Well, it’s happened. I’m older than Peter Fox. It happened a while ago, actually, but I’ve just now realized it.

It’s funny when you grow up with characters who stay the same age. Jeremy from Zits will always be fifteen, and Paige Fox will always be a freshman. I remember when I thought Paige was practically grown up- now my little sister is her age!

We always think of our age as the typical age to be. Everyone younger than us is a kid, and everyone older than us is, well, old. It messes up this idea when characters stay the same age. “Okay, Peter’s the old one. Old old old. No, wait- I’m almost two years older than him! But- but- I’m not old! I’m just average!”

I’m not having problems with getting older, it’s just a strange thing to think about. I’ll be eighteen in a couple of months. I’ll be OLD. It’s great!

This may seem like a strange thing for me to say, what with my general skepticism and lack of religious belief, but I don’t understand how people can not believe in aliens.

I’m not saying I believe in little green men who walk among us. I’m not saying I believe in any sort of government cover-up conspiracy, past UFO landing, or mind control/anal probing horror story. But I can’t believe that out of all the billions of planets out there, ours is the only one that’s managed to develop intelligent life.

True, the odds of another planet having intelligent life right now are a bit slimmer than the odds of other intelligent life ever exitisting, but think about it- our galaxy alone could contain 100 billion stars. Our sun is just one of those. If only 1% of the stars in our galaxy had a single planet, and if only 1% of those planets were capable of supporting intelligent life, and if only 1% of those capable of supporting intelligent life supported it right now, that would leave 99,999 other planets with sentient life. That’s quite a few.

Saying we are the only intelligent species out there seems a little too self-important. Yes, humans are unique and special and deserve any amount of back-patting, but we’re not that special. We’re not the only ones.

I think a lot of our problems are caused by our thinking we rule the universe. We don’t. We don’t even rule the planet- or, at least, we shouldn’t. We aren’t the only ones who matter.

I think one of the reasons I’m having a hard time making up my mind about where I want to go to college is that I can’t decide exactly what I want to do. I know that, at seventeen, I don’t need to know precisely what’s going to happen for the rest of my life, but I haven’t even firmly decided on a college major. Again, I know that’s common, but I’d like to post about it anyway.

My problem is that I’m interested in too many things. Some of my interest, like English and psychology, are not likely to become college majors. Others, though, like math, computer science, and neuroscience, are. Whenever I try to pick one thing, I feel like I’m abandoning the others. With unlimited money and time, I’d like to spend more than four years on my undergraduate degree and double or triple major with lots and lots of electives. I just want to take too many courses. Lots of liberal arts classes are good because they teach you how to think and live, but I want to major in something very technical- and take as many courses in that as possible.

Actually, here’s what it comes down to. I want to do a major in computer science with some sort of concentration in artificial intelligence. Also, I want to minor/double major in math, and take enough math courses so that I can study topology and geometry, along with number theory. That can be managed. But here’s the problem- I also want to devote a fairly considerable amount of time to the liberal arts. Other science courses, like physics and biology, would be nice, too. As far as I can see, I can’t get a really good education in two fields without sacrificing somewhere else. Alas! Four years is too short.

Keep in mind, though, the above plan is only valid for the next little while. I could change my mind any time. For right now though, top two choices are Carnegie Mellon University and University of Chicago. The plan mentioned above is more tailored to CMU, though- I’m not sure what I’d do if I went to UChicago.

I’ll be glad when I’ve picked a college and sent in my deposit.

I’ve spent most of this summer alternately working and goofing off. I finished my calculus homework pretty early on, but didn’t do anything else about all my homework until recently. It’s even a little hard to write right now, because I’ve been doing so little of it. My penmanship is much worse than usual, and my hand keeps cramping up.

