Admittedly, it’s probably a good thing that people freak out about the snow. Walking around on slushy sidewalks all day is enough to annoy even the most hardy Pennsylvanian/New Yorker/Minnesotan/whatever I feel like calling myself that day. Knowing that every time you cross the street you’re surrounded by death projectiles driven by utterly clueless people, sometimes it’s a little difficult to motivate yourself for a trek outside.

In the mole cave that is this basement abode, it’s no matter. One needn’t even acknowledge that days even happen. Fortunately, sometimes I step out in spite of the danger (and the light) to capture nice photos of the neighborhood like this. Nothing like a little wet sticky snow to make for some good pictures.

• Number of full-size suitcases: 1
• Number of t-shirts, undershirts, and overshirts: 33
• Pairs of shoes: 6
• Days in Minneapolis: 3

For the skeptics out there, know that I will sweat through basically all of those shirts (except for the small number that I’ll be wearing on my two-day work trip to Boston afterward).
It is most definitely time for Showdown.

I’m not a master DJ by any means, but I love to explore new music, and I like the challenge of playing for dancers. Maybe I like the power trip of controlling the energy level of an entire room full of dancers. I know it’s definitely fun to get some appreciation for my musical tastes.

Anyway, I had a request for my playlist. I like to hang on to playlists anyway while I can, and if reading through mine helps you find some random artist you never thought you’d hear, all the better. So here it is:

Most people have probably experienced it, but for those who haven’t, it works like this: some ne’er-do-well creates a bogus profile, then tries to add you as their friend. Why? Once they are your friend, they can use things like spam bots to try to lure you into porn sites and the like. They can sell the information with the added bonus of saying that you think gullible is written on the ceiling. Or even worse, they can insert redirects so that as soon as you click on their profile you’re looking at pictures that make the intimate dating service ads look like they were taken at a church picnic.

MySpace spam is highly targeted by demographic. Read: young horny males who will friend anyone with a hot picture (others too I’m sure, but these are the ones I get). The young part and the male part are pretty easy to figure out, but sometimes it’s hard to figure out the horny part. Well, no, that’s not true either, sometimes its painfully obvious, but let’s just leave that little detail of social networking aside, shall we? (Oh, you silly silly Americans).

Point being, I’ve decided that there are two simple ways to get targeted by MySpace spammers. One, be young and have a modestly attractive picture of yourself. Two, have a lot of friends from different places.

The first one is self explanatory. Unfortunately, it’s also pretty hard to avoid if you’re vain like me. Maybe I could put up a picture of me picking my nose. That would reduce the spam, right?

The second one, well, that seems to be the kicker. Between Lindy Hop, Carleton, and high school, I have almost 100 friends. Mostly young, and owing to the social miracles of social dancing, mostly female. All legit, of course, but how’s a spam bot to know that? To it, I look no better than this guy. *shudder*

That’s why I’ve gotten at least a dozen fake friend invites in the last day alone.

So I’m making an announcement. I hate all of you. You’re not my friends. More importantly, you’re most definitely not my MySpace friends, a class of friend that is far more exclusive than any mere offline “friend.” I’ve had enough. If you will please just unfriend me, so my vicarious virtual life can return to normal, everyone will be happier for it.

Why can’t I unfriend you? Well, why should I do all the work? I’m the victim here!

Right, so hop to.

What does one do in this situation? Is it worth pissing off your neighbors to start flashing your lights and honking your horn at 1 in the morning? Should you get out of the car, try to wake the person, and hope he says “gee, thanks mister” as you send him away?

Of course not. You head right back out and park on the street.

A precious few hours later, you slither out the door in your pajamas and put your car back where it belongs before it gets towed.

All this on a Sunday night too. I wish I could find that guy and bill him for my lost sleep.

That, however, may be a problem.

My hip urban existence is growing a little concerned here. I need something a little more edgy. This layout I put together last year is, well, so last year.

I have to admit, I like the brightness of this color scheme much more than my first color scheme. I’m not about to go black background on y’all.

