(title translates as “fully detached”; it comes from Peter Schilling’s excellent rendition of Major Tom.)
It’s been a while. I was hoping for an easy last quarter of college, but this spring has been busy as hell. This week, though, I did not have an epic economics problem set due, and so I decided to turn my attention to sprucing up somatablet. The first thing I did earlier this week was upgrade my server package, so that it could run the latest version of WordPress, the content management system I use to do a bunch of behind-the-scenes stuff. Hopefully, this will mean the amount of spam comments I receive decreases a lot. It also means somatablet has the latest, most delicious feed technology. So, by all means, add me to your Google Reader with the feed links in the sidebar.
Speaking of Google Reader. I really like it. If you haven’t used it before, or don’t know much about feed readers/rss aggregators, the concept is pretty simple. You tell it a website you like to read, and it checks to see if there are new updates for you. Back in the olden days, I would click my “blogs” bookmark link in Safari two or three times a day, and about 20 blogs would pop up in tabs. Then I’d flick through them, only to see that 18 people hadn’t even updated. I no longer waste time with such compulsions. Google Reader only notifies me of new content, with the result that I spend more time reading new stuff online and less time checking to see if there is new stuff online.
The other thing I really love about Google Reader is Shared Items. If I see an article or entry that I find interesting, all I have to do is click “Share”, and any of my Gmail contacts that happen to use Google Reader can see the article that I shared. Since I’ve started doing this, I’ve completely neglected the linked list I used to have here on somatablet. Using another Google product, I managed to get the items I share in Google Reader to appear here on somatablet in a format that I like. Maybe down the line I’ll be able to have them interspersed with my blog posts again, but in the mean time, they’ll reside in the sidebar to the right.
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Besides economics problem sets and German homework, I’ve started getting ready for the move. It’s crazy to look at the iCal printout I have on my bulletin board and see that we’re leaving Chicago in just six weeks. Danny and I have created some spreadsheets for packing, things we have to do before moving, and a budget for when we get there. We’re going to use Door2Door to ship and store most of our stuff; the cats and our clothes are coming with us across the country in the Jetta. I’ve started boxing up books and throwing out the detritus that has accumulated in the last year. If anyone wants some books, there are plenty that are not going to come with us.
Three more weeks—11 days—of classes.
Four weeks until graduation.
Six weeks until moving.
