off-topics

I was planning to write about going shopping… hell, i had written the entire entry already. And then one, tiny, inadvertant window resize caused Netscape to reload all the of the visible frames (instead of just the one it needed to shrink) and my twenty minutes of writing was gone. I hate Netscape. Yes, it’s the only browser i have ever used. Yes, i love the options i get out of the right click menu. But, frankly, it just isn’t worth it anymore. I have lost more of my own written material this month to the whims of Netscape than i have ever lost to any computer i have owned in the last five years. Why? Because of my incompetence? I wish i could say that was the cause, since it is one i can personally control. Sadly, it is because Netscape has rapidly degraded to a buggy piece of shit (which i’m sure has something to do with AOL owning it). So, it looks as though i might be forced to turn to MSIEX. Is it designed for an idiot? Yes. Does its integration into Windows make it both a nuisance and a threat? For sure. Does it give you options you don’t need but take away options you should have? Totally. Do i have any choice other than to switch? None whatsoever. Right now the only reason i still use Netscape is that i have five years of mail saved in my backfiles for Messenger. But we’ve all got to leave home sometime.

One of my friends stole my Natalie Imbruglia cd Senior year of highschool. Ok, maybe she didn’t steal it, but she currently still has possession of it. In Boston. This is why i am leery about lending things to people. I, of course, have ultimate trust that my all expansive love of music will be respected by the timely returning of my CDs, but that hardly ever works out. One of the other Orientation Leaders has my Living In Clip CD, and if i don’t have it back by the end of this week i might start to get violent. Oh yeah, starting now there is a no lending policy in effect. Ever.

So, apparently the turn around time for gettings new Blogs into the the directory on the Blogger site is something like 4 days. Which means, by the time i am official i will only have about three posting days before i move into my new apartment. It also gives me three days to pile the content onto this thing so that the people from Blogger are shocked and appalled at the amount of free time i have. I mean, that sounds like a plan, doesn’t it?

I think that the whole purpose of a blogger (when it isn’t being used as a posting mechanism to something more defined) should be to develop thoughts. Sure, not everyone is interested in that process, but i think a blogger is the perfect tool for people who are frequent posters on e/n sites of all shapes and sizes. In one day i went through quite a few thoughts on this page, and amongst them i struck on two quality posts which i developed for shafted. Perhaps this is the communications major in me talking, but i think each poster at Shafted should have their own blogger to doodle in, and for everyone to see. Bloggers would be like farm teams, and some posts would get called up to the big leagues while others held down the fort in Reading (or wherever your AAA teams plays). There is a niche for every artistic and asthetic impulse on the internet, but you can’t always cram them into the wrong ones.

Scarius over at shafted has been a friend and classmate of mine for a long time. I can tell you right now that he is one of the more intelligent members of my peer group i have ever met, but sometimes he doesn’t strike me as the most rational. Shafted has been going through some growing pains this summer, especially because some of its regulars are vacationing and they were augmented with the addition of myself and my good friend Yorick as posters to the site. The recent growing pains have had to do with who posts what and why anyone else should care. I personally have a policy of posted highly editted posts of some length that are always accompanied by a picture and a song lyric for a title. Scarius posts whenever the feeling moves him. I suggested that he ought to get a blogger for such purposes, at which point he said something to the effect of “you don’t understand.” And then he posted 7 or 8 times in a single twelve hour span. I think that was rather borish of him.