Over the past week, I’ve been working on my biology homework, since it’s due on Wednesday. It’s so easy to fall back into the homework rhythm. Doing worksheets, answering questions, writing paragraphs. It’s almost refreshing. Somtimes (usually during the spring) I think of how great it will be when I get out of college and don’t have to do any more of this. Deep down, though, I love it. Learning new things, answering questions about them, taking tests . . . it’s soothing. I’ve been doing it all my life, so I’m used to it. This is why I used to wish I was a man born centuries ago, so I could be a scholar. Now, I have to content myself with spending a lot of time in college. I love knowledge, and I want as much of it as possible.

On another note, I’m excited about the upcoming year. Even aside from the fact that I’ll be graduating, I’m going to be taking AP English, AP Calculus, AP Computer Science, AP Physics, AP Biology, and Computer Graphics II. Those are all courses that I actually want to take. No history, and no Spanish- at last! I’m especially excited about computer science because it’ll be completely new. CG will just be very fun, as will calculus (I think). Physics is going to be very small- it’ll probably end up with about ten people. I loved AP English last year, and I’m sure I’ll love it again; and biology will be very interesting. Plus, almost everyone I know is taking it, so I’ll have lots of people to talk to.

I always spend the entire month of August anticipatng the beginning of school. I love the start of the year- new classes, new teachers, new books . . . And I haven’t burned out on it yet, either. I spent the majority of last year with a very bad case of early-onset senioritis, though it didn’t affect my grades. I hope it’s different this year. And I hope I can get my college essays written before school starts.

I interned at Bose this summer (previously alluded to here, here, and here). I realize that after posting a lot about it before I started, I completely failed to follow up in any way. So, it went well, the guys I worked with were cool, and there may be a job there for me next summer. Their website is redesigned and streamlined, and the masses can breathe freely once again. Unfortunately, as the site is on the Bose intranet, I can’t link to it and show my work.

Near the end of my time there, when the website was basically done but there wasn’t much else for me to do (or when the tedious parts of the job made my brain cry out in pain) I did some reading up on CSS, validation, web standards, and the like. It was very interesting, and looks like a bandwagon I’d like to jump on. The separation of content and presentation (describing each with XHTML and CSS, respectively) appeals to my sense of organization, as does the concept of one file determining the presentation of the entire site.

This version of Lodenocity.com (called Three in my mind, but lacking an official name) was created with those ideas in mind. Unfortunatley, due to several problems with templates and lost stylesheets, my site was down for a bit during my move from Movable Type to Wordpress. Thus, I was trying to get it functional again as quickly as possible, and didn’t stop to make sure it validated. I did use CSS for virtually all presentation for the first time ever, but I got lazy near the end and stuck in a table and a few align=”center”s because I didn’t want to go back into the CSS and define new classes. Also, I’m sure my problems with IE could have been fixed in a better way if I had started the layout over from scratch, but I didn’t feel I had the time. I got a little over zealous with WP’s links list feature and went wild on the right menu bar.

After about a week of constant staring at a computer screen and struggling with trying to make my old layout agree with WP, trying to make a very cool template agree with anything, and trying to get together a decent-looking new layout, I was done. That’s why the comments aren’t very nice-looking and the archive system doesn’t link to individual entries. Somehow I can’t just go back and fix these things- I want a whole new layout, a new beginning. I want something clean-looking and easy on the eyes, which this is not. I’d like something similar to this.

Also, I want to try harder to make the new layout up to web standards and as CSS-ified as possible. Ultimately, I want visitors to the site to be able to switch skins, going from one stylesheet to another depending on their taste. I also want to look into syndication and lovely things like that. Unfortunately, school starts soon and I have lots of homework left to do. The school year itself will probably leave me little time for anything huge on the website front. Oh, well. I can dream.

Despite its blatant racism, ‘Nation’ still needs to be seen

The above is an article appearing in the Boston Globe today, about how some people don’t want the blatantly racist film The Birth of a Nation to be screened.

