I know I’ve been lax on the old blog lately. I claim a combination of schoolwork, socializing, nearing-graduation stress, returning television shows, and generally not much interesting going on. Oh, and also the part where I’ve gotten in Twitter a lot more and am post one-off thoughts there instead of collecting them together into a blog-sized post. That gets most everything I want to say out of my system so it doesn’t end up here, which can be good or bad, I guess, depending on how you look at it. The socializing has been largely responsible for my not being around and live-blogging American Idol. Various people have wondered what’s going on with me, though, so here’s a bulleted update.

• American Idol – I’ve been ragging on Carly a lot, but honestly, I was pretty shocked when she went home instead of Jason. I’ve also supported Jason mostly throughout the show, but that was a trainwreck of a performance on his part, and I think he’s pretty well proven that, much to my disappointment, he’s a one-trick pony. So America got that one way wrong. For me, though, David Cook has it locked. Which means he’ll probably get voted off next. Just my luck.
• School – In case you didn’t catch the edit to my post about the oral exam, I did pass it. Which is a major yay. Actually, it was sort of enjoyable – a conversation about books and film with really smart people. :) Except one professor kept asking me about Faulkner even though I admitted to never reading any Faulkner. Guess I know what’s next on my reading list! And a friend and I gave a joint presentation in Literary Criticism yesterday which went surprisingly well. And now I just have two seminar papers left, and I’m fairly comfortable with them, so stress-level has fallen exponentially in the last two days.
• Post-Grad Plans – My current plans are to take a couple of weeks after graduation, maybe spend a week here hanging out with friends minus finals week stress and a week at home, then move to Los Angeles. I’m looking for jobs at USC or UCLA (not teaching; administrative), or pretty much anywhere out there that will pay me to do something I can do. ;) I mostly just want to live in a big city for a while, at least, and LA won out over New York due to climate.
• Television – Most of the TV shows are back from the writer’s strike now, which caught me by surprise, a bit – I had gotten used to my DVR NOT filling up every week. ;) The fact that I found the writer’s strike a bit of a relief probably means I’m following too many shows, but I can’t figure out which ones to give up. And the down side is that I ended up picking up a bunch of Bravo reality shows during the strike, and now I don’t want to give those up either. Good thing most of them are short. Anyway, the big television news around here is that Battlestar Galactica is back! After marathoning S3 on DVD, my friends and I jumped straight into the fourth and final season, and it is frakking amazing. If you’re not watching this show, get the DVDs and start. Don’t start in the middle.
• Gaming – GTA IV came out last night at midnight, and I went and got it. At midnight. Only time I’ve ever done that for a game, though I’ve been to midnight movie premieres. One. Harry Potter. Anyway. I wasn’t able to stay awake for more than a couple of hours gaming once I got home (I’m getting old, what can I say?), but it’s pretty sweet. Graphics are beautiful, Liberty City is HUGE. I was afraid that it’d seem small after the three-city-plus-desert of San Andreas, but no. It’s ginormous, and with so much stuff going on that I’ve repromised myself never, ever to drive in New York City (on which Liberty City is based). It’s craziness. I also used Amazon.com gift certificates to upgrade to Gold on Xbox Live, so I’m set for multiplayer, once I can tear myself away from the single-player campaign.
• Socializing – It’s starting to hit me that I’m leaving here in like a month, and though I feel confident in the strength of the friendships I’ve made over the past two years (and the power of Facebook) that I’ll keep in contact with most of my friends, I have been trying to spend as much time as possible with them all before I leave. And I’m at that place where I’m glad to be almost done with school, and I’m very glad to be leaving Waco, but I’m not at all glad about leaving all the people here. I know everyone goes through that every time we change life situations, but that doesn’t make it any easier.

So that’s pretty much my life right now.

I won’t be liveblogging American Idol this week due to being on Spring Break at a friend’s house off South Padre Island where there is no internet. We’re all at the library now doing some much-needed e-mail catch-up, but I’ve been surprised by how little I’ve missed being online, especially since I’m normally online something like ten hours a day. Ah well. We’ve had other things to keep us busy. Even though it’s been a little chilly to do much beach stuff. We’re going to try to go today, but we’re all wearing sweatshirts. :) Anyway, just wanted to give y’all a heads up so you didn’t think I was dead when I missed American Idol tonight.

Competition! Competition! I’m excited. And I just finished watching all the episodes of Australian Idol I had downloaded, and the right person won that (well, I would’ve been happy if either of the two finalists had won), so even though the two shows are unrelated at this point, I’m optimistic for American Idol. Which may not be a great thing. But we’ll see.

I’ve tried on and off to crosspost entries from my blog to my Livejournal, but I keep slacking off. So I installed a crossposting plugin that should do it automatically. It means that everything I post on my blog will also get posted on LJ, and I can’t post anything to LJ that’s not posted on the blog, which is sort of annoying. But anyway, I think it’ll be better than being so completely absent on LJ that I don’t keep up with my friends, which is what’s been happening. So if you’re subscribed to both my blog and LJ feeds (or my blog feed on LJ), you can pick one or the other, because they’re going to be identical from here on out. Unless I change my mind, in which case, I will tell you. In general, the blog is probably going to look prettier, because that’s where I write and preview posts. Just sayin’.

