Hello World

So, I'm moving to Boston in a week. I'm only there long enough to drop my stuff off and head off on a two week trip taking me to five cities in thirteen days. If you live in one of these places and will be there when I will, let me know--I'm always willing to consider meeting random internet creeps.

August 16th-19th: San Francisco/East Bay
August 19th-22nd: Los Angeles
August 22nd-25th: Denver
August 25th-29th: New York City
August 29th-forever: Boston

You know how sometimes you are extremely happy or extremely sad and suddenly songs and movies etc. become poignant and significant? It is extremely dangerous to throw Jeff Buckley into that mix.

Trust me on this one.

I've been thinking about blog layouts and design and LiveJournal's strengths/weaknesses as a platform.

Some of the things I like about LJ include:

• The way comments are displayed as threads instead of as one long string.
  
• The built-in community features that make it easy to subscribe to and read lots of journals at once.
  
• The simplicity of selecting one of many layouts, and the limited but versatile customization options (colors, basic layout adjustments, etc).
  
• Cuts (like the one in this post), which make it easy to keep your main page neat and manageable.

Some of the things I don't like about LJ include:

• I can't use javascript in sidebar content.
  
• It's a serious hassle to do any extensive custom coding, since LJ has its own formatting language that you have to learn before you can get into the guts of changing your layout.
  
• Most of the world thinks LiveJournal hosts teenage goth girls exclusively, which does very little to enhance the credibility of anyone who writes here.
  
• No trackbacks, no simple way to see referral URLs, no invisible counter functionality (all of which would be simple for LJ to implement).

I've also got a pretty specific layout idea that LJ definitely doesn't offer me. As far as I can tell, nobody else does, either. ( Here's what I want: )

I'm thinking, eventually, about switching from LJ to something else, although as far as I can tell the only way to get exactly what I want is to code it myself, from the ground up--and, as awesome as I think I am, I'm pretty sure that's beyond my capabilities/free time. Does anyone out there (especially people who operate blogs outside of blogger/LJ) have thoughts or suggestions?

If you google my name, the #1 site is about me. It's been a long slog--for a while, all I got were pages like this one (a list of surnames), and this one (related to the fact that my last name is also a dorm at Johns Hopkins) and this ridiculous one (my alter ego is apparently enrolled in the School of Hard Knocks).

So now it's my Flickr page, DCist music reviews, and sundry immature articles from my college newspaper that mention me.

But not this blog. And I think that's probably good news. Or, you know, it was, until I wrote this.

I am currently planning a trip that will take me to Boston, Providence, and New York City. Specifically, Boston (to look at apartments) on June 30th, Providence (to network with members of the ruling class) on July 2nd, and New York (to drink whiskey) on July 3rd. If you want to hang out with me, or give me a place to stay (in Boston or New York), let me know ASAP.

In light of yesterday's post on iPods and how lame the media coverage of them is, it's pretty funny that I (and my friends*) ended up on TV for going to iPod Jukebox Night last night. Click here for the story--check out the video, I'm the handsome devil in Carolina blue.

FYI, my playlist was:

NWA - Express Yourself
R. Kelly - Ignition (Remix)
John Marr - Toxic Rhythm

Also of note is that as usual by the time most of the world noticed this trend it was already over--there were only about 20 people there last night.

^*My friends included: DCaffeinated (Fletcher) DConstructed (Lauren), Evan, and Catharine. Click on those links, especially if you live in DC, which is what they mostly write about!

DCist wrote about it.

This is true.

When I was about 10 years old, my parents made me answer the phone like this: "Hello, this is Jacob--may I help you?"

Their friends thought it was really cute. I thought it made me sound like the house concierge.

I thought you all would like to know: I got a mosquito bite on my left eyelid a couple nights ago, and it hurts and has swollen up a little bit. My life is slightly uncomfortable as a result.

But on the plus side, on Saturday I went to see the first Washington Wizards playoff victory in 17 years, and tonight I'm going to see the second! Also, this weekend I went to a hipster bar in Columbia Heights and hung out with a bunch of kids who once went to high school with me. This included both my junior and senior prom dates, neither of whom made out with me (either at prom OR this weekend)! I don't hang out with too many high school friends, these days--I've fallen out of touch with a lot of people in the last 6 years--but it's not because I don't like and miss seeing them. Every once in a while a night like this affords me the opportunity to catch up with old friends and fool them into thinking I have changed since the last millenium, and it never fails to entertain. It was pretty freakin' weird, I don't mind telling you, but it was fun to see everybody.

