Last night, I read this joke while browsing the internet and doing some research for my homework. It went something like this:

What’s the difference between a duck?
One leg is both the same!

I read it about three times before scratching my head and going to Google for an explanation. Even after Googling "What’s the difference between a duck," I was unable to find a valid explanation to what it actually meant. It drove me crazy for the rest of the night, and I was unable to concentrate on my home­work. It’s not often when something confuses me this much. I ended up going to sleep an hour earlier than normal.

Today, during school, I asked many of my friends and teachers, but their responses were unhelpful. A majority of the people I asked responded with "A duck and what?" Others responded with completely random answers, like names of fruit and European countries. One person said that his dad told him this joke when he was younger, but he hasn’t been able to understand it since.

After much contemplation, I devised the best explanation I could of the joke:

The joke itself is a paradox, and is supposed to be funny because it makes fun of "What’s the difference" jokes. You hear them all the time: "What’s the difference between your mom and my mom? Yo mama is fat, and mine isn’t!" Note how "What’s the difference" jokes compare two different things, but only one object is given in the joke.

The answer has a grammatical error with plurals: "One leg is both the same." You cannot compare two things and state they are the same when you are only dealing with one item.

If you haven’t made the connection yet, this whole joke is a play on plurals. When you hear "What’s the difference," you’re expecting two items to compare, but you get one (a duck). When you hear "both the same," you’re expecting two items that are identical, but you only get one (one leg).

If anybody disagrees with my explanation, I would like to hear yours, seeing as I’m not 100% sure if my explanation is anywhere near what the joke really means.

You see them everywhere. Banners advertising products and services can be found on just about every website, sometimes on every page. I have my own collection of banner advertisements on my own website, and a leaderboard sized advertisement on the bottom of every page on my blog. But being an internet user and lover myself, I know how annoying advertisements can get, so I try to make my advertising placement and formatting as fitting and subtle as possible. Take the advertisement on this page, for example. It’s located all the way at the bottom, out of the way of the main content. It even fits the color scheme of the page, so it seems like it belongs naturally on this page.

Unfortunately, I’m not the owner of every website. Some webmasters choose to place destructive advertisements on their pages that may pop up, pop under, play sounds, or flash like crazy and give you seizures. Some webmasters even give chunks of their website to advertisers in the form of an IFRAME, so advertisers can do whatever they wish to do with that space. Their selfishness to do nothing but promote their business has caused an overall bad image for advertisements in general, internet-wide.

Here’s a reward for you for reading this far into my blog post for today: a solution to annoying advertisements. Mozilla Firefox offers an add-on called AdBlock Plus that removes page elements that match any entry in a list of thousands of well-known advertisements. Even better, you can custom-define your own advertisements to get rid of ones that were not originally on the list.

Now that you have eliminated probably the most annoying aspect of the internet, you caused a different problem, this time for webmasters like me. I get paid for displaying advertisements and getting clicks or impressions. That’s right, even for impressions – I get credited for merely showing you the advertisement, without you having to click on anything, in some cases. So essentially, by showing you how to remove advertisements from your browser, I indirectly lowered potential income I could make from advertising. But, because I’m such a nice person and taught you something new, I think you should use the exceptions for AdBlock Plus and add my websites as approved sites.

Unblock me, please? :D

I have an extra day off school this week thanks to a day of non-attendance. Apparently, it’s actually supposed to be called Good Friday, which someone told me was the Friday directly before Easter, but they can’t use "Good Friday" to offer a day off in school because it’s religious. So then, I’m wondering, how come we get Christmas off when that’s also religious? Then I realized we don’t – Christmas just "coincidentally happens" to fall during the weeks of winter break.Because public schools are supported and funded by the government and taxes, they are required to honor freedom of religion, and not promote one religion over another. I don’t see why this rule is still in effect, seeing as it’s pretty obvious all public schools (or mine, at least) honor Christian holidays, and nobody’s doing anything about it.

Even more interesting is that America seems to honor Christian holidays. Public schools can’t have Good Friday off because it has to do with Easter, but workplaces everywhere else, including government jobs, honor holidays like Easter and Christmas, and give vacations to their workers. So what’s the point of pretending the entire school’s not Christian-based, when obviously the rest of America is?

Either way, I’ve had difficulty holding a religion ever since I was little, and for the longest time, I declared that I was an atheist. In the recent past, I’ve made a few conclusions, and I’m not quite sure about being an atheist anymore. I decided to document my thoughts by making my final AP English Language and Composition paper about it – the fourth dimension as a religion. I know that the Bible states this legendary God being is our creator, but it provides insufficient evidence for me to believe it. But what if God was in the fourth dimension? Just like a two-dimensional being could not look in the direction of the third dimension, what if we, three-dimensional beings, can’t see God because we can’t look in the direction of the fourth dimension? All of a sudden science starts making a connection with religion, and connections are made.

This is where things get complicated. Luckily, I have the rest of the quarter to write the paper. I wanted some general input on this, which is why I made this the topic of my blog post today. Comment with your views on your religion and what you think about the fourth dimension; your input will be greatly appreciated.

