I need a bike during my 3-month jaunt to Claremont, CA. One big question is whether I should try to fly with my existing bike, which is a roughly $700 mountain bike, or buy some sort of bike when I get there.

I would love your advice for transportation on a budget…

I am relocating to Claremont, CA for the rest of the semester, to spend time with my girlfriend Karen. I will be flying to Ontario, CA on Feb 10, so if you’re in the NJ area you’ll probably want to see me before then, and if you’re in the LA we should hang out sometime after that 🙂

I’ll be returning to the east coast on May 8th to take my final oral exam for my philosophy major, thereby completing all of my requirements for graduation from Swarthmore College. Unless something unexpected and horrible happens, I should be walking with the class of ‘007 on like June 3rd.

During my semester off, I hope to travel and speak in support of free culture, so if you want to bring me to your campus to speak, check out this little page I made about why you might want me to speak at your school. (Please leave some constructive criticism if you’ve got it.) I already have a few speaking gigs in the works, including an event at the University of Florida on March 5th, but I would love to have more. The more I speak, the better my speeches will get 🙂

My grandma has written me hundreds of notes over the years, much like this one. The content of these notes is never terribly important, and there are far too many of them to keep conveniently in our overcrowded house. Nevertheless, I feel a twinge of guilt whenever I throw one out. I know that someday my grandparents will no longer be with us, and I will be sorry that I discarded these tokens of their affection. Therefore, we have a compromise: this note is getting recycled, but not before I preserve it digitally for posterity.

[cross-posted to Flickr]

This has been a very frustrating hour and a half. I’ve been trying to clean up the Stairball logo so that we can use it on Stairball.org, but I can’t tell what color it really is! Different programs see the colors differently! Preview, iPhoto, the Gimp, Inkscape, Seashore… Firefox… they don’t agree! If you want to see what I’m seeing, check out this Flickr set:

Thank goodness the last picture in the set seems to look universally good, so that’s the one you see in this post.

Well, all of my coursework is done for Swarthmore. As far as I know, all I have to do is take my oral exam next semester and I will have completed all of the requirements for graduation. Swarthmore, it’s been fun, but good riddance.

When I wake up today, I’m running down to Brian’s house for a Wrong Side Of Dawn business meeting / practice. We are recording an album the first week of January, and we have a lot of things to sort out, such as exactly what days we are recording.

On December 27, I’m going with Adam to see Thursday‘s holiday show in NYC’s at the Starland Ballroom in central NJ. I’ve seen and enjoyed Thursday before at Warped Tour back in the day, but I’m told that this holiday show will be extra intense. It’s been forever since I’ve been to a punk concert, and although Rainer Maria was sincerely awesome and fun to dance to, they don’t count as punk. If I don’t see a moshpit or crowd-surfing I’ll be disappointed (although I will also be pleased to emerge with all of my limbs intact).

I also have to clean my room and such in preparation for the holidays and Karen’s visit in early January.

Perhaps most importantly, I have to figure out what I’m doing with this semester off before I start law school next fall (almost certainly at George Mason Law in Arlingon). Any crazy ideas?

Karen is going to be at Newark Airport for a 6-hour layover on her flight home from Denmark tomorrow, from about noon to 6pm. Is there anything cool in Newark that we should do during that time? Or is Newark just a hellhole that people should try to avoid spending time in?

I have a job to do, namely finishing my final course work so that I can finish graduating from Swarthmore. This job has been dragging out far too long, partially due to mental and physical health issues that I’ve been working through, partially due to distractions such as the internet. It cannot drag on any longer. I am going to vanish from the face of the earth from now until I have finished the bulk of my work, so that I can dedicate 100% of my time to that. Please do not attempt to contact me. Hopefully I will return soon, ready to put in more time on old commitments and start up new projects.

P.S. If you’re wondering, my previous experiment with going offline was only partially successful, which is to say that it was a failure. I signed off IM and IRC, but I continued checking e-mail and blogs. This will be a more complete disappearance. My apologies.

Brian sent me this comic today:

For the record, I’d just like to state that I have 3 or 4 favorite hoodies now! I have two orange Billabong ones, my black straight edge hoodie, and the blue one I wear the CC t-shirt over. And they all get washed whenever they, um, need washing.