• I grew a beard, then shaved it off, then grew it again, over and over and over again.
• I moved from my apartment in Cleveland Park to an apartment I’m sharing with my friend, Drew, in The Center of Cool DC (i.e., the 14th St. Corridor between Logan Circle and U St.).
• I obsessed over Foursquare and Twitter and Google Reader (and, related to these things, Fojol Brothers, ChurchKey, Google Wave, and Android). These obsessions have yet to wane, and indeed I have managed to infect many other people (but not enough!) with them.
• I went to Spain and ate all of that country’s pork and foie gras.
• I listened to the same music as ever–Daft Punk, Kanye West, Chromeo, Ratatat, the Old 97′s, Lily Allen, Lil Wayne, and Michael Jackson’s “Beat It”–on a continuously rotating basis.
• I relished the most recent seasons of Lost and Mad Men, and have so far found the current season of Top Chef to be a very enjoyable return to form. Dollhouse was as good as it could possibly be, but that actually wasn’t very good at all–it was a fundamentally flawed show that richly deserves cancellation.
• The Redskins went 2-6 against the easiest first-half schedule in the history of the NFL, because the owner refuses to hire professionals to manage the team and let them make football decisions. But then they won one game, and now everyone loves them again!
• Obviously, I completely lost the habit of posting anything on my blog. This may be permanent, although I would like to get back to it (even though, as I may explain in a forthcoming blog post, Twitter + Google Reader have essentially replaced whatever meager benefits I used to get out of having a blog).

And… that’s all, folks. See you again in 2010!

Am I taking crazy pills?

And furthermore…

[Geekologie via itchymutt]

Sorry if you’ve already seen this. I was delayed in posting it because I was watching the Redskins win an ugly one in Detroit. Go Skins.

From Fimoculous.

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.

Want to know if a celebrity is playing both sides of the fence? Whether that new guy you’re seeing is actually a Republican or just dresses like one?

FundRace makes it easy to search by name or address to see which presidential candidates your friends, family, co-workers, and neighbors are contributing to. Or you can see if your favorite celebrity is putting money where their mouth is.

So yeah, remember what I said about everything you say or do inevitably ending up online? Believe it.

I find this sneaky ad to be very good.

I logged in and tried to delete the songs from my playlist, but just got an error message. So it’s not just a weird caching problem, or an odd programming error–clearly there’s something in the system setting these lists and keeping them that way.

So what’s going on here? My guess is someone figured out an exploit and performed what is indisputably a goofy, harmless hack. But there’s always the slight delicious chance that the entire site was created for this purpose–to garner a large use base, get them used to the interface and hooked on the service, and then take advantage of it by spamming everybody with some unknown band’s latest piece of crap single.

Unfortunately, that is almost certainly not true, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if it were?

Incidentally, I haven’t actually bothered to listen to the song yet (amazon.co.uk review here–you’re welcome, Aim). But if it happens to be any good, I’m pretty sure we’ll be hearing a lot about it in the next day or two.

Update: Yep, Muxtape is saying they got hacked. Bummer.

So in that spirit, as you can see (if you aren’t reading this via RSS), I’ve changed the look of the blog. I’m customizing a bunch of stuff, and will probably break things as I go along, so let me know if you notice anything that doesn’t look right.

Update: The new theme sucked and was written by a moron so customizing it made it look like garbage. So I’ll be trying some other one(s). Wish me luck.

Update 2: This is a new new theme, and I’m liking it so far. Same deal–let me know if it doesn’t look right.

Turns out that on his first day, Jon Stewart was neither funny nor well dressed. Still, I think we can all agree that it’s pretty cool that the Daily Show website offers (immaculately tagged!) clips from shows going back to 1999. Thanks, internet, for this (from before Colbert was a hawk!):

Erin Jane Webster, 22, a long-term substitute teacher in Prince William, keeps a page similar to other teachers’. Portions are professional, but some parts suggest the author is in the throes of sorority rush.

