Okay guys. Tomorrow morning I head off to California to take a test. It’ll be over on Thursday, after which I will be on vacation for a while.
I’ll be in San Francisco from the 1st to the 4th, then in Vancouver from the 4th to the 7th, then in Seattle from the 7th to the 10th. It’s not a lot of time in any of those places, but I’m hoping to be able to meet up with anybody who’s around. Leave me a comment here or email me (calamityjake at gmail dot com) if you want to make that happen–although I may not be able to get back to you til after the exam is over.
Good luck to everyone else who’s taking the bar–I’ll be back on the internet, hopefully with something more interesting to say, in August.
I really enjoyed this interview between Dan “DC Sports Bog” Steinberg and Chris “Chris Cooley’s Official Blog” Cooley. It made me feel a bit bad for Fabini. Also, when Cooley mentioned that his blog gets ten or fifteen thousand hits a day, it made me feel a bit bad for myself.
If you don’t have time for the whole thing, you can just catch the highlights at this page.
Lately, a bunch of my RSS feeds have been silent all day (or sometimes longer than a day), then popping up with dozens of new items all at once. Usually it’s a bunch of posts I haven’t seen yet, but occasionally it’s a bunch of old ones. What I want to know is whether this is a Google Reader problem, or, e.g., a GawkerPlex problem. Have any of you who don’t use Google Reader (are there any of you?) run into this problem?
Second problem: For some reason, as of a week or so ago, Google Reader is including all of my shared items (which, pretty much by definition, I’ve already read) in my “Unread Items” count. It’s also including them in my “All Items” stream, so I can’t practically use that to scan my new items.
Is this what resting on your laurels look like? Or is Google’s development team busy working out the kinks on Google Reader 2.0?
Update: Well, that’s one feed accounted for. But my general query remains!
Disjointed Batman thoughts (with tons of spoilers) after the jump. To be clear, I talk about lots of stuff that happened in the movie, so if you haven’t seen it yet and want to be surprised, do not read the rest of this.
One of the reasons I’m so busy right now is that I’m trying to find a place to live in Washington DC. Finding a place is annoying enough generally, but it’s especially aggravating this time because I’m not in DC, and can’t actually see these places in person. So I’m spending a lot of time trolling craigslist, trying to sift the useful listings from the ugly, overpriced, desolate, and creepy ones. Not to mention the thinly-veiled ads.
Which is all to say that I’m getting really sick of seeing listings claiming that apartments are three blocks from the metro when anyone who knows the city (or, um, has ever been to the apartment) knows that it’s at least seven blocks away. And that’s a generous calculation. It’s not three blocks, it’s never been three blocks, and unless they pave over Willard, Swann, Riggs, and Corcoran streets, it will never be three blocks. So we’re talking about brazen deceit here, not “putting yourself in the best light” or however we characterize the piddling inaccuracies that riddle our resumes and facebook profiles.
Now, in the bad old days, this kind of thing might have been more effective. But we’re a bit better equipped to assess these claims. Why bother lying, when the truth is so easy to suss out? I Guess We’ll Never Know.
After I take the bar, maybe I’ll have time for posts based on something other than my site visitor logs (or cut-and-pasting from someone else’s blog). Until then…
I’ve been thinking about my most popular posts, in terms of hits (most coming from web search sites). The common thread is that Googlers really want to know how to do stuff: how to reset their ipods, how to block the stupid video on ESPN’s homepage, and how John Basedow died in the tsunami (or not).
The first two links (A and B) consistently get more hits than the rest of my blog, combined. The ESPN one, I get–it was linked by Deadspin, and actually fixes a problem that lots of people have. But the iPod one is even more popular, and the actual content of the post is basically just a series of links to other, useful sites. I don’t understand it.
And the John Basedow post is not actually that popular, but it is a personal favorite, especially since the lazyweb came up big and I now have the mp3 of the John Basedow theme song, of which I will never tire.
Now You Know.
Hey, Common Sense Dancing did it again. EW has another list up, of “the New Classics”–movies of the last 25 years. The ones I’ve seen are in bold, the ones I’ve seen and loathed are in bold/italics (spoiler alert: the movies I hated are Hoop Dreams, Drugstore Cowboy, and Napoleon Dynamite). Enjoy this fascinatingself-indulgent look into my likes and dislikes. (The last 90 movies, and my thoughts on the list, after the jump.)
1. Pulp Fiction (1994)
2. The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-03)
3. Titanic (1997)
4. Blue Velvet (1986)
5. Toy Story (1995)
6. Saving Private Ryan (1998)
7. Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)
8. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
9. Die Hard (1988)
10. Moulin Rouge (2001)
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