Say What Now?

I just saw a commercial for Aaron's Rent-To-Own. Their tagline? "Do the Math. Aarons." Are you kidding me? Do the math? For rent-to-own? Where you overpay for everything? People really are morons, I swear.

You'll notice Technorati tags now appearing in the bottom of my posts. If you've never looked at Technorati, check it out. Interesting stuff, more social bookmarking (much like Digg and del.icio.us).

So I'm going through my usual Saturday routine of watching three college football games at once (one of the joys of having 3 old televisions is putting them all next to each other and going back and forth watching all the early games) and the one on the big TV is UNC-UVA. The Wahoos just kicked a field goal to bring the score Heels 7, Cavs 5. What the hell kind of score is that? That's a baseball score, not football. Even more depressing is seeing a score of 7-2 late in the 3rd quater. Both QBs have about 65 passing yards, so this one is pretty pathetic so far. Why am I watching this game? Because it's ACC football, and I love ACC football. I would rather watch two ACC teams duke it out than the majority of other teams in football. There's a bunch of Big Ten (Eleven?) games on right now, and the only one I'd want to watch would be Northwestern absolutely thrashing Michigan State, only because I would love for NU to win that terribly overrated conference. Go Cats! (But really, I should make an ACC football blog or something).

I did something fairly crazy last night. I took my new (and pretty expensive) Organic Chem book and did the unthinkable - I took the binding off and separated the pages? Why? Because I then scanned the book in as a PDF file. That may sound idiotic, but now I can take the entire 1200 page book with me either on CD or on my laptop. I can instantly jump to pages. I can type in a phrase and search through the book (I pumped the pdf through Acrobat's OCR scanner) and find it quickly. I can copy sections out of the book and email them to other people. When the data becomes digitized, there's so much more I can do with it. Plus, I can keep that PDF file on me as long as I want, and don't have to deal with the size and weight (about 8 pounds) of the book. I can sit in a class in med school with my laptop and instantly pull up something in my old O-Chem book. I would love to have all my old textbooks digitized eventually.

Flock's been good to me so far. I don't like how every Firefox extension isn't immediately supported (Adblock, Greasemonkey, and a few others are) but that'll just take time. The blogging features are great though. One click of a button and a window pops up, I type my post, and it submits. No need to log in to Blogger, click on which blog, click new post, wait for the load, wait for the republish. I'm impressed so far. I just wish there was a way to tie in my digg and del.icio.us accounts so if I digg something, it gets added to del.icio.us.

Technorati Tags: rent-to-own, OMFJ, pdf, textbook, flock