A while ago, I Stumbled MyStickies.  It’s a great idea, in theory–a free service that lets you put sticky notes on any web page.  You come back to the web page however much later, and look!  Your sticky notes are there for you!  It’s very Web 2.0, apparently.  (I’ve never understood what exactly constitutes Web 2.0, but I hear it’s the hot new thing.  It’s always seemed a little silly.  Wikipedia tells me that “Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, has questioned whether one can use the term in any meaningful way, since many of the technological components of Web 2.0 have existed since the early days of the Web.”  I think I like him.)

Anyway, it seemed perfect.  Many a time have I found a web page that interested me for one reason or another (even more so now that I’m using StumbleUpon), and found myself faced with a conundrum.  Do I keep the window open but minimize it, gradually slowing down Firefox as these windows build up?  Do I email myself the URL and then completely forget about it?  Or do I bookmark it, filling up my bookmarks folder with sites that really only interested me for some small reason, and that realistically I’ll likely never visit again?  MyStickies could have been the solution.

Alas, it was not to be.  I signed up, and was prompted to download the browser extension.  Unfortunately, the browser extension download that the MyStickies dashboard leads to is not compatible with Firefox 3.0.5, to which I had coincidentally upgraded the day before.  So I was frustrated, and left it alone for a few weeks.  It was the holiday season, I thought, and maybe they just hadn’t gotten around to updating it.  Every once in a while I’d try it again–nope, still incompatible.

Until I got tired of it and decided to try searching for other sources.  As it turns out, the version on Firefox’s add-on page (0.1.7) is compatible, and was released way back in June.  As it turns out, the version available from the MyStickies dashboard is 0.1.5, which hasn’t been current since last March–seems like one of those things that should get updated.  But downloading from the Firefox page was successful, and it added a toolbar to Firefox.  I was ready to start sticky noting webpages.

No, wait, I wasn’t.  There are four different methods for adding a new sticky note to a webpage and not one works on any page other than the MyStickies page itself.  I’ve tried uninstalling and reinstalling, I’ve tried being logged in and not logged in, I’ve added my username to the “Accounts” section of the toolbar, and no go.

Furthermore, I’ve sent feedback to MyStickies twice, once when I first discovered the incompatibility issue, and again just recently when I couldn’t get the toolbar to work.  No response–although I’m willing to consider again the possibility that no one’s paying attention during the holidays, which would be reasonable.

So great idea, MyStickies, but poor (as in nonfunctional) execution.  Various blogs suggest that the service has worked for people in the past, but I don’t see any recent responses, and I’m at a loss.  It’s entirely possibly that I’m doing something wrong, and if that’s the case, I’d love to be told so.  Ah, if only MyStickies worked for me.

I’m back from a sumer hiatus, with a brief post about facebook.  They just made the new layout the permanent layout–”New Facebook is now the only Facebook,” they say–and I, along with many others, find it much less convenient than the old layout.  Fortunately, there’s a workaround over here.  It does work, in that when I tell it to switch over to MSIE (Microsoft Internet Explorer?) 5.5, it displays facebook in the old layout, with a note at the top of the window saying “Sorry, new Facebook is temporarily disabled.”  Some other things–gcal, for example–will also go funky with the switch, but you can turn it on to use facebook and off for everything else.

Hang on, strike all of that.  It used to work, but I was just checking it while writing this, and it looks like facebook has worked around the workaround.  Far be it from me to understand how this whole thing functions, but I gather that User Agent Switcher mimics old versions of internet browsers, and for a while there, the new facebook wasn’t set to work with some of those versions.  It seems they’ve caught on, though, and have made it work with all old browsers, thereby drowning the last hopes of us change-fearing naysayers.  *sigh*  I guess it’s back to trying to get used to the new layout for me.

My guilty pleasure: popular television shows.

I know, I know. I’m supposed to only like obscure scifi. (I do, really! Lexx is great fun!) Or say in a haughty voice that “I don’t really watch television–I prefer radio as a medium.” (”Of course, I get all my news from NPR. Did you catch yesterday’s This American Life?”) Maybe I should maintain that the best show on television is the Wire. (Well, I’ve seen a few episodes with my roommate. It’s not bad.)

Yet I can’t help falling into those all-too-popular traps. Mostly this happens on vacations, when I actually have the time to watch television, or indeed do anything but read Latin and write papers and go to rehearsal and the myriad of other necessities at school. Last year during winter break, I watched the entire first season of Lost at TV Links, back when it was working. This past winter, I did the same thing with Heroes. And now that I’m out of school for the summer and have free time again, I’ve fallen back into the second season of Heroes, and the rest of Lost is waiting in the wings.