LJ people: Hi! I imported my blog posts to LJ, so if you scroll back, you should see most of them. I imported them as private (because I wanted to make sure it was working), and then switched most of them to public, but left a few that were no longer relevant or whatever. Just in case anyone starts comparing blog and LJ, that’s why posts before today aren’t necessarily identical. Also, any internal links in the posts are going to be to the blog and not the LJ.

Facebook people: Hi also! I’ve had my blog on my profile as an RSS feed for a while, but I decided to be a shameless self-promoter and use Facebook’s “import blog” feature to make them into notes. If it completely overwhelms y’all’s newsfeeds, let me know and I’ll do something different.

Now, theoretically, when I hit “publish,” this will also post on LJ and Facebook. We’ll see.

It’s probably not generally known here, but about ten years ago I was massively into figure skating. Not doing it, just watching it. Anyway, I don’t follow it closely anymore, but once in a while it’s on and I watch it. Since I don’t pay much attention to it these days, I didn’t realize the Nationals were last weekend, so I missed most of them; I did happen to catch the men’s, though, featuring the continuing rivalry between last year’s champion Evan Lysacek and the champion before him, Johnny Weir. I’ve seen Weir around for several years, and never cared for him much, but he seems to have matured a lot this year or something, and I liked him better. But that’s by the by.

I had friends over on Sunday night and taped the end of the competition and didn’t watch it until tonight. And discovered that Weir and Lysacek TIED their overall score. Dude. That doesn’t happen. They score these things to the hundredth of a point, and they TIED. Now, Lysacek was given the championship because he scored higher in the free skate (the second program; they did the short program earlier in the week). Now, I think there is sort of precedent for this, because didn’t Oksana Baiul win the 1994 Olympics over Nancy Kerrigan because her artistic mark was a tenth of a point higher than Nancy’s even though their overall score was the same? (Nancy had a tenth higher on technical marks, IIRC.) That was before the scoring system changed, though, so the scores weren’t calculated nearly so finely. In any case, I’m really glad I managed to catch this moment, even a week later, because wow.

I am sorry I missed the other portions of the competition, though. I love me some ice dancing these days. Exhibitions are on Saturday, so I made sure to set my timer for those.

Here are both programs, courtesy of the fine folks who upload stuff to YouTube. (Where I should probably look for the ladies’, pairs, and dancers, now that I think of it…)

• My WordPress dashboard is still messed up, more than 24 hours after it started messing up. Getting very annoyed! #

So what does that mean?

Right Brain/ Left Brain Quiz The higher of these two numbers below indicates which side of your brain has dominance in your life. Realising your right brain/left brain tendancy will help you interact with and to understand others. Left Brain Dominance: (9) Right Brain Dominance: (9) Right Brain/ Left Brain Quiz

Please note, this post is out of date. Please see here for more recent information about my layout.

I’ve been quiet the last week or so except for a few brief repostings of newsfeed items on the side there. Reasons for that? *shrug* Laziness? I have been working on the back end around here a bit–upgrading to WordPress 2.2, figuring out how to get my sidebars to work with the newly integrated widget system they’ve got (not sure I’m totally loving that, by the way), trying and so far failing to get the Last.fm widget to fit into the sidebar, giving up on that and playing around with the new Facebook applications instead, etc.

I will note a few things that might not be immediately noticeable around here. The “pages” linked on the left side of the page–these are like static posts that I update now and again with what I’m reading, watching, etc. Some of these things are also in the “Now Watching” and “Now Reading” sections in the right sidebar. However, the sidebar only keeps the last three or four entries on there, while the pages have everything back to my last recap update. Right now I’m way behind on the recaps, so the reading/watching pages go back to March. I mention this mostly because I’ve started doing the reading/watching pages in an image format, and I think it looks cool. Also, you can see my media consumption goals for 2007 over there, and how I’m doing on those. Not that anyone probably cares about this but me, but I sometimes think it’s fun to see what other people want to watch and read, so here’s what I want to watch and read this year. Finally, over there is a page called Writing. Here’s where I’ve linked most of the essays and stuff I’ve written over the past year for school.

The newest thing I’ve added to the ol’ sidebar is an RSS feed from my Tumblr. Tumblr is sort of a media-blogging application, I guess you’d say…one step up from Twitter‘s micro-blogging approach, but focused on collecting brief snippets of text, audio, video, etc. in a very simple format. I’m partially just trying it out, but it’s kinda fun, so I may keep using it. We’ll see. In any case, it seemed to be a good compromise for the moment between the amount of videos and photos and stuff I want to in some way mark as cool and the amount of videos and photos and stuff I want to actually post on here. Because when I go on a media rampage, I could get incredibly spammy incredibly quick, and nobody wants that. So that’s the compromise.

Oh, and lastly, the Amazon.com banner down there now only shows things that I’ve specifically told it to. So you can rest assured that when it says I recommend it, I really really do. Although I need to update it, because I haven’t since…February? Maybe?