1. Open your fancy Firefox 3 browser.
2. 2. Click on the awesomebar and type in ‘youtube’.
3. 3. Post the first four videos that come up.

Here are mine.

I realized today that math gives you both the gradual, drawn out experience of a longer poem or novel and the instant experience of a haiku at once. A proof may take a while to go through, building up step by step, but when you’re left with, say, aⁿ + bⁿ ≠ cⁿ, you have that same instantaneous understanding as with a haiku.

Math is so beautiful.

And of course, I immediately recognized what I was doing when I searched for that: “Hey, it’s a googlewhack! I wonder if it still works.”

So I tried it, and it almost worked, except the passage it was written in had been quoted a bunch of times. But I also noticed that google suggested “quercivorus” instead of “quercivorous”.

Obvious choice of action, test it out and see which one gets more search results. Which I do, and see quercivorus gets 500 results, and quercivorous gets 15300. And wow! My blog is at the top of the results for quercivorous! That’s awesome! But wait… these look like mostly just word lists… the results for quercivorus looked a lot more scholarly… yeah, they do. And oh… 15100ish of the 15300 are all one site.

GAAH. I misspelled my own favorite word, and it’s at the top of google’s results for it to boot.

So I went and edited my post. Made a note about my misspelling it, and corrected the spelling for the future, in hopes of google putting me back high in the rankings for the right spelling.

But just before submitting, I thought to myself “I wish I had my OED, so I could check what it says.” Of course, I don’t, because no one brings their OED to college with them, at least, not anyone studying computer science.

But maybe the library has one. So I walk over there, and yes, it does! And then I look it up… And it says I was right all along! It really is spelled quercivorous! Yes!

A bit more research shows that there are 4 species (probably of insect) named Something quercivorus. Removing those, there are practically no results. I cancel the edit to my old post and write this one.

The moral of the story: The OED may not know everything. But in its niche, it’s smarter than even google.

I don’t like being marketed to.

Today I finally uninstalled the last bit of proprietary software I was using, Flash, and am compiling gnash to replace it. This will certainly be a bit of a drop in functionality—there’s a long list of things unimplemented—but it’s worth it to finally have my computer clean. Macromedia/Adobe hadn’t released any version of flash for linux since 7 anyway, so I was already starting to get locked out of sites. I just hope my game site doesn’t accidentally detect it as me cheating—I’ll probably be the first person ever to use it on their site. :P

(I also got rid of a few old (unused) java plugins that were lying around. I still have some games installed that I can’t see the source for; I treat those as media, the same as music, and while I don’t listen to music from companies I don’t like (read: any RIAA member), I don’t restrict myself to only openly licensed music if the money’s going somewhere decent. Feel free to try to convince me that I’m wrong (or right) about that.)

My courses are Java 1, Calculus 2, English, History of IT, ECT Orientation, and Computer Networking. Java is all right; I’d rather be taking C, but I’ll get to that next semester; most of it so far is familiar, but that’s 4 classes’ worth and I expect there to be new stuff later on. Calc 2 I’m retaking, as I haven’t taken any organized math in three years; it should be, and has been, very easy. English is not actually English, it’s Pseudo-Philosophy From the Context of Literature, like nearly all “English” classes are; it bores me to tears, but so far I’ve actually done all the work. History of IT is very fun; having spent my life around computers I know > 1/2 of it anyway (so far closer to 90%, actually), but the teacher is very good and it’s nice to rehear some of it. ECT Orientation is a once-a-week, one hour thing, which is boring, stupid, useless, and required; there is no work, no tests, you merely have to show up and listen to people talk at you for an hour; perhaps I’ll bring textbooks and do some reading then. Computer Networking looks to be fun, like Java and History of IT; I’ve known everything in it so far, but I expect it to get new soon too.

The people and food both average to mediocre, but have enough high enough above that average that I’m okay, the rooms are all right. The internet connection is faster but more restrictive than I’m used to (no bittorrent, even for legal things, and although I’m used to external ping being blocked, now I can’t even ping computers on the network). Other than that, everything’s about normal