Text

| Friday, November 25, 2011

This is my first time posting here since Blogger updated their interface. This updated editor is so much better. It utilizes all the space available in the browser window, which is what it should always have been doing for such a single-entry form.

Kind of like how SimpleText does it. I have been using it for the past year or so. I have it as a Chrome App shortcut that opens it in a clean small sized window, which is just perfect for its minimalistic, super-resizable interface. I like having a little notepad-sized thing for lists, rough drafts, and paste snippets. Making memos in this app is so simple and easy to do—I love it. I just noticed today that it was "deprecated as of October 31st, 2011", however... this makes me sad. Fortunately, it is open source, with public APIs to at least get my text files back before it self destructs, which hopefully won't be this week... they didn't note the grace period, which is a little disconcerting. Looking at how to host my own SimpleText on nuggit.nu lead me to Google App Engine, which I'm not totally sure what it is, but it seems like something I would've loved to look into much sooner than now. Certainly not right before dead week with a backlog of tasks to do, but I digress.

At least if I can salvage my text files from SimpleText, I won't worry about setting up my own SimpleText until I can immerse myself in the probably fairly simple process of doing so. Probably over winter break. I may even use Google App Engine with my senior project. That is entirely another topic, one I should not ramble into at the moment. I want to be zen like Writer, which is something I found today. It's similar to SimpleText, yet so different—instead of medium black Arial on sprawling white, it is small lime Courier on contained black. I think these serve different purposes, too. Perhaps Writer would be good for writing bad poetry and long private journal rants. But here is Blogger, with small black Courier on sprawling white. Something in the middle?

It's cute—at the bottom of Writer, it links "Writer's block?" to a thesaurus and rhyme finder utility that Big Huge Labs also made. From there, there's also this little page for blog ideas. A short list that changes on each refresh, it's actually pretty good. Almost enough to make you wonder how you could have blogwriter's block.

It's not writer's block keeping me from updating the blog so much as having the time to keep it up. There are so many distractions. So much happening in life on multiple levels that I could lose myself. Yet, I continue living. Life and identity being thoughts and experiences, is it stored if I don't record it somewhere? This blog is mostly for myself, to try to store myself. It's just one of many outlets; each for different purposes. But if one of the outlets are lost, do I lose that part of myself? There is too much data, yet I covet it. Information overload. But I have to have it, store it, back it up and make sure it never dies; make sure I never die. I'm not the only one that cares about this data. There is an entire blog about Data Liberation. At least that one is for Google products; I've seen other blogs on the topic, one that showed me how to liberate my Facebook data. I've got that zip file of my Facebook tucked away, outdated almost as soon as I clicked the button for it. My accrued social identity between August 28, 2007 to 3:30pm, July 16, 2011.

My computer froze and crashed, because I have a bad RAM stick in this computer—of course the 2GB stick, out of the 3GB I have in here. After restarting and opening Chrome again with all 23 tabs, I got distracted and forgot where I was going with this post. So I set up Google Apps with nuggit.nu, which also got me to create yet another email for myself. I have 3 active email addresses already. It actually makes sense considering each email address serves a different purpose: personal, school, work. What will this one serve? Probably one to update my business cards and resume with, if my student email closes sometime after graduation. Nagisa Day, nagisa@ (this domain). There, my real name, on my website for the very first time.

I would need to spruce up my website to actually represent me, though. For the past few years, nuggit.nu just points to this blog, which has a lot of personal stuff on it—not necessarily things that should professionally represent me. Really, though, how much of myself am I supposed to hide or change to get a job? I am just hoping that despite my crazy late-night ramblings, periodic depressive grumblings, and other mundane generic personal blog posts, they will accept I'm human and not all the facets of myself I show online are my proudest. Maybe I am naive. Maybe I worry too much. It probably depends on the company, and I think I just need to find the right place for me. But maybe none of this matters, since they probably won't look so deeply into all of the information there is of me online. They will just look up my LinkedIn, which is mostly blank.

Blank like the document I didn't save before my computer froze. At least nothing was lost. Time to get back to work—I know I can do this. At least I feel this now, stronger than ever: I know I can do this. Like my old boss from the kitchen used to say: "How do we know that we can do this? Because we have to." This is my senior year.