News You Can Bruise for 1998 March

Did I mention how doomed I am? I have a physics midterm on Friday and an engineering presentation two weeks from tomorrow. Doomed, doomed, doomed.

Slightly less doomed than I was on Sunday, but still pretty doomed. In other news, it's National Engineers Week. Kiss an engineer today (preferably me, if you're female)!

    A mini-tract fell into my hot little pagan hands today. My analysis of it is here. I am not one who currently has the time to discuss the issues raised by the tract in any detail. I just wanted to write down my ideas while they were fresh in my mind. After finals if you want to talk, we can talk. If you just want to email me telling me I'm going to hell, go ahead, since there's really no way to respond to that except "We'll find out, won't we?", which is easy enough to type.

    Stream-of-consciousness domain name that actually works of the update: www.scrum.com. This parrot is no more.

In my semi-infinite (what is Prof. Durian smoking?) wisdom I have made yet another update to the browser SSI. You can now surf this page with Arena, Opera, or NCSA Mosaic, and be greeted in style. The code is starting to look ugly. I know what I have to do to make it more elegant but it's going to have to wait until spring break. Feel free to hack on it yourself, if you feel so inclined [45 degrees] [Jimmy Smitts.]. Here's the source.

Later: I fulfilled my role as hunter/gatherer today by going to a Taos Mountain information meeting, where they gave us pizza and t-shirts and talked about how great it was to work at Taos Mountain. I have two pieces of pepperoni and a Sprite in the fridge (Sprite sez: "Let me out! Ye dare remove me from the land of magical enchantment? The Fairie King will avenge me sure!" Yeah, yeah, show me the way to your pot of gold and we'll talk.). The t-shirt is pretty nifty and joins the ever-increasing stack of techie t-shirts I have. Let's see, I've got a Linux shirt, a Toshiba shirt, a Microsoft Developer Tools shirt, the Taos Mtn. shirt, a freaky Workgroup Switching shirt, and a Symantec Bug Bash shirt. I hope to go to Comdex this year (Comdex Comdex. Comdex '98. Comdex Comdex.) and quadruple that at least. But Comdex shirts will always be inferior in my mind to the shirts I had to earn by hard sitting-in-recruitment-meetings and bug-bashing.

    Coming home, I found a very nice letter in my mailbox from John Farragher, professional OS/2 user. John followed his nose to my page, Toucan Sam style [by Jove, Toucan Sam!], from the Dweebspeak Primer. He made me laugh, he made me cry, he made me update the browser greeting program yet again, here's the letter.

    Oops, I almost let the whole day go by without making the awful once-a-year pun! March Forth!

Kris and I are planning a comic of epic proportions. In doing research for this comic I came across Pat Buchanan's web site, but no, that's not what I wanted to show you. At the web site, they have an American Heritage library, and I was going through it and I thought they had the Constitution in there twice. But they don't. They have the U.S. constitution, but before that they have the Confederate Constitution, which is interesting to read as I had never read it before.

Article IV, Section 2.3: No slave or other person held to service or labor in any State or Territory of the Confederate States, under the laws thereof, escaping or lawfully carried into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor; but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such slave belongs, or to whom such service or labor may be due.

    There's just nothing else to say.

Later: What the...? www.buchanan.org is running Apache! You'd think that Pat would take be the first to take a stand against a communistically-developed software package named after a tribe of savages, but I guess he's just a hypocrite like all the other politicians.

    Oh, I see what it is. buchanan.org is being hosted by advicom.net, which uses Apache. Still, you'd think they would care enough to take their business to a web hosting company that uses all-American Microsoft products.

    Prokofiev [Ha ha! Then Prokofiev showed up!] and Stalin [Ha ha! Then Stalin--no, that doesn't work.] both died on this date in 1934, I think. Today was also the day Winston Churchill coined the phrase "Iron Curtain".

Later Still: My mother writes in with an elegant, nigh-Gordian solution to a question that has been puzzling me: who is less trustworthy, Bill Gates or Orrin Hatch?

    Tomorrow I'm going to see The Big Lebowsky! Everyone but me went to the sneak preview a month ago. Adam says it's the greatest movie ever made, Kris wishes it would go away. These two facts, and the existance of the Cohen Brothers Seal Of Approval (tm), mean I'm going to like it. Already Adam and I are quoting it left and right.

    I put up the Dirty Harry sketches Kris and I wrote today. They're probably going to go on the new album.

