Our 2007 Scripps Spelling Bee national champion is Evan O’Dorney of Danville, Calif., who spelled “serrefine” in the 13th round to win more than $45,000 in cash and prizes and a lifetime supply of bragging rights. He beat 285 of the best young spellers despite missing his pre-bee ritual which is to eat fish, specifically a Tuna fish sandwich from Subway because “fish is good for the brain” he said.

Samir Patel’s was considered to be this year’s favorite (2nd place last year) and in one quick moment of the 5th round his dreams were dashed with the word “clevis.” His mother lodged a protest over the subtleties in the difference with ‘clevice’ but the judges denied the request to reinstate him.

serre-fine (sar-fn, sr-)
n.  A small spring forceps used for approximating the edges of a wound, or for temporarily closing an artery during surgery.

clev-is (klev-is)
n.  A U-shaped yoke at the end of a chain or rod, between the ends of which a lever, hook, etc., can be pinned or bolted.

These were the 15 finalists at the 80th Scripps Bee:

Jonathan Horton, 14, Gilbert, Ariz.

Evan O’Dorney, 13, Danville, Calif.

Tia Thomas, 12, Coarsegold, Calif.

Cody Wang, 13, Calgary, Alberta

Nate Gartke, 13, Spruce Grove, Alberta

Anqi Dong, 12, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan

Joseph Henares, 14, Avon, Conn.

Claire Zhang, 14, Jupiter, Fla.

Kavya Shivashankar, 11, Olathe, Kan.

Nithya Vijayakumar, 13, Canton, Mich.

Connor Spencer, 14, Platte City, Mo.

Matthew Evans, 12, Albuquerque, N.M.

Prateek Kohli, 13, Westbury, N.Y.

Amy Chyao, 13, Richardson, Texas

Isabel Jacobson, 14, Madison, Wis.

‘They’re made out of meet’ is a 2 page scifi story by Terry Bisson that originally appeared in OMNI back in 1981.

The story is a conversation between two aliens that have apparently been monitoring us puny little Earthlings.

Link, enjoy.

In Vista, if you decide to switch from the standard QWERTY KB layout to Dvorak you would not make the change in the keyboard control panel applet. No, that would be too easy

Instead, you need to make the change deep within the International control panel applet (intl.cpl) titled ‘Regional and Language Options’. Not very intuitive is it?

You can launch this by entering intl.cpl in the Run dialog or drill down into the control panel for this little bugger:

Within the Regional and Language Options control panel, go to the ‘Keyboards and Languages’ tab then hit the ‘Change Keyboards’ button. This brings up the ‘Text Services and Input Languages’ panel.

Highlight the language you will be typing in (in the above case you can see it’s EN by default), then the ‘Add’ button will bring up the last dialog to deal with here which is the ‘Add Input Language’.

You can see the preview button to get the lay of the land before you make the big switch in case you’re going to be doing this by touch typing on a QWERTY board (in which case you’re a ‘manly man’). Here’s what the Dvorak preview looks like:

Tips on making the switch to Dvorak:

• For a while after making the switch you may need to give yourself frequent typing breaks throughout the day while you become familiar with the new layout
• Get a typing tutor. My favorite that helped me convert from ‘hunt and peck’ to about 50WPM is Mavis Beacon.
• Dvorak Keyboards on Wikipedia
• The muscle memory built up for keyboard shortcuts will need to be relearned (e.g., CTRL+C)
• You might want to change your password to something a little more convenient for the Dvorak for a short period until you’re more comfortable with the layout.

I noticed today that there’s a new security update for Firefox 2, it’s update 2.0.0.4.

In the update dialog the ‘details’ link sends you to the update’s release notes. Skim down to the Vista caveats section and see :

Vista Parental Controls are not completely honored. In particular, file downloads do not honor Vista’s parental control settings. This will be addressed in an upcoming Firefox release.

They’ve been diligently looking into it since October with limited success at blocking all downloads but at least the mozilla devs are calling it out and agree they need to fix it in the next release, whenever that is. Here’s the bug: Bug 355554 : “File downloads should honor Vista’s parent control setting”

In the meantime, if you’re a parent and expect to lock down your children through Vista’s Parental Controls, be wary if they’re surfing with FF.

Here’s more basic info from msdn blogs on Family Safety on Windows Vista basic Parental Controls settings and Parental Controls in IE7 with controls that are more hardcore and browser specific. For instance if a child tries to download a file, instead of seeing the standard run/save/cancel download dialog the child see this:

I found this little coding anecdote on reddit.com. It describes a software bug that is only exposed every 4 years and is not related to Leap Year.

Here’s Clinton Forbes.