It’s time to change primary colors here. Those greens and yellows may really speak to motorcycling around India, but they don’t speak much to the colors I see on my morning commute. The greenest thing about my workday is the color cast of the omnipresent flourescent lighting.

But I aspire to conjure up more than the nine-to-six-on-a-good-day. My color scheme can’t merely talk the talk. I need a color scream that shouts, “walking down the sidewalk weighted down with groceries and avoiding the drunks.” I need a color scheme that screams, “I just overpaid for this martini, and it’s still happy hour.” I need a color scheme that pokes sternly and retorts, “you live in an English bunker because you were too cheap to pay for an above-ground apartment with real windows.”

So yeah, it’s time for a new color scheme. Green and yellow just won’t cut it anymore.

For the past two years, this blog has been hosted by what one might call the kumbaya circle of servers. Gridley is Carleton’’s student-run Unix server, a sandbox for Carleton folks to build and destroy their own little Internet castles.

Like the harmonious existence it represents, Gridley is a beautiful idea with just a few quirks. Every once in a while it goes endearingly awry. The major failure that that brought my blog down for two weeks was one such bump in the road. Endearing. Really.

A younger, more idealistic me would laugh this all off. I’d let the blog go back up when it was ready, and I’d shrug it off as a gentle reminder of the quirkly world in which we live. Hell, I’m surpised I didn’t make my blog tie-dye.

Call me a sellout. But a precocious, well-paid young professional such as myself needs a precocious young professional web presence. So from now on, I will happily pay my $3 a month to get the good things in life. Good things like redundancy and 24-hour support. For less than the price of my precocious young professional half-caf skim milk caramel machiavelliato with extra whipped cream and a shot of cholesterol.

My old posts will be restored as soon as I have access to them. Like the idealist I am, I never bothered to back up my database tables. But I see a bright future for my posts. All that money I’m blowing on this site ought to be an incentive to write some new ones.

Oh yeah, and hold the cholesterol.

Surely it can’t just go away. After all, I’m not going away anytime soon. I may not be in college, but I am young. I am alive. I lead a charmed life in my English bunker. I bike in the park, dance in converted mansions, and wade through lengthy depositions like it was my job. Oh yeah, I guess that last one is my job.

Neither is my newfound non-poverty (non-povertedness?) going to keep me from blogging. I will be forever in search of free food. Let me tell you how excited I was this morning when learning the rules of the company expense account. Suddenly, working 10 hour days seems so much more attractive. No, money has not changed me. After all, the best spice is not pepper or paprika, it’s that inexplicable tingling sensation that comes from tasting something without a price tag. Or at least without a price tag to you.

No, that’s not MSG either. Trust me.

After a month of running around driving home, finding an apartment, packing, unpacking, and more than anything dumping craploads of money into my sad state of a car, I am ready to begin my online life again. There’s a whole world out there that needs to be explored, and it’s high time I start exploring it. And then telling you about what I explored. And then letting you read, comment, and generally live vicariously through what I said. Isn’t that why we read each other’s blogs in the first place?

So first thing’s first. I need a new tagline. Anyone have any ideas?

I don’t mean this metaphorically. I mean it physically. It took me about an hour to pack my trunk up alone. My trunk is packed so tight that I can barely close the door. My backseats are piled up to the headrests, and my passenger seat is full too. Every so often, I have to unravel the cord to my lava lamp from my shifter. I don’t know how I’m going to make it home like this.

Ok, fine, maybe I do mean it a little bit metaphorically. Carleton has been good to me. And if the head of the alumni association has any say in the matter, I will (apparently) be good to it in return. Tough as it would be to stay, it’s tough to leave.
I will resist the tempation to go on at length about how great college was, or about entering the real world, or about leaving friends behind, or about how Carleton is not a bubble but a series of vectors. I will spare you the abstraction, because nothing I can say–especially in this venue–can possibly make sense of it. If you’re not there in the present, you’re just not there.

So, I will brave my way into the future, as I always have. College is over, and I’ve got a lot more living to do. That’s that.

Just know that my car is packed.