Day: March 9, 2004

I think Atom is stupid, and Blogger is stupid for using it. But now, feed on feeds supports Atom! Which doesn’t make it less stupid, but does mean I finally get to read Blogger blogs via aggregator.

Future plans for my aggregator include somehow fusing it with my cell phone, or giving it lasers. I may also paint flames on the sides (we all know what that does). Plus, someday, it will babysit my kids.

It’s only March

My notes are mostly doodles now, but I can’t claim the same kind of downhill slide as Amy, because they were mostly doodles to begin with. I think the first page of last semester’s notebook was all doodles.

What it gets down to is that I don’t pay much attention in class, which is bad. But the professor for whom I have two of my classes hands out hard copies of his PowerPoint presentations every day, which is good. But I’m still not doing well in two of my classes, which is bad. But I get a lot of writing and drawing done, which is good. But I’m still not drawing comics and I haven’t gotten around to publishing my writing project yet, which is bad.

Grad school is proving very useful to me, in that I’m a much better programmer than I was six months ago, and also now I understand frequencies. It may well be, though, that it proves more useful as a way of forcing me to create via an acute and growing distaste for computer science. If I actually had a way to make a living writing, I know perfectly well that I would instead play Dynasty Warriors and never write anything, until I ran out of food and starved. But being stuck in a quiet room with lots of math and Web Serwices[1] is a pretty efficient way to turn my desire for escape into a very exacting word count.

Amy’s blog is pretty great, by the way.

[1] Not a typo.

It occurred to me the other day that to all appearances, I completely touch-type now. I learned to type ages ago, during my first year of high school, and could theoretically do it then. I never quite got rid of my bad glance-at-the-keys habits, though–habits that persisted through high school (when I didn’t type all that much) and college (when I did). I never quite mastered the numbers row, either. I can touch-type numbers on the numeric keypad now, though, and I appear to have left my glancing habits behind (unless I’m subconsciously reading keys out the bottom of my eyes).

I do still need to glance down for things like ampersands and square brackets, so maybe I should hold off on the plan to cover all my home keyboard keys with decals and clear gloss. Also, it would make it kind of tough if anybody else wanted to use my computer, and I’d look like a showoff bastard. It’s tempting, though. Think about it–I could cover them all with patcheyed smiley faces and be totally Hackers!