Good Intentions

I’m testing out Raven to see how well it works. Don’t really like the fact that I can’t add categories from it, though.

From here:

Texas A&M fans are considering a “jort-out” game in 2008. ^[4] Many believe this is a way of attracting attention to their ever rapidly decreasing relevence in the college football landscape.

HA! That is hilarious. I bet it’ll be removed soon, hence why I’ve quoted it here. Take that, Aggies!

I went back to the original theme. Wow. I’m ridiculous.

I changed it again. If that isn’t indicative of my state of mind these days, well, then nothing is.

Once again, let me know what you think.

Also, I changed the theme. Let me know what you think, if you care enough.

UH won, Texas won, and A&M lost.

Verily, it was a good day for football.

Nothing to report. Enjoying the long weekend and (somewhat) taking it easy. I just bought a collection of Borges’s works, so I’m probably gonna crack that open for awhile.

Labor Day. Awesome.

Only four more days of work left, counting today. That is all I want to say right now, because it’s dominating my thoughts.

I think I can, I think I can…

Phew, that was a bit of a break.

So, here I am, with only 8 more days of work left and then the real fun begins: the agonizing countdown to orientation and the first day of class. I’ve actually finally received my schedule from UH, so that’s somewhat comforting. Except comforting is the wrong word; really what I mean is terrifying. But in a giddy, schoolchild kind of way.

You know, like back in elementary school when you’d get your teacher assignment and you’d scan the room looking for someone you know but then that slow-dawning horror of realization crosses your mind like a dusky shadow, that no, you don’t know anyone in this class and you never will, no, you will be the pariah, the outcast, eating your peanut butter and jelly sandwich alone every single solitary day of elementary school, alone, alone, all alone.

Or maybe it was just me? Ha.

Anyway, the sched is fairly ok. I start at 9:00 MTTh, 9:30 on Friday, and 10:30 on Wednesday. Not too shabby. Torts, Contracts, Legal Research, and Procedure. Fun stuff, right?

Right.

I was looking at the orientation schedule for UH, and it’s two days long. Not so bad, right? Well, for the first day’s schedule, it goes from 8am til around 4pm…ALL IN ONE ROOM. No other room is listed. I hope we don’t have to sit on our asses for 8 hours in the auditorium. That would suck a skosh.

Only 8 more workdays left, and it seems my tasks are drying up. That’s a good sign, right? Well, not so good for boredom. On the plus side, blogging at work is fun!

Like I mentioned previously, I tripped over a variety of social media tools yesterday–Plurk, Jaiku, HelloTxt, and I’ve already been using Twitter pretty extensively.

But does all of this lead to too much connectivity? Are we too plugged in?

As Danielle mentioned over in The Road to Waco, what happened to letter writing? Epistles! There was a whole novel form based on epistles back in the early days of the Union–the epistolary novel, 19th century brainchild for rich people who wanted to take their minds off how rich they were. The novel was a series of letters passed back and forth from the main characters, and that is how the action of the plot was driven forward.

I had a penpal back in third grade. It was a fun experience, and I’d like to try that again. Anyone know of any penpal sites?

I’ve been using Twitter now for quite some time, and while I do enjoy it, the interface leaves a little something to be desired: it’s clunky and doesn’t do much, really. That’s why I’ve been checking out Plurk, which adds some interesting features onto the model Twitter has already created.

Plurk adds a timeline view, which allows for more interactivity with the short messages themselves, and also each message creates a “thread” so that replies can be easily recalled. Plurk seems to lend itself more to group conversations, while Twitter allows for powerful one-on-one conversations to which outsiders can easily respond.

One of the downsides of Plurk, of course, is that I have only one friend currently, and no fans, while on Twitter I have something like 20 followers (a paltry sum, but I’m proud of it). What’s worse, it seems the user bases don’t intersect all that much, or at least they don’t yet.

What I WOULD like to see is some way to connect all of these services, so I can just use the “portal, and therefore interface, of my choice to communicated with multiple services. That would be quite neat.

There’s also this article which is very enlightening and speaks to the differences between the two.

I think each has its uses, and I will be using both now, I think. Of course, there’s also Jaiku, which is invite-only right now, and I hope to get an invite one of these days so I can check it out.

EDIT: Ack! I just found another, Brightkite. Invite-only as well.

EDIT DOS: I stumbled onto another service called HelloTxt. It lets you update all of your social media accounts at once. More info to follow?