I was browsing Slashdot today and happened upon an article pointing to a site that demonstrated what would happen if Google had to design its own site in order to get more hits from its own search engine. If Google designed for Google.

Let me explain. The Google search engine ranks pages based on how many occurances of a key word there are in the page, how many links it has to other pages on the same site, how recently the content has been updated, how many links it has from other sites (Digg, Furl, del.icio.us, Yahoo, etc.), and how many inbound links it has overall. Thus we have the Google PageRank search algorithm, which decides which search results are important enough to be placed at the top of a query. The downside to this is that web developers who need more traffic on their sites must go to extreme lengths to ensure that their sites show up on the first 3 pages of results for a specific query. They add needless gimmicks like feeds from blogs, partnerships with other sites to boost inbound links, and custom bookmarking tools, all of which clutter up a site's layout. So somebody, inspired in part by the "What if Microsoft designed the iPod's box art?" video, created a presentation called "What if Google had to design for Google?" It takes the pristine interface of Google and then mutilates it step-by-step in order to get a higher PageRank, tranforming it into a cramped, cluttered mess. You can find the presentation here. The "Microsoft molds the iPod into its own horrific vision" video can be found here.

Oh, and I found some nice videos on YouTube a couple days ago. One's a 3D animated short from the Vancouver Film School, and the other's a love story told through an . . . interesting medium. Enjoy.

"After Oz" by the Vancouver Film School

"How We Met" by tracecats

One last thing: Sandeep's got a blog.

NOTE: Yesterday was my birthday. This is the post that I started writing on that day and finished today.

Today is my birthday. Need I say any more? I baked my birthday cake (a pound cake) with my sister and my mom yesterday, and my mother thoughtfully made some vanilla icing/glaze for it as well. I had most of the cake for breakfast today. As for presents, from my parents I got a TI-84 graphing calculator. I have an inordinate fondness for graphing calculators, especially (I think) because of their programmable capabilities. I love my PSP and all, but I'm more interested in making the programs than using them. Besides games, of course. I love those whether I'm writing them or playing them. At a summer camp at Northwestern last year, I created a program that basically rendered my friends' calculators useless by getting itself stuck in an infinite loop, but someday I want to make a self-replicating program that will automatically copy itself to other calculators when its host is linked up. In other words, a virus. A TI calculator virus. It might be impossible, but that doesn't stop me from trying. It's mostly for high school, though. I know it doesn't seem like much of a present, but my father tells me that there's a different present on the way from the site where they purchased it. It should be here in two or three days. From my sister I got a $25 Best Buy gift card, and although the workers at Best Buy are stupid and frustrating (except for the Geek Squad), Best Buy is one of my favorite stores, bested only by EB Games and Gamestop (not to mention Borders and Barnes and Noble). Okay, so it's my fifth favorite store . . . but whatever. At school, I got impromptu birthday cards from some of my friends. Thanks Umair, Stephanie, and Teddy for the hilarious quasi-birthday-cards! By the way Teddy I am not from the region of India known as "the Cow Belt", but I love cows nonetheless, so your card is still politically correct. My good friend Sophie was very thoughtful and got me a hacky-sack and a friendship bracelet, so thank you very much Sophie if you happen to be reading this. I need to pay you guys back sometime; I feel like a jerk not giving presents to my friends for major events.

I also got my hands on a book I've been after for a while. I picked up Mind Hacks at the library just before it closed. The idea I'm working with here is: if I can hack the structure of my own thought processes, then I can hack anything, seeing as the human brain far surpasses any computer in its complexity and subtlety. Oooohh. Feel the power. Speaking of computers, I managed to get myself transferred out of my Web Authoring course to the Programming course I've wanted all year. Hallelujah. It's pretty cool, despite the fact that I'm two weeks behind. I'm catching up pretty quickly, though. C++ is a great language. My previous experience with OOP languages was a neat little keylogger I wrote in Visual BASIC .NET. VB is a sloppy, messy language, like HTML with programming capabilities. I didn't like it very much. But it was helpful because of the coding habits I picked up from it, like actually declaring my variables before starting the program and being more specific about data types to conserve space. I also learned how OOP actually worked, which was great. Previously, I played around with weakly typed, lenient languages like Liberty BASIC. The rigid structure of C++ and object orientedness eliminates the guilt I felt at writing programs held together with spit and prayers in non-OOP languages.