The Big Lebowski ROCKS! It is better than Fargo! It is one of the funniest movies I have ever seen! The part at the end with the nihilists setting fire to Dude's car had me laughing so hard I was pounding the unforgiving plastic seats of the theatre (I am wont to pound on things when I'm laughing really, really hard, as Angie Hernandez can attest). Not to mention the total disrespect for the persons and property of every character in the film on the part of every character in the film. Oh, man. See it. NOW! Although if you're under 18, you'd have to go with your parents, and they might not appreciate it.

    In the tradition of, well, the tradition of something, I'll cast myself and my friends in roles from The Big Lebowski:

• Jeff Lebowski: Adam. Adam is Mr. Slacker. Although you'd have to take Adam and combine him with me to get something that looked and sounded like Jeff Bridges in the movie. Adam quote: "They finally did it. They killed my fucking car."

• Walter Sobcek: Me. Anyone who says "You're about to enter a world of pain. A world of pain." is me. Also me-ish is ""You want a toe? I can get you a toe, believe me. There are ways, Dude. You don't wanna know about it, believe me. I'll get you a toe by three this afternoon--with nail polish.""

• Donny: Kris, because he's so annoying. No, just kidding. Actually, I think we all have a little bit of this character inside of us, someone who loves bowling, who as a surfer explores the beaches of southern California from Redondo to Calabassos, even up to Pismo, who loves bowling, who likes to drink orange Slice, who loves bowling.

• Jesus Quintana: LJ, because his last name is Quintana. And he likes to lick bowling balls.

    If I had to complain about The Big Lebowski, I would say that the computer-generated effects were pretty lame, and there were no attractive women in the movie. Adam likes Maude Lebowski, but I say yecch. And Bambi is just a hussy.

    Oh yeah, I failed my physics midterm today.

I spent the weekend in Windows 95 trying to get some Engineering 95 (coincidence?) work done and failing miserably (again, coincidence?). At one point I made some dinky changes to this page, after which I wondered why I kept getting the same quote over and over again. You may have wondered this too, if you hit the page Saturday or Sunday. I wondered as well, until I hit the page under lynx today and it said I was using Mozilla/95. So, that explains it. When I edited the page in the dang Mozilla editor, it took the output of the SSIs and treated it as gospel text, which was then not changed by the SSIs because the SSIs were never called. Never fear, I'm back in Linux now and your SSI output will be correct until... next time.

    To help motivate myself, I am constructing a list of things I have to do, and the dates I have to do them by. Here it is:

Task	Date
Study for Math 61 midterm	Wednesday
Study for Math 33 midterm	Next Monday?
Do slides for Engineering 95 presentation	Thursday
Write words for Engineering 95 presentation	Next Tuesday
Turn Engineering 95 presentation into report	03/23
Study for Physics final
03/23
Study for Math 61 final	03/24
Study for Math 33 final
03/25?
Start work
Thursday 03/26

    All of a sudden, I don't feel so good.

No time to talk now. I just put up that schtick up there in honor of the fact that Kris and I keep finding fragments of busted Macintosh CDs while leaving the engineering building. I think someone is throwing them out of a high floor or something. Today I also found on the ground a guide to those hazardous waste stickers. I think a funny practical joke would be to stick one of those stickers on someone's back after labeling it 4-4-4-radioactive.

    Here's my revised tasklist:

Task	Date
Math 33 midterm	Monday
Engineering 95 presentation	Tuesday
Engineering 95 report	2 Mondays
Study for Physics final
2 Mondays
Study for Math 61 final	2 Tuesdays
Study for Math 33 final
2 Wednesdays
Start work
2 Thursdays

Hey, this evening I'm going to go see people from Red Hat talk, as seen on slashdot. Then we get (presumably free) dinner! Woo-hoo! I gotta wash my clothes so that my Linux T-shirt will be clean to wear.

    A question for you: What is the opposite of "incentive"?

    Yesterday Adam Kaplan wrote an extremely mighty song about me. Here it is: Crummy. He wrote it as part of a deal that he would write a song about me and I would write one about him. I'm gradually chipping away at my end of the bargain. My song is called New Time and is an Adam-saves-the-world type deal.

