This Ought To Make You Feel Safe...

So one week of driver's ed is over, 5 days of class from noon to 2 (although with a 15 minute brake in the middle so that the students can run to one of the nearby fast food resturaunts and buy a drink, but more often they just stand around outside complaining about how they really hate the old desks they have to sit in during class).

Anyway, today we studied intersections, and what to do at them. To help us we got to watch two movies. Old movies by the look of them.

The first movie was about the 5 rules of determining who has the right of way at an intersection, and demonstrated the facts with computer generated models. Old computer generated models. It looked very much like a colored pong. So it starts with blue-rectangle-car approaching the intersection and yellow-rectangle-car approaches from the left. Then the models jerk forward and disapear, only to reapear a second later, a few inches in front, so it looks very much like they should have crashed, if the blue-rectangle-car had not made it safely through the intersection.

The second movie (titled something like: Railroad Crossings: Staying Alert and Alive [already I'm feeling the love]) seemed to be made from model trains filmed with model cars. Crashing into model cars. Alot. Everyone in the class cheered whenever there was a crash.

That should make you feel very safe about the future of drivers in America.

Another short post today, as the first day of driver's ed. seems to take a toll on one's sanity (On a side note, do any of you drivers out there remember to honk your horn shortly before passing a car so that the other car will not be startled? I've never seen this done, but so sayeth the Day 1 video).

For today, I would just like to comment upon a few quotes:

"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." Abraham Lincoln
-A very simple way of expressing my outlook on communication. Once I have thought about something and made sure it is exactly what needs to be said, only then does it need to be said.

"Speak only when the words outshine the silence." Somebody else who I cannot remember, or perhaps anonymous
-See above.

"I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: 'The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair.' In these words he epitomized the history of the human race." Bertrand Russel
-And to whom does the youngest child ill-treat?

"Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality." Beatrix Potter
-Yes, thanks alot Public School System.

"Ye can lead a man up to the university, but you can't make him think." Finley Peter Dunne
-The same holds true for the aforementioned Public School System.

(Most quotes found on http://www.wisdomquotes.com/cat_education.html )

Have Recently Discovered Something...

There may be an actual blog posted later, but I just discovered that if your computer is one that fills in the rest of a website address for you based upon your recent/favorite webpages, you can type in "Stud" and odds are that this one will pop up.

Coincidence? I think not.

Internet: the Good, the Funny, and the Ugly

/enter rant

Over the years, much of my time has been spent surfing the web. Over these years, I have begun to wonder if perhaps the once noble internet (one of many tools seperating mankind from monkeys) has in fact not evolved into just one more tool of the ultimate enemy of all that is good, the idiot.

Before going further, I think it may be important to examine the three forms of internet use. To begin with, there's:

The Good

It's often astounding how many resources and uses you can find on the internet these days, if you dig through all the trash that is. From the people created Wikipedia.com (on which you can find nearly anything you could hope to find in great detail thanks to being made from enthusiastic people across the world) to a connection of shopping choices (Ebay or Amazon key among them) that propel buisness and accumulation of stuff into the 21st century (that is what century we're in, right?), it really does show a great shining core of use. On the other hand, it can take a plunge.

Moving on, we have the next section, the "I can live without it, but it sure is great" section:

The Funny (Watch out, it bytes) (This section also has almost no point and is handled by machinery that may handles peanuts. Keep away if allergic.)

On one of my intellectual thought tours (it's something I do, being one of the intellectual elite, as far as I know/care) I once wondered how long it took before the internet was gifted with the likes of this:

http://hampsterdance.com/classorig.html

Those hamsters sure do add to the atmosphere of the internet, right? Also, they're nearly a staple of the internet (and speaking of staple, check out: http://www.virtualstapler.com/ ) but give only a few sections diversion. And now, with almost no plot resolution, we move on to: (Unless you are one with a heart condition or with small children in which case I ask that you remain here and watch the hamsters/play with the stapler again)

The Bad (Watch out, not only does it byte, but can also turn you into a vampire. It's true.)