YouTube has just held its first annual YouTube Awards (yay!), so I'll finish off this post with the category winners:

Most Creative goes to "Here It Goes Again" by OKGo:

Best Comedy goes to "Smosh Short 2: Stranded" by Smosh:

Best Commentary goes to my personal favorite, "Hotness Prevails/Worst Video Ever" by thewinekone:

Best Series goes to "Ask A Ninja" by digitalfilmmaker (gotta love those ninjas):

Best Music Video goes to "Say It's Possible" by TerraNaomi:

Most Inspirational goes to "Free Hugs Campaign" by PeaceOnEarth123:

Most Adorable goes to "Kiwi!" by Madyeti47:

I recently got back my ISAT scores, and noticed something on them that I hadn't noticed before. It fascinated me. On the left side of the scoring sheet, at the bottom, was a yellow rectangle containing what it claimed to be my "Lexile" score. This score apparently told me my level of ability in reading comprehension and whatnot. My score was 1450L, which meant nothing and still means nothing to me, for reasons which we will come to later. The yellow box also unhelpfully informed me that books with a Lexile score between 1350L and 1450L should be comfortable leisure reading for me, and that books with a score between 1450L and 1500L should prove to be satisfyingly challenging for me, but not insurmountably so. Armed with this enlightening knowledge, I proceeded to the official "Lexile Framework for Reading" web site and looked up a few books that I'm planning on reading in its database. The database, I was told by the yellow rectangle on my ISAT score sheet, would help me find books appropriate to my Lexile reading level. Tolstoy's War and Peace, this miraculous database told me with utmost confidence, had a Lexile level of - at the very most - 1240L. After picking myself off the floor, I read the entry again in disbelief. Tolstoy? 1240L? This thing was telling me that War and Peace was so far beneath my reading level that I shouldn't even consider it for light bedtime reading! As such, I am once again firmly convinced of the utter uselessness of systems that attempt to gauge your intelligence definitively with a letter/number. IQ tests included. I mean, it's just ridiculous. You cannot tell someone how smart he is judging from his score on a test! A kid who gets perfect grades is not necessarily a genius. Likewise, a kid who gets terrible grades is not necessarily stupid. And besides, one of the main reasons to not take an IQ test is because you might get preconceptions of yourself as either the greatest thing since da Vinci or the stupidest thing since flavored paper. Which can lead to even worse things. If you think you're brilliant, you might think that you don't even have to try hard in school to get good grades, and if you think you're an idiot, then you might question the point of trying in school at all, seeing as the test just told you that you're hopeless.

This Lexile thing is even worse, though, considering its staggering inaccuracy. Maybe in the theory of whoever created this piece of junk, a kid who gets 1450L should be able to walk all over Tolstoy with the ease of walking and talking at the same time, but in practice - in real life - that's definitely not the case. I found out a little bit about how these comprehension systems work. Want to know how they assign Lexile scores? By syllables. They count the average number of syllables in each sentence and figure the score from that somehow. Being able to read a fifty syllable sentence is enough to read whatever you want, apparently. Never mind trying to understand the text, just read it. Never mind the philosophy behind the words, because that doesn't matter as long as you can read them. It makes me want to cry. If you have anything to say about this, feel free to leave a comment under this post.

In other news, and on a much lighter note, I finally finished Flags of Our Fathers last night. I highly, highly, highly, highly recommend it. Make it your next book, like right now. The main draw of Flags is reading about the story behind the famous Iwo Jima flagraising photograph. You get to know the six boys in the photo as though they were your best friends, because this book was written by the son of one of those boys. It is meticulously researched, rivaled in my experience only by M.J. Simpson's excellent biography of Douglas Adams. It not only reveals so much that has been forgotten about the photograph, but also provides insight into the background of the lesser-known part of World War II: the Pacific Theater of War. Reading it is a very rewarding and enlightening experience, so read it right now. And then watch the movie. This book is WWII at its grittiest and goriest. Not for the faint of heart. Read it.

