if i could only keep up--

First things first:

These are the things that I miss the most right now:

1. My girlfirend;

2. My guitar;

3. The class of 2008 (PACA);

4. The class of 2010 (PACA);

5. The class of 2012 (HC)...

I realize it's been over a week since I last posted. Plenty has happened. I'm fully moved in; my house meeting went fine and since then I've met with everyone enough so that I feel more comfortable at home (with most people). I've watched plenty of movies and had many ideas about everything. (Since Taken, it's been The Knack, and How to Get It--which had you cheering for the morally wrong thing to happen (well the better of two evils, I guess)--, plenty of Morgan Spurlock's stuff--i.e. Supersize Me and his TV show 30 days on intriguing social experimentation-- a creepy movie about a bad roommate, and Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist--kind of cute and playful, but still a tad morally dicey, since it catered to the tensions of teenage life in the adventuresome NYC nites. I haven't listened to any new music--I need to hook into source for that at some point. I have read some things, but I'll get to that later.

The biggest thing in the last few days happened on Monday--I finally talked to one of the owners of Midwest Grill (churrascaria) and I'll be starting on Friday with my first training. I'll admit, I'm having a hard time really connecting with the owner, mostly because I feel like a child around him. Hopefully I can work on that in the coming weeks. I bought my black shirt to go with black pa--ahem...--trousers, which will be my new working uniform. I'm quite excited to start, and also very afraid of screwing up at all. I'm not sure if I'll still be looking for a job--it's actually a lot easier not to, and to sit back and wait to see if any of my 15 or so applications already submitted will do anything. Maybe it wasn't that many.

Back to reading I've just finished an article from the TIME I found lying on the dinner table here. Its cover article on the Twitter phenomenon (you can find many more on twitter at any newspage, I'm sure), to me, a not-so-up-to-date-web-user, was mesmerizing, and made me want to get on board the booming revolution. The only other impression that I had of it, really, was that my roommate didn't think it was that great--even overrated. So I was fine with what I knew, intil I saw it on the cover of TIME. It's features and potential described by Johnson seem like a very good thing. Twitter came from the creator of Blogger. Despite its critics, it doesn't necessarily limit people's interactions to 140 characters. (you know, I wish I could make a running commentary of what I'm writing, like you can in Word--just leave a floating comment in the sidebar that is directly linked to the text... oh, what the rigors of paper-writing do to you) Of course, my mind was racing with how I might or might have used the tool. The mention of Twitter used in a discussion/conference reminded me right away of debates in English class with Carps--socratic circles and all--and how such a feature could be used in the same way to stimulate discussion. Things could easily get out of hand and off topic, of course.

Speaking of getting off topic, I just browsed about 7 other webpages, and chenged the settings on both of the webbrowsers I have open. I've thought about hooking up with Twitter, in light of the above article, but I've got enough--technology or not--on my hands, methinks. On my computer alone, I've gotten a new messaging compiler, Digsby, and am considering moving from Firefox to Chrome, and basking in the wonders of the Google empire entirely--which is why I still have both of them open right now (chrome seems like the better deal, but I already have so much built into my own Firefox that it's hard to transition--all my links and add-ons. Chrome covers some of them, but not my favorite).

Speaking of empires, I went on to browse another article in the times about Palm's new Pre, made to compete with the iPhone, which basically took over Palm's niche of the smart-phone market. I mention empires, because my conception of Apple is that it's the big competitor with Microsoft--releasing ads that constantly bash PC, and Microsoft rebutting with happy PC buyers. I guess MS's Bing is competing with Google Search, too. So, it's dog-eat-dog out there--Microsoft is the old evil empire, and Apple is the Shiny new underdog that comes in shining armor and more; now we see Palm, which was exploited (sort-of, not really exploited; at least stunted) by the iPhone line, clearly building on Palm's original groundwork; in some ways, not doing things as well as Palm--see the article for a comparison. In short, the iPhone is only better because it's so popular, and three years old, not just a couple of months, like Palm's Pre, which is quite buggy, for now. I guess that's the same you could say about Windows--Apple came around, did it better, and will eventually take over. Well, not quite, but I think you see where I'm going.

I hope you got through that all in one piece. That's all the result of one week's LOA--more like AWOL, but w/e. overandout