hilizzle in the hizzle

No, not to a new town. Don’t get your hopes up, all you locals. But after a year of tolerating my blogsome blog, I am giving up and moving to my old blogspot account. So if you’d like to continue reading about all my adventures, feel free to catch me at hilizzle.blogspot.com. (Creative, I know.)

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, I had to post this site: techpresident.com. It’s a blog that will track all tech-related information about the 2008 campaign(s). Should be interesting, even to those who aren’t so techie…

I think it’s really interesting that Barack Obama not only jumped into the social networking world wholeheartedly with his 08 campaign, but created his own social networking site/world. That’s pretty intense. But maybe I’ll join just to see what comes of it — it could be interesting, or it could just be a bunch of message boards about how cool he is. We’ll see…

Soon a subcommittee of the NCAA will release its recommendation on whether it should ban all postseason games taking place in South Carolina because the state government flies the Confederate flag over a Confederate soldier monument at the Capitol. You can read a news story related to this issue at MSNBC.

This is so infuriating to me. While the NCAA has taken on the noble cause of trying to eradicate any celebration of racism, they are really just butting heads with the most obstinate people I’ve ever met and the only result will be harming the lives of students and student athletes across the state.

USC, Clemson and other South Carolina schools (including SC State, a historically black school) are members of the NCAA, but will now be "less equal" than other members due to state politics out of their control. When interviewed by ESPN, representatives at SCSU anonymously stated that if they were to pressure the government to remove the flag, they felt there was a real danger of having their funding decreased. So essentially the NCAA is punishing these schools for protecting their students by protecting their state funding in a state where education funds are already lacking.

I can tell you that most students at these schools want the flag removed. But what control do 18-year-olds have over more than a century of obstinate Southern tradition? Why punish these students for political issues out of their control? Even if every student at USC signed a petition to remove the flag, it would have no effect. And yet now these students and their athletes, who in the past 5 years have boasted the #1 and #2 baseball teams and superior football, basketball and soccer teams as well, can’t participate in playoff games in their own state. The new Colonial Center built at USC will remain unused for tournaments due to a completely unrelated state law.

Again, the NCAA’s intentions are noble. But if they take this committee’s recommendation, the only people they will hurt will be thousands of students in states like South Carolina.

How did you kick off your new year? I realized today that if your entire year mirrored the first day, I might be in trouble… or have a really great year. I slept in till 10, lounged and read in bed till noon, lunched at the exclusive Taco Bell club, read all afternoon (and hid from the rain), and prepared a gourmet frozen pizza for dinner. Heart disease, here I come…

On the other hand, this was probably the most relaxing day I’ve had in months. And last night, as my friends asked for my new year’s resolution and I scrambled for an answer, I realized I didn’t have one. Now, I really am the kind of person that is paranoid about my faults and stresses over them all the time, especially ones other people notice. So I was sure I’d come up with a good resolution sooner or later.

But as I climbed into bed, I realized that my resolution this year is to have no resolution. It may have just been the champagne talking, but at the ripe old age of 23, I’m beginning to realize how much of my life has been based on what I think I should be, or what I think other people think I should be. And while I think that’s helped me become a better person, it’s also left me pretty tense. Lately I’ve had trouble eating and I grind my teeth in my sleep every night so hard that my jaw is sore most of the time.

So maybe this year, I need to just figure out who I am without all the "should"s. I need to relax a little and be myself and figure out what I want from life, or at least for right now. It’s not like I’ll refuse to improve in the ways I notice, but why seek them out? Can’t I have one year in which I just do what I want (within reason) and try to dial down the stress a little? And if so, shouldn’t I do it while I’m young, with minimal responsibilities?

So, my resolution this year is to do what I want, and figure out what I want, and to put less pressure on myself about things that are out of my control. After I’ve had a year off and seen what that’s done for me (good or bad), then I can come back with resolutions that are hopefully more realistic and productive.

Happy New Year!

In case you missed the announcement, John Edwards is running for president again in 2008. Oh wait, maybe you missed it because it hasn’t technically been announced yet — too bad his campaign Web site already went live. It’s particularly embarrassing that his campaign slogan is "Tomorrow begins today"… oops.

Today I hosted Thanksgiving for three of my closest friends here. It was my way of compensating for a holiday season away from home — this year was my year for Thanksgiving, but it would have cost nearly $1,000 to go home. Plans with Graham’s family didn’t work out, so I got to celebrate the holidays with friends and try to scrape together a semi-respectable Thanksgiving dinner.

I hope everyone else enjoyed it, and I definitely did. It was the perfect low-key way to spend the holiday, especially the first holiday I was trying to host. I had fun cooking and trying to reproduce my favorite dishes of my mom’s (they turned out nowhere near as good, but still a recognizable copy). And I had fun hanging out with friends and listening to indie covers of traditional Christmas songs. It didn’t even bother me that Graham watched football all afternoon.

I think the older you get, the easier it is to get caught up in the family politics and stress of the holidays — they can become a little too real. But I think getting older also gives us the perfect opportunity to more fully appreciate the meaning of holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas. As I learn to look a little closer at the world around me, I realize that I have so much to be thankful for. After a stressful and quite imperfect fall, this time seems like a kind of rebirth to me and I am so thankful for a chance to start over with a few situations, improve others and begin entirely new projects. I love the holidays and tend to get overly excited, sappy, sentimental and childlike — but what a perfect time to turn over a new leaf.

Happy Holidays, everyone. If you’d like to share what you’re thankful for this holiday season, I’d love to hear it.

Last night I saw Casino Royale. It was kickass. I’m sorry, that’s not polite language, and if you clicked through from Facebook you possibly have never heard me swear in my life (it’s a pretty recent development and only done when appropriate, such as when describing James Bond).

Anyway, go see it. You won’t regret it. I plan on going again soon.

Today’s Dilbert comic made me laugh out loud in my cubicle. Sometimes I get depressed that after years of hating Dilbert, I now not only find it funny, but also empathize with most of the characters.

Tomorrow I’m copresenting at a minor event at work called a Freaky Friday. We’re giving a brief intro to The Facebook and then talking about the issues involved — such as security, etc. — and how to use it to communicate with students from the role of faculty/staff.

In conducting some background research, I found the following priceless quote, from The Wall Street Journal article "MySpace, ByeSpace?":

***

The guerrilla marketing has driven away James Kalyn, a 30-year-old technical writer in Regina, Saskatchewan. He kept receiving friend requests from half-naked female strangers through his MySpace page. Clicking on a request usually led to a profile that turned out to be an ad for a pornography site. At first, Mr. Kalyn was excited that "these hot girls allegedly wanted to be my friend." But after looking at a few profiles, he realized: "If it’s a picture of someone fairly attractive, they’re probably not my friend in real life." Last spring, Mr. Kalyn killed his MySpace profile.

***

I laughed in my cubicle for a solid minute. Oh, techies.