I’m in Massachusetts through Tuesday, so posting will be light over the weekend. I feel like I’ve gone back in time - it’s cooler here than it’s been in New York for months, and I’m loving the (temporary) return of hoodie weather. I intend to spend most of my time reading in the hammock, eating things that have been grilled, and playing with the dog. It’s good to get away from the city once in a while.

It’s not even worth saying at this point that Manhattan is absolutely packed with iPods, because everyone already knows that Manhattan is absolutely packed with iPods. The first week or two that I had my own iPod, I used to keep track of how many other iPods I noticed during the course of a day - iPods on the subway, iPods on the sidewalk, iPods at NYU. Generally, any day that involved going below 14th St would be at least a 15-20 iPod day. Now, while I still love my iPod very much, I’ve stopped noticing when I see another person with those distinctive white earbuds, but that doesn’t mean the other people have stopped noticing me. Usually we’re all off in our own little iPod worlds, but once in a while there’s someone who tries very hard to make eye contact with me as a fellow iPod user - someone who wants to have an iPod moment. That’s all well and good, but one of the reasons I got an iPod was so that I could ignore everyone else, and now that I’m over the novelty of being another person with an iPod, why aren’t they?

What am I doing now? It’s not entirely clear. In the short term, I’m freelancing and keeping an eye out for a decent web dev job. (If you know of any, let me know.) But yes, I do plan to go to grad school - it’s just not entirely clear when, where, or for what. My BA is in philosophy, of course, but I also minored in computer science. All my CS friends think I’m nuts for considering a PhD in the humanities, and all my philosophy friends think I’m nuts for considering an MS in computer science. (Not because it’s computer science, since most people agree that’s at least more likely to get me a decent job, but rather because there’s little to no funding for MS programs.) About all I can say about it right now is that I’m more comfortable with the idea of leaping into a master’s program than I am a doctoral program, but I think most of that is residual exhaustion from my senior year. What’s likely to happen is that I’ll work for a while and then apply to grad schools during this coming year. And that’s fine with me, even if it does mean it’s probably time to break out the GRE study books.

One of my new favorite bars is Ginger Man on 36th St. It’s hard to find a good bar in midtown - it seems like everything is either way too expensive, some kind of goofy theme place, or a total shithole. Ginger Man is probably a little pricier than most of its Village equivalents, but it’s worth it. It’s big enough for groups, but it doesn’t feel huge because everything is made up of little corners and rooms. (That Citysearch page I linked to says it’s too crowded on weeknights, but that’s not really true.) It’s also definitely a beer lovers’ bar - there are over sixty beers on tap and over a hundred others bottled. Like a few other places I’ve found in the city, they’re now importing Smithwick’s, which makes me happy.

Chris and I watched the extended edition of Fellowship of the Ring this afternoon for the first time. I’d sort of thought I might wait until I had all three extended editions and then watch them back to back, but I probably couldn’t handle that much Tolkien in one sitting. I really liked the extended version of Fellowship, even though the film’s now something around three and a half hours. There were several things that I thought ought to have been explained or dealt with more in the theatrical version that got their fair share of time in the extended edition. I also hadn’t seen any version of Fellowship since 2002, so it was fun to watch it again. (The extended edition of Two Towers is on its way from Amazon right now.)

Many thanks to Michael, Katharine, Joe, and Wolf for the graduation presents. There might be something better in the world than new DVDs, but I certainly don’t know what it is.

It’s been a week since Commencement now, and about two weeks since I had my last philosophy final. I can tell that I’m finally fully recovered, because I’ve started thinking about philosophy in the shower again. This morning, I remembered that someone at NYU had mentioned the surprise test puzzle to me several weeks ago but not the solution he’d come up with. So I thought I’d do the same to you: I’ll describe the puzzle, and then forget about it for a couple of weeks, and then bring up the solution I came up with. (There are several solutions on the web, of course, but it’s more fun if you think about it on the subway or while doing dishes or something.)

Here’s someone else’s formulation of the surprise test puzzle: Suppose a teacher announces to her class one Friday afternoon that she will give a surprise quiz sometime during the following week. Her class meets five days a week (poor class), so the test could be on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday. But it can’t be on Friday - by Thursday night, the class will know that the test is on Friday, and then it won’t be a surprise. And if it can’t be on Friday, then it can’t be on Thursday, because by Wednesday night the class will know it has to be on Thursday (since it can’t be on Friday), and so on. So, does this show that surprise tests are impossible?

A couple of people have written to me about the new MT licensing scheme. Some of you are angry with 6A over the new pricing, some of you are angry with me for seeming angry with 6A, and of course some of you are angry about a lot of things. First off, it’s obviously important to note the changes and clarifications that came to light a few days ago. The redefinition of “weblog” as “site” (rather than the thing that’s called a weblog within MT) removes what was probably the biggest obstacle to my continued use of MT, although the author limits are still troubling.

The bottom line, of course, is that I’m not willing to pay for blogging software. Call me a freeloader or a fuckface or the enemy of developers everywhere, whatever. I was using a homegrown CMS that my friend Spencer wrote in PHP long before MT was a gleam in anyone’s eye (and long before I’d ever heard the word “blog”). I’ve hopped around a lot since then, and I’m perfectly willing to hop once more or take a crack at writing something for myself. Of course MT has more features than other similar options - but it so happens that I use almost none of them. And whatever advantages the new MT has over the free alternatives, they just don’t interest me if MT itself is not free. I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who are happy to shell out for their blogging software almost as much as I did for my operating system, but I’m not one of them.

That said, I’m perfectly aware that there’s a free version of MT for me and all of the other fuckfaces. It might even do everything I need it to, now that 6A’s definition of “weblog” has been cleared up. But if it doesn’t, I won’t be breaking out the credit card any time soon. (Although I probably will stay with the old version of MT for a while.)

You may remember that I was planning to donate my Amazon referral fees to a charitable organization. I settled on Oxfam, eventually, and will be able to donate just over a hundred bucks this time around. I’m planning to do the same this summer, so keep generating those Amazon links for things you’re planning to buy already, or check my book list if you’re looking for something to read at the beach.