Imported From Livejournal

Went to Wedge. Had much funness. Played Zendo, Bohnanza, and Bang. Muchness of fun all around.

Tomorrow, will work on homework & research project. Also, we have a Costa Rica team meeting in the morning. But now is time for bed.

When I asked “Why LJ” in jjlc‘s journal, pezzonovante posted an ancedote about ICQ. It got me thinking about years and years ago, when most people hadn’t even heard of the Internet. I was on ICQ then. I went to ICQ’s web site today and saw ICQ ID numbers in the 9 digits. When I was on ICQ, my number was 6 digits. I’m fairly certain that the first digit was a 1 or 2.

Well, I know that I haven’t been using this for very long, but I already think that their interface is suboptimal.

• While the Friends List aggregates people’s posts, it doesn’t do a good job of showing me what entries and comments are not yet read… I have to wade through the list to find what might interest me, and if there are any unread comments.
• I want some connection between comments I leave on other people’s pages and on my entries here… I reply to something somewhere else that made me think of something, but I kinda want to crosspost it to a journal entry as it’s of general interest and what I am thinking at the time. Plus, if I have something to say in a comment somewhere, there’s a possibility that it won’t really get seen by people who don’t check the comments pages of my friends. Something just seems off here, and I’m not really sure what it is or what the solution is.
• There’s no link from my journal for me to post to it.
• The spell checker doesn’t understand contractions
• Journal entries display local time (Eastern); comments display server time (Pacific).
• There’s no preview-post feature for journal entries, although there is for comments
• Web pages are not valid HTML (just a minor pet peeve)
• And that’s just what I’ve found in half a day.

I want things to work more like my mail/newsreader, where only unread messages are seen, and threaded, and all my inbound communications is in one place.

Now that I think about it more, one of the main convincing reason for me to try this out was ‘s comment about how it helps keep in touch with people that you don’t see often, letting them see a synopsis of what’s going on.

As people want to keep up-to-date on what’s going on, here’s my timeline for the future:

Right now

Procrastinating working on my Grad. Research Project

Apr. 30

Done with Grad. School. Done.

Apr. 30

Running my 2nd Magic: the Gathering Sealed Deck Tournament

May 3

Start working at Checkerboard full time.

May 16

Go to ‘s graduation ceremony at WSC

May 22

Go to my graduation ceremony at WPI

July 31 – Aug. 9

Trip to Costa Rica with , CBC, and CFCI. (I love acronyms)

In about a year or so

Move into new house in Charlton (next to my parents’ house)

Well, I’ve decided that enough people think that this is a useful tool for keeping up to date on each other that I figure I’ll try it, at least for a while. Perhaps this journal will become a continuing quest to discover exactly what its usefulness is.

Although, I’m starting to see it. Not quite, but I can start to see why people find it popular, although some aspects (current music? separate clients?) still baffle me.