Hey folks, I’m going to be discontinuing this blog for the near future, until I can get some good blogging software installed (the new version of PHPosxom didn’t work for me). Please refer to my homepage for updates. I’ve embedded my livejournal in my website, so it’s one-stop shopping for info on Nelson 🙂

Before I sign off here though, I do have a few things to say.

First of all, you’re going to need a resume sooner or later, so start working on it now so that you just have to update it and submit it when the time comes to apply for internships or jobs. Don’t procrastinate on that, because missing out on an internship because you missed the deadline would be dumb. I now have to write my resume STAT!

Second of all, don’t try to put your gloves in your pockets if there isn’t any room for them because you’ve already filled your pockets with fruit. If you do, your gloves fall out, and then you’re left with only one glove, like me, or like Michael Jackson. If you see a black biking glove that says “Trek” on it and has little silver reflecty pieces of fabric, please return to me, this is seriously my favorite pair of gloves and I am quite distraught!

Finally, stand up for yourself and your ideals, and there’s no telling what you may accomplish 🙂

Are any of you Deviant Artists?  I just set up my deviant account there… I’m not really much an artist, but hey, I can dream, can’t I?

The reason I set up an account there was actually to test a feature of their userpages… If you look at my userpage you’ll notice a green button that says GeoURL.  This is a quick way to search for webpages by geographical location, which ties into a site that Luke and I like a lot called Headmap.  Headmap is a project to connect cyberspace with “meatspace”, by mapping URLs to physical locations and then wearing computers around so that you can superimpose the internet onto the world around you.  With this futuristic system, park benches can have blogs, roads can have songs attached to them, and you can walk up to a building and see its website.  For an analogy, consider hypertext, or “linking”.  Usually when you write words, they are isolated, they have no meaning aside from the meaning that they have in your head.  However, with hypertext, words can be connected to all sorts of information through the World Wide Web.  Just think how much more potential a living website has compared to a dead, static book, and you begin to understand the possibilities that wearable computing and enhanced or “mediated” reality offer.

If you want to know what this future might look like, you’ll want to read up on Steve Mann, the cyborg professor, one of the pioneers of wearable computing.  Despite (or perhaps because of) his extreme geekiness, he has a wife, which means there may be hope for me someday 😉  He has an interesting idea called Subjectright… he thinks that if we have intellectual property over our writings or musical creations, isn’t it ridiculous that we do not have property rights on ourselves and our likenesses and personal data?  Are songs more important than people?  It’s a well thought out philosophy, and his claiming of the right to control both outbound information (privacy rights) and inbound information (right to not be disturbed by spam) is wonderful.  I’m not sure how I feel about everything he says, but I think it is logically consistent with the idea of intellectual property.  Does this demonstrate the absurdity of intellectual property, or is it a good use of IP as opposed to the abuses that we usually see?

Finally, as I mentioned on my last blog entry, I lost a black biking glove… have you seen it?

Is it just me, or has Slashdot managed to slashdot itself?

My friend Brian Rose and I are trying to put together a band here at Swarthmore, and we need your help!  We’re looking for a drummer, bassist, and maybe a keyboard player (definitely if they can sing harmony).  Check out the temporary band page to listen our songs and see if you might be interested.  Tell your friends!

I had a groovy day in the city on Monday

For those who haven’t noticed, you can read my LiveJournal on my website (it’s embedded in my front page), and you can read my blog on LiveJournal at nelson_blog … they’re not mutually exclusive 🙂

Well, I can’t seem to SSH into the school webserver from my externship, so it looks like I’m going to take the easy way out and update my LiveJournal.  Also, I wasn’t able to install the new version of my blogging software which enables comments.  So, I’m complying with the votes of my readers and updating this LJ for the near future.  Sorry Sarah 😉

I’m externing for the week at this law firm in NYC, Proskauer Rose LLP, which is positively huge and has offices around the world.   Right now they’re running a check to make sure that they’re not somehow representing Diebold in any way, which presumably would complicate matters.  I’ve got a temporary desk with a phone and a laptop, right next to a nice intern from Cornell.  Her name is Sharon, and she’s also a sophomore,  and I hope to see more of her during the week 🙂   Right now I’m going to read through a lot of memos that I need to sign, about Equal Employment Opportunity and Anti Harrassment Policy, Use of Non-Public Information For Purchase or Sale of Securities, and Confidentiality of Client Matters.  That last means that I can’t disclose any information about any cases that I happen to witness, so some of my journal entries may be exceedingly vague!

I won’t be on AIM during the day, so that I won’t be distracted from my learning experience, but you may find me online at night.  Peace out folks!

Update: The check came up clean, Proskauer Rose is not representing Diebold in any way… thank goodness!

Update #2: I e-mailed Sharon once, but she never e-mailed me back.  Lame!

For all my readers who use LiveJournal, I have syndicated this blog using its built in RSS feed at lj user nelson_blog. There’s also my LJ account skyfaller, as I mentioned before.

I’m also very happy, because while I was complaining about how PHPosxom, which I use for this blog, is a dead project that isn’t updated anymore, I visited the sourceforge website and discovered that a third party had actually done a major update! It implements comments and XHTML compliance, which makes me very happy 🙂 I’m going to test it out, and if it works correctly I will then update my blog to this new version. Wish me luck!

Hey folks, I’m going to put the question to you… which would you rather I updated on a regular basis, my weblog or my livejournal? The basic issue is that I won’t be getting comments on my blog anytime soon, (probably not until after SCCS gets SQL support) but you can leave comments on my livejournal. On the other hand, my blog supports categories, which allows me to point someone to all of my entries on Diebold, or all of my entries about music, etc., which you can’t do on LiveJournal. Also, it’s cool to have complete control over my own blog, but I guess that doesn’t really matter to my readers. What are your preferences?