Oh, and I'm going to the Who concert with Perry tonight. Screaming at the top of my lungs would be an understatement in describing my excitement. I'll be sure to tell you all about it later.

I suppose I haven't blogged at all for a while now because I thought that there was nothing in my life worth blogging during that time. Thankfully, I've changed my mind. It's my blog, so I'll blog my life; the good, the bad, the ugly, and the ugly. I blog, therefore I....am? Huh? Whatever. Onward to my life!

So, let's see how I've been doing with the whole "New Year's Resolutions" thing. I've failed one already: I crawled ignobly from the National Geographic Bee's running in my school after miserably failing to correctly answer my first two questions. I did get a cool little NG Bee pin, though, and a Certificate of Achievement. I guess that counts for something.

I played "Rondo Alla Turca" by Mozart in the Talent Show on 1 March, which gets rid of half of the resolution concerning the Talent Show and the musical. I played like crap, and the piano brought new meaning to the phrase "sucks on ice", adding to the wretched overall effect of my sad, sad performance. I auditioned for the musical a few weeks ago and got callbacks and I now have the part that I originally wanted: Olin Britt in the barbershop quartet. The musical that we're doing is The Music Man (albeit a shortened version designed for student productions), which is about a traveling salesman/con man going by the name of "Professor Harold Hill" who convinces the townspeople of his current location that they have dire need of a boy's band, and then proceeds to take all their money in payments for his wares before disappearing from the entire state before anybody can sue him for an encore.

I've also been putting the "current" in "current affairs" by way of a handy BBC News ticker that scrolls across the top of my screen whenever I'm logged in. If you happen to care, you can get it from the BBC web site.

As for the remaining resolutions that I have any progress on, I guess I've been exercising regularly enough, and I've compiled a massive reading list to meet the goal about reading more books. Right now I'm reading Flags of Our Fathers by James Bradley, and next I've got The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, Hamlet by Shakespeare, and Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None by Nietzsche. Three of those books appear on Time's list of the Ten Greatest Books of All Time. I highly recommend Flags of Our Fathers, by the way. Excellent read. I also found out that a good friend of mine, Perry, plans for me to tag along to a Who concert with him on 5 March (this coming Monday!), so my other friend Kelsey has been helping me "study" for the concert with numerous Who CDs and a documentary on them, so I've been listening to a lot more music recently.

Talking of Kelsey, I've been meaning to blog her insane web site, so I'll do that right now. Kelsey's web site, Caviar And Cigarettes, can be found at geocities.com/goingslightlymad3. I highly recommend checking out the Stories section, especially the "Harry's Our What?" story, as it's the only completed one that she's decided to put up. And the reviews will keep you on the site for hours. Enjoy.

If you're a student at Highland Middle School, then you probably remember when we had to do ballroom dancing, right? We all hated it. Here's proof. We had all decided once and for all that ballroom dancing had the highest level of suck out of any class at Highland. I did too. Until last night, I guess.

Last night, I watched a really good movie called Strictly Ballroom. It was directed by the same guy who did Romeo and Juliet with Leonardo DiCaprio and the whole inner-city gang war premise (you'll get that only if you're in PEAK Language Arts). Strictly Ballroom, as you can probably guess, is a movie about the intense, super-competitive sport of...um...ballroom dancing?

Yeah, ballroom dancing. But seriously, you wouldn't believe how intense the actual sport can get. I mean, the people who actually compete in ballroom dancing tournaments should be considered an ethnic minority in and of itself. They aren't kidding around. They marry only other ballroom dancers and everything. It's a completely self-contained society.

Anyway, here's a bit of a summary of the movie. The main character is a guy named Scott. Scott here has been training to win a dance competition called the Pan Pacific Grand Prix. Since the age of six. Six. He's also Australian. Did I mention that everybody in the movie is Australian? The entire plot takes place in Australia. So Scott's like in his teens or something, and he's got a good dance partner named -- well, I forgot her name -- and he's in the Pan Pacific Grand Prix and now they're in the last category of dance in the competition: Latin. So then the rumba starts playing and Scott and his partner are doing great and all. Until they get "boxed in", or sort of backed up against a wall by another couple so that they can't do any moves.

