My first LiveJournal post!

I'd been debating whether to start a blog for a while. Usually I figure when you start writing long comment sections on other blogs, its time to get your own, instead of mooching off of others. I'm not quite to that point yet, but this seems like as good a place to start as any.

So, I'll be using this from time to time to put down some reflections/thoughts/opinions as they come to me. Updates will probably be fairly irregular through the end of the year, since I'm currently trying desperately to finish my dissertation by December, so that's taking the bulk of my time right now. The topic is "Disclaiming of Biological Children by Males in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth" - it uses a specific dataset which I helped create along with my boss at my last job, and that took a few years to put together.

I guess my main life-happenings right now, other than The Dissertation, now that we're settled in after moving to Santa Clarita from the Valley, are my efforts to get a job as a substitute teacher in California and our planned trip to London in October. I should have my CBEST results finalized next week, and then I can send in my application for a credential as a substitute. Yesterday I got fingerprinted at a local police station, another requirement. So, things are coming along on that front.

Donna and I have reservations with a friend of ours to visit London in October. That's another reason why I'm trying to bust hump on The Dissertation right now, so I can get to the point where I actually can afford to take the week for the trip. I'm going to feel a little guilty about going regardless as long as the dissert isn't finished, but its the difference between being majorly stressed and only somewhat worried while over there. Regardless, the reservations have been made, so we're going. Fortunately we didn't have to pay for the tickets, our friend Paula generously decided to use her freq. flyer miles to get Business Class tickets for the three of us. Having never flown anything other than economy, that should be an interesting experience in and of itself.

OK, just some quick thoughts to wrap up my first entry:

- I appreciate the irony in seeing John Dvorak blasting blogs as being overhyped here in Nov. 2003, then in July the next year, guess who decides to start a blog?

- One of the most useful services online for me is the ability to monitor when a particular page changes. Given the large number of bookmarks I've accumulated over the years, its a huge timesaver to have something automatically monitor when a page has changed, rather than having to check the page every so often. Originally I used the free Mindit service by Netmind, until they decided to go pay-only in early '02. Then I moved over to the free Spyonit.com service for most of '02 - it was nice, and able to monitor ebay as well as web sites. Unfortunately, their admins decided to take it down "for improvement" late in '02, and sure enough, it never came back online. Since then, I'd been using Change Detection; like the others, its free, and up until a couple of months ago, the updates had been pretty reliable. Unfortunately, I've noticed the number of updates I've been receiving from them has dropped to next-to-nothing recently, which is usually a bad sign that a service is about to go belly-up, or that they're having server problems.

So, my most recent shift is to stop relying on online services for monitoring, since I don't have control over whether a particular service will suddenly disappear or not. I've been researching various programs which reside on my PC and monitor web pages automatically. This has the downside that I have to actually physically run the program, unlike the online services doing so automatically & emailing me any results. But, the upside is that, barring a catastrophic crash, I'm not likely to suffer a complete loss of the list of sites I want to keep checking on, and keeping control "local" is probably just the smart play to make. After experimenting with a few, the one I think I'm going to settle on is called "Morning Paper" by a company named Boutell. The formatting is fairly nice, since it puts the sites which have changed at the top of the report page in the browser, and the registration fee is a very reasonable $10.

- Politically, I suspect I'm like a lot of post-Baby Boom voters, insofar as I don't really *care* what Bush or Kerry were doing during a war that I can't remember at all. I'd much rather hear a serious, mature debate about terrorism, health care, the deficit - you know, something actually relevant to the problems we're facing *today*. But I guess that was too much to hope for.