Nerdfighters Gazette

Many of you have probably heard of the SETI@HOME project where SETI records data, and sends it to several volunteers over the internet to have other computers analyze the data. While cool, I don’t see how it’ll do very much good for helping the world. Luckily there are many other projects and researchers using grid computing.

The World Community Grid is one. It has projects you can contribute to like a cure for AIDS, Cancer, Muscular Dystophy, maximizing crop yields, and several others. They send your computer parts of problems, your computer calculates the answers, and then it sends the answers back to them. It’s like a supercomputer, but distributed.  If 365 people are running it, then a year of computing can be done in a day.

All you have to do is:

• Go HERE (this link automatically puts you on the Nerdfighters team when you register)
• Sign up.
• Download the program.
• Pick the projects you want. (Make sure you choose to have other projects sent if the ones you picked aren’t available)
• Let it run.

Within the team, we can track how many hours we’ve contributed and there’s even a point system.  It’s really easy and I don’t see why everyone couldn’t do it. You can even edit the settings to control when it runs and how much of your processor it uses.

The top team on there has 16,000 members. I think we could easily blow them away.

All research conducted as part of the world community grid is in the public domain.

The most important day of my life was also my last.  I think it’s safe to start out my tale with a little bit of insight to how it ends.  I’ll give you the quick and dirty, the hard and fast, cut straight to the chase – okay, sorry.  I always did take things a little overboard.  Which is probably how I ended up putting a gun to my head and pulling that trigger quicker than anyone could look up from their books.

‘Books?’ you may be asking yourself.  Yes, this happened in a library.  The college library, in fact.

Perhaps I should just get to the story then.

February 14th, 2008 was the day that I first started officially dating a guy named Ralph Davis.  He was a cute boy, with straightened bangs, an always-present beanie, and skinny jeans.  Not exactly the manliest-looking guy, you could argue, but not exactly the most girly either.  He swore a lot, smoked a lot, and drank a lot.  He laughed at fart jokes, pushed people around, and often gave a friendly punch to encourage someone.  Ralph Davis.  My second and last boyfriend.

I met him at the school cafe.  I remember perfectly clearly that he ordered a slice of pepperoni pizza with extra cheese and a medium Mountain Dew.  I watched him carefully as he handed the three one-dollar bills over to the pretty girl behind the register.  I remember glaring at her from my table, watching as he smiled flirtatiously at her, and she giggled cutely, pulling her blonde bangs to the side.

“I saw him first, bitch…” I muttered under my breath, stabbing my Caesar salad with a plastic spork.

He quickly thanked her as she handed him the pizza and a clear plastic cup.  He turned around sharply, flipping his hair to the side of his face, and stuck his cup out under the fountain.  I looked away, feeling like a total stalker.

That was December 8th, 2007.  I didn’t even talk to him until four days later, at the library.

That day was the most magical day of my life.  He talked to me first, for the record, and I was totally taken by surprise.  He brought up interesting conversation topics like the bands he had seen in concert, the brands of shoes he likes to wear, and the cool things he saw on YouTube.  He was basically my dream guy, with his dark, tight-fitting pants and his long hair.

Gosh, I could’ve creamed my pants right then.  Probably did.

We started going out on February 14th, 2008, like I said before.  Ralph was a good guy, at first, and always celebrated each following month that followed.  He bought me small presents and big presents, ranging from a chocolate bar to a giant teddy bear with a dozen roses.  As the months got closer to the year mark, however, the presents started vanishing altogether.  He started calling me less.  We still talked at school, but it seemed like we were drifting.

I became increasingly interested in the gun club.  I visited their meetings every now and then, and even practiced shooting a couple of times.  Eventually, I became well known in Room 54.  People knew me quite well.  Jake Presher was always saving me a seat when the club ate together.

Finally, on February 14th, 2009, there was the party.  I was already feeling very self-conscious about my relationship with Ralph, and the way he seemed to not really want to be around me at all.  It was this party that would bring us back together, I had convinced myself.  We would be going together, and everyone would see that we were still going strong.  We’d made it to the year mark, and we were proud and happy about it.

But an hour before Ralph was supposed to pick me up, after I had already gotten dressed, my makeup and hair done, practically already sitting on the front porch – I got the call.

“Hello?” I answered.

“Hey, it’s Ralph.”

“Oh, hey!  When are you coming to pick me up?”

“I’m not.”

“Excuse me?”

There were muffled noises in the background.  “I said I’m not picking you up.”

Hesitance.  “Oh, then… who is?”

A pause.  “Nobody, Jess.  Don’t you get it?  The party’s not happening.  It got canceled.”

Dread.  Despair.  Hatred.  Sadness.  “Canceled?”

“God, are you thick?  Yes, it’s canceled.  No one’s going.  Cops got warned about the booze or some shit.”

“Oh.  Okay.  Sorry.”

