First Day

Sorry, about the weak posting.... Twice now, I have written up my post and had Blogspot erase it after previewing. So, that kinda killed my motivation.

Anyway...

First day at UCI. I love when the learning curve is sloped in my favor. Especially when it involves traffic. Left house at 6:40am and arrived at UCI at 7:05am. Which, after discovering they have no coffee shop (that I could find) open, left me time for blogging.

I am excited to be starting here... It's going to be a big switch for me from the get go. My first class has nearly 70 people in it. (the largest class I have ever been in started at 50, and about 20 dropped by the end of the term.)

(As I sit here, the sun is rising up over the mountains, the coffee cart pulls up and starts to open. Drat, brewed coffee only. I got my hopes up too soon.)

I'll bring a camera next week and see if I can do a little photo-blogging around campus. The campus is really nice early in the morning. A few dedicated folks are jogging quietly. The buildings are all bathed in that cool gray light that precedes the dawn. As the sun rises, the buildings cast abstract shadows on each other, creating sharp contrasts between the fleeting gray and the bright golden tones of the rising sun.

Hard to believe I picked Engineering over Literature, but Engineerng hires before you graduate. (I don't think literature hires you even if you graduate! haha)

More later~

Google

Ever googled yourself?

I tried it for the first time today. Surprisingly, the first result was my time and ranking in a benefit triathlon from December. Woohoo! And, number 6 on the list, is my homepage. My "less than one month old" homepage. I didn't even have to do anything to get it listed. You can check out my ranking here.

The funny thing about this is, before today, I had read about google-bombing and such but never had any real desire to pursue it. Now I find myself wondering how to move myself to the number one slot. I need to move myself to the top of the list. I'm so close! Just 5 more spaces up!

So, continuing my new habit of asking you to act: Please link to my page. That's it. Just make a link like this: Soriano-Clark -or- Ken Soriano-Clark. I plan to check my ranking about once a week. You can check back here for my status.

Until then, check out a successful #1 page ranking by my friend.

Orkut: This is from Google?

So after much ado....I'm in. Just in time, too. Orkut's "Bad Server, No Donut" error message was starting to get old. I emailed them out of frustration (back before I was able to log in) and suggested that they might consider randomizing their error messages to include such possiblities as: "bad server, no cookie", or any number of food themes (pretzel, biscuit, etc), or even humorous attacks on the user such as: "Now look what you've done!! You've taken down our server. Now we have to go all the way down there and fix it. Thanks a lot."

But that was in the past. Now, I am a proud member of the trusted online community, that is Orkut. Now what do I do? I have discovered that meeting people through these sorts of things is not nearly as easy as one might have thought. Because people have to approve you as a friend before can post messages to them. And it takes a while before the messages filter through to them. And it takes a while for invites to people outside of the network to filter out (plus a week of server trouble for them as well, no doubt), so at the end of my first week in Orkut, I have 3 friends. I can't help but feel totally lame.

Is this entirely my fault? It would be nice if Google would allocate a little more server space to Orkut. Lord knows they need it. And it is slow enough that I think it might run the risk of atrophying. If slow servers cause people to stop inviting new friends, or even expand their personal networks, the community is doomed to stagnate.

In the meantime, I'll be here. I'd hate for Orkut to die with me only having 3 friends. So if you received an invitation from me, please accept it. We can both hang out here in the swamp.

And She's Off!

Well, she did it...
check out Izzy's blog here.