    Another thing that happened yesterday is that I got new shoes from Robinsons-May, a store I would not normally be caught dead in (actually, I wouldn't be caught dead in any clothing store, unless you count the Salivation Army and Goodwill as clothing stores); but I had a gift certificate, and my old shoes, hand-me-downs from my huge cousin Brian, had been mine for almost two years (and who knows how long he'd had them) and had begun to fall apart (Aah! My shoes are falling apart!), and it's difficult to get shoes that fit me at a thrift store so I figured I'd buy new ones. My goodness, what a long, complicated sentence. That's what I say, for some reason, "My goodness!" and "Oh, dear!" like June Cleaver. I don't normally type them, but I say them a lot in meatspace. Which reminds me, I'm working on a Leonardonics page which will replace the "What the he{ll,ck,pcat}" page down there and which will explain many of the words and phrases I use all the time. It's the least I can do.

    Anyway, the new shoes. They're modeled after hiking boots, but they're not boots, they're shoes. They look watertight. They're kind of difficult to get on but that will change as I break them in. They're quite sturdy. The brand name is "Claybrooke Outdoors" if that means anything to you. I am pleased with my purchase.

    Andy and I are probably going to go see Penn and Teller during spring break. They're appearing at the Wilshire Theatre, which is a few miles from here and next door to the Flynt Building, owned by that kindly old pornographer, Larry Flynt.

    What's this?, you say. No, sorry. What's this, you say? What's this? you say? "What's this?", you say. That'll work. "What's this?", you say. "Leonard actually going to see a live performance?" But the cosmic balance will never be in jeopardy (do do do do do do do), as Adam is going to take me to Pasadena to perform at some open mike nights. Woo-hoo!

    Also, if you don't know this, you should. The five surviving Pythons are going on an anniversiary tour next year, when any partying we do will be, by definition, partying like it's 1999. Haul down the well wall, Hazel, I am there. They're going to be performing new schticks as well as old favorites, and probably doing more sick stuff with Graham's ashes (or ashes claimed to be his, it doesn't really matter) in the style of both previous Python engagements, and, yes, The Big Lebowski. Andy has witnessed the power of The Big Lebowski, have you? Accept the Dude into your life and know that he takes it easy for all us sinners.

The Red Hat thing was great. I got an oversized mug and a mouse pad for knowing the name of Linus' daughter. Useless trivia knowledge pays off again! The mug is benchmarked at half a liter of liquid and can keep its cargo warm for about 15 minutes.

    Does anyone know how the V-chip works? Because it seems to me that they're going to have to keep fine-tuning the ratings system, and are they just going to make people keep buying new TVs? Or will the chips be reprogrammable on the fly? In which case the government can control what we watch. In any event, the government controls us all by secretly funding the networks to put crap programming on. My other television conspiracy theory is that the dubba-dubba-WB is run by white supremacists who are trying to keep urban blacks from rising up in revolt by pacifying them with unfunny ethnic comedy. You laugh at me now, but when they start producing The Animated Adventures of Steppen Fetchit, I will be vindicated.

    This is what government is good for. Funding cool and useful stuff that private industry [working for you!] wouldn't touch. $50 million is about 6 cents per American. I'd put in a dollar for a geographical satellite.

    As long as I'm going through the rather sparse [graph] news at newshub, take a look at this. I say get used to moral decay. Moral decay is here to stay. I should do a moral decay page. It's a pretty interesting article, though. The Malaysian government realizes that they can't censor the net, so they're resorting to other tactics.

I'm putting this here for lack of anywhere better to put it. Read it and weep.

China: pornography, dissident political information
France: Information from newsgroups (may be out-of-date)
Singapore: sex, religion, politics, homosexuality, gum-chewing, and HTTP headers

It's very difficult to find this information. You'd think there's be a worldwide censorship watch somewhere, but if there is I can't find it. Help me out on this list.

    You know what I want? I'll tell you what I want. I want to be able to control how HTML tags are processed by my browser. I want to be able to define new tags and control what and how they display by means of a script (eg. I could make the <censor> </censor> tags I did as a joke a while back actually work), which script could be downloaded by others and integrated into their own browsers so that they could see my tags, and see standard tags the same way I see them, if they so desired. I want Netscape to work like emacs, basically. This would solve the problem of nonstandard HTML tags; it would take maybe five seconds to download a script and add it to the browser's library; it could even be automated. Is this what XML does? If so, <annoying commercial lady>I want it!</annoying commercial lady> Hm, I don't know what that tag would do, though.

The Leonardonics page is up. Wallow in the Leonardonics. I also updated the Open Standards Band page, and added a new OSB page about Sally, the Ow, My Prostate!: 24,996 Years of Porcelain Puppy Oppression mascot. Wallow in those pages, too.