It's hard to imagine a world where everyone was as intelligent as I. In this world, no one would get on an internet forum and argue for days on end about something that in the long run doesn't matter. For example:

In the last two days it was announced that the expansion for Blizzard Entertainment's MMORPG "World of Warcraft" would break a pre-created rule and allow the two factions to have characters that until this point had only been available to one faction or the other, because it had become apparent that the Alliance (Humans, Dwarves, Elves, and Gnomes) had an advantage based on fighting creatures in the environment in the form of their paladins whereas the Horde (Orcs, Trolls, Tauren, and Undead) had an advatage while fighting other players because of their Shamans, and about four days ago this was all you could read about on the forums. However, when two days ago Blizzard announced that they would be allow the cross-over in the expansion pack, suddenly every topic was someone expressing their own opinion about why this was unfair. First the Alliance players complained that they would no longer be special (not a problem as far as I'm concerned, Alliance outnumbers Horde 2-1 so it's really the Horde that is always the more special anyway) and then they complained that the changes to the story line that tells how the Horde aquired the Paladins didn't work with the past history of the game. They are however forgetting that Blizzard writes the story line and can do whatever they like with it (Besides in most cases no one but real nerds [like me] have ever bothered to figure out just what is up with the storyline anyway). Frankly, the idiotness of the situation would be much more managable if a) there was only one topic in which the people could place there thoughts and b) people didn't complain for the sake of complaining.

Lastly, it would be nice if the people who claim that they'll quit playing over this would just go ahead and leave already.

/leave rant

The Hive Mind tells you to return to your daily lives as if nothing has happened.

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Welcome to Nerdology, a study of how to interact with and preserve (the sanity of) and endangered (by the more physicaly fit) species, the nerd (scientific name: Futurus Bossus) (Disclaimer: this blog is not actually a guide to interaction or preservation of the nerd species but in fact an account of the trials and tribulations of one Futurus Bossus).

To begin this blog, I've decided to commit an act of piracy (Arrr!), blog-piracy in fact, stealing something from my mom's blog, but with a Nerdology touch:

Four Things:

Four jobs you've had in your life: counting inventory for a scrapbook selling mom, weekly existence... I mean chores (allowance), cleaning up other people's messes, and taking other people's blame.

Four movies you could watch over and over: All three Lord of the Rings and Monty Python's Quest for the Holy Grail. What, you're only counting the first three as one? Well in that case add Jurassic Park and Finding Nemo to the list (Finding Nemo not by my choice, but because I'm forced to see it on every school function, even though Nemo is always found at 42 Wallaby Way, Syndney).

Four places you've lived: San Antonio, Pflugerville, Pflugerville (rental house), and Denial.

Four TV shows you love to watch: "Quantum Leap," "Home Improvement," "The Simpsons," "Star Trek: The Next Generation"

Four places you've been on vacation: Boston, Denver, That Place in Canada That I Can't Remember the Name of, and to several scattered parts of Texas.

Four websites you visit daily: Yahoo! (It's the Homepage), worldofwarcraft.com (because 9 out of 10 doctors recommend getting a daily dose of idiots on forums*), penny-arcade.com (truly, a paragon of webcomicry), and wizards.com ([sarcasm] because new cards and RPG products are released so fast, you have to keep up[/sarcasm]).

Four of your favorite foods: pizza, cheeseburgers, chocolate covered orange peels, and Twinkies.

Four places you'd rather be: Lothlorien, Middle-Earth (Lord of the Rings); Quel'Thalas, Azeroth (Warcraft); Stormhome, Aundair (Eberron, Dungeons and Dragons); Hawaii, USA (Outside your window and anywhere from 0 to many more miles away).

Four magazines you read: "Nintendo Power," "Time," "Shonen Jump," and "Science News"

Four cars you've owned: You're kidding, right? At 16 I'm lucky to be let to use one. But counting the "Teenage Driver Car" parked outside, there's also a collection of Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars that I haven't used in years.

Thus I conclude the study of Four Things which I enjoy, and perhaps tommorrow there can be actual day-to-day content here.

*and it's a known fact that 97.4% of facts are made up on the spot just to prove a point.