. I'll try it with someone else's computer when I get the chance.

What's academia's obsession with Java?

AP Computer Science is my easy course. No kidding.

See, I've had some computer programming experience before. I learned TiBasic for the calculator to do my 8th grade geometry homework in about 30 seconds. I learned some basic Python over the summer, and took a look at some C++ at one time or another.

It got me thinking about why schools (or the AP curriculum, specifically), and more and more colleges, usually teach Java as their primary programming language. I mean, it was the Big Thing™ in programming a few years ago, but is no longer hyped up so much. In the real world, a knowledge of Java is not as useful as, say, C++.

A common argument is that Java is taught as a "beginner's" language, because the references and pointers of C++ can be a bis-nitch. But the syntax of Java is just as bad as C++, if not worse. There's a lot of "just do this now, it'll be explained to you later" going on in my Computer Science class. (Not exactly easy to explain "public static void main(String[] args) {}" to someone without programming experience.)

If that's the whole reason, why couldn't you just teach Python first, and then graduate to C++? With Python, the syntax is much simpler, and you don't even have to compile the code. (No wasting time figuring out that your code won't work becuase you missed a semicolon. Man, that would save me time in class, not having to debug everyone else's code.) Heck, it even teaches good programming habits, such as using indents meaningfully.

I suppose this shows you just how much influence the College Board (makers of the AP curriculum) have, for better or for worse. (Of course, there are plenty of upsides to having a standardized national collegiate curriculum for high schools, just not in computer science.)

In the end, I guess you have to cut acedemia some slack on their choice of programming language. It's really hard to change standards, so when the College Board adopted Java, it's not an easy thing to change their minds.

Sorry if this post was too technical. Hey, at least I'm not (directly) complaining about school!

Important, Relevant, Interesting

I know, I've complained about the school system a lot lately. I'll promise that after this post I'll hold back a little. (Hey, at least I'm posting, right?)

It seems like teachers give us too many pointless assignments, and we study too many pointless things. I was pondering the criterion that keeps something from not being pointless. I came up with this: Work or information in school is worth it if it is either important, relevant or interesting.

Something is important if you need to know it, regardless if you like it or not, or if an individual student is going to do something related later in life related to the subject. Multiplication is important. Fundamental US history is important. Basic grammar is important.

Something is relevant if you need to know it in order to be able to understand something that is important or enjoyable. Although few people in my networking class (sans moi) enjoyed learning about binary math, it was important to be able to understand IP addresses, and was thus relevant.

Something is enjoyable if the learner finds the topic or work interesting or fun. Although there is nothing that everyone finds enjoyable, there are things that no one finds enjoyable.

It seems so often that teachers give out work without thinking, "What will my students get out of this?" It seems like we're forced to take courses just because they're hard, and not because we'll get anything out of it.

Too bad I can't just title an English paper Beowulf: Nobody gives a s***.

If I didn't have too much to do

The internets are bitter and ironic.

I stumbled across a wiki, with articles about the differences between not having enough time, and having too much to do. (Stop contradicting me!)

Not having enough time is an unsolvable problem. There's no way to create more time, unless an asteroid suddenly hits the earth and days are 25 hours long.

Having too much to do is the opposite. You can work smarter and harder, and find a way to solve said problem.

I guess time is like the law of conservation of energy, where it cannot be created, but can be changed in form.

Inspiring, perhaps, but doesn't neccesarily make essays less intimidating. Pity.

When I have more time

I'll post to my blog, when I have more time.

I'll read more, when I have more time.

I'll study for math competitions, when I have more time.

I'll write, when I have more time.

I'll program, when I have more time.

I'll have fun, when I have more time.

Why am I giving away all of my time in the first place?

Schedule Coincidences

My '06-'07 schedule is as follows:

A-Day:
1. IB Theory of Knowledge
3. IB History of the Americas
5. AP Computer Science
7. IB English III

B-Day:
2. IB French IV
4. IB Biology II
6. IB HL Math II
8. IB Physics II

Some notes and thoughts:

I don't share any lunches with Clare, which sucks big time. At least we'll see each other at the writer's club meetings and such.

I've got most of my right-brain, humanities courses on A-days, and my left-brain, math and science courses on B-days. Because my French and Computer Science teachers don't assign pretty much any homework, my homework schedule really lines up like that.

I've had none of my A-day teachers before, and all of my B-day teachers before either my freshman or sophomore year.

