Since Clay recently mentioned that he was participating in National Novel Writing Month, I figured I'd take a moment to elaborate more on the project... and it's spin-offs.

November is a special month in the blogosphere because of this project.

I want to take a quick moment to announce that BarCampManchester is this Saturday, July 28.

The event is from 10 AM to 5 PM.

The event is located at Amoskeag Business Incubator (ABI) which is located at 33 South Commercial St. Manchester, NH (see map).

There was another thing that impressed me about the CNN/YouTube debate that I didn't really think of before reading a handful of blogger commentary on the event to the effect of, "This wasn't revolutionary, it was just clever marketing. They only did it for the buzz. It's a gimmick."

Now that debates are up on YouTube for everyone who wants to to watch, I think I'm ready to post my thoughts about it.

Overall, I was generally impressed by the format of the debates. I thought it was interesting to get questions from a more diverse age group than what you'd see a a traditional debate, and from a more diverse geographical locations than just the state the debate is being held in. The questions seemed more difficult than many of the traditional debates I've seen in the past.

Tonight was the CNN/YouTube Democratic Presidential Debate. For those of you who watched it, what did you think of it? Did you like the format? Did you like the questions picked? What were your favorite questions? Which candidate impressed you the most tonight? What about the least? What were your thoughts?

I can't believe the last time I posted here was February.... February! Truth be told, I have tried to blog several times, but I've had some issues with TinyMCE (that's the module on this site that makes all the text areas where you type your blog entries and comments have the option to bold, italicize, make links, and spell check and such). TinyMCE, from my experience, doesn't play as nice as they say it should with Firefox, and I've had several of my entries and comments dissapear into nothingness. I figured it was worthwhile to mention, just because I have a professional interest in TinyMCE and how it behaves, from the research I've done, TinyMCE is supposed to work fine with Firefox, but I've seen issues to the contrary. Has anyone else lost any posts? If so, what browser are you using?

The first rule of blogging is you never apologize about a lapse in blogging. You just merely pick up where you left off three months ago. Either that, or you start a new blog at a new location. That's what teenagers do to remedy the situation. Personally, I find it's a waste of effort to start over.

Buy Nothing Christmas is an initiative which was started by some Canadian Mennonites to de-commercialize Christmas and to challenge people’s over-consumptive lifestyles.

In short, thinking outside the box (store) for Christmas presents.

Some of the alternatives suggested included making gifts (arts and crafts type stuff), making food, giving IOUs for services like babysitting, gifting things that you already own but no longer use, the gift of open source software…

There's one thing I'm not looking forward to when I move in two days from now.

Dealing with dirty laundry.

The new apartment does not have on-site laundry. It's not an incredibly huge deal seeing as we're in walking distance from any convenience that one would want to be in walking distance of including a laundromat. Nonetheless, having to