Divine Lunacy

Imagine a world with no Official languages. A world in which each village has own dialect. A world in which communications between groups of people is impossible. Official languages prevent such a world by “forcing” everyone to speak the same language, but that’s a whole different topic. I don’t want to get started on why we need to make English our official language before the Spanish people assimilate us in our own country. Anyway… If I am so inclined, I can send an email to a mac user in England (I use Linux). The mac user in England will be able to read my email because although our computers are running different operating systems, they speak a common language. This is ensured by standards such as ASCII, ANSI, and ISO. I am using ISO 8859-1; the mac probably isn’t using ISO 8859-1, but it most likely knows how to read it. The character set is specified in the email headers. I can go to a variety of websites, and my browser of choice, Firefox, will have no problem displaying them. This is also due to standards. The w3c, or world wide web consortium was formed in 1994 to oversee open standards for the internet. Without a single organization overseeing standards, different websites would be coded in different languages, and not all browsers would be able to display every website. The internet would be much like the hell described at the beginning of this paragraph.

While many websites willingly comply with w3c recommendations, some seem to go out of their way to shit all over standards. Myspace is one of these websites. Even though I believe myspace is the root of all evil, I’ve been on it a lot more lately. Each time I type myspace.com into the address bar, I loathe Tom even more than before, and fear his horrible coding will yet again crash Firefox. Any website that crashes firefox doesn’t deserve to live. I’m not trying to say Firefox is perfect. (I know it isn’t.) Firefox’s poor memory management could be used to frighten small children. (adapted that from a Linus quote). In many respects, Opera is a better browser, but this post isn’t about which browser is better—it’s about which website sucks at life. That website being none other than myspace. Anyway… Just for fun, I figured I’d run my profile through the w3c markup validator. The profile is over 1000 errors away from being flawless XHTML 1.1. Tom wouldn’t know valid [X]HTML if it challenged him to a duel.

In addition to using bad markup, myspace goes out of its way to promote the use thereof. The default style of a myspace profile is boring to say the least. To remedy this, users have taken to using CSS and HTML to spice things up. Unfortunately, myspace was not designed for this kind of customization. Profile customizations are hacks at best, and some effects can only be achieved by blatantly disregarding standards. Fortunately, the casual user is not at fault in this case. The myspace profile system is lacking in many areas. A system similar to the blogger template system would be quite nice.

For those of you who haven’t noticed, I do a lot of whining, but rarely do anything about it. Well, I’m not doing anything about myspace either. I would jump at the opportunity to help design an open, compliant, alternative, but I lack the resources, time, and funding to undertake such a project by myself. I just hope someone gets to it before myspace corrupts the whole world. If we’re lucky, Google will own the world before that time, and Google Groups will challenge myspace groups to a battle to the death… Robozombie Google Vs. Myspace. (Google will kick Myspace’s ass any day. {robozombie or not} Their 52 week range is roughly $116-$358. Kick ass.)

I knew you were smart, said Mrs. Drouin while she was returning my test.
Greg [Thinking] “heh. I still haven’t read the epic of Gilgamesh. In fact, I didn’t read any of the reading you assinged.”
Greg [Speaking] “Well, there was only one french word in the word bank.”

And this, folks, is how we slide by without doing homework…

I’ve taken to posting little thoughts as they come to mind… Don’t mind me if I come off as insane… I really am insane.

Puddle boy, as he is now being called really needs to learn when to give up, and when to shut-up. He really is quite relentless.

I was browsing myspace, which is the root of all evil (along with livejournal and subway), when I saw a cool new person whom I recognized. Turns out he’s from Wisconsin. Go figure. (I still think I know him)

I was under the impression that I was taking this class to plan my… post-secondary… life, but apparently, that is not the case. As it turns out, I am here to be graded on taking notes about pointless things I don’t even care about. If I want to know what fafsa is, I’ll look it up by myself. I don’t really care about reciprocity, nor do I need some old hag to download applications for me. I am not too inept to click on the “Click here to download application” hyperlink… Not yet anyway…

I had planned to switch out of this horrid class, and even tried once, but alas, my plans were quickly shot down with Mrs. Short’s warm words of encouragement. I told her to take me out of post-secondary planning in order to better accommodate my independent study, but she told me it was a good class to take, and manged to fit me in by created a scheduling conflict.

I stopped, switched to first, turned the four wheel drive on and gunned it. If you’re dumb enough to stand right next to a puddle that size, you don’t have the right to flick off the person who soaked you.