“Don’t be.  Bye.”

Click.

Don’t be. It was almost reassuring to know that he didn’t want me to feel bad.  That I had nothing to feel bad about.  Sure, I had done nothing anyway, but it always felt good to know that he thought so, too.  I smiled to myself as I looked in the mirror, taking out my earrings and then slowly taking down my hair.

The next day, I went to school wearing a good outfit and fresh makeup.  I was looking good, and I knew it, and I was sure that when Ralph saw me, he’d know it, too.

But when I got to school, no one was looking at me with smiles and compliments in their eyes.  They were looking away quickly, hiding their faces, but always looking back for more.  What was going on?  I was about to ask somebody, when Lonny, a girl I knew from my biology class, walked up to me.

“Hey, Jess, are you okay?”

I was confused.  “Okay about what?”

Now she was confused.  “About the breakup?”

“Breakup?”

“God, are you thick?  Ralph broke up with you, didn’t he?”

“What?  No.  We’re still together.”

“Yeah, okay.”

She rolled her eyes and walked away.

That was weird… I thought.

I quickly found Ralph in my first class, in his seat like he always was.  I confronted him immediately.

“Ralph, why are people saying we broke up?”

“I dunno, maybe ’cause you’re a cold-hearted bitch,” he said without looking at me.

“W-what?”

Now he looked.  “You cheated on me, Jess, and I can never forgive that.”

“What?  What are you talking about?  I never -” I looked around the room and despite the spinning, I can see the faces staring, judging.

Ralph just looked at me, amused.  “I can’t be with a cheater, Jess.  I’m sorry.  I thought you knew it was over once you did that.  And with Jake Presher, too…”

“Jake?  Presher?  Who?”

“God, you’re so thick!  I always hated that about you.  Bugged the living shit out of me.”

I walked out of the room.  I didn’t want to hear anymore.

Yeah, so it’s a stupid reason to kill myself.  But hey, I already had the self-esteem issues.  This was the last thing I needed.  I knew where to go.

“Room 54, here I come.”

I headed straight there, having memorized the route to take.  Things were all a big blur.  I grabbed the gun and ran to the most public place I could think of.  Library, library, have to get to the library…

I stood in the middle of the room, hiding the gun in my jacket.  I looked around, but nobody noticed.  I lifted the gun, pointed it straight at my temple, and pulled.

…and nothing happened.  The gun was out of bullets.  In my eagerness to die, I had forgotten the most important ingredient to shooting myself.

And that’s when Jake Presher looked up and saw me with the gun to my head.

“What?!  No!  Jess, put that down!”

He ran over to me, and as I watched him, my hand slowly went lower and lower.  The gun was at my side.

“What are you doing?”  He held me tightly.  “What are you doing?” he repeated.

“I dunno.  Dying, probably,” I responded.

“Well that’s a dumb answer.”  He pulled away and looked at my face closely, holding it in his hands.  “What’s going on?”

“Same shit different day.  Can’t take it.”

“God, Jess.  Even when you’re about to shoot yourself in the face, you’re being sarcastic.”

“Temple.  I was going to shoot myself in the temple.”

“Whatever, Jess, whatever.”

So yeah, yeah, Jake stopped what wasn’t going to happen anyway.  Goddamn bullets.  Those things should come preloaded for the desperate, in my personal opinion.

We started walking away from the scene, and he led me outside to the front steps of the college.  He looked at me closely, holding my face in his hands once more.

“Don’t you ever do that again, Jess.”

“Yeah, yeah.  Won’t make any promises.”

“No, really, Jess.”

“I -”

And that’s when I dropped to the floor.

Wouldn’t you know it?  Heart disease runs in the family.  And I was just the kind of person to get a heart attack and die when I was twenty-two.  I guess you never know when you’re going to go.  Sure, I had been ready five minutes before, but the look in Jake’s eyes, the way he held me close… You might’ve even thought I was happy the bullets had been misplaced.

Oh well.  Life goes on.  Wait… fuck.

I’m going to assume that 98% of you have not heard of robo.to.  It’s a site similar to DailyBooth or Twitter, depending on how you use it.

The way the site works is like this: You record a 4 second, muted video with your webcam.  If you have the option to use effects, then sure, go ahead.  You can update your status to Twitter like this, using video to emphasize things.  Or, you can just keep things on the site (and if you want, still tell your Twitter followers that you’ve updated).

It’s pretty fun, and not very well known.  So, if you want to check it out, then go ahead and do that.  I have an account here.

If you join, go ahead and link us to your profile in the comments!

Everyone knows what blogging is.  Heck, even old people know what blogging is.  And I know that a lot of you probably have taken up this little hobby.  I know I do occasionally.  So this post is to ask you Nerdfighters to do a little shameless plugging and link your blog in the comments.

Mine contains swear words, even in the name, but nothing too obscene.