I know I'm not a very good blogger.  I tend to forget what the point of having a blog is a lot of the time, and that's entertainment.  You all don't stop by to get a lecture every other week, and I know that's what I spend a lot of my posts doing. You come to be entertained, and I'm not doing very well at that.  I am aware of this.  It's just that sometimes I forget that even the most trivial personal anecdotes can be amusing, and I instead opt for the long, drawn out intellectual dissertation.  But that's boring.  So I'm going to try to make this a turning point, and focus more on narrative and entertainment value.  That being said, I know that I have readers who enjoy my wisdom and insight on various topics, and I'm going to try not to lose that quality.  I just want to make it more fun.

So to start off with that, I thought I'd share with you all some amusing things that happened to me today, on my birthday.

My IST professor is a troll.  I think I've mentioned her before.  She's an interesting person to listen to, and she's got a whole lot of neat insights into the past and future of technology, because she spends a lot of time on the front lines of the development arena.  The class itself is about the interaction between humans and computers, and networking, and things like that.  Broad topics, sorta an introduction to the whole information-people-technology triangle.  It's an interesting class, and I wish it wasn't so early in the morning, so I'd feel inclined to attend more often.

But today she was talking about the history of gaming.  And, as one might expect when one discusses the history of gaming, Tetris was mentioned.  So she showed us the first minute or so of this video for no other purpose (and she admitted as such) than to get the music stuck in our heads for the rest of the day.  And she was successful, at least on my part.  I was whistling it while walking between classes.  And, with any luck, most of you clicked on that link, and I've spread it around.

A lot of you have probably heard some form of the saying, "If everybody is special, then nobody is."  I read it most recently in the context of "If we practice tolerance toward everybody, then we are intolerant."  And while the implications of that statement are worth considering in and of themselves, I wonder if there are even more areas in which such suggestions are valid.  My dynamics professor was talking today about his education in China.  Apparently, when he graduated, he had to take a placement exam in order to gain admittance into college.  Out of the three thousand students in his class, only one hundred were allowed to seek higher education.

And we wonder why the US is so far behind in education versus the rest of the world.  Education is not a scarcity here.  Sure, it might not be cheap, but academic performance hardly if ever keeps anyone from being able to attain higher education anymore.  Those Chinese kids knew that only a small fraction of them were going to be able to attend college, so they had to work hard for it.  We don't.  And I think this is the reason why I'm wary of Obama's assertion that every American should be able to attain higher education.  Added to that should be the clause that higher education needs to be more 'education' and less 'high.'  Is it fair to say that if everybody can get a higher education, then nobody is educated?

Anyway, enough contemplation.  It's my birthday, I shouldn't have to think on my birthday.

I though you might be interested to know that I do write things other than blog posts.  I recently finished an 18000 word fictional piece that has received enough praise that I figured it would be worth posting about here.  Oh, and Reynard helped with it, too, which I am still incredibly thankful to him for.  It has to do with some things from my micronational roleplaying (a hobby I talk about briefly in my author bio), though it does stand on its own fairly well.  If you're interested, you can find it here.  Feel free to let me know what you think.  I'm always open to critique.  And if you happen to like it, you'll be glad to know I've just started work on a new story ('new' being a bit of a misnomer, since it's one I've had the idea for since middle school and just was never able to flesh it out) that has absolutely nothing to do with the one I've just shared, but it should still be good.  I hope.

Anyway, thanks for reading all the way through this jumble of stuff.  I hope to be getting back to regular updates soon.

~Jument