Oh, the nerd shame!

This is just flat-out nerdy. I've been trying to come to terms with Linux ever since I took a job where 30% of my day is spent in a PuTTy session. I've always wanted to use Linux if for no other reason than to impress people by doing everything from the command line, LIKE MORPHEUS. Most of the people here at the office check their e-mail and edit code straight from the shell.

Anyways, today I found out about Lynx-- a text-based browser at my disposal-- and decided to give it a spin. It's awesome... I CAN THINK SO CLEARLY WITHOUT ALL THE VISUAL CLUTTER. Above is this site in Lynx. But yeah, okay friends, disown me or whatever.

Domainz

Short version:
The site is now located at http://www.confusednation.com, just like it should be, and Kyle wasted like ten minutes writing an explanation that no one will read unless they're looking for jokes about themselves.

James Joyce Version:
Every year, around Christmastime, the domain name that I've hosted this blog on for eight big ones expires. And every year, I painfully decide that this chosen-on-a-whim domain needs to stick around, if for no other reason than shear posterity. After all, I have a lot of memories attached to this site. Or at the very least I have [8 years times 12 months/year times $14/month] worth of cash invested in its existence.

I thought this year would be different. Really. I thought I had finally come to peace with the fact that no one really minds adding ".blogspot" to the URL when it can save me some pocket change in the long run. After all, most people who visit this site use feedreaders to aggregate the content. And so, I watched as my domain host started sending me renewal notices back in November, and finally I got an e-mail that simply said "Domain expired on confusednation.com."

I didn't even flinch.

But when I returned home for Christmas, my friend Roy offhandedly mentioned how weird it was to type in the old site address and get an error back. That was actually all it took for me to race home, re-register the domain, transfer it to another registrar, and configure Blogger to use it.

And so now it's back here on http://www.confusednation.com, at least until next Christmas. I've also been mulling over the possibility of renaming (gasp!) my blog. If you've got any good ideas, you should totally throw them this-a-way.

Also, be on the lookout for my brother's blog, which should exist somewhere soon. He's actually an English major, which means he can't say things like "alot" and "there coming over for dinner tonight," and he probably has smarter things to write about than I do.

I did something you can use!

In between bouts of doing work and reading about different types of piercings on Wikipedia, I've actually done something that every Rice student could probably benefit from--

Presenting The (Slightly Unofficial) Rice University Academic Calendar!
I painstakingly copy-pasted every single event from the Summer and Fall '07 sessions into Google Calendar. If you're anything like me, you can benefit from having every single little holiday and pass/fail deadline set in front of you. So if anyone uses GCal or iCal, knock yourselves out...

Rice University Academic Calendar (Summer Sessions 2007)
XML | iCal | HTML

Rice University Academic Calendar (Fall Semester 2007)
XML | iCal | HTML

Corrections are welcome. Just don't be a dick about it. And if you try to tell me this is available FROM RICE somewhere else, I'm going to just cry.

The More Things Change...

...the more they stay the same. Or something like that.

So I guess I owe everyone a little bit of an explaination as to why, suddenly, CN was replaced by an emo and wrathful "fuck you" to the world. And why I've stripped the site down to being a just-me blog for now. Think about it from my perspective: for the first three years of your high school life you lived a dull, pretentious existance and you documented it on the Interweb for everyone to see. Do you really want to go into your second year of college dragging behind you a big, stupid shadow of a life that you now renounce?

Yeah, and I don't either. And that's why the milk video, every little stupid high school project, the pictures of my pimple-faced friends, the essay on why Tim could get poon back in 10th grade, and everything else is gone with the wind.

I'm moving on to a better place-- a more Web 2.0, instant gratification kind of place where I can spill my guts about serious things without having 80% of my visiting traffic be 12-year-olds searching for the word "asshat." Have I lost my sense of humor? No. But it's kind of hard to be yourself when you're ammending your thoughts to a backlog of immature bullshit. I don't totally regret the person I was in high school, nor do I regret the friendships or the fun I had. The posters, the people who loved CN five years ago, friends... I can't tell you how great it was to be part of something that, I felt, was big.

So you've got to understand that in order for CN to exist at all I had to sweep out the high school me and make a throne for the college me. I think you'll still like it.

Oh yeah, and no one else can post besides me, for now. The only people I think I would ever consider letting post on here again, besides me, would be Matt and Roy. Every time Matt gets drunk he laments about wanting to post more. God knows he has stories to tell. And Roy actually has stories that don't revolve around a high BAC, along with being the most level-headed person I know. I think we need more of that, maybe.

So welcome back to the not-so-redone but still different Confused Nation. It's a blog.