Now, don’t let my tone fool you. I’m not about to say “But I only like them ironically” or anything of that ilk. Someone (I can’t remember who, unfortunately) once wrote an invective against claiming to like something because “it’s so bad it’s good.” If you like it, said this person, then just say it’s good! Don’t be embarrassed and try to over it up!

In that line, I really truly like these shows, no matter what people say. They’re engaging, and fantastical, and have all sorts of different fun plot lines (too many, if the critics are to be believed). Some of my like for these shows probably comes from A. my very clear love for scifi, and B. my secret attraction to conspiracy theories and secret societies and such things. Yes, I certainly did take that book out of the library and read about the Thugs and the Freemasons and the Illuminati before I got to the KKK and got bored of it. Oh yes, I suspect that there are all sorts of secret plots behind things. In fact, this item B is probably responsible for item A. All the “real world” scifi–Stargate, X-Files, etc.–tend to have some elements of the conspiracy theory in them.

And apparently I’m not alone in this interest, given the popularity of these shows. So when the plots of Lost get ever crazier and more all-encompassing and the people pulling the strings get more puppeteer-like, it’s great to watch. When we watch Heroes and get hints of the group of specials running things behind the scenes, we love it.

Are these shows great television? Do they have any larger value? Do they address any of the fundamental questions of humanity? I don’t know. Maybe. That’s something that will be collectively decided once they’ve finished their run and we can look back at them. But they’re certainly damn entertaining, and for that, producers of Lost and Heroes, I doff my hat to you. Even if writers’ meetings do actually look like this.

Whew. Greek is done, after a meh final this morning. It could have been worse, but it was by no means great. Now I just need to study Latin enough to do decently on Wednesday, and I’m done.

I downloaded Quicksilver recently, after reading about it somewhere or other and checking out reviews of it. I can see that it’s useful as a launcher, and probably saves me a little time over wading through the Finder, but it doesn’t seem like a true godsend, which is how people seem to characterize it. Then again, I haven’t gotten into most of the features, so I’m sure there’s a bunch that I’m missing. I could be convinced.

I’ve also continued using Akatoo. I’m mostly rating others’ answers, and answering questions myself only occasionally. One can get enough IKU points from rating answers (indeed, that seems to be the main source) to stay easily in the top 20 (and thereby presumably therefore be one of the contest winners at the end of the month), but it does require a certain amount of time spent reading and rating. Whether there’s worth in it beyond personal gain, I’m not sure, especially if I’m not contributing much of my own anyway. My questions of copyright and reproduction issues are still there, though somewhat muted–I’m certainly not saying anything particularly genius in my use of the site, and I don’t think most others are either. I inquired about the project mentioned in the ad that originally brought me to the site, and it looks like the project is to recruit more people and see what they think of Akatoo, and report that feedback to the company. I’ve never been a fan of the whole “get more people in and you too could win big!” marketing schemes (You know those people who post spam links in facebook groups and forums? I hate those people.), so I’m pretty hesitant to sign onto this.

In recent life news, I’ve agreed to assistant direct a (pending Drama Board approval) production of select plays from 365 Days/365 Plays, by Suzan-Lori Parks, next fall. More on that as it develops.

I did, by the way, get to SCCS. Kit took care of upgrading my WordPress software. The problem was with Fugu in fact, and not actually a problem so much as a quirk in the way it handles deletion of directories. He also kindly modified this theme to include tags, which you can now see at the tops of posts. Plus, he changed something with permissions that briefly allowed me to upload photos in the old WordPress, but with the new upload system of 2.5, I’m getting a different error message when I try. One of these, days, I’ll be successful.

Had my last seminar on Monday, and my last Movement Theater class (which was actually a joint performance with the Movement Theater II class of pieces we’d been creating throughout the semester) last night. Now it’s just two Greek classes to go, and then just studying for finals. Today was the end-of-year Classics picnic, which featured excellent food and a skit parodying the Agamemnon and much discussion of what this year’s Classics T-shirt should be.

Housing didn’t end up being terrible. By the time they got down to the last hundred or so Juniors, all singles were gone, so they opened up the singles waitlist. Most of the remainder elected to go on it, which meant that the part of my block that will be here next semester managed to get the last two (pretty sizable, actually) available doubles in Mertz.

