I admire Jish’s commitment to his goal of leading a spam-free life, but I think there’s an even simpler way to achieve it, at least in some cases: install SpamAssassin. I’ve been running SA for about a year now, and I get little to no spam, despite the fact that my primary email address has been on the web for over four years. Once in a while something makes its way through, but it’s usually semi-legitimate - and for any persistent survivors, there’s always the blacklist. I know SA isn’t exactly a recent development, but I mention it only because it wasn’t included in Jish’s otherwise comprehensive and excellent list, although it is mentioned on Spamotomy.

I stumbled through today walleyed with caffeine and still uselessly tired (again), but I plan to sleep for a solid twelve hours tonight. Today was the last day of classes, so my papers are all turned in, programs written, quizzes graded. Of course, I need to spend the next several days catching up on some reading in preparation for the three finals I still have to take, but that’s not something that needs to happen tonight. Or tomorrow, for that matter. Tonight my only goals are to become unconscious as soon as possible, and to stay that way until my downstairs neighbor’s noxious cooking fumes wake me up as they always do when I sleep in past 10am. I don’t know what the hell they eat down there, but it reminds me of the presents my dog used to bring us from local garbage cans.

You know, when I was a rosy-cheeked freshman (at a tender eighteen years of age), I never slept and it never bothered me. I went out nearly every night with my newfound local friends to all the various then-thriving goth clubs and came home long enough to shower before hitting my eight am class, and I didn’t feel much the worse for wear.

Now, it’s not quite five years later and I’m unbelievably punchy after going a few days in a row on three or four hours of sleep. I’ve been surly and incoherent all day, and I really shudder to think of the papers I handed this morning in getting read by another human being. I fell asleep during three different lectures this afternoon (when I normally only sleep through one). And then I spent half an hour staring at a program this evening in search of the source of a null pointer error, only to realize when I found it that it was in the first place I usually check. When did sleep become essential to my ability to function on even a basic level? Am I getting old already?

The awful, awful paper that sparked last night’s shocking anti-Aristotle post is now finished, footnoted, and ready to turn in. I’m suddenly feeling a lot more benevolent toward ancient philosophy as a whole, although that’s likely to change - I’ll be knee-deep in pre-Socratics this week, since finals start Wednesday.

I finished my Christmas shopping today, by which I mean I finally got around to placing the Amazon order for everything I couldn’t or didn’t want to buy locally. That includes things like most books and DVDs - while it’s not like that stuff is hard to find, I’m a sucker for the Amazon discount.

Yes, there was snow here all weekend, but not as much snow as we were told to expect (surprise, surprise). I didn’t have to shovel it or drive in it, so I stayed in with my hot beverages and my philosophy papers and watched it through the windows.

Look, I’ve tried to like ancient philosophy, I really have. However, I still can’t get over the fact that reading this stuff feels like that one physics class I had sophomore year where we spent three weeks covering the fucking ether: I mean, why? One lecture on the ether theory, that’s fine. Get a sense of the general pre-Einstein consensus, and all that. Influence, development, progress: I get it. But there aren’t any classes in the Physics department that cover only ether-based theories, right? You see where I’m going with this.

So, ancient philosophy: I realize that a lot of it displays amazing foresight and anticipation of dilemmas that still plague contemporary philosophers, and that’s all well and good. I have an appropriately reverent sense of the history involved - the sheer venerability of this material. And there’s some stuff I do like, don’t get me wrong; Aristotle’s zany compatibilism isn’t bad reading, especially for those of us who always thought there was something a little fishy about Hume’s take on free will. But does every single philosophy undergrad really need to take an entire semester of ancient metaphysics, for all love? Seriously, people: remember the fucking ether.

I know that there’s bound to be a classics professor out there reading this, and I bet she’s shaking her head in disappointment. Maybe a grad student writing his dissertation on the four causes doctrine. Please, believe me - I tried to like ancient philosophy, I really did.

From left to right: Arthur Schopenhauer, Plato, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Søren Kierkegaard. These are magnetic finger puppets from the Unemployed Philosophers Guild - they have a booth at that (mostly) awful holiday market that’s living in Union Square until Christmas Eve. You may remember my Nietzsche puppet from the other day. I just wish they’d had a Wittgenstein - doesn’t anyone love dear old Wittgenstein anymore? In any case, I’m fairly sure that this post will do away with any remaining cool points I might have had, but the bottom line is that I have a Kant finger puppet, and you don’t.

Supa asked why I hadn’t made a real post about the Wizbang Weblog Awards. I guess part of it is that I’ve never heard of Wizbang nor of most of the other sites that are nominated, either in my category or others, with a few notable exceptions - including the excellent Crooked Timber and the indefatigable Rabbit Blog. Another part of it is that some of the categories strike me as a little weird - does there really need to be a best female-authored blog section at all? And best foreign blog? Either way, the moral of the story is: I’m still the Sexiest Female Blogger, and it’s definitely time for my coffee.

While I realize I’m the last person in the world to do so, I finally switched from Mozilla to Firebird today, and was surprised to discover it’s actually faster than Safari on my box (and, of course, faster than Mozilla - but that’s not saying much). The last time I downloaded a version of Firebird, I wasn’t impressed - but that was quite a while ago, now. I haven’t discovered anything I dislike about this version yet, except for the dorky icon for the OS X version. It has all the Mozilla-y things I like without the painfully slow rendering, and it hasn’t crashed yet. With that said, however, it seems one of the last things that’s kept me from switching to Safari will be fixed in the upcoming new version - so Firebird may have only a very short stint as my default browser. Either way, though, I doubt I’ll go back to Mozilla.

I’ve got another one of those irritating hurts-to-breathe sore throats, but it started to snow this morning. Not the first flurry of the season (that was Tuesday), but the first time it’s actually piling up. I enjoy snow a great deal when I don’t have to go out in it, and when I’m home writing papers with plenty of coffee and hot chocolate in my kitchen, and now that I don’t have a car that will need to be freed from the drifts tomorrow morning. Hooray for winter!

Here’s a question for you philosophers: where does one buy cheap back issues of the big journals? Is such a thing possible? I mean, there’s always JSTOR and Bobst, but my access to both of these goes away in about six months, when I don a dweeby purple cap and gown and my ID expires. While it’s likely that I’ll be back at some university or other in the near future, it would be nice to figure out a solution in the meantime. I suppose I could just subscribe to my favorites - but if I could afford that, I wouldn’t be wondering where I’ll work next year.