Joseph Ratzinger from Germany! I had been hoping they would go with a Latin American poope like they had been predicting. Not only because this would have probably been a Hispanic, but because it would have been the first Pope from the New World. I would also have liked an Asian or African Pope because that would also have been a break from a European Pope. Well, maybe next time.

A new pope has been chosen! More info when I hear it later tonight. Wow, this world really had been accelerated. They picked someone on the first day unlike in previous times.

Flickr just did the best and worst thing to me it could possibly do. As a Thank You for my going pro while they were still Beta, I got my subscription doubled to TWO years! Not only that, but they doubled my bandwidth to 2 GB. They may as well have made it unlimited because I’ve been having a hard enough time filling up my 1 GB limit! They also gave me the ability to freely upgrade two people to pro. I upgraded my mom. I’ll upgrade someone else later.

In a world based on technology, a small error in a program can lead to some interesting results. Take this for example:

This was what weather.com displayed a few days ago when I typed in Ithaca’s area code. Rest assured that it was barely HALF the temperature they claimed it was. I think they probably had a variable slightly off and so it pointed to Arizona or something, but came up as Ithaca. Pretty humorous when it’s the weather that’s so off this way. Not quite so funny when it’s your phone freezing up.

A study my fiancee shared with me:

A series of epidemiological studies were conducted. The results were as follows:

-Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans -French eat a lot of fat and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans -Japanese drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans -Italians drink excessive amounts of red wine and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans

Wordpress has listed some hosting sites which allow their users to use wordpress for blogging. Why didn’t they show my server? hehe….

There’s a very hackneyed saying, “don’t put off for tomorrow what you can do today.” For a while now I had been putting off talking about the new Anberlin album and now Andrew beat me to it. I had been listening to “Ready Fuels” for almost six months before I got around to buying the first album, Blueprints for the Black Market. I almost immediately fell in love with the band’s music. I put it on my workout playlist and it was what I listened to for about a month and one half while working out. My fiancee said it was the first time she had heard an album where she liked every single song. When I found out they had come out with a new record in February, I set out to buy it.

Last Monday I joined the Order of the Engineer. Although it has a title like the Loyal Order of Water Buffalo of the Flintstones, it is nothing at all like that. It is based off of a similar, but much older Canadian process known as The Ritual of the Calling of the Engineer. The American version was founded in 1970 by engineers at Cleveland State University. We will never had a meeting or pay dues again. The whole point of the order is to function as yet another institution I belong to which does not tolerate unethical behaviour. Unlike the IEEE, I have a ring to wear which symbolizes to all my commitment to the ethical practice of engineering. Official Order of the Engineer literature has this to say about the ring:

To all the US citizens who read this blog: Happy Tax Day! I did mine a while back, how about you? Today is the last day to postmark the filed returns or an extension request.

I recently began listening to the followup to The Lexus and The Olive Tree, entitled The World is Flat: A Short History of the 21st Century. The latter was written in 2005 so the author has had time to absorb the true impact of the internet, while it was just getting revved up when he wrote the former book. His key point in the first part (of three) of the book is that there have been many events which have caused the world to flatten. This flattening is a metaphor for a leveling of the playing field across many different industries. For example, Linux has leveled the playing field in computers by allowing poorer people to afford computers since they don’t have to pay for an operating system or programs. Fiber optics have leveled the playing field for India by allowing data to be transmited so quickly and with so much bandwidth that companies are able to do more and more abroad, allowing educated Indians to have jobs of a caliber they could not have before. You get the point.