You hear it all the time. "Vista sucks. Vista sucks." Not many people really give you a reason, but just continue saying, "Vista sucks. Vista sucks." This has made some people hesitant to try Windows Vista, and encouraged them to stick with XP. Unfortunately, even after reading all these horrible reviews and messages of discontent, I still had to try Vista out for myself.After using a Windows Vista Ultimate DVD I had laying around to install my new, shiny, glossy-black operating system, I was pretty content. When I clicked, there were flashy animations and smooth transitions. I felt like I was on top of everything, and ready to accomplish the world. I just couldn’t get enough of it; I fiddled with preferences and settings everywhere I could find them.

Then, I realized that Vista kept asking me for administrative permissions to carry out tasks that I started. I deleted an unnecessary folder in the Program Files folder, and it asked if it could have permission to delete it. I installed a font, and it asked if it could have permission to install it. I even opened an application, and it asked if it could have permission to open it. I started getting slightly annoyed, but I felt as if I could deal with it. I resumed using my new operating system without much further thought.

Not much later, my real problems started rolling in. I had compatibility issues with just about everything. I tried connecting my TI-89 Titanium calculator to my laptop, and Vista kept telling me it couldn’t find the driver, even though I installed it and manually placed the driver in the proper location three times. I tried to open a .jar file in BlueJ for Java programming, and Vista kept telling me it couldn’t create a temporary folder to keep my extracted files in. I went ahead and manually created the folder for it, but Vista still insisted on creating itself, and failed. I tried accessing my website files using Webdisk to add and update pages, but Vista told me my website URL was not a valid location. I went to Microsoft’s downloads page to get the patch for using web folders, installed it five times, restarted three times, and nothing happened. According to Vista, my website didn’t exist.

The above list is just a few out of many problems I’ve experienced. A bunch of people suggested that I run the software in compatibility mode, but that did nothing either. Ultimately, I dug up my old Windows XP installation DVD and upgraded.

Vista sucks.

Not that long ago, I heard a supposedly true story about something that happened in South Korea. Apparently, a young man died while playing World of Warcraft… for 36 hours straight. I’m not quite sure if he ate or used the bathroom, but obviously he did not sleep. This man has set the archetype for dim-witted gamers, and is a disgrace to Koreans across the world. I personally have never played World of Warcraft before, and I don’t ever wish to either; I’d rather not get addicted to something that doesn’t even make me high.

What is the true purpose of these games? We accomplish nothing by gaming except for wasting our lies and making ourselves stupid. People think these games are fun and entertainment, when they’re actually mere repetitive tasks done over and over again, with a bonus of animated graphics. To "train" or "level up," you must complete the same task hundreds, thousands, or even millions of times.

A few days ago, I remembered a game that I was a beta tester for. AdventureQuest Worlds is a multiplayer game written using Flash, by Artix Entertainment, the makers of BattleOn, DragonFable, and MechQuest. I went back to AdventureQuest Worlds and logged in, to find that the game was no longer in beta testing mode, but now public. I had gotten myself to Level 2 while the beta testing period was effective, and when I logged in, my profile was transferred over as-is to the public version. I clicked around for a little while and killed some monsters, training my account up manually to Level 3. While I was training, I met another guy training in the same spot, and we talked for a little while. We added each other to our Friends Lists, and he left.

I then realized that each time I clicked and waited, I was doing the same thing over and over, just like any other role-playing game with monster fighting. I concluded that it was pointless, and was about to log out and do something else.

ALL OF A SUDDEN I REMEMBERED THAT THE GAME WAS WRITTEN IN FLASH.

USING MY ULTIMATE PACKET TRANSFER SNIFFING AND SOCKET IDENTIFICATION SKILLS, I SPAMMED THE ADVENTUREQUEST WORLDS SERVER WITH THOUSANDS OF DATA PACKAGES THAT MADE IT SEEM LIKE I WAS FIGHTING THE MONSTER OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN WHEN I WAS JUST SITTING HERE!

WITHIN MINUTES, ADVENTUREQUEST WORLDS THOUGHT I DEFEATED HUNDREDS UPON HUNDREDS OF ENEMIES AND AWARDED ME WITH THOUSANDS OF GOLD AND EXPERIENCE!

I went from Level 3 to Level 20, the level cap, in one day. I maxed out my gold capacity of 1 million. Later that evening, I came across the same guy again that I had met earlier that morning. He saw me, and asked in disbelief, "Are you the same guy as the one I met this morning?" With my affirmative response, he "…" for a while, then said "wtfhax?!"

As clearly described, the only ultimate goal in gaming is to reach the level cap, the gold cap, or whatever maximum there is to your character. What people spend months completing, I was able to finish in one day with some background knowledge on Flash and a good internet connection. Is it really worth it when there’s people out there like me, completing the same tasks in less than a fraction of the time? I guess there’s only thing you can say… "wtfhax?!"