I lost a $1500 scholarship today.

I won a $1500 scholarship from the Daytona Beach College Foundation (of Daytona Beach, FL, USA) in the Fall of 2007. It is split into two semesters. There is a rule: “You can only receive one DBCC [sic, DBC used to be Daytona Beach Community College] Foundation Donor scholarship per semester.” Many of the scholarships are spread out over two or even three semesters. So, in my strategic cunning, I interpreted the rule in the manner that is most beneficial to me: you may only be awarded one scholarship per semester, but you may be profiting from the sacred funds of multiple donors in simultaneity.

I’m not one to ask questions. Ten times the yeses come from decisive action rather than cautious inquiry. I went ahead and entered for the scholarship. Surely if I interpreted that rule erroneously, I would receive no award, right? I finished my application online on 2007-10-25, with a glowing recommendation from Dr. Casey Blanton, my humanities professor in the QUANTA learning community, and author of Travel Writing: The Self and the World. No error messages or notifications of my ineligibility. It must be fine, right?

December 10 rolls around, and I receive this delightful news from the postman:

Dear Richard:

Congratulations! On behalf of Daytona Beach Community College, I am pleased to advise you that you have been awarded a $1,500 scholarship from the Elizabeth Barr Studio Arts Scholarship Fund. Your scholarship will be awarded over two semesters for the spring 2008 ($750) and fall 2008 ($750) semesters at DBCC [sic]. This scholarship is not transferable to any other semesters.

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I was commenting on this poll by Sortvind at deviantART about web browser usage, and want to share my wonderful insight with my readers.

I use Mozilla Firefox because of the great tab control, automation, nice bookmarks toolbar, no text aliasing, other add-ons, and general speediness. But it slows down a lot as I leave one window open for days (using Windows’ hibernation function at night); it’ll even lock up and make everything else slow as molasses, as it steals all the CPU cycles and RAM. I did re-install recently, switching from the portable version to the regular Windows installer, but to no avail. It surely doesn’t help that I like to keep 20 tabs open.

Firefox was originally supposed to be simple and fast, replacing the slow Mozilla suite, but with spell-checking, RSS support, history caching, etc. in the core instead of being relegated to add-ons, it’s becoming increasingly heavy-weight. Inefficiencies in the code don’t help either, though changes will mess up the plugins people love, I hear.

Incidentally, there is the same problem of slowness with Wordpress; I and many other users have to use caching to stay running during traffic spikes. Though most database-driven websites use caching, it’s particularly necessary due to Wordpress’ inefficiencies. And they won’t be going away or else plugins will break. At least we get