Anyway, if all goes to plan, I’ll only be here a semester anyway. In the spring I want to study at ICCS in Rome. From what I’ve seen in my research of it and what I’ve heard from several people, it’s a great program, and while it’s pretty highly rated in academics, the workload is not bad compared to Swarthmore. I think I could do with a break, especially in Rome. Half of the program is a course that involves multiple field trips per week to go look at old Roman things, so I’m excited.

I’m also trying to figure out what to do in the summer after the program ends. I had originally planned to make a bunch of money sometime between now and then in order to stay in Europe and travel for a while. After speaking with Professor Turpin, however, my new plan is to find some sort of summer program and get the college to pay for it through Classics Department or general Humanities funding. This is a while off, so I have plenty of time to consider, but I’ve been looking at archaeological digs, mainly in the U.K. I’d kind of like to go back to Germany or the Czech Republic, though. If I could come up with my own interest and write a convincing enough plan, I could probably get funding for whatever I wanted, actually. I just need to figure out what that is.

Bollocks. I’ve broken my headphones again.

I was in Sharples (Swarthmore’s dining hall), and walking up to bus my try. The curlicue cord, dangling from my pocket, got caught on a chair back as I was walking by, and pulled my up short. Everything looked fine, but when I tried to listen through them, nothing came through. Once I got home, I opened up the plug and found that while the ground was still attached, both the left and right channel wires had pulled off of their contact points. Well, now that I know how to solder, I can fix it on my own. I just need to get hold of a soldering iron again.

I preregistered for classes today–sort of, at least. My schedule for next semester was going to be Acting II Monday afternoon, Latin seminar (Aeneid) Wednesday afternoon, and Directing I Friday afternoon (plus a likely fifth course–maybe intro to Comp. Sci. or intermediate Greek). For a while, the Latin seminar was going to be moved to Monday, but after surveying students, the department found that Wednesday worked best. Unfortunately, the theater department didn’t follow suit when they changed Directing I to Wednesday afternoon at the last minute. As of now I’m registered for all of those classes, regardless of the conflict. Come next September, I’ll need to talk with people to see if one of those classes can be moved. Otherwise I’ll have to put off Directing until the fall of senior year, which would require a whole bunch of schedule juggling. Grrrr, theater department.

Also, my blockmates and I didn’t get any of our desired blocks for next year. When we got our lottery numbers yesterday, we found out why–they’re terrible. Because we blocked together, we have a series of six numbers in the 760s. Rising Junior numbers cut off at 800, so we’re going to have bad luck picking rooms. Also, our housing lottery is Monday at 7:30, the same time as my Movement Theater class. Grrrr, housing.

Regardless, the semester is almost over. A week and a half of classes, followed by reading week and exams. I don’t have much work left, now that my final seminar paper is done. I’ll have a lot to do to prepare for exams, though, what with catching up with all the Latin reading that I haven’t done. I’m looking forward to a month in which to do nothing before I head up to camp.

Well, it’s been a while since I posted. A week or so ago I was trying to write a post about how to make a small alcohol burning lamp that Bevan and I put together a while ago, but WordPress was uncooperative in photo uploading. Also, I haven’t yet managed to update to the new version of WordPress, but that seems to be more the fault of Fugu, which won’t let me delete the old files. Eventually, I’ll make it over to SCCS and see if they can be helpful.

I handed in my final seminar paper this morning, having pulled an all-nighter to finish it. This is the second one I’ve done on this paper, unfortunately. The other one was a couple weeks ago when the previous draft was due. The paper’s been keeping me pretty occupied since then, so I’m hoping to have a little more free time now that it’s done.

Previous to that, on Wednesday evening, I saw a showing of the documentary Second Skin. It’s about massively multiplayer online games, and how they affect the lives of a few different sets of people. I enjoyed the movie. It looked at gaming from several different perspectives, and let the viewer decide what his or her stance on the issue was. I also found it to be well-filmed and well-edited for the most part. It followed several different story lines, and while the three main ones wound throughout the movie, others were only brief interludes. These gave the film a choppy feel at times, but admittedly, I’m not sure there would have been a better way of integrating them into the rest of the movie.

The film was being shown at Swarthmore because one of the producers is a Swat alumnus from 2000. It debuted at South By Southwest, and the production team is currently looking for a distributor. Hopefully people will be able to see the movie soon. (Anyone out there who works for a distribution company should take a look at Second Skin.) In the meantime, the trailer is available on the film’s website.

