Just trying out the “blog post” option in Microsoft Word 2007.

Will delete if I hate it, but who knows? I may end up loving it and using it every day.

It just depends on what happens. Yup.

I need to rethink my website. Something that requires daily attention is (obviously) not working for me.

I have proved that I suck at consistent blogging. I’m just going to face it. Ah, well.

So the first day of classes is over and done with. It’s always a relief to get the first week out of the way so that you can know what to expect from classes and homework. I had four classes today, starting with archery at 7:45, which, if I keep it, I will definitely be auditing. The way the teacher grades is based mostly on attendance, but also the top 1/3 of the class get A’s while the rest of the class gets A-’s. That’s a fair way to grade, I guess. Not everyone can get A’s. I just don’t personally want a 1 credit PE class messing up my GPA because I know that I’ll be at the lower end of the class already.

Not really much else to say except that I HATE 2:00 classes. 1:00 is fine. 3:00 is fine. But 2:00? That’s when I crash. My Intro to Programming class is at 2:00, and I can already tell I am going to have such a hard time concentrating in there. Oh my goodness. Also, fun times, is that it’s in a classroom with no computers, but with smallish tables. It’s kinda like circle time in elementary school.

ETA: Oh yeah, I was looking into some GRE prep stuff and it just depressed me. I thought I had a pretty decent vocabulary, but apparently it’s not decent enough. I can see that I’m going to be doing some studying in the near future.

Connected to my earlier post, as a part of trying to make this the best senior year ever! I really would like to volunteer for some of the activity programs on campus. The problem is, you have to volunteer for them at the beginning of the semester when you’re (or, I’m at least) not too sure about what my schedule and time constraints are going to look like yet between school and work. I read on some of the application submissions that volunteering can take anywhere from 3-8 hours a week. That doesn’t seem like a lot right now, but who knows how I’ll feel after two weeks when my schedule has hammered itself out?

The other problem is, some of the volunteer positions don’t even come with smallish descriptions as to what these opportunites entail. So, I’m volunteering to help with a specific event on campus. So . . . what? Does that mean that I’ll be asked to help with lighting or maybe advertising? Ah, well.

Well, after what was the longest summer of my life, I am finally back to school tomorrow, which means my life will take on the appearance of normalcy again after a crazy two weeks.

To recap: I quit my job on the 24th and spent the next week playing around and packing. After that, I went on a 36-hour drive from Alabama to Idaho with my younger brother. We drove pretty much all night (we stopped for two hours at a gas station an hour outside of Denver). After that, I’ve been packing and adjusting to student life again.

My schedule is so nice this semester. I’m taking 19 credits, though, so I don’t know how I managed it. Also, this is my senior year. To me, that’s crazy! Only one more year before I enter the “real world” as it were. We’ll see how things go.

I like using StumbleUpon website to surf the internet for cool or useful sites. Here are a few I’ve found recently that you may enjoy:

blockposters.com - Make your very own large wall posters using your very own images. Depending on the size of the poster, you’ll probably want to have an image with pretty good resolution, but it’s totally customizable. It gives you a pdf file that you can download and print. All for free.

Sheep Reflexes - Discover how fast your reflexes are with this fun little flash game from the BBC. I’m pretty much rubbish at this, but you gamers might have better luck.

dailygalaxy.com - Cool science-related blog. Added it to my RSS feeds.

Snow art from Calvin and Hobbes - Collection of Calvin and Hobbes snow art comic strips. Very entertaining.

gnod.com - Get movie, music, and book recommendations in a graphical map format. Interesting.

jellybattle.com - Become a jelly man jumping from platform to platform trying to beat other jelly men. It’s trippy to think about but fun to play.

1. Blogging is a lot of work. Aside from writing posts and maintaining things around here, it’s a lot of work trying to establish a presence in the blogosphere. Reading and commenting on other people’s blogs, checking stats and Technorati, trying to drive traffic . . . how do people do it? How do people find time to do it? Yet, here I am.
2. Blogging is fairly nerve wracking. I thought I was prepared. I don’t think I was. It’s weird thinking that other people may be reading what I’ve written and making judgments about me. They could think I’m an idiot. They could think that I have no idea what I’m talking about (probably, I don’t). Is anyone I know reading? I don’t know why that matters, but somehow it does.
3. Blogging is expressive. Sometimes I’ve just got stuff to say and nowhere to say it. This gives me a platform. (All right, not a very large one, but still.)

A stereotype I especially hate that English majors are just English majors because they can’t do anything else. I’ve had this argument with my father I don’t know how many times now:

Him: Joke about English majors.
Me: English is valuable!
Him: Too subjective.
Me: There are standards, you know.
Him: Ha.
Me: No, for reals, there are! Bad grammar abounds! English majors are about helping people communicate with each other!
Him: You could have been an astronaut.
Me: o.o;

If you’re an English major be prepared to hear the question, “What do you want to do, teach?” more times than you can possibly count. I try not to be rude when answering this question, but it’s hard. It’s like people can’t even fathom that there may be another career path out there for English students. Gah.

But then I read about silly things like this where people who use language (journalists, writers, pr people) are admitting to be total dunces when it comes to math and science. GAH.

If you can’t even do elementary math, how did you get through your formal education? How did you get a college degree? No one expects journalists to be the next Isaac Newton or anything, but they should at least be math- and science-literate enough to be able to recognize blatant errors in either calculations or reasoning.

No wonder so much junk science gets published. The people publishing it have no idea what they’re printing!

Let’s look at the other end of the stick, shall we? No one expects scientists and/or mathematicians to be great writers either, but they do have to know a thing or to about communication to get published. They may know or care about dangling participles or sentence fluency, but they’d better know enough about the language to put a subject and a verb together (so that an editor can worry about the rest of it).

I, for one, like science and math. And I think it’s possible to be good with both verbal and mathematical reasoning. Please, English majors, let’s start acting like we’re smart and maybe other people will realize that we are.

Can I just say that I, for one, think that openness could be a good idea?

Basically, the article says that if you have a Facebook or MySpace account or some similar social networking account, it would definitely be a benefit to be able to interact with people on different services without actually having to sign up for that network.

I don’t even necessarily think it’s a problem at the moment. On the one hand you have dedicated MySpacers and on the other dedicated Facebookers and on the . . . third hand . . . dedicated . . . something elsers? And right now each camp appears pretty happy with where they are. Sure you have some people who use both, but for the most part it’s “never the twain shall meet.” And people are cool with it. I have no desire to open a MySpace account.

But . . . wouldn’t it be cool if I could add people from MySpace and interact with them without actually having to get MySpace?

Right now, like I said, not a problem for me. My perception of MySpace is that it’s mostly high school kids trying to look cool and failing miserably. But . . . wouldn’t it be cool? You could still keep all the security features of whichever site you’re using (I, for one, like the fact that only people in my network can view my profile, for instance).

I think the OpenID format is all about this, if only more sites would support it. I don’t necessarily think it’s the best implementation, but there it is.

Heck, why stop at social networking? Where’s the blogging interaction? Why can’t Wordpress’ers and Moveable Type’ers and LiveJournal’ers and Blogger’ers all just get along? Wouldn’t the world be happier?