Calibration

Wow, it’s been quite a long time since my last post. I customized the HTML style for this journal a bit, although most people (who read my entries through their Friends pages) won’t notice it.

During my last couple of days at home, I drove up to Boston. It was a ton of fun seeing everyone. Since then I’ve been back here trying to do some research. I’m way behind in prelim studying still.

I’ve decided not to move back to IHouse — as fun as I’m sure it’ll be, I don’t think a second year at IHouse will be quite as revelatory as the first. Also, I need to do work, and I need to make some long-term friends. So instead I’m moving in with Umesh. It’ll be my first taste of life as a high roller. I’m used to living cheaply and not owning lots of stuff. Umesh is the opposite. We’ll see how much of a material boy I am.

I’ve noticed that (at least on my friends page) people are leaving fewer comments on other people’s entries than they used to. I wonder why that might be.

It occurred to me the other day that this journal is fairly useless: it consists of either stories or boring regurgitations of daily activities. And I’m bad at telling stories. Perhaps I should rethink this thing.

I was talking to Kerry a while back and we realized that it would be a good idea (or at least fun) to compile a “book” of dating sense: things that work and don’t work in the world of relationships, qualities to look for in the other person, etc. Of course this has been done a thousand times before but such books always seem way off target (or too generic: “look for a sense of humor” blah blah). We were thinking of things like
– Tit-for-tat is generally the best way to handle meals and outings. Either you’re treating the other person or getting treated — both nice.
– It’s really important that the other person be interested. Not just in you (although that’s certainly nice, or course!) but in things in general that she (or he) may be unfamiliar with now but that she’s willing to eager to explore just because the concepts are interesting. An engaged, open mind is a huge plus!
Stuff like that. I’m too lazy to type out more. If you feel like it, send me others if you know any…

I’ve been toying around with an idea for a new site for a while now. I’m not very good at writing LJ entries, but I am pretty good at reading huge amounts of news every day and selecting good bits for other people to read. I always end up emailing some friends some of the articles, and neither I nor they have a comprehensive list or even a forum on which to discuss the articles.

So I was thinking of creating such a site. I’ve already been recording my favorite articles from the past couple of weeks. I’d like the site to have the following properties:
For each entry:
Title
Abstract/Byline
URL
Date
Sent by
(should be able to add more such fields at a later date!)
Comments *** very important
(voting? “how interesting is this article?”)

Search by Date/Source/Author/Text

LJ is nearly a good venue but unless I can squeeze some of that stuff into header fields (“mood”, “music”), it’ll be hard to have it look good (e.g. formatted in HTML) and also searchable by different fields, unless I simultaneously keep a separate database elsewhere.

Does anyone know of some easy-to-use software that does all of this?

Gosh, this has been one of the all-time most boring entries ever. Here’s a marginally more interesting observation: despite our country’s obsession with violence and guns, as portrayed by video games, the media, movies, and so on, and its constituents’ fairly fanatical devotion to gun-ownership rights, I’ve personally never seen a real civilian gun in my life. Sure I’ve seen the tops of guns sticking out of police holsters, but I’ve never seen a whole gun, certainly not one owned by a normal person. I find that fairly incredible.

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