Joshua Rogers

Every year Snead State Community College sets aside one day as S-Day.  They provide food, games and contests for anyone that goes to the college.  When I was there, one of the smaller contests that they had was a paper airplane contest.  The rules were rather simple.  Anyone who wanted to try would be given a piece of paper that they were allowed to fold anyway they wanted.  Whoever managed to throw their's furthest would win a CD.  Most of the planes few a decent distance.  I crumpled my paper into a tight ball and chunked it.  I won the CD hands down.

Please assume the party escort submission position.

On Tuesday I'm going to turn 25.  I hadn't really thought that much about it.  I'd done almost no planning for it whatsoever.  On the other hand, it seems that Jenna has been thinking about my birthday a good bit.  To be more precise, she's been planning for almost two full months.  She came over yesterday so that we could go out to eat.  Just before we left, she brought in the first of two presents from her car.  Unwrapping it revealed a copy of "Lego Batman" and a note that read "I promise to play this game with you for at least ten minutes."  She knew that would be my first question.  :P

As if that weren't enough, it seems that Jenna had come up with one more present: a weighted companion cube.  Over the last two months, she hand sewed and stuffed a giant weighted companion cube (see picture.)

The cube is huge and looks even more awesome in person.  Also, the weighted companion cube will never threaten to stab you and, in fact, cannot speak.  I love it!  Jenna constantly amazes me.  I don't know how she does it.

People are usually surprised when I tell them I don't use Facebook.  The usual response that I get is "Why not?"  There's always the subtle implication "You're a 'computer guy'.  Aren't you REQUIRED to be on Facebook?"  I can't help but feel a mixture of frustration and amusement at that.  It's not that I never got around to trying Facebook.  I actually did use it for several years.  At first it was "a magical way of connecting with friends present and past."  Things changed though.  The shiny wore off.  I just quit enjoying Facebook.  That seems to perplex most people.  If they weren't already confused, discovering that I still actively use Twitter finishes the job off usually.  Is there really a difference?  Why I am being so different?  Why not just use Facebook like everyone else?  WHY INSIST ON BEING DIFFICULT!?  Signal-to-noise ratio.

According to Wikipedia, a signal-to-noise ratio is "a measure used in science and engineering to quantify how much a signal has been corrupted by noise."  In this case, the reason that I left Facebook can be fully attributed to a bad signal-to-noise ratio.  The more that I used Facebook, the more it became apparent that the way it was designed and typical used was conducive for noise.  This could be seen throughout the system.

For reasons that I've not quite figured out, for the last several weeks, I've felt all but compelled to map article links in wikipedia.  I think it would be interesting to (attempt) to see how all of the pieces fit together.  I mean, they post XML copies of all of the articles at least once a month.  All I need to do is download a 5.7Gb compressed en.wikipedia.org mirror, decompress the file, parse it and locate some kind of graphing software that won't implode the universe when it sees the size of the data being passed to it...

Something tells me this is going to take a LONG time... until the last step which I fully expect to be infeasible.  Either way, I think this project can safely wait until summer.

For my proposal for the core developer summit I suggest providing a $restriction variable through settings.php that can be used to deactivate certain functionality without requiring that a site be preconfigured or that its code be patched or edited.