Ms. Berini, he teacher for English III isn't quite as bad as some people make her out to be. She seems like a nicer to-your-face version of Ms. Anliker. I'll bet that she grades with an iron fist, but I'm not quite sure yet.

Difficulty vs. Rigor - A few thoughts

"You should make an effort to take the most rigorous classes that you can." - Mr. Spivey, address to Myers Park (somewhat paraphrased, forgive me.)

An article that I read online (sorry, forgot to bookmark it) got me thinking about higher-level classes in schools, namely the AP and IB programs.

So much emphasis is placed on this thing we call rigor. It prepares us for college, they say. It's probably why I have to spend hours on homework per night, when I could likely learn more by just reading the durn textbook. (Mr. Abbott, can you hear this?)

I think many people in the school system fail to see the differeence between rigor and difficulty (for lack of a better word). Taking multivariable calculus as a senior is difficult. Having to do 80 algebra problems for homework per night is rigorous.

I propose that instead of trying to make the advanced courses in schools more rigorous, school systems should try to make their programs actually teach the students more stuff. More interesting stuff, mind you. More difficult stuff, mind you. More stuff that actually make us want to learn, not more boring textbooks and note-taking and quiz preparation and quarterly projects, mind you.

Come to think of it, high school these days seems to be a giant college entrance exam. So much pressure to get a high GPA, get a high class rank, do the best on your SATs, ace those standardized tests, cram your life full of extracurriculars, find leadership opportunites, do more community service, spend all your free time slaving away for school.

What ever happened to learning? What ever happened to preparation for the real world?

I don't need to take notes on more chapters of my U.S. history textbook. I don't need to write another literary analysis paper. I don't need to make another poster on who-cares-what.

How does senseless tedium help us out later in life?

Sorry if this post turned from thought-out argument to stressed-out rambling. Stupid IB program is beginning to rule my life.

Bookselling, Served Two Ways

You know the little books section you see in grocery stores, like Bi-Lo? Why the heck would they ever sell books in a grocery store? (Come to think of it, it may be reminiscent of the good ol' drug store days.) An even better question: Who actually regularly buys books from a grocery store anyway? My dad claims to have bought a few books from a grocery store, and I can picture an old lady that doesn't get out much getting her novel at the grocery store, but I fail to see how it can be profitable enough to not replace the shelf space with some sort of food. There's gotta be a something that I'm not seeing.

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On the way back from La Grange to visit relatives, we stopped in a mall to grab some lunch. (When none of my family can agree on a place to eat, variety often wins out.) Anyways, we passed by a book store in the mall that was having a closing sale, probably due to a Barnes and Noble moving in across the street. Hardcover books for $4, paperbacks for $2. I saw some copies of one of Seth Godin's books (who I'm a big fan of), so I picked up a copy.

I was wondering how hard it is to sell something on Amazon.com or Ebay, so I bought 2 copies, with the intention of selling one on Amazon, and reading one myself. When I went online this evening, I saw something that suprised me. Two people were selling used copies for one cent each, and several people under a dollar. It didn't take much reasoning to figure out that these people were making their profit off of shipping and handling, not the sale price.

This seems like a quite obvious problem, and quite obviously is keeping new sellers from entering the marketplace. Why doesn't amazon.com come up with a better solution to the shipping profit problem, when it is a definate bottleneck to their already flustering growth?

Obligatory News Post

I've been dreading having to make this post.

NCSSM didn't work out for me. I basically felt too homesick to stay up there, and ended up disenrolling.

On the bright side, I can access my blog again.

(Jerks up there blocked blogger but put myspace on quota time. Why? Who knows.)

A Recipe from My Kitchen

The parents are out car shopping, as the BMW looks as if it has finally croaked. (At 210,000 miles, no less.) Which left the problem of dinner, as they went out at 3 PM, and aren't coming home until later tonight.

Tonight was the first time that I actually cooked a meal by myself, without my mom. (TV dinners don't count.) My mom suggested defrosting and a piece of the frozen tilapia (a white fish) that we have in the freezer in our garage. I also found some baby spinach in the fridge, and sauteed it in a pan. (Also out of my mom's playbook.)

What follows is an account of what happened over the past hour.

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Get Dinner!
A recipe set from Matthew

Begin by placing one frozen filet in tilapia in a bowl of water in the sink. By the time it is needed, it will be completely thawed.

Over-Sauteed Spinach

Ingredients:
3 Handfulls of Baby Spinach
1 Clove Garlic
Salt and Pepper
1 Lemon
Extra Vergin Olive Oil

Place a large skillet over low-medium heat. Drizzle in extra vergin olive oil to coat the bottom of the pan. Chop the garlic into large pieces, and toss into pan. When the garlic starts to brown on the edges, remove it from the pan. Add three handfulls of baby spinach, but hesitate on the last one, such that it goes in when the rest of the spinach is already moderately cooked. Sprinkle with kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper. Allow the spinach to overcook, so that it becomes one mass that is leaking liquid. Slice the lemon into two pieces, and squeeze one half over the spinach. Reserve that half to be used later; the other half can be returned to the fridge. Remove the spinach from the pan, place on a plastic plate, and cover with foil.


Tilapia. Yes, that's a fish.

Ingredients:
1 Filet of Tilapia
Salt and Pepper
Sage
Extra Vergin Olive Oil

Wipe down the pan that you used for the spinach to remove most of the extra lemon juice, oil, and spinach juice. Add a few more tablespoons of extra vergin olive oil to pan. Sprinkle both sides of the fish with kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper. Try to shake sage out of container until you can actually see a little bit on the fish. Add fish to pan, and squeeze more lemon juice on it. Cook 3 minutes on each side, or until fear of burning the fish overcomes fear of undercooking the fish. Try to flip using two spatulas, one below the fish, and the other trying to hold it on from above. Remove from pan using same method, and clumsily move to plate.

Recipe notes: You will not be able to taste the garlic in the spinach or the sage on the fish. This is completely irrelevant.

Mom!!! Get him to stop picking on me!!!

Bleargh.

I tried adding more random text to the the Ultra-Random-Text-Generator-O-Mizer 3000 at the top of my blog, as I've named it, but there's this weird bug in the code.

If I add more than about 7 or 8 random text pieces, the output completely disappears. I added all of the new text in the same way, and there's basically no reason I could come up with that would make it suddenly dissapear with the addition of more pieces of text.

Meh. And I was getting so creative with it last night.

Stupid JavaScript. Go pick on a script kiddie your own size!

Perils of a Stagnant Mind

I have trouble with getting really bored during the summer. I usually end up spending too much time just messing around, surfing the web.

Evidence:



I've been trying to come up with things to do that are more, well, productive. I finally got around to learning to program in Python, but I haven't been doing much else that I can be proud of.

This may be the first time I'm actually happy to go back to school.

Background Music

I was finnicking around with my Rubik's cube, trying to solve it as fast as I can. I wanted to time myself, so I used the easiest and simplest method I knew of. Start playing a song in iTunes, and when you solve the cube, see how far into the song you are.

Not suprisingly, I solved the cube 30 seconds faster when listening to Archetype by Fear Factory than Alone in Kyoto by Air. (Bonus points for citing a band no one's heard of! Ka-Ching!) That's death/industrial metal versus ultra-light electronica, for you mortals, err, non-geek-types. You could argue that I got a much better starting position with for my shorter, 2-minute time, but I was definately moving/thinking faster.

I love to stream online radio when I'm doing homework, playing poker online, or doing other stuff on the computer. One of my favorite stations is Groove Salad from Soma FM, which describes itself as "Ambient Chill". I can just zone out for something like an hour while playing poker and listening to it. (Kinda freaky when you wake back up and realise, "Son of a mother, I'm 30k down!")

I'm curious to know the extent that background noise or music can affect the brain.

Orginazation Systems

I find it hard to describe how organized I am. My room looks very messy, but I know where pretty much everything is. (Well, the important things, anyway.)

It got me thinking about how I organize, and organization in general. I remember 7th grade vividly, where I had one gigantic binder for school, with one divider per class, and a pocket in the front that got literally stuffed with hundreds of papers.

My thesis is this: A good organization system tends to stay organized with the least amount of effort as possible.

Yes, my room looks cluttered. But my shoes are always in the same nook, and my wallet, cell phone, and car keys are always in the place that I've designated for them. (No, I'm not posting where I keep my wallet on the internet.)

Sure, lugging a binder for every class around was tough on my back, but it let me subdivide my subjects into homework, classwork, etc. Avoiding the one huge pocket, stuffed with months of old papers, made it all worth it.

When I started carrying a folder in my bookbag designated only for paper, I stopped having to search though every binder for a loose sheet, and was able to know when to refill.