Happy Bach's birthday (wasn't this Schroeder's schtick)?. Had Bach lived to this day, he would be 313 years old, which is very, very old. I remember playing at a Bach festival at the tricentennial, in 1985 (I mainly remember it because I have a certificate from it). I was five years old. I'm rambling. Anyway, Bach is good booze. It looks like today is going to be a day of Bach on KUSC. Woo-hoo!

    It's also the first day of spring. Spring can bite me.

    Chih-Chien "The Cable Guy" Chang sent me his part of our Engineering 95 paper. It is a 3-megabyte Word file. I'm going to have to go into Win95 to read it, but it only took a couple minutes to download in Linux. I don't think I've ever gotten 33.3K out of this modem before.

    OK, I've got to cram for Physics, I've got to assemble the Eng95 report from the pieces I am sent by my teammates, and then I'm okay. The Math 33 final needs some studying for, but that's not until Wednesday and the Math 61 final on Tuesday should be a piece of cake (not literally). This weekend will be the weekend from hell, but I think I can make it. Wish me luck.

    The Old News page is getting big. I'd better split it into its constitutent parts. Later...

Hm, Sampo doesn't seem to be responding. I'll have to call Andy and ask what's up. It wasn't working yesterday either. So you won't read this for a while. No great loss.

I've got this old 60s song stuck in my head, the one that goes "How can I be sure... in a world that's constantly changing...", but the part that is stuck in my head is "It's a pity I can't find someone who's as pretty and lovely as you." What a shallow bastard the character in that song is.

    This is not a good sign, as I always get songs stuck in my head while I'm taking midterms and finals. And they're not relaxing songs, either. Once I had the part of the Animaniacs theme song that goes "We are the Warner Brothers and the Warner Sister Dot...now you know the plot" repeating over and over again. AAAAARGH!

     Speaking of finals, here is my revised schedule:

Task	Date
Physics final	20 hours
Engineering 95 report	22 hours
Math 61 final	37 hours
Math 33 final	64 hours

    So the time to panic is now, pretty much. However, in 23 hours I will be mostly free, and in 64 hours I will be completely free, for better or for worse.

    OK, I gotta go study magnetism now. I hope to be able to get at least 4 hours of sleep tonight.

    I don't know why the server was down. I'll find out eventually.

The horror that is the physics final is over. I think I may have held my own with the other people. It helped a lot that I was able to keep any song from being stuck in my head. Behold the ever-shrinking task list (go to the old news page to see it in all its hugeness):

Task	Date
Math 61 final	3 hours
Math 33 final	27 hours

    I updated the bio and the Leonardonics, and put up a contact information page which I will link to on various pages.

    Adam and I were discussing my song Malibu, and I was trying to explain to him why I don't think it's a sad song. He thinks it's the saddest song in the world. And I finally figured it out and I said "I don't think it's a sad song because I don't like the characters in the song. I want to hurt them." and Adam said "You create your characters to live in hell, Leonard." I don't. The characters in Malibu are not living in hell. They are living in Malibu. I'm not even hurting them all that much. They're just stuck in a lousy relationship with each other, and they seem used to it.

    There, I've justified it.

    You know, that's the sort of thing I used to imagine God doing all the time.

Later: Only one more thing on my list. The M61 final was easy, even though I couldn't do two of the problems at all. The M33 final needs some studying for, but I have until tomorrow to do it. I'm going to get some sleep now.

DONE! I'M DONE! Woo-hoo! And I passed physics! With a C+ even! (Yes, not the mere C I was expecting). So I should swing a high B average this quarter. And next quarter, unlike this quarter, I actually get to take at least 1 CS class! Maybe two! Then after next quarter I'm a junior and I can take upper-division CS classes to my heart's content! Will the excitement never stop?

    My new shoes are in fact watertight, which means that I can walk in puddles without being soaked, but it also means that when I am attacked by the Mother of All Puddles the way I was today, and water goes in through the top of the shoes, it never comes out. Argh. My feet are wet. Argh. Argh. Ah, Ricky.

    Admittedly, that's a pretty petty thing to be complaining about, especially being done with finals as I am. But it's the principle of the thing.

    There is an annoying dripping sound emenating from outside my bedroom. Oh well. I don't even care [we could have all three].

    What to do over break... well, work, mostly. I need to organize my pages, and put some new stuff on Crummy, and clean out all the crap in my room left over from last quarter.

OK, I'm continuing my newfound fetish for list-making by making a list of pages I need to do. I had it down here, but that didn't make much sense, as it would soon be lost to history, so it's up there.

