My latest assignment for management class is to do a three-day log of how I use my time, make a pie chart based on relevant categories of activity I engage in, and then write a 500-700 word paper about it. The first thing you should note is that the paper is done, even though strictly speaking I haven't even finished the three-day log; I feel like I pretty well know what today will end up being like, in that I am going to do reference homework after I get off work at noon, and then I am going to go home at 5:00, read for a bit, probably watch Turkish film at Duke, and then come home and get my Game 7 on.

The second thing you should note is that this paper will be one of the supreme hack works of our generation. The thesis I will present is that, really, I haven't given the slightest tick about time management until they assigned me to write this paper; I know at IMSA and at Carleton and at IMSA they pushed it real hard on me, but eventually I just learned how to get into a rhythm where I didn't need to schedule my time very strictly. This especially happened at Carleton, where I could keep a pretty good idea of when my classes were and when my work shifts were, and then just wing it vis-a-vis my homework and have it get done when it needed to. This is especially apparent to me when I look at my time log for Monday, where it's like "I tried reading, but really, what's the point when I don't need to have this book read until like the end of November? WATCH RED SOX"

I don't think I'm really the target audience for this homework. I haven't really figured out how grownups work yet but I'm pretty sure once you work you're maybe expected to be able to manage your time the way they expect you to? I'm pretty sure an undergraduate's conception of time management isn't exactly the best one to use when approaching this paper. Who knows. Anyway, I haven't ever had to work for a living since I've been a student my whole life, so this whole assignment will end up being pretty revealing for just about everyone involved.

Time to stop blogging while I'm at work. This is basically exactly what I'm talking about.

Welcome to the new page. This is not what it will ultimately look like, but this is the basic idea; it will be different pictures in different places. Some of my pages are looking quite badly at the moment but I'll fix those up in the future when I'm not supposed to be doing my homework.

Some other things I'm working on are as follows: finally getting round to classifying my posts and working out an indexing system for that; writing up my date-based archive; and ceasing to use the script that syndicates my blog to livejournal. This is because I am tired of having the same content posted in two places, and I would like for people to actually come here instead of just reading that all the time. Not that I don't like all y'all who are reading the livejournal, but I take a lot more pride in my actual web site that I pay for.

Library school is a lot of fun because it is easier than Carleton, and over the weekend I learned that Sarah Horowitz wants to come to school here too. That would be pretty awesome; I bet we'd end up taking special collections together next fall, which would be weird.

Anyway, new site design! I ripped this off of a lot of other people, notably stealing a bit of CSS from Andy, but that was all in support of the design which is solely my own.

Minnesota was pretty fucking awesome. Snaps to everyone I had a chance to visit, and my apologies to those of you I didn't. I am now poor, and about to get temporarily poorer after I get these hotel reservations, but I expect I will be back in Northfield for commencement, and for a longer time if I can get the days off/hours made up for work. I have a busy June schedule but I also have a lot of '05 friends, and I would like to see them graduate.

More later but for now I sleep, because tomorrow is Monday and I am busy.

So, here I am in Northfield, where it is cold and grey and rainy and generally not a good time to be alive. I see it's really nice out in Chapel Hill so I guess that's something.

I did part of my reference homework because it was imperative for me to know what the "Bug-Eating State" was. So that was fun, and I also learned that many states have a state beverage, which is milk, and that Florida has like a state waste management symbol or something. That strikes me as pretty obnoxious. I also learned that the state language of Illinois is English, which is something that I don't think is very tenable in the long run.

But Minnesota! I've seen some folks that I know, and expect to see many more folks that I know in future. I also expect that I will drink Leinenkugel's while I'm here, and perhaps some Summit, as these are things that are inaccessible to me when I'm in North Carolina. I went to quiz bowl practice last night, which ran until 11:00 and featured me buzzing on some trashy movie thing with "The Glass Bead Game" because it was a packet I'd heard in practice two weeks ago and I was sure there was a question about that somewhere. Oh well, whatever.

Did you hear the radio show I was on last night? It was fun! Andy wrote about it and many other things. I played some indie pop and talked about how the Streets released the Album of the Year, although time will tell if I stand by that statement because it was rather off-the-cuff. We talked about concept albums, and had a nice discussion about which bands are most and least likely to release one. This is a conversation I expect to have with nickd when I get back.

So anyway, I guess right now I'm going to go wander around until Jonathan gets here. Maybe I'll go visit the history department or something.

You probably noticed that the background is a different colour. This afternoon I decided that instead of, oh, doing my homework, I would start trying to make the page look the way I'd really like it to, at least for right now. This is pretty clearly the first step. Also I have done work on the archives page and it will look better than it does very soon.

I saw Saturday Looks Good To Me last night, and they were excellent although I am tired now because I didn't get home until like 1:45 this morning. I also owe it to myself to write a Drive By Truckers review, so eventually when I'm not in class or in Minnesota I'll write some concert reviews or whatever.

Also it seems as though I will be in KRLX tomorrow night.

Jacques Derrida, 1930-2004

So I totally forgot to register yesterday, on account of not bothering to get out of bed until about 2:30 and then watching baseball all day. At Carleton this would have resulted in me not getting any classes I wanted and having to be stuck taking stupid intro-level classes with freshmen; here it just means I'm waitlisted for things and am stuck taking a class on Thursday night. Not exactly apocalyptic.

Anyway, I am taking these classes for serious:
INLS 151 - Organization of Materials
INLS 224 - Humanities and Social Science Reference
INLS 326 - Seminar in Popular Materials

And these are the classes in which I am first on the waitlist, in order of how much I would prefer to take them:
INLS 156 - Introduction to Database
INLS 342 - Seminar in Academic Libraries

I would post the times I am in those classes but, then again, I could always not bother. My Carleton mindset has me pretty deathly afraid of 300-level classes, but my Carleton-was-80000 times-harder-than-this mindset has me feeling like I could take pretty much everything SILS could throw at me. I'll probably just stick with the database class, though. I don't know. I feel pretty okay about getting into either of those classes, since I've gotten into pretty much every class for which I've ever been first on the waitlist, but I suppose we'll see how it works out.

Okay, before Neal gets back and I have to talk him off the cliff, I just want to say that the Twins deserved to lose this game and they still aren't built to make a serious run at a pennant. I think what pained me the most was seeing them chase Vazquez and get a 5-1 lead, with the Yankees bringing in Loaiza, and then having every Twin who came up start chasing first-pitch high fastballs. Guys! You got this far by not swinging at those. Don't you remember last year, when that was all the White Sox did and that's how you beat them? And they were playing desperate because they were already losing. There's just no reason to be impatient in a situation where you're already winning the game, especially against someone like E-Lo who's going to make a mistake sooner or later.

Also Gardenhire shouldn't have lifted Santana after five innings; he probably had one more left in him and the bullpen isn't that good. (Although Balfour was amazing, for what it's worth.)

While I am genuinely disappointed that the Twins didn't force Game 5, part of me is smugly satisfied that if the Twins had to lose to the Yankees, at least they did it at home. Now the playing field is level between us and them. Now it's time to get ready for what should be an actually interesting playoff race in the Central, what with there being three teams now that seem to think they can make a run at Minnesota.

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Speaking of Minnesota, I decided to buy plane tickets when I got my fellowship check, and I will be in Northfield next weekend. Enjoy it while it lasts, because once winter shows up I won't want to set foot in that cold-ass, God-forsaken town anymore.