Assorted Afflatuses

My dear friends at the College Board released the November test scores today. I did not score well - at least by my exacting standards. Frankly, I find it incredibly difficult to believe that, after taking the infernal exam three times, I cannot manage to push my math score up into the 680-and-beyond range. My critical reading and writing scores both fall within my acceptable range of 700 to 800 points, however, I seem to lack the necessary test-taking prowess to conquer the mathematics section. At this point, though, I have concluded that my SAT score probably will not make or break my college applications; the admissions folks should manage to realize that, if I manage to survive second-year calculus, I can do math.

And therein lies the irony of my situation: I can do differential and integral calculus with relative ease, yet I cannot determine how many possible seating arrangements exist when twelve people sit down to eat at the dinner table. Or, at least, the College Board claims I cannot. This third lamentable score almost makes me want to order my detailed score analysis; I may never take the SAT again, but, aside from one absurd problem with circles, I felt that I correctly answered each and every mathematics question.

As I have a startling lack of homework, I figured that I could afford to spend more time attempting to discern the context in which a certain LiveJournal user set a spate of referrals upon my website. When last I checked, nearly 20 different LiveJournals had linked to my website - if only via their "Friends" pages - with the result that nearly 90 new unique visitors have paid a visit. While I cannot honestly say this influx of hits altered my visitor count in any largely perceptible way, this entirely new pocket of visitors has aroused my curiosity.

At any rate, I did some additional digging and I stumbled upon the LiveJournal of one fidget62 - whose real name I refrain from using solely because I find most people's chosen screen-names quite amusing. Her blog that provided at least some context for this new pocket of readers. It makes me quite happy to think that, based upon the rather faint details provided by Ms. fidget62's LiveJournal, someone happened to serendipitously stumble upon my blog and found it amusing enough to write about. In a sense, progress.

Still, I would like to see the original context in which some mysterious author recommended my humble blog to a new pocket of people, or - perhaps more importantly - discover how this mysterious person found my blog in the first place.

(On an almost entirely unrelated note, I must express my great esteem that fidget62 decided to use the 24-hour clock in one of her posts. It reminds me of my own insistence that the day of the week must go before the month: 1 December 2006 instead of December 1, 2006.)

An Enigma

After an exceedingly difficult or dull day at school, I make sure to visit a number of websites, so as to keep myself abreast of the latest news and happenings around the world. I generally start with engadget, BBC News and LCI, followed by a quick check of my website statistics. There, I can view all sorts of information about the lovely people who visit my website each and every day. Amongst the browser statistics and top search strings is an area which permits me to see which web pages link to mine and how many people have followed the links on those websites. In general, the referrals come from places I might expect - say a friend's blog or technorati.com. Today, however, I noticed a litany of links from a certain person's LiveJournal. Curious, I clicked on the link and happened upon a page explaining that only the user's friends could read the entry. So, I removed part of the URL and looked at the user's public LiveJournal.

This mysterious LiveJournal impressed me in one way, disappointed me in another, and left me quite perplexed in yet another. To begin, this mysterious LiveJournal looked good. Really good. In fact, it looked better than any other LiveJournal I have happened upon in the past. Unfortunately, though, the praise must end there. For I cannot judge the LiveJournal in any other way, since the author has only granted permission to his or her LiveJournal friends to view his or her entries.

But that aside, the question remains: who is this mysterious referrer?

A Mystery

I often find myself in the midst of a conversation whose subject would not necessarily cross my mind. Today, for instance, I spent several minutes discussing the merits and demerits of certain types of Christmas trees. The notion had never crossed my mind. Though, when I did consider it, I realized that I had no real preference as to which particular type of Christmas tree I prefer. Certainly, I would much prefer a strong healthy tree to one who looked on the brink of disintegrating into a pile of dust. But I cannot say that I prefer a Douglas Fir to a Noble Fir. I call them both "Christmas Trees."

When I took a peek at my website statistics a few minutes ago, I noticed a number of queries for "MUN" on this blog, which would lead to nowhere. For your reference, the MUN Blog is located at www.kibeland.com/mun and cannot be accessed directly from the rest of my website.

Rather than provide a printed copy of my "Holiday Wish List" to those who want it, I have posted it online to help preserve our forests and limit my consumption of costly color ink.