I’m constantly frustrated by people’s tendency to ignore ugly things. You can’t erase the fact that we used to treat people like scum. What good will it do to repress our history? We need to look it in the face and accept that it happened. It needs to be taught to our children. We need to learn as much as we can about it to insure that it will never happen again.

Some are afraid that showing this movie will result in hate crimes and more racism. But really, if we’ve done our job, everyone will see it as a warning: look at the depths to which humanity can fall. Look what we’re capable of.

Really, this is a censorship issue. There will always be people unwilling to look reality in the face, and I will never be one of them.

I love used book stores. What can be better than rooms full of weird, cheap books? Every once in a while, you even get a book with a personal history.

I was vacationing in Maine years ago, and ended up at a used book sale in a church. I bought the second and third books in the Griffin & Sabine trilogy by Nick Bantock. The books are about Griffin, an artist living a lonely life in London and running his own greeting card company, and Sabine, a woman living on one of the Soloman Islands- also an artist. They share a strange mental bond, and communicate with postcards and letters. The books are fancy- they consist of the actual correspondence. You can take letters out of envelopes and such.

Inscribed in the front of the second book in red rollerball pen was the following note:

Christmas ‘93
My Dearest “Sabine,”

I give this book with the full awareness that possibly one similar might be winging its way westward. Nonetheless, its light is still treasured. But are you real or is it just an illusion.

With deepest devotion,
“Griffin”

And in the front of the third one in the same handwriting, this time in red marker:

Rebecca,

The final chapter . . . or is it? A mirror held to our collective faces? Reflections? Images? The Trilogy Ends.

Merry Christmas.

The Griffinesque One,
Rick

I love those inscriptions, though they never fail to make me a little sad. Assuming that they’re genuine, I can’t help but think about the man that wrote them and the woman he loved. More than anything else, I wonder what happened to them- why are these books being sold in a church instead of sitting happily on Rebecca’s bookshelf?

Maybe they had a messy breakup, and Rebecca donated the books to the sale as a way of showing how little she cared for her memories of Rick. Maybe he died, and they were too painful a reminder. Maybe she died. Maybe Rick and Rebecca are living a pleasant life together right now, but they’ve left behind the sentimentality that made them hold on to old gifts.

I don’t like the possibilities that involve their love fading, or never really existing in the first place. I like to think that love lasts forever, that people never change and grow apart- but it isn’t true. These books are testament to that. It makes me love them.

It’s official. Everything works. If you find a broken link especially one that’s supposed to lead to a blog entry, please let me know.

Also, if you have one of my static pages bookmarked, please visit it again using the link on the left and change your bookmark to the new URL. The old one will work, but it will give you a page utterly devoid of CSS and proper beginning and ending tags. I’m using a Wordpress plugin that allows me to very easily integrate static pages into the blog. Much less of a headache for me.

At last, I can leave the corny nautical title behind and get back to real entries instead of these terrible status alerts.

Note: I’d really appreciate it if you’d go here and complete the poll I’ve posted. It’s very short, and it’d be a big help to me.

Okay, the site is back and the blog is functional! Static pages are still in the old layout and the links in the sidebars have messed up formatting, but everything works. I’m also proud to say that this is my first CSS layout. The header, two sidebars, and content are each in a seperate div layer, and each of those layers is positioned using CSS. All formatting is also done in CSS. There is a table that comes into play if you’re browsing with IE, but that’s only because IE doesn’t play nicely with CSS.

The link list on the left is strange looking because it’s not done manually. WP has a feature that creates link lists for you, and I’m still trying to find a way to format it. Same goes for the Archive by Month list on the right.

Note: I thought I had found a solution to my problems with IE, but it turns out I haven’t. If you’re using Internet Explorer, I’m sorry. For now either get a better browser or be satisfied with the messed up site.

Yes, the blog is broken. I’m working on it, but I don’t have that much time. Also making a new CSS-tastic layout. It will be back soon. For now, here are links to the site’s static pages, which still look like they used to:

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