I did end up joining into distribued computing. I dowloaded the BOINC (Berkely Open Infrastucture Network for Computing) software, and I’ve been running a climate change model for ClimatePrediction.net. I haven’t seen it affect the performance of my computer, since it hands over whatever processor I need and just uses the spare. Granted, since I’m now using all of my processor’s capabilities, the computer is working harder, and the fan runs pretty high all the time, so I turn it off to sleep, but I can deal with it otherwise. Additionally, the work it’s doing is going to take a long time: it’s had 12 hours of processor time so far, and it’s 3.6% through one of the tasks–and that’s the shorter one.

There are a few non-words that I’ve decided should be words:

Brandinage– someone on a Latin quiz (I grade quizzes and homework for one of the intermediate level Latin courses, by the way) was trying to write “brigandage” and apparently was writing too quickly, so ended up with brandinage. Google tells me that there are no uses of it on the internet, so I should soon be the only one. It should be pronounced similarly to “triage” rather thn “bandage.” I’m not sure yet what this one should mean.

Faights–this was my own mistake. When I translate Latin, I usually end up looking back at the Latin text while still writing out the English translation, which can end up in some drastic misspellings, like this one, which should have been “fates.” Google tells me that its uses are mostly misspellings of “fights,” and perhaps something in Latvian. The spelling suggests to me that a faight should be some sort of fairy/sprite sort of a thing, and I think it should be pronounced as “fates” is, but with a slight glide towards the pronunciation of “fights.”

Usion–A similar error in Latin translation for “unison.” Google gives mostly vaguely pretentious respellings like [conf]usion.  Should be pronounced like fusion, but without the F.  I don’t know what this one means yet either.  It makes me think of use and usury.

My roommate did acquire a soldering iron. I had expected to have to go into the electrics lab with him and maybe, if I was lucky, be allowed to solder. But the lab instructor just handed over the soldering iron and the accompanying business to Bevan. He brought it back to the room, and after setting up a workstation of a slate tile to keep from burning the wooden floor, he proceeded to teach me to solder. We followed an excellent guide I found for changing a headphone plug. We differed from it on only a few points–the wiring in my headphones had tension relief material in it, which looked like tiny threads, so we had to separate that from the actual wires and cut it out before doing anything. Each “wire” (left channel, right channel, and ground) was actually made of a bunch of small wires wrapped around the tension relief, and each of the small copper wires had some sort of insulation painted onto it (except for the ground, which was uninsulated). Filing was working to get it off, but going very slowly, so we resorted to touching it to a flame, using pliers a little way down the wire as a heat sink, and that burned it off quite quickly. After that, it was a matter of getting tiny wires through small holes, soldering all of the connections, and screwing the pieces of the plug back together. I now have perfectly working headphones, and can proudly say that I fixed them myself (and with Bevan, of course, who had all the knowledge and did much of the work.)

Never having soldered before, the thing that surprised me was how quickly the actual soldering went. Touch the iron to the wires and heat them, touch down the solder, let it draw in, and then the connection is done. What did take a long time was setting everything up. The iron has to heat up, and the insulation has to be stripped, and the work station prepared, and proper lighting acquired, and a helper to hold the work (If you do not have, as we do not, a soldering stand), and every time you put the iron down for a while, you need to clean and tin it again. I suppose that like everything else, it’s all in the preparation.

I’m back at school after doing not nearly enough work over break. I’ve found that I have perennial trouble doing the reading for my Latin seminar. I mean to, but get distracted by a book, or the internet, or even just sitting there and not really doing anything. I go away and realize this problem, decide that I just need to buckle down and do Latin, without checking my email or wasting time, but it never happens.

If you hadn’t heard, Terry Pratchett has early-onset Alzheimer’s, and is donating half a million pounds to a fund to search for a cure. While looking at different articles on that, I ran into a link to a program called Folding@home, which is trying to find a solution to the misfolding of proteins, which can cause Alzheimer’s among other things, by using the spare computing power of volunteers who download a program to their computers. This led me to the broader category of distributed computing, which is this process of letting your computer work in something in a network of other computers during its downtime. My computer runs pretty slowly as it, is, so I think I’m using most of what it’s got and won’t be joining any of these, but there’s a list of distributed computing projects here.

Also in the category of fun things to do with your extra (or not) time online, a while ago I wandered by way of steampunk into Instructables. Users post step-by-step instructions on various projects. I was fascinated looking through what was there, but don’t foresee having the time to attempt any of them any time soon.

In other news, I think I’ve found a source for a soldering iron (the physics electrics lab, courtesy of my physics roommate, who presumably will also teach me how to solder), so look for that fixing-my-broken-headphones update soon. It will potentially include pictures, if I can get my hands on a camera. Funny how I don’t own any of the things I need for this venture.