The large folder hierarchy of My Documents makes finding documents again a snap. (Yes, I have stuff like \Schoolwork\10thGrade\Physics\StringTheory\FinalReport.doc.) It takes only a fraction of a second to save the document further down the hierarchy, but saves tons of time finding my files.

Sometimes, the solution to disorganization is not to spend more time organizing, but to improve your organizational system.

(Edit: Slightly changed example filename to make it fit on the screen. Stupid Blogger's fragmented CSS made my line run off the page.)

The Great Data Migration of 2006

I finally gave up, and bought a USB flash drive. I got a spiffy, 2 gig, aluminum one from newegg.com that only cost me 40 bucks plus shipping. Supposedly, it's a little slow, but I can't really notice anything as I have nothing tangible to compare it to. It transfered my 80+ MB pictures folder to the drive in 40 seconds, which comes out to about 2 Mbps. Ah well, so what if legacy Ethernet was 5 times faster?

It's gonna be really useful for transferring all of my data from my PC to my new laptop at school. It irks me that they only give us our laptops once were at NCSSM. If they let us have the computers beforehand, we could migrate all of our data and install all of the software that we wanted on the laptops beforehand. However, now that I have 2 gigs of space to play with, I can take all of my files, plus some other stuff to expedite the process of downloading/installing software. Methinks I can get an install package of Firefox on the drive, and not even have to download it to the laptop.

Speaking of which, I'm gonna be spending a load of time instailling software to the new laptop. First of all, if I want to set it up as a dual-boot machine with possibly Fedora core 5, that'll take at least a few hours. Then there's Firefox, OpenOffice, iTunes, some incarnation of Myst, probably Dev C++, definately a Python install package, and possibly several other things I'm forgetting.

Yup, I'm a nerd. Guess we established that 3 paragraphs ago.

How to Use a School Computer 101

Now that I've escaped the system... I mean CMS... I should probably write down what I've learned over the past two years about how to get around the stupid, completely locked-down computer systems they have.

In 9th grade, they didn't let me take a computer course other than Computer Applications I, which was extraordinarily easy. Thankfully, Ms. Camia let us do pretty much anything we wanted with the computers for most of the class. I had plenty of time to find workarounds for the different blocks the school system has on the computers.

The big thing you have to remember is that with the Altreis Client software they have installed on every computer in the whole school system, anythime they want, they can look at exactly what you're doing on your computer.

In the Networking class I took last year (which was awesome, by the way), we got to take a tour of the campus the day before spring break, to take a look firsthand at the different servers, wiring closets, etc. around campus. In the computer lab, the school's head tech guy (I don't remember his exact position) showed us some of the utilities he could use remotely. He pulled up Altreis Client, and (randomly) picked the computer in my English teacher's classroom. In the split seconds before the guy could shut down the window, we got to look at my teacher's inbox, including a sligtly embarrasing e-mail from a parent asking about her daughter's poor grades.

Here's what this means. If you're just messing around a little on your computer, getting around the blocks to, say, check your e-mail, surf the web, and play some games, they don't care. Too many people do that sort of thing for them to worry about it on a case-by-case basis. If you're thinking about doing something even semi-illegal, save it for home. They can catch you, and they can nail you.

The biggest thing you will need to get around is the blocks the school system puts on certain internet sites. They use some web filtering software on their servers that blocks sites that are classified as anything they don't want you to see. This means no games, no forums, no pretty much anything that you would normally do at home.

Standard MO for avoiding this kind of web filter software is to find a website that acts as a CGI proxy, such as www.parkersproxy.com. (This particular site may not be online anymore, but it's one that we were able to use for months.) The problem with this technique is, of course, that they can block those sites too. The solution? Find another site. Googling web proxys usually doesn't work because they've usually blocked all of the proxies that have been around long enough to be ranked relatively high on Google. What I would reccomend is to join a mailing list from your home e-mail that sends out new web proxies every few days. (You can do this at peacefire.org.) The sites on the mailing lists are often blocked after just a couple of days, but by then, another mailing comes out with new sites for you to use.

Anyone who has tried to use the crummy version of IE on the school computers knows that they have installed a version of the software that doesn't let you download pretty much anything. The simple solution, if you will always be using the same computer (for a class or something), is to download an alternate web browser, such as Firefox or Opera. You may need to change the internet settings of Firefox to configure the default gateway, etc. correctly. You can try checking Internet Explorer to see if you can find that info, or check with your school's resident computer geek. (There's always at least one.)