$20 & Under

Perhaps Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Or Jules Verne's Vingt Mille Lieues Sous les Mers
Maybe Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray
David Kamp's The United States of Arugula
And a copy of The Economist Style Guide
Along with assorted Moleskine Notebooks and Cahiers

$60 & Under

Possibly a Cross Tech3 (Pencil/Pen²)
Oxford University Press' The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories
Or Oxford University Press' The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Quotations
Maybe Aaron Hillegass' Advanced Mac OS X Programming
And an All-Clad 8" Stainless Steel Skillet

$100 & Under

One Casauri Portfolio Valise
An Apple Wireless Mighty Mouse
Or an M-Audio Nova Microphone
Possibly a Thermoworks IR Gun Industrial Infrared Thermometer
Or a Thermoworks Super-Fast Thermopen

$200 & Under

For recording an M-Audio MobilePre USB
For listening a pair of HarmonKardon SoundSticks
For cooking an All-Clad 10" Nonstick Stainless Steel Skillet
And for keeping warm some cashmere sweaters
A crazy scarf
Or something more conservative

$200 & Up

Conceivably one Wacom 6x11 Intuos3 Graphics Tablet
Some stylish Paul Smith Stripped Shirts
Or a Nikon 85mm f/1.8D AF Nikkor Lens

I may have more thoughts as time marches forward, but for now, 'tis all.

I have long known that Parade - a supplemental pseudo-magazine that graces in the insides of many Sunday papers in the United States - does not distinguish itself with the kind of writing contained in the pages of its competitors, such as the New York Times Magazine. However, I did not realize how strange it was until earlier this evening.

I picked up the 19 November issue of Parade as I was munching on a cinnamon roll. After the celeb-gossip section and an article chronicling the technological phobias of some famous faces, I stumbled upon an article about high-tech cooking tools with a sentence that made me scratch my head. The sentence reads, "Everything from ovens to refrigerators is getting smarter." At first, I thought that the author of the article incorrectly chose to use "is," rather than "are," in the sentence. But upon further examination I realized that the author had mutated "to be" correctly. Still, it would have made the sentence clearer if the author had inserted some hyphens so that the sentence read like this: "Everything - from ovens to refrigerators - is getting smarter." Otherwise, it seems like the sentence should use "are," as in: "Ovens and refrigerators are getting smarter."

Most of the other writing, while clearly not written for the most astute audience, did not baffle me like that article on page 8. However, when I finished rifling through Parade and flipped it over, revealing the cover, I saw something else that struck me as strange. The cover has a blurb reading, "An easy guide to keeping it simple." I don't see why the author choose not to write, "A guide to keeping it simple" instead. The word "simple" implies that the activity is not terribly complicated, so, assuming that simple activities require simple instructions, the guide must be easy to understand.

I stopped looking for writing anomalies after finding the one on the cover, though I am inclined to think that if I had continued looking, I would have found more. I cannot believe that a nationally syndicated magazine has such strange sentences contained within its pages, especially in giant, 48 point type.

Rarely do I write two blog entries in a single day. But tonight I seem to have the writing bug, so here goes.

MySpace, the wildly successful social-networking website, has one problem that irks me beyond all others. Without considerable skill, time, and dedication, one cannot possibly create a MySpace that looks anything less than decidedly hideous. "Your Fav. Blonde," whose MySpace I selected at random, has a MySpace that looks like this:

(Lime green and hot pink do not go well together.)

Fortunately, however, Six Apart - the same wonderful company who writes the MovableType blogging software I use - recently launched a new service called Vox. Vox provides many of the same features of a MySpace, but without the undesirable hideousness. Users can still befriend one another, contribute to their online journals, swap messages with one another, and extol the virtues of a particular book or band.

But unlike News Corp's MySpace service, Vox provides users with thousands of gorgeous templates that can be applied on a whim as they see fit. As a result, Vox users have some of the best-looking websites on the Internet. Aldrin, a Vox user selected at random, has a Vox that looks like this:

Clearly, Vox users have an advantage in the looks department. Templates come from a variety of sources on Vox - from professional graphic designers to closet creatives - and, for the most part, they all look incredible. Vox also makes choosing and applying templates exceedingly simple. One simply clicks on the design button, finds a design, and clicks apply.

Vox's more polished look also seems to promote better writing. In my limited experience with MySpace, I have never noticed any writing that seemed particularly stellar, or, for that matter, even passable. On Vox, however, all of the writers manage to compose complete sentences and many Vox users write with a fair amount of skill.

Vox users John and Sylvie wrote recently:

MySpace user Girien, on the other hand, recently posted:

That is not to say that nobody on MySpace writes well, but rather to illustrate the generally higher quality of writing on Vox.

Hopefully, Vox will supplant MySpace as the preferred method of online social-networking. It provides many of the same features minus the ugliness. Pay them a visit at Vox.com, especially if you use MySpace.

Much to the delight of home fitness equipment manufacturers, the Thanksgiving holiday will take place this coming Thursday. So, students across the nation have begun or will begin their Thanksgiving breaks at some point during the week. At my school that break began today, at around half-past eleven, following an wholly unproductive "half-day" of school.

