I have already hinted that I read many articles that I feel are worth sharing, but never get around to writing anything about them. Explanations of this behavior include being busy, lazy, or not really having much to say, other than something is interesting. As described earlier, this leads to a build up in the various (lame) places that I store the links. To mitigate this, I have started using Twitter to make small posts about these interesting articles. That’s all fine and good, but that means my reader(s) has(ve) to check two places. I preferred the idea of having all of it in one place, hence the revamp of parts of the site. I am now using Lifestream to pull in my Twitter feed and displaying that in the new, right sidebar of the blog pages.

Since it has been a while since I messed with CSS, I had to tinker around with stuff for a while to get it right. I found some insight about float elements here and got a lot of help getting my second sidebar in place by looking at this example.

Consider this a technical preview for the moment because I have not modified all of the page templates to work with the new stylesheets. That’s why the tags page, for example, is missing its sidebars. I will fix it soon, but I need to move to another task for now.

I like that we are building out rail-based mass-transit infrastructure, but I was a little surprised that the light rail does not have space that works well for luggage.

There is more than six inches between the seats, that’s an exaggeration. There is, however, very little knee space, and definitely not enough space for luggage.

I wrote a while ago about my old workstation being taken down. My (old) website was not the only one being hosted there; Shun Wang also had his site there. He has relocated, though, and his new site is at http://www.shun-wang.net/.

I was confronted this weekend by a friend — let’s call him “Kiran” — who was faux-irritated that I never told him about this blog. Sorry about that, and I am also sorry to anyone else who has landed here and felt similarly. This whole thing started as an experiment, and I believe I only told two people about the blog (one being my mom).

Here are possible explanations for having never advertised this:

• The blog never left experiment mode.
• I did not think it would appeal to a wider audience.
• I was too lazy to say anything.

One or two people have probably noticed that I have not posted for a while. September gone. October gone. Most of November gone. Well, a lot has been going on, but I am not going to go into details now.

An important role that this blog plays for me is that I post news and articles that I find interesting here. This serves the dual purpose of sharing with friends and family and also organizes thoughts and articles that I find noteworthy. Before posting here, I do record interesting things that I find, but not in a consistent way. I tag articles in my RSS aggregator or mark them in some other way. More often than not, I never see those articles again, but the most disorganized thing that I do is to record links as drafts in my email account. During long periods of not posting here, the drafts folder in my email account swells. The worst property of the draft emails is that I do not bother including any information about the links that are pasted there, so I just have many dozen drafts with raw links in them. Often, I never bother to figure out what the drafts are after they have been there for a while.

That previous paragraph is kind of funny, since in many other ways I am very organized with information that I come across. I like to know that I can find things again.

There is another force (other than simply having a lot going on) that keeps up the disorganization. Sometimes I hesitate to post something that I find in the news or on other blogs simply because I feel silly writing about things that everyone has possibly already seen. That concern, however, seems irrelevant given my self-centered goal of organizing my thoughts.

Stopping this rambling post short, I am going to dig out a few of those draft emails.

Back in late January I reported that my workstation at UIUC was going to be taken down. It took a while because another website on the machine needed to be moved first, but that is apparently done because Proteus is now down.

At the end of this link is a great picture of a squirrel that jumped in the frame during a time-delayed photograph. Be sure to read the caption beneath the picture.

I do not know if this is normal around here, but I am frequently discovering and having to deal with spiders in my apartment. Me being me, I catch and release these spiders, which have been ranging from pretty small to one exceptionally large spider that required a substitution in my usual capturing device (a glass) due to its size. I currently have one trapped underneath my desk and will be relocating it outdoors in a few moments.

In response to yesterday’s wholly unnecessary assault on my shoe (see Berry Stains from the Sky), I have decided to memorialize the event in haiku.

In the first poem, I write from what I imagine to be the perspective of the assaulting crow. The second poem describes the event from my perspective, starting with the crows on the ground, followed by the realization that they were distracting for the attacker from above.

summer is most fun
eating berries in the tree
poop on humans’ heads

young crows in the park
diversion! third crow in tree!
they laugh, stain my shoe

A young crow pooped mulberries on my white running shoes today.

I am pretty sure it was deliberate, and I am pretty sure he was aiming for my head.