Under a “Work Info” heading, the page reads, “Employer: Prince William County Schools. Location: Parkside Middle School Language Arts Teacher.” The section lists where she attended college (Radford ’07) and high school (Osbourn Park High ’03).

But the page features multiple “bumper stickers,” including one that uses a crude acronym for attractive mothers and another that says: “you’re a retard, but i love you.”

Teensy problem: Webster teaches students with emotional and learning disabilities. In an interview, she acknowledged her use of “retard” could be misconstrued. The word, generally considered offensive, circulates among some young people as acceptable derogatory slang.

“My best friend, she always calls me that because I say ditzy things,” Webster said. “My best friend and I would never go around calling people that. All of my [students] have emotional disorders or learning disabilities. . . . I love them.”

Anyway, my friend Lauren emailed me:

I think the answer is if you want a job in this day and age, you need to clean up your personal BUT PUBLIC profiles. I don’t think it’s that crazy to ask of someone. Yeah you might be 22 and “young” but you’re also asking to be part of the “adult” world. I mean when I applied to grad school I made my friendster profile private and I don’t keep a myspace or facebook page. And I have to accept that when I am on the job market or up for tenure, anything they can google about me becomes acceptable grounds for my evaluation. I guess the slippery slope is when you put something public that you don’t see anything wrong with, but the examples the article gave were clearly stupid!

And then I replied:

Yeah, some of those examples were egregious—might not want to call people “retards” when you work with the developmentally challenged! But there are real issues here, too—people our age put so much stuff online and if we ever become important, it’ll all come out. I don’t think I’ve posted anything that’s a big deal, but I’m sure some of it is objectionable. It’ll be weird once everybody in the public eye has this problem, we’ll have to revise our views of what constitutes “problematic material.”

Now I’m going to post this exchange, and it will become part of your permanent online file!

And that’s the story of how I spent 20 minutes I should have been spending writing a paper.

Edit: I just reread this and I hope it doesn’t seem like the point of this post is to make fun of Ms. Webster and the other examples in the article. I just think this issue–the effect of the public/private barrier getting blurred (or erased)–is important, and getting more important every day.

In case CNN wises up and yanks this feature:

The irony is that I think he’s probably right–this isn’t very good journalism. Baio should have tried to get in touch with the relevant persons (just about all of whom seem to be quite available) before publishing. No question, it’s a thorny issue–the material he’s citing was company property, so he doesn’t need permission from the employees to post it–and who knows what happened behind the scenes.

At any rate, there’s a lot to enjoy here, if you’re patient enough to wade through it all.

No time to write anything substantive, but this is pretty funny. [Kanye's Blog]

For me, though, the greatest use is keeping up with people without phone calls/emails/telegrams. I like knowing what my friends in other cities are up to, but I’m a pretty crappy one-on-one correspondent. So I keep up best with friends who have blogs and/or twitter–all I have to do is check Google Reader or Twitter to see what’s new with dozens of people. It’s lazy, perhaps, but it works. And since clearly most of you are never going to start blogging, my best hope is that you’ll start twittering.

Now, I should warn you, despite its simplicity, Twitter is not necessarily easy to get into. At first, especially when you don’t have many friends on it, it seems like a serious waste of time. But if you stick with it for a week or two, I think you’ll come around–and the more of you that give it a shot, the better it’ll be.

C’mon, people. Get on Twitter. It’s time.

You can find my tweets @calamityjake.

[fimoculous]

So why not just go the extra step and put together a SWPL/Simmons mashup site? Take every Simmons column and cross reference every time he mentions something that White People Like (e.g., “Bust a Move”, Holy Cross, indie music, and of course Steve Nash). Of course, his columns would end up more links than plain text. It might be easier to just start posting his full columns at SWPL.

¹ Although that was subtly different, in that it subtracted Garfield’s words/thoughts, but not Garfield himself. I assert that it’s actually much better that way than without Garfield entirely. Not quite as weird, but a lot more funny/poignant.