For whatever reason, the administrators at my school decided that, with only half a day to educate us this week, they would have us come to school and attend each of our classes for a wholesome 26 minutes. In theory, this plan is imbecilic. In practice it's even worse.

Today, I accomplished next to nothing in the four-ish hours I spent at school. I helped one beleaguered classmate with her crossword puzzle - though I really only managed to fill in one or two clues - and I managed to solve a handful of organic chemistry problems with help from the two people in that class who had not begun to dance or play "hacky sack."

Anyone with half a brain should have realized that students and teachers would accomplish next to nothing in 26 minute class periods.

Teachers cannot possibly teach anything in 26 minutes. Reasonably, it takes ten minutes to let the class settle in and perhaps another five, at the end, to let them prepare to leave. On any other day with hour-plus periods, a teacher has at least 45 minutes to impart knowledge. With 26, on the other hand, they have almost none.

As such, students will do what students will do: digress into strange behavior. Giving students the entire day off would have been far more productive even if every student only managed to finish one math problem at some point between the hours of 8:15 and 11:30 AM.

I have no idea who dreamt up such vapid a schedule, but he or she desperately needs a potent injection of intelligence.

An Allegory on the Banks of the Nile?
The writing experts at Toys R Us have done it again. It's unleashed, not unleased! (Photo courtesy engadget)

Bobakabobit, the eBay red-star power-seller who listed the console, is making a killing. The retail value of dear Bobakabobit's top-end PlayStation 3 package (complete with receipts, two games and one rather unimpressive Blu-Ray movie) falls somewhere between the comparatively small sums of $700 and $800. Thus, Bobakabobit - just one of the many people selling the console on eBay, amazon.com, and other popular Internet shopping sites - stands to profit nearly $4200.

I would have gladly spent several hours in an over-caffinated hoard of video game fanatics for $4200. I must almost pause to wonder why I didn't slog out to Best Buy at 4am on Thursday.

Bobakabobit's auction also makes me question why anyone who managed to snatch a PlayStation 3 at list price would open the box. Gwendolyn Gamer or Pete Playstation could redeem his or her respective pre-order voucher, sell the console on eBay, and, by waiting for a few weeks or months, buy a PlayStation 3 console and fifty games! Yes, the game-fanatic in question would have to spend another three months without Deadly Death Duel 12 or Crazy Car Capers 8, but that warm, fuzzy TV time cannot possibly be worth $4200.

Nintendo's Wii console made less of a splash. Nobody was maimed or killed, though the Toys R Us outlet in New York's Times Square committed the almost-as-agregious act of putting, "A New Style of Gaming is Unleased," instead of the slightly more logical, "A New Style of Gaming is Unleashed," onto its Jumbotron facing 42nd Street. But then, the store is called Toys R Us.

From what I have read, supply shortages will probably not impact Nintendo's Wii as much as Sony's PlayStation 3: Nintendo expects to sell 2 million Wii consoles in Q1, whereas Sony has forecasted PlayStation 3 sales in the hundreds of thousands. As such, the Wii has appeared with only slightly inflated prices online. eBay seller Good-Guyz has a Wii with game listed for $710, meaning that he stands to make a paltry $450 on his transaction - only 11% of Bobakabobit's.

The law of supply, demand and Christmas shopping habits at work.

I have come to the conclusion that the College Board - an organization which has caused me a great deal of grief - has a very warped view of what aspects of our culture potential college students should and should not be familiar with.

On the critical reading section of the SAT, the questions seem to require test takers to have familiarity with all sorts of English literature from nearly every century. One practice test I took, for instance, had a question that went something like this:

Lord Driveldrum was unable to take delivery of his oolong tea because the ---------- was sick in Lincolnshire.

The correct answer was "stevedore" - a person employed, or a contractor engaged, at a dock to load and unload cargo from ships, according to Oxford - which I managed to guess after eliminating the other four choices. But, unless the test taker happens to be familiar with all of the other options, he or she would have to be incredibly familiar with 18th century British literature to correctly answer the question with any certainty.

On the other hand, the College Board seems to think that prospective undergraduates do not need any familiarity with watershed pieces of literature. The most recent SAT, which I took Sunday, had a story that made an allusion to Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. But for one reason or another, the College Board felt it needed to add an asterisk to inform test-takers that Captain Nemo was a character in Verne's novel.

It makes absolutely no sense to hold students to such an arbitrary cultural standard. If the College Board wants to ensure that students have some sort of familiarity with our culture, then they should stop explaining such obvious allusions. If, on the other hand, the College Board wants to make the test accessible to as many people as possible, they should remove every obscure cultural reference in the test.

My opinion of the College Board diminishes by the second.