Just going off into a side note here - what we did in gym class had nothing on what professional ballroom dancers actually do. And you thought that pretzel thing was hard? Well these guys are all flourish and twirl, and the complexity of their moves is something that has to be seen to be believed.

Anyway, back to the story. So Scotty and his parter are boxed in, and what does he do? He breaks the rules. *Ominous music*. He slides out on his knees under the other couples' arms to a clear spot on the dance floor and starts dancing a completely different style than what everybody else is doing, with leaps and bounds and arms wide open. The problem here is that Scott is not using the moves allowed in competition by some ballroom dancing federation (a ballroom dancing federation?), and so he loses and his entire family is extremely ashamed of him. As far as I saw when he was dancing those "illegal moves", he was just dancing in a more modern style than everybody else, and it looked pretty cool. But anyway, everybody's really angry at him and they're hoping to bring him back to dancing like everybody else does, but he stubbornly refuses. And you've got to see how angry his family gets. This isn't just a competition to them. It's their lives. They have nothing but ballroom dancing. Anyway, so when Scott's alone in the dance studio, he starts making up his own dance steps which are pretty amazing until this ugly girl named Fran tells him that she wants to dance with him his way at the Pan Pacifics, seeing as his other partner has left him. He eventually agrees, and they practice together for three weeks. Obviously, seeing as no movie has ever had an ugly heroine, Fran turns from an ugly duckling into the proverbial swan.

Meanwhile, the rest of his ballroom-dancing family is trying to find him another dancing partner (they don't know about Fran), and they're holding tryouts for people who want to be Scott's dancing partner. Scott finds an excuse not to dance with each of them. "Too short". "Too tubby". "No musicality". "No sense of rhythm".

So later there's a run-in with Fran's grandparents, who watch how Scott and Fran dance to Latin music, laugh at them, and then show them how it's done. This all makes sense because Fran and her family are Spanish immigrants.

So now Scott and Fran are training with her grandparents and it's great and then his family thinks that they've found him a dance partner when they find out that the champion dancer Tina Sparkle is looking for a new partner. All this results in Fran getting mad at him and Scott snubbing Tina and going after Fran and his mom getting really mad at him and slapping him and the Federation president telling him the "truth" about his dad not wanting to end up the way he did and everything. So Scott believes the guy and dances with a new partner (not Fran; they don't want him to dance with Fran) and Fran gets super mad at him for being an idiot and he frantically tries to explain and then his father tells him the real truth about his dancing career and Scott then dances the rumba in the Pan Pacific Grand Prix with Fran and they're a big hit and everybody's happy.

That movie really gave me a new look at ballroom dancing. In terms of its rules, it's a very strict sport, and the dance moves are extremely tough. Sure, very few people from our school will ever be professional ballroom dancers and ballroom dancing is pretty useless in real life, but it's a really complex and beautiful art.

You can get Strictly Ballroom at the library.

So, it's January 1 of 2007, and I've started my new blog as planned! Originally, my blog was going to be hosted on Freewebs on my website, but Freewebs' blogging software was crappy, so I ditched it and switched to Blogger instead, which is great. Anyway, 2006 was a great year. The thing that I liked the most about 2006 was that the sense of community on the Internet really grew. Video blogs on YouTube. The rising popularity of community-driven Wikipedia. Social networking sites like del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, MySpace (which sucks actually), and Facebook. Great stuff. All of you end users out there, who had never experienced the power of the Internet before, experienced it this year, causing Time magazine to name you (yes, you) as Person of the Year. The Internet is all about freedom, and that principal was truly exemplified this past year. I'm proud, 2006. It was a pleasure working with you. And it can only get better in 2007. The word "two thousand seven" still has an exotic flavor on my lips, the way saying the word "PlayStation Three" did before. It looks like it's going to be another great year in our lives, people.