Installing software on the computer, in itself, has not been a problem in the past for me. The thing is, they regularly check the start menus, and delete all of the icons other than the software provided with the computer. Since you can't directly access the hard drive (without the workaround I'm going to show you), it can be a pain in the butt to access your software again. Make sure that you either install the software in your own directory, or install it to the hard drive and create a shortcut in your own directory.

In their seemingly infinite wisdom (or not), the school system trys to keep you from accessing the hard drive on your own computer. All of the data of the school system is stored on their own remote servers, and then downloaded into your computer when you log in. As I've said, you can install things to the hard drive without too much problem, but they try to keep you from accessing it. (On a side note, I was amazed when I accessed the hard drive of my Comp Apps I computer for the first time that there was so much software installed to it by former students, that they were just not able to use.)

A workaround may be to try to use Internet Explorer or Firefox to try and access the C:/ directory, but when you try it, it gives you some sort of "permission not given" error message. But when we try to do the same thing in Opera, alas, it works just fine. The directories appear like hyperlinks on a web page, which is fine for accessing them, but you can't rearrange files or do most anything you can normally do in Windows Explorer. One thing that I did not try, but would probably work, is to download an alternate Explorer-type program to access the C drive.

Okay, a few last tips. First of all, don't put too much stuff into your directory. Keep the amount of data in your directory very low, below 256 MB at max, and they won't get too suspicious. (Microsoft Office files are extremely bloated, so a quarter of a gig for a student's directory is possible.) The kid who sat in front of me in Comp Apps I put 2 gigs of emulated Nintendo games on his computer, and he almost got into some deep trouble. If my teacher hadn't put in a good word for him, he could have been suspended, easy.

Make sure your teacher is at least somewhat okay with what you're doing. Don't try installing a bunch of stuff on your computer if your teacher never gives you any free time to mess around with the computer. My Comp Apps I teacher didn't care what we did, so I could do all of this stuff to my computer at will. You know your computer teacher better than I do.

Again, don't do anything too illegal. Save your filesharing software for home. If you're gonna put emulated games onto your computer, keep them to a minimum. Don't visit websites, especially the ones they normally blocked, looking at stuff that's NSFW.

A good practice is to save files that you wouldn't want the school system to directly see in folders named something like "schoolwork". This most definately will not keep them from finding something really bad that you want to hide, especially becuase they can just search for a filetype, but it's a good practice for something like storing a few MP3s in your directory.

If you've got a lot of data, save it to the hard drive, and use a technique listed above to access it. They only routinely check the students' individual directories.

Ok, that's pretty much everything I've learned. (I may edit this later if I remember something.) Remember: Use common sense, and don't do anything they would kick you out of school if they caught you doing.

'Ben Stein's Money' was real?!?

Remember the game show on Comedy Central, Win Ben Stein's Money? Twas a great show. The premise was that three contestants competed to literally, well, win up to $5000 of "Ben Stein's Money". In the final round, the one remaining contestant would go head-to-head against Ben Stein. If the contestant lost, he won the dollar value he scored during the show, and if the contestant won, he got the whole $5000. (Here's a clip of the show from YouTube.)

With the YouTube clip I found tonight, I could pause it at will, so I read the disclamer text that appears at the end of the episode (that flashes by too fast for you to read). Here's what it says:

"'Ben Stein's Money' is the prize budget furnished by the Producer. Ben Stein keeps the prize money in the prize budget won by the contestants at the end of each production period. If during the production period the contestant's winnings exceed the prize budget, Producer pays the overage."

You know what that means? "Ben Stein's Money" was actually Ben Stein's money! A prize budget was set aside for the contestant's winnings, and Ben Stein kept what was left at the end. So, when Ben Stein said he was defending against the contestants taking his own money, he really meant it!

They really should have made it more clear that it was just not figuratively "Ben Stein's money", but that it was real. Not that the show wasn't great.

I miss the great shows from Comedy Central like Win Ben Stein's Money and Battlebots.

Ok, I was off by .10%

I'm fond of mocking the interest rate (APY, really) on my bank account, which I joked was around .25%. For some reason, Wachovia doesn't post the interest rates of their bank accounts on their websites.

Turns out, I was wrong. Based on the statement I go ttoday, the APY of my savings account is more like .35%. Oh, joy.

If I'm using the rule of 72 correctly, that means it'll take something like 200 years to double the amount in my savings account. Remind me too look into investment options that can actually come close to beating inflation.

(Yes, I know savings accounts are for saving, not investing. But that still doesn't mean I can' t mock it.)