    This page is like my journal. I was never able to keep a journal before, but this is easy. Cool. This is a good thing. Of course, as Kris points out, there's stuff I could put in a paper journal that I wouldn't want to put up on the Web. But if I kept a paper journal and used it to record all my sordid deeds, revisionist historians would get ahold of it after my death and make me out to me even more of a bastard than I am. Best to cover the whole thing up. [tomato, tomato]

    Do you think I should change the name of Leonard's Yummy Homepage? It doesn't sound as good to me as it did when I thought it up. In fact, I never really thought it up, I just started the first version of it with "This is my yummy homepage" or something like that and it didn't become a name until later. Let me know what you think of the name.

    I have a message from Jake which I guess can go up as a mail thing. Do you know of any things that let you convert mail to Web pages? Ideally I'd like to have a separate directory where I could just stack the mail I recieve on a particular day and then have a CGI that puts the glitz on them for the viewer at home. I know I saw something recently that converts mail to HTML, but I can't remember where I saw it. Argh. I'll check freshmeat.

    Do you think I'm talking to the elves in my head in the last two paragraphs? Well, I am, but I'm also talking to you the person reading my home page. Let me know what your opinion is. Or I'll sic the elves on you.

    Even when at work in the horror of Windows 95, I can take sanctuary in the GNUness of Emacs and edit my homepage. I have this nifty ergonomic keyboard which came with one of the new systems we bought. It hasn't been taken away from me yet, so I'm using it.

    Yummy links: http://www.kirch.net/unix-nt.html, http://egg.microsoft.com/poweredby.gif

Later: I've done some work on the Crummy Cookie Bombardment CGI of Interminate Confusion, as it is now called. Look for it tonight or tomorrow. It will combine every possible silly and subversive use of cookies into a single CGI.

    Microsoft's trade magazine ads lately have been interesting. Though they continue to lay the FUD on thick with "All who will not join us will die" ads, they also are running ads emphasising interoperability, apparantly since it has occured to them that there still exist MIS managers for whom the political cost of implementing a crappy system is greater than the political cost of a non-Microsoft solution. There's a Microsoft ad in the latest Infoworld which talks about their committment to Unix interoperability. And it's a cool ad, I'm not dissing the ad at all. Microsoft does some great ads. But I don't really understand it. It's very Waiting For Godot-ish, it's a B&W photo of three IBM-type old white guys in suits, and two of them are in a rowboat holding oars and the third one is outside the boat turning on a water faucet. And the copy of the ad implies that Microsoft and its new bedfellow HP are committed to working with Unix, at least until such time as it [Unix] goes away. But I don't understand the dynamics of the ad. Who represents the guys in the boat, and who represents the guy with the tap? I don't know. And don't even get me started on the ads with the creepy MSCE.

    Oh, I see. There's another ad in another Infoworld in which the two guys in the boat are seen holding up a giant fish. So it would appear that the guys in the boat represent Microsoft and HP, and the fish represents Unix. Still pretty freaky.

OK, as you may have noticed the page looks a lot different. That's because it's now the special spring cleaning edition of Leonard's Yummy Homepage! I'm cleaning out all the crap that's in the root directory, I'm adding a bunch of new directories, I'm making stuff look nicer, I'm updating pages that haven't been updated, and generally doing stuff. Enjoy the new format, and mail me with any broken links. There's a directory called misc/ where stuff I can't categorize is going, look in there if you can't find something.

    I've done all the stuff that doesn't require Perl hacking, so I guess I'll get started on that. I've made dinky changes to pages across the board, and added new indexes, so have fun with that if you want to. The only thing I remember is adding "professional" to the Leonardonics page.

Later: OK, the dynamic silly nickname page is up. I wrote code so that it would never duplicate names on a single page, but it didn't work so I gave up. I'd rather work on the cookie bombardment thing. I'll check back later.

Cool, I just came back from my appearance at a coffee shop in the Valley, as those in the know call it, aparantly. It was The Coffee Junction or something. It was open mike time and I played dead last, but everyone loved me. I played I Screw Up Everything I Touch and Disaster Movie and everyone laughed in the right spots. Kris made a tape of Adam's performance and mine, which tape may soon be avaliable as a bootleg through Horses of the World, audio clips, etc. The tape also features Kris and me doing Richard Attenborough impressions talking about Adam. Adam played a song of his called Born Wrong and an Electric Light Orchestra cover. What the...?

    I'm just going to keep gloating here. The lady who owns the coffeehouse thought I was incredible. Adam says I may get invited back to play a whole set (it happened to him the first time he played there). There were old people there who dug my songs as well, proving the width of my demographic. Ah, it feels good to wallow in my success.

