The Desert of My Dreams

Happy Birthday Cari!

Only one more year until your quarter-life crisis! Enjoy the last year of your early twenties!

I’m sitting next to Erika in infoviz right now and she’s got paragraphs of notes. I’ve only managed to take a few sentences of notes.

Hmmm.

Adobe would make a killing if they somehow integrated EndNote-like features into Acrobat. I’m envisioning something that would have better support for creating a library of PDFs, managing your citations, and taking notes.

My current setup of EndNote, PDFs, and paper copies isn’t cutting it. There’s got to be a better way to do this . . . and a way to do it so that I don’t have to lug around a three-inch binder of literature.

I’m pretty new to EndNote so maybe there is something that I’m missing? Maybe I’ll appreciate it more once I’ve inputted all of my notes?

Hmmm.

I’ve been living in my apartment for a little over two months and the apartment across from me has been empty that whole time. For a while, I was anxiously anticipating my new neighbors. Who will they be? When will they move in? What will they look like? As September came and went and the apartment stayed empty, I started getting lonely and thinking that nobody will ever move in. Why won’t anybody move into the apartment with hardwood floors that is across from me? Are they scared of the faux terrorist name that is on my mailbox? Does my flowers Welcome mat emit a sense that a violent psychoatic lives here? What could it possibly be that is keeping them all away from renting out the apartment across the hall?!?

Nonetheless, my anxious anticipation quickly faded as I realized that having no neighbors across from me was rather nice. I can throw junk out in the hallway, blast my music, and invite people over all without worrying about offending my neighbors. Moreover, it was just so nice and quiet . . . all the time. I had the third floor of my building all to myself.

I’ve grown attached to my third floor. That’s right, it’s my third floor.

Alas, nothing lasts forever and right now some girl is moving in across from me and I feel violated. Someone is encroutching encroaching on my terrority . . . MY third floor. How dare she and her parents move furniture into the apartment across the hall with hardwood floors? Why are they huffing and puffing as they move boxes in? Why are they having loud conversations in the hallway about going downtown for lunch and finding the dumpster? Why won’t they shutup and stop making noise!

And who moves into an apartment on Halloween weekend anyway?

Oh goodie, they’ve left for lunch. It is nice and quiet once again.

J: I met the State Archivist of Michigan!

Noor: Cool!

J: Someday I’ll be the Archivist of the United States!

Noor: There’s an Archivist of the United States?!? What does he do? Archive the entire United States? [Imagines J. in a Captain America suit with the words “ARCHIVES” plastered across his chest.]

J: No, he just oversees the government archives.

Noor: Oh. [Still imagines J. flying around the country in the Archives Captain America suit picking up artifacts, saving records, and placing finding aids.]

I’m taking a UM “Healthy Minds” survey right now and this question just cracked me up:

This question asks about ways you may have hurt yourself on purpose, without intending to kill yourself. In the past 4 weeks, have you ever done any of the following intentionally?
(Check all that apply)

Cut myself
Burned myself
Banged my head or other body part
Scratched myself
Punched myself
Pulled my hair
Bit myself
Interfered with wound healing
Other (specify)
No, none of these

I really shouldn’t be laughing because this is a serious question and troubled people really do do those things but it just seems like if you’ve burned yourself in the past four weeks, you probably wouldn’t be in the mental state to answer an online survey.

But that’s just my hunch.

Two is the number of Blockbusters I had to go to tonight before finding an instock copy of The Net.

There better be more than five people at tomorrow night’s SOCHI movie night.

I played around with Flock for like ten minutes. It’s cool (the integration with del.icio.us and your own blog is awesome) but it is super slow. I have a gig of ram on my laptop and it was crawling. Typing up the last post took five minutes - the response rate was that bad (I’m typing this from FireFox right now). It is a “developer preview” so I shouldn’t be too harsh.

In any case, it’s a nifty idea and I’ll play around with it some more when I’ve got time.

I’m blogging from Flock right now.

My friend Stephanie (from way back at SIUE) works at a school that is trying to win a contest for a mobile computer lab. So just go to this site and vote for her school!