For those of you who despise my driveway, for those of you who despise my kingdom on the hill: Burrillville has declared a state of emergency. The clear river isn’t looking very clear right now. There is flooding in parts of the Spring Lake area. The dam at wallumn lake broke. For all I know, mill pond is non-existant… There are rumors of sandbags at Nikos, while other rumors state that the damn at pascoag reservoir has been damnaged. Parts of the Steere Street/park ave/east ave area have been evacuated…

When all of your houses are underwater, I’ll be atop my kingdom on the hill yelling: I’m king of the hill. I have the highground now, bitches.

Hey… Even Greg needs to gossip once in a while….

I had a dream Friday night… Matt Mullenweg, whom I have never met was there, and he was pushing a tractor trailor truck down a road (sideways.), while I just stood around and watched.

I submitted three quotes to the yearbook, each a different length, and each quoting Linus Torvalds. Apparently, senior quotes should be ’serious thoughts’. To someone who doesn’t know what ftp stands for, to someone who hasn’t a clue in the least who Linus is, and to someone who’s knowledge of computers barely stretches past pressing ’start to begin’, my quotes may seem ridiculously jocular, but to someone who knows that ftp stands for ‘File Transfer Protocol’, to someone who knows that Linus is Linus Torvalds, to someone who knows that Linus is a BDFL, and to someone who actually knows what a BDFL is, my quotes are actually quite serious. Does the title ‘Yearbook’ advisor give Mr. Goudreau the right to define serious? Apparently. To quote Obi Wan Kenobi in Episode six, “you will find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.” Perhaps solemnity is a point of view. And perhaps from Mr. Goudreau’s “… point of view, the Jedi are evil!” (Darth Vader - Episode III).

I’m told my ambition doesn’t quite cut it either. Perhaps I am a little too ambitious. Getting a doctorate in math and conquering the world is a lot to do in only one life time, but who is Mr. Goudreau to crush my ambitions?

As a yearbook adviser, it is apparently his duty to ‘uphold the integrity of the yearbook.’ If my quote isn’t quite serious enough for the yearbook, and my ambition jeopardizes its integrity, he is free to remove it, but it is only fair to remove all of the equally ‘funny’ quotes as well.

More annoying than the fact that my quote cannot go in the yearbook while other quotes, equally laking in seriousness, will be posted, is the fact that mine will not be posted because a certain yearbook adviser is too lethargic to sit down in front of a computer, and run a few Google queries in order to better understand them, and too rigid to change his mind even when/if he does realize that his judgement of seriousness is largely incorrect in this matter. I am fine with my quotes being left out for a good reason, but I don’t consider a yearbook adviser’s lack of knowledge a good reason.

Quote 1:

My name is Linus, and I am your god.

Before you tell me that this quote isn’t serious, please read the thirteen-thousand Google search results for ‘worship of Linus Torvalds’. To quote Wikipedia, “Many Linux fans tend to worship Torvalds as a kind of god.” There you have it. “The Free Encyclopedia” verifies (as I knew it would…) the fact that Linus is a god figure. Saying this quote isn’t serious tells all the ‘Linus Worshipers’ out there that you think their idol is a joke. Linus Torvalds is not a joke.

Quote 2:

Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it

Mr. Goudreau doesn’t know what FTP is. He can’t put anything he doesn’t know in the yearbook. He’s human; there’s a lot he doesn’t know. A simple Google Query would tell him that FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. Read in context, this quote is quite serious.

Quote 3:

When you say “I wrote a program that crashed Windows”, people just stare at you blankly and say “Hey, I got those with the system, *for free*”.

Again, taken in context, this quote is quite serious.

As for the ambition… I don’t just happen to have any old yearbooks lying around. If you have one, please comment with stupid/funny ambitions (and quotes) that jeopardize the integrity of the yearbook.

If your name is Mike, please click here. (I’m guessing that everyone will click there out of curiosity.)

Here’s the slightly abridged version: There was the thing with the thing belonging to the little people, then the meeting with the larger people, the the show down between us and those other people. Then there was that thing involving marble, which was soon followed by the thing involving high speeds. After all of that, there was the thing involving the greenery and the dumpster diving.

• Eighteen years ago today, a baby boy was born in a hospital in North Attleboro, Massachusetts, and given the name Greg.
• Some girl named beth, who just happens to be Kayla’s sister was born.
• Josh’s brother was born…
• Others…

Special thanks go to April for giving me twenty-one 8.5 calorie tubes of colorful goodness and a top secret transmission sent here by aliens. ( and funded in part by BIll Gates. )