And in 5 days I am leaving town for a whirlwind tour of Prague, Budapest, Vienna, New York, Boston, and New London, Connecticut. And you are not.

Poll #483749 Where Should Jake Live?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 34

Hypothetically, if you could live in one of these places for the next three years, which would you choose?

Feel free to leave comments about why you picked what you picked and what your second or third choices might be.

I am a spendthrift who would rather take a $20 loss than spend 15 minutes on the phone with customer support. I act as if my time were exceedingly valuable, although I waste most of it on the internet. I see money as a means to an end, not as something to hoard jealously like Scrooge McDuck. This attribute has its positives (like I don't waste half my day seeking out 3% discounts on stamps and I don't freak out about bills) and negatives (like I suck at saving money because I always get takeout for dinner and am obsessed with owning material things that ultimately don't matter at all).

But today I bit the bullet and got on the horn with some business entities what done me wrong, and I got $29 back from my sinister credit card company and $26 back from my confused apartment building's office. That's $55, bitches!

I think I'll spend it on on a new pair of sunglasses...

This review of a.k.a. Friscos dredges up some of my most positive memories. This was the cool place to get lunch when I was in high school here in DC (longer ago than I can really believe). These days, now that sandwich shops are the next big thing, a place like a.k.a. Frisco’s doesn’t stand out that much, but back then my other lunch options were the school cafeteria (like, omg, tater tots again????), Popeye’s, and McDonalds. There was the bagel shop, too, but that was really more of a place to smoke cigarettes while skipping study hall.

It felt like being an adult, leaving campus, strolling right past the kids waiting for their super value meals, and sauntering into a real lunch place, frequented by grown-ups. They had fancy sodas, like IBC root beer and Orangina, and baked potatoes and side salads. They had tables in the back where people on lunch breaks from the Fannie Mae Foundation (pre-scandal) would sit, talking about more important things than how hard the next day’s bio test would be.

I remember being astounded by the exotic sandwich names, taken from San Francisco landmarks and neighborhoods: the Alcatraz, the Nob Hill, and my personal favorite, the Presidio. California was far away, and as mysterious as Oz--I knew it existed, and had my own ideas about the specifics, but when it came down to it I saw it as a land of free spirits and counterculture. Those place names were just empty signifiers to me, like “Arabia,” or “solipsism,” and I gave the allure of their geographic and cultural distance free rein. I imagined wandering around Haight-Ashbury, tie-dyed, pot-addled hippies holding hands and singing songs of freedom and love. Curvy hills stretching up and up, obscuring the horizon with townhouses and a neverending stream of streetcars. Professors in Berkeley and flaming homosexuals, corduroy-coats with elbow patches coexisting peacefully with leather chaps and G.I. Joe moustaches.

Of course, a lot has changed for me since then. I’ve been to California, even lived there for a while, and saw my (in retrospect) ridiculous expectations fall to the wayside, only to be replaced by more subtle and far more fascinating realities. I’ve taken up and given up bad habits, I’ve flown across an ocean to walk on ancient ground, I’ve read books written centuries before I was born. I’ve made great friends and lost them. At some point I became an adult, I suppose, for lack of a more meaningful term. I’m pretty sure there aren’t any adults who really feel like they’re all grown up, though, and probably that realization is the best indication that I’m not a kid anymore.

I miss the days when I could walk down the block to a sandwich shop and enter another world, and the days when this kind of crap sounded like real profundity.

This is, technically, a livejournal. It's like a blog, except it's much easier to get a bunch of people to half-heartedly read what you write. See, LJ people want to be loved, so they pretend to love other people so that the other people will pretend to love them back. It's quite disgusting, really, but it is what it is. And that's why people read mine--because I pretend to care about them.

Anyway, most people on LJ write, with varying degrees of skill, accounts of their day-to-day lives, and although there's a smattering of that in my LJ, I try to write about things that might actually be of interest to strangers who don't know me or care about me (or have any reason to pretend to care about me). Some of the things that interest me are technology, politics, grammar, literature, and pop culture. This means that you are probably bored to tears by at least 40% of what I like, but on the other hand you're not likely to hate everything I like.

If you know me in real life, and you read this thing, let me know. You are familiar with the fact that I am an egotistical, self-centered person, so you surely understand why I crave attention and accolades. Give them to me.

If you don't know me in real life, and you read this thing, let me know. I am an egotistical, self-centered person, and I crave attention and accolades. Give them to me.

Oh, and I guess this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License by me, calamityjake. That sounds iron-clad to me.