fling93 loves fishies

I'm not dead! I'm getting better! I think I'll go for a walk!

Yeah, it's been a while since my last update. Those of you who know me in real life know that I'm still up and about elsewhere (mostly Flickr and writing friends-only posts at LiveJournal). I still plan to maintain and update this site, but it's going to be pretty sporadic for the foreseeable future (again, RSS is your friend).

But let me just clue you in on some changes.

I'm now a graduate student working towards a Master's in Economics at San Jose State University. What's a Berkeley alum doing at a school like San Jose State? To be sure, the convenient location was the reason I first started taking classes there. But then I started hearing good things about their economics department. It specializes in the Austrian School, which has been very influential in the libertarian movement. And I like a lot of the professors I've met so far (many of which got degrees from George Mason, one of the other schools I was considering). Yeah, my original plan was to take classes for a year and a half before applying to grad schools, but I think that was mostly because I was overly afraid of picking the wrong field yet again. I am pretty obviously an econ dork.

Being a grad student is, obviously, one reason I haven't been blogging. As Dan Drezner says:

Sure, some blogs burn out and fade away, while others become pale imitations of what they once were. Rather than think of these kind of inexorable trends, however, I suspect that blogs, like much of life, are cyclical. Attentive readers can surely point to days or weeks where it's clear that blogging has not been at the top of my priority list. This doesn't mean that I'm fading away… it (hopefully) means I'm acquiring new forms of substantive knowledge that trickle down onto the blog.

Okay, unlike Dan, I haven't written anything that's gotten published. But then again, he already has a Master's and a Ph.D. I'm probably not going to pursue the Ph.D. because I'm pretty leery of academia and instead have an eye towards working on policy analysis at a think tank, where a Master's would be enough. But regardless, less blogging now should hopefully mean better and more substantive blogging later. I don't want to write too much about topics I don't know very much about. So I'm expanding my knowledge. That's the plan.

Another excuse for lack of blogging: I never finished my planned WordPress migration from Movable Type. This means trackbacks are still disabled, which is somewhat of a disincentive for me to write brilliantly. I did start messing around with WordPress, but I ran into problems getting the Textile 2 plugin to render my old posts correctly. Anybody know Perl who wants to help me out? I'm willing to pay. I also want a site redesign. That stupid logo is cute, but unprofessional, and I no longer think I'll ever have enough spare time to actually draw a better one, even though I probably could.

And there's one more reason which surprises me the most. My stats (such as they are) haven't suffered. I haven't updated since April, and yet my stats since then have remained pretty steady. Yes, that's one reason (along with my starting school full-time) that I added Google ads to this site. It's not a lot of money, but hey, I'm not doing any work for it, so I can't complain. Note that I do not choose the ads, and I will make every attempt to continue to write my own thoughts independently of any financial incentives. For those of you who really don't like the ads, sorry! All I can suggest is to use Firefox with the Adblock plugin.

As always, I can't promise any regular updates. I'm tentatively planning on posting some of my better photos from the last year as well as some of the links of the better blog posts I've read as I've been slowly wading back into the blogosphere. But there's a lot going on in my life right now that is likely to intervene. E-mail me or friend me on LiveJournal if you really want to know.