All my favorite bloggers haven't posted anything new for at least four days (except Ernie, congrats on the job and site redesign!)

Anyhow, I'm no better (and maybe worse) because I'm just posting to say I'm late for class, (last class! Only 2 finals to go!) and will try to post somethng meaningful later today. I've got loads to share, but even bigger loads to read before tomorrow's 8am final.

Seeya in a few.

Trivia for a lazy Sunday afternoon:

Size of the combined California Adventure and Disneyland Theme Parks in anaheim, CA: 140 acres

Size of the UC Berkeley Central Campus (Gayley to Oxford, Bancroft to Hearst): 170 acres

Next time you go to Disneyland, check out how you can almost never see more than 100 meters in a given direction. It makes it seem a lot bigger than it is.

Wow. Life can go so suddenly. Sadly, it left Douglas Adams yesterday morning, when he had a sudden heart attack.

Wow. There's an author that shaped a generation, and possibly even a medium of fiction. He will be dearly missed by millions. In an ironic tangent, yesterday Terry Pratchett spoke at Cody's, an event that Benjy found lackluster because it was a prepared (though aparently not well rehearsed) speil. I bet it would have been a lot more interesting if Terry had known about Douglass's passing, as Adams was a major influence on his work.

What a downer...

So my first final is on deck today: Molecular and Cell Biology, MCB 61. I've got about three hours to finish studying, making sure I'm taking the test at the very peak of the retention curve.

After that is my Womens Studies exam on Tuesday, and then Linguistics 100 next Friday, the day after graduation. It's really a luxury having them so spaced out. I usually wind up with two finals on the same day.

Anyhow, the skies are bright, the heat has finally given Berkeley a rest, and everything's pretty cool.

In short, it's a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

Thank you Chris. I'm so glad I'm not the only Metacookie blogger who does this.

We should probably come up with a name for that. Metagoof?

Okay, okay, so that this isn't a completely frivolous post, let me say that I'm so happy that I finally finished my last paper of my undergraduate career! Now I just have to take three finals (tomorrow, Tuesday, and next Friday) and I'm all done and get to bask in whatever for a week before starting at the j - o - b.

Oh, and someone asked me if I'd be posting my American Beauty paper. Hmm, well, maybe. And maybe I'll post this one on 19th century textbooks, but if I do, I ask you to keep in mind that both papers were written for pass/notpass courses under stressful circumstances, not like the gumflapping stream of consciousness tomes that sometimes fall onto these pages. Oh wait, is that worse? I guess we'll see.

(doing my best (worst) Seinfeld impersonation)

You ever notice that 'reset' button at the bottom of the form? What's that about? I mean, you've got a 'reload' button at the top of the browser. Heck, if you've got a fancy broswer you might even have a 'refresh' menu item. And what is that, 're-fresh'? Does it make it fresh again? Can I buy just the refresh button? I'd like to take it to the store with me before I buy fruit. I mean there's something I'd buy off an infomercial. "Oh no, the bananas are all brown again." "That's okay, I'll just refresh them!" Just think of the possibilities. Marriage counsellors could keep one in their desk drawer for couples who's love lives have gone stale. And let's not even get started on beer...

(Okay, sorry about that. Back to normal)

I just hate the reset button. 9 cases out of 10 it doesn't do you any good because you're not going to want to reset the entire form for any reason, but it will piss you off when you hit it instead of 'submit' by accident. Maybe they should have three buttons: Submit, Reset, and Undo Reset.

Or maybe we should just lose the reset button once and for all, like the blink tag.

So as you know I posted yesterday about wanting to shed a few pounds and today I got two pieces of spam (I know they're spam because they were to addresses completely unrelated to this blog) on how to do just that (only not any way that's clinicly proven, or inexpensive).

It got me thinking: If everyone kept a public blog, how long would it be before companies would abandon trying to get inside our heads thrugh our clickpaths and purchase histories, and start catering to our desires as evidenced on our weblogs?

How long before the folks at Google, Inktomi, and Lycos created new search engines to harvest current blogdata and sell the info to marketers?

Heck, Blogger could start doing that today, and become the next dotcom success, until everyone abandoned their system, or paid $5 a month to have a 'harvesting-free' blog.

So I got on the scale a few days ago and was above 190. Having been hovering at 180 for two years I wasn't too pleased and yesterday I decided to do something about it, so now it's normal meals instead of starve, fill-to-brim, starve, repeat, and I'm cutting back (though not completely out) caffeine. Say, from a 20 oz Coke and some chocolate a day to just little bits, like maybe some chocolate that happens to be in something, or the caffeine that happens to be in an excedrin tablet. At any rate (and I'm not trying to create a correlation between caffeine and weight gain or loss) I've decided that yesterday will be the day I weighed the most for the forseeable future. I'd like to get down to about 173 without any cutback on energetic activities, though I'll be happy if I stay around 180 after a good conversion from dead weight to muscle.

Hey, it could be a lot worse. Ever get so bored you feel like doing something drastic, just to live a little larger? Ian is going on a fast just to see what it's like. He's entering his third day now... It'll be interesting to see where this goes.

A frequent correspondant of mine from the site, 'AA' asked me yesterday about my opinions on using paper versus digital tools for notetaking, writing, and other creative tasks. While I intend to write a pretty full answer to that question, and post it here, I thought you might be interested in a story printed (heh, posted) in SFGate this morning, on the longevity of digital versus paper media, and the tradeoffs archivists are struggling with right now to cement current data for future generations. It's a good read.

An interesting example of overlap between this topic and the paper on education I'm writing is a site offering digitized archives of 19th century schoolbooks, complete with a full text search. One of my favorite examples, from McGuffey's 1879 Fifth Grade Reader, is "How to Tell Bad News."

Two stories from SF Gate really hit home today:

In the first, two reporters left the Claremont Hotel in Oakland at 6:30 in the morning, bound for a hotel in Los Angeles. One drove to SFO, where they had a ticket to fly down to LAX and then rent a car to the hotel. the other set off down 580 to I-5 and drove the 380 miles.

Guess who got there first? Here's a hint. 2/3rds of United's flights from San Francisco to Los Angeles are either over a half-hour late or are cancelled altogether. This is one of the reasons Southwest pulled out of SFO entirely earlier this year. I love flying from Oakland to Burbank on Southwest. It's faster, friendlier, cheaper, and much more reliable.

Incidentally, one day when I'm feeling long-winded, I'll tell you the story about my hell trip from LAX to SFO to Oakland Airport to home, and how it took 7 hours from start to finish, with an airporter, a bart ride, a bart-airport shuttle, and a truck plowing into Terminal Two all in the mix.

In the second story, they investigate the sorry state of undergraduate advising at UC Berkeley, where you don't get anything if you don't ask for it (and wait in line), and how even the brightest students get lost in the system because they assume someone up there is watching them. This really epotimises the problems I have with UC Berkeley, and I'm glad that it's getting some attention. I will say though, that overcoming the problems Berkeley poses trained me more for the 'real world' than any class I took.