Linkstew

One of my goals this semester was perfect attendance, but when the day was done, I didn't quite make it.

I actually missed my first three classes way back on Wednesday, November 13th. I had a 172 homework assignment due that due that was giving me fits, and by 10 am that morning I hadn't made much progress. Instead of go to class and split my attention between lecture and my homework, I decided to stay home and focus on my assignment. I'm going to console myself that I missed those classes because I was working on a homework assignment.

Looking back now, I never would have made that choice. The assignment was due at 2:30 (the beginning of class), but I figured I had until 4pm (the end of class) to turn it in. At 3:30 I only had three questions answered. I needed to turn in what I had, so I started out the door for a brisk walk up campus to Soda. When I got to Hearst and Euclid at 3:55, I got vaguely worried when I saw a few of my classmates walking onto campus. When I got to Soda, I found the classroom empty, and the teacher gone. I don't know if my clocks were off or what, but that finding incredibly frustrated me.

I suppose I could have tried to email the instructor to turn in the assignment, but between only having three of the problems done, and not wanting to contest the instructor's "no late homework" policy, I didn't bother.

To make things worse, that night, I had a Ling 106 assignment to do that also gave me fits. In retrospect, I suspect going to my 106 discussion that day would have helped me significantly in writing that assignment.

Just as I predicted, once I missed one class, I missed many more by the end of the semester. I missed two more 106 discussions, missed a 172 discussion, and missed every 160 discussion. I also missed every one of the last four 160 lectures, and 3 out of 4 of my last 172 discussions.

But, I went to every Ling 106 lecture this semester. Of course, Shannon claimed that I missed a lecture at Raleigh's after Ling on Thursday, but Jeremy backed up my claim of perfect Lakoff attendance.

I'm pretty sure that I never managed perfect attendance in even a single class before, so attending every Lakoff lecture feels like at least a partial success in my goal of perfect attendance this semester.

I realized today that I can count on one hand the number of things I have left to do before I graduate. Now, first of all it's unprecedented that the number should be so low before Thanksgiving. Second of all, I can count how far I am from graduation. On one hand, baby! Check it out:

1. Finish my CS 160 Project. [1]
2. My last CS 172 homework assignment is due on 12/2.
3. My Metaphor term paper is due on 12/4, and then that class is done.
4. My CS 160 final is on Monday, December 16th.
5. And my CS 172 final is on Wednesday, December 18th.

[1] Okay, admittedly, that CS project has about 5 major chunks left to do (two of which are due in 9 hours), but as a CogSci major, I think I'm justified in applying a fairly high level of abstraction on this point.

I had a CS 172 midterm today, which obviously meant that I had some heavy duty procrastination to do last night.

In particular, I replaced Metacookie with an RSS feed both here on Linkstew and over on In Passing. I admit I probably should have given metacookie users a chance to transition, but I suck I was so excited by RSS that I accidentally deleted all of the metacookie code without saving a backup before I realized what I'd done, and once I was gone I decided it wasn't worth the time to re-implement a dead technology. Metacookie was fun while it lasted, but I agree with Kevin, and I think RSS is a much more viable and flexible solution anyway.

So that brings us to RSS. What is it, what's it do for you, how do you use it, etc, etc? Kevin already answered most of those questions, but in short, in combination with an RSS browser of some form, it lets you subscribe to sites that you want to keep track of, and it not only tells you which sites are updated, but it also lets you skim the headlines of the sites that you're watching and keep track of particular articles that you've read. When you feed Linkstew's RSS to your RSS browser, your client will grab the titles, first paragraphs, and number of comments of the 13 most recent entries.

And credit where credit is due, Kevin let me borrow his RSS generation code which made my life much easier, and made it of a reasonable size to tackle as a procrastination project.

So over on the left, there's a link to Linkstew's RSS Feed -- just grab that link and feed it to your RSS browser of choice. On the Mac side, NetNewsWire Lite is a very elegant Mac OS X RSS browser that also happens to be free. On the Windows side, uh... I don't use Windows, so I haven't used any of these, so I can't exactly assess what a good free implementation is... Kevin suggested Trillian Pro (the swiss-army-IM-client for Windows) and NewzCrawler, but unfortunately, neither of those are free.

I've got a couple of questions about my RSS implementation for y'all, though:

• Should I use that ugly orange XML button like Kevin has? I totally thought it was something he made up, until I ran into it on another site today.
• Right now I include the comment count under each entry. The purpose of this was to make the reader mark an entry as unread when the comments increase. With NetNewsWire, though, this behavior is a little inconsistent, and I have no idea how other clients work. And I could see this behavior being really annoying... So, good? Bad? Should I make a feed without comment counts?
• 13? The right number, or too arbitrary?

As for today's midterm, I didn't really feel prepared, but that's just the status quo for me. The more things change, the more they stay the same.