    I got a weird spam mail recently. Fairly well targeted to me. Hm, what's this in my mailbox? More spam! Wow, really well targeted. It's forged to look like it came from Kris! Well, into the trash with it!

    The dynamic silly nicknames thing is screwy. I don't know why, but it generates nicknames once per browser. If you reload you don't get different nicknames. Unless you're using lynx. So use lynx if you want that kind of action, that's all I can say. The problem's not on my end. Shoot yourself in the foot, too.

Tomorrow Netscape source code will fly free on the wings of the net. Just thought I'd mention it.

    Here's a cool link: www.idiom.com/free-compilers. I think what I'm going to do on LYH, link-wise, is to have a several pages of links in different categories, with descriptions, and then periodically upload my Netscape bookmark file. By the way, check out Linbot for all your bad-link-finding needs, now in GNUvision.

    I have on my desk a CDROM copy of FreeBSD, which I will soon be installing on one of the old systems we plan to replace today. It is in fact the 2.2.2 version of FreeBSD, which is somewhat old (June 1997), but that's fine. I'll just have to download a new Apache. I think there should be a cage match between the FreeBSD daemon and the Linux penguin to finally determine which one is more sappily cute.

    Oh yeah, yesterday at the open mike a little girl sang Hanson's Mmmmbop. It actually doesn't sound so bad when a real XX person sings it. It's like those whalesong tapes.

Later: Of all the things I hate about Visual Basic, this is the thing I hate the most: To display a form on the screen you say Formname.Show. To get the form out of memory you say Unload Formname. Show is a method of the form, but Unload is a statement. AAAARGH!

    And the thing is, this makes sense according to the internal logic of Visual Basic. There is a Hide method which stops displaying it but doesn't remove it from memory, and there is a Load statement that loads the form into memory but doesn't show it. But if you're doing actual programming, nine times out of ten you want programs on the screen and in memory, or off the screen and out of memory, and so you only want to use Show and Unload, and it looks inconsistent.

    In case you're wondering, Load and Unload can't be made methods of the form because they're also used to create and destroy new controls on the screen at runtime. Like Internet Explorer and Windows, these two features have been welded together into the same entity.

    Man, my elbows hurt. Why are my bones so brittle? I always drink plenty of... "malk"?

    My grades are trickling in: Physics: C+, Math 33A: C. Math 61: B+. It's just not fair. I am so much more competent in the Math 33A arena than in the physics arena. No word on my Engineering grade yet. I hope I get an A. A, dammit! A!

Well, it's a big day. Big, big, very large day. First off, Netscape source. Woo. I think so, anyway. I can't find any information about it. Oh, good, this News.com article tells me I'm not going crazy. I won't be able to immediately do anything with the source, unfortunately, as I lack the neccessary hardware. Wait a minute. "unxbuild.htm"? What the heck kind of filename is that? It's almost like [shudder] a Windows filename!

    Also, today in California marks the beginning of electricity deregulation, the subject of my Engineering 95 report, which class I still have no grade in. What does this mean? Well, various sundry things. I don't want to go into it. I'm sick of discussing it.

    Thirdly, today is Haydn's birthday. I pay tribute to him by spelling his name right.

    Today's link: Li-Cheng "Andy" Tai's "Software Wars" drawing. Also check out Today's Space Weather, which I hit every day even though I don't really have any way to apply the information. Cool pictures of the sun, though.

Later: I just got an official email from the Chancellor (oooh) regarding the new crop of freshmen coming in next year. A lot of it is dedicated to discussing the effects of Proposition 209 on admissions. The following excerpt caught my eye:

Data also show a dramatic increase in the number of applicants who chose not to state their race or ethnicity. The number in this category nearly tripled, from 1326 last year to 4,264 for fall 1998. This year, UCLA edmitted 1,463 from this category, compared with 569 in fall 1997.

"The increase of applicants in this group makes it difficult to calculate precisely the ethnic breakdown of admitted students," Siporin said. "However, in the past, most of those who have chosen not to declare their race have been either Caucasian or Asian American."

Hard Questions People Ask Admissions Officers:

• How do you know?
• Doesn't making a guess devalue the purpose of the "undisclosed" option?
• If you found that someone had lied about their race, would you kick them out of school? Would you have done this before Proposition 209?
• Why don't Caucasians get "American" after their name? More importantly, why do African-Americans get a hyphen but Asian Americans get a space? Is this some cockamamie ANSI standard you are following?