So, having said farewell to yesteryear, it's time to set the stage for this new year. And that means New Year's Resolutions. Does anybody remember that? I think I found out about these in second grade, and I sort of forgot about them over time. But the promise of a blog starting this year brought me back to the idea of setting my goals and my standards before embarking on my journey through 2007. So I sat back and thought about what I wanted done this year. And I came up with a lot of stuff. Most for my own improvement, and one for us all. Here are my New Year's Resolutions for 2007.

• Adhere to my schedule for the rest of eighth grade, and keep all of my grades in the A-range by doing so.
  Having a schedule makes homework and school a lot easier for me, but it can be difficult to stick to. Thus the resolution to stick to it. And I'm not looking for 4.0s here (because I won't get them), I just want anything in the A range. A+, A, A-. That's what I'm looking for.


• Gather enough material and information to write my maternal grandmother's biography.
  My dear old grandma's not going to be with us much longer. She's old and frail, but she's still a vivacious person, and she will be to the end. I want something for my family to remember her by. I'll interview her and everything this year, but the actual biography's gonna take some time to write. In the end, my parents will help me publish it.


• Learn Python inside and out, prove it, and move on to Java.
  Python is a programming language, for those who don't know. I plan to master it over the course of this year (it takes a long time to learn a programming language). "Proving it" means writing a complex program in the language that covers nearly all of it, including any obscure corners of its functionality, like a database program or a game. And then I'll move on to Java.


• Switch to Linux.
  I know that I complain all the time about how much I hate Windows and Microsoft and all, but the problem is that I'm stuck using it because my laptop's disk drive is screwed up, so I can't install Linux. I'm hoping to either get the drive fixed or get a new laptop so I can finally start using Linux as my regular OS.


• Get at least beyond the school level in the Geography Bee.
  Sort of self-explanatory, but the Bee means a lot to me this year, seeing as this is the last chance I'm going to get at it in this life. It's gonna take a lot of studying to get very far, though.


• Write a few self-motivated essays.
  Currently, I only write essays for school assignments or contests. I know I can write reasonably well, but I'm not going to get anywhere with that unless I actually try to write about stuff that I care about.


• Construct my web site.
  Don't I already have a web site? Well, yes I do, but I'm not that happy with it. Freewebs is good and all, but I want more control over my site than what they give me. So I'm going to construct all of the XHTML and CSS for a full web site from scratch this year, and I'll upload the whole thing to a web server and register a domain name next year.


• Learn Geometry and a little bit of Algebra II over the summer.
  I love math, but I really suck at it. So last year I cheated a little bit. I took a course on Algebra I at Northwestern University over the summer. I'm taking Algebra I in school right now. I don't even pay attention in that class. Learning everything beforehand made everything much easier. Seeing as high school is equated by many to Hell, I'm thinking I'll need all the help I can get. Being ahead of the class won't hurt.


• Perform in the Talent Show and the school musical.
  This is my final year in Middle School, and I may never have time for these things ever again. QED.


• Write a useful program or Firefox extension.
  I can program, but I haven't ever programmed anything that people will find remotely useful. So I'll try to write a useful program, which may be difficult because a program is brought to life only when it scratches a developer's personal itch. I need to get inspired. If my inspired program falls beyond my own ability to write it, I'll just write a useful Firefox extension, which is much easier.


• Stay current with current events. Be able to speak intelligently about whatever's on the news.
  Staying current can also help out with the GeoBee. Plus I won't sound like an idiot when people start talking about the thing that happened in that one place a little while ago.


• Exercise on a consistent basis.
  I'll be thanking myself when I'm old.


• Play a particular sport often enough to become competent at it.
  I suck at sports overall, so I guess I'd better do something about that. I'm looking at basketball, because I'm sure I'll never be good at soccer and football.

And here's one for all of us (you don't have to take it literally):

• Read more books. Listen to more music. Work as hard as you play and play as hard as you work.
  To put it like Sony does in its advertisements: More. In every sense^TM.

That's the promise of 2007. And any other new year, for that matter. More. In every sense.