Distance Equals Rate Times Time

For my very last day of classes at BYU, I thought things were pretty uneventful. At least until the day ended and I started thinking about it. It was so uneventful, I'll tell you all about it just so you can get the feel of how things go for me.

Got up at a leisurely pace. Grace spent the night at the Robbins since Emily was at the hospital by5:30 am or something crazy like that, and so I could go into work at 8:00. I couldn't find either sent of our apartment keys, so after some thought, I would just have to lock the doorknob (which is broken) and warn Emily before she tries to get in. We have to use the deadbolt only. If the doorknob locks, the only way in is with a credit card. I'm getting good at it, Emily hasn't got the knack of it yet.

At work, I do my usual routine, read scriptures online at www.lds.org, checked the only Facebook group worth checking: "If this group reaches 4,294,967,296 it might cause an integer overflow" where a whole mess of internet geeks (mainly /b/tards) post funny pictures and invent all sorts of internet inside jokes. It's not for the faint of heart, and sometimes gets inappropriate, but there are moderators who try to keep it okay. At some point, coworkers Scott and Christian come in and someone starts singing a song from Cake's Fashion Nugget, and for the next 10 minutes we all join in performing an a cappella montage of the album-complete with guitar, bass, and trumpet parts. Since Scott and the other Christian have joined our office, we've broken out into random song no less than a dozen or so times. It's really strange to have so much in common with others who I seem to have so little in common with. I'll miss this job, a lot.

As recommended, I looked up the end song to the game "Portal" and found a blog with the video from the game. For some reason, this Youtube video wasn't blocked even though I was on campus. No other videos worked and most attempts resulted in the page from BYU's filter service telling us it is blocked like normal. But for some odd reason, the video worked for me for about 5 minutes.

If you want a mind blowing experience, watch the trailer for the game on the website linked above. Whew. Reality just went out the window. The picture below was posted on the Integer Overflow group.
My boss, Shane Warby (of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir fame) has the game and put it on the computer next today to me to see how it'd run in Windows Vista. So I got to play it for a bit, laughing ridiculously at the incredulity and awesomeness of the game. I'm always a fan of games that stretch your thinking into creative and new ways. Other simple online games I'm a fan of: Bloxorz, Silversphere, Text Twist, and the Teagames.com Motocross Series. Grace loves watching me play 'Bloons and "mo'cycle" (Motocross).

As I left work, I asked Shane what we were going to do with the iBook G4, that Christian and I took apart a few days ago. It was out of warranty and had serious hardware issues. We had to take it apart to get the hard drive out for the part-time faculty who'd been using it. Those machines are Beasts! We lost about half of the bajillion screws and it took us 2 1/2 hours to get machine apart enough to get the hard drive out. Shane decided we'd just declare it junk and cannibalize it for parts. I asked if I could snag the RAM and see if it'd work in my own laptop. Yoink! My laptop now has 512 MB instead of just its original 256!

My last two classes of BYU (ever!!) went without incident. I'll miss both of them. Microbiology and Personal Finance. The PF teacher is an independent financial planner who teaches part time (In my experience, the part-time faculty I've had, are among the best teachers. They do it cuz they like teaching, not for the money--BYU pays them almost nothing from what I understand). It's been an amazing class.

During Micro, I finally decided to read what the textbook has to say about the fungal genus, Malassezia, which causes a few skin disorders including chronic dandruff/seborrheic dermatitis. It didn't tell me much that I hadn't already found out through pubmed.com, wikipedia, and various other sites. It lives off of the oil produced by your skin, especially in the scalp. Hard to kill, but there are ways of prohibiting it's growth. Tea Tree Oil Shampoo isn't working for me, and neither has Head N Shoulders, Selsun Blue, or Extra Strength T-Gel; all with their unique active ingredients for controlling the problem (terpenin-4-ol, zinc pyrithrione, selenium sulfide, and coal tar, respectively). I got some greasy hair (must be all that manly testosterone).

After class, I met Em and Grace at the Wilkinson center where a bunch of inflatable jolly-jump things were set up for BYU students to celebrate classes ending. After a few minutes of jumping on an inflated Twister board, Grace pukes up strawberry smoothie all over. Ha Ha. Ohhh boy.

Then, Emily and I watched a few episodes of House before going to bed, and like most Tuesdays and Thursdays when I have late classes, I had trouble sleeping. So I get up and write you all a mini epic about one simple day.

Oh yeah, it was sunny and pleasant this morning while I rode my bike, snowed this afternoon, and foggy/hazy this evening. I wore shorts today. Good thing I decided against the sandals.

Is She Weird

April Fools has taken on renewed strength on the internet. Google has consistently had some sort of prank (last year they advertised Google Paper where they would print all your emails and mail them to you for free). This year they advertised Custom Time where you could decide on the time stamp of your email. In Australia they boasted GDay with MATE where you could search for internet content that doesn't exist yet. Youtube's featured videos all sent users to Rick Astley's video, thus RickRolling millions of people. (Rickrolling is tricking someone into watching a super cheesy Rick Astley 80's music video for "Never gonna give you up." Big-time internet joke). Firefox put out a plugin that works only for the day that does all sorts of random things to the web pages you're viewing. On Digg it added "whatever" to the end of every entry. It abbreviated all sorts of random things. Trying to go directly to a web site sent you on to random other web sites.

Since all but one of us were in our office yesterday morning, we pranked a coworker. We found a desktop background that looks like a cracked computer screen, set it as the only picture for the screen saver and unplugged the mouse and keyboard. When he finally came in at 2:00 it was just myself and the other Christian in the office. When he asked what happened I told him I was tossing a mouse and missed. He was fairly upset although he hid it pretty well. He shut the computer off out of frustration. I tried to get him to turn it back on (thus revealing the joke) saying "We liked the way it looked so we left it on all day." He spits back, "Well why didn't you do it to your computer!" Shane, Christian, and I just about died laughing (quietly behind is back). Eventually Christian turns it back on and reveals the joke. We eventually all got a good chuckle at his expense.

Also, three popular web comics traded sites. XKCD, Questionable Material, and Dinosaur Comics. If you typed one website, you got another comic. If you haven't heard of any of them, don't worry, it just means you don't spend enough time on the internet. They're pretty geeky.

Last night I also saw on Google's home page a link for Virgin Galactic's and Google's combined mission to mars. Web users can fill out an application for being a member of the first human mission to mars. They went through a lot of work for the site, and it's quite impressive with lots of humor.

So, in good taste, here's a link to probably the most popular video on the internet recently. Yesterday, they had replaced the original with an excellently dubbed muppet video of Beaker "singing" the song from the Muppet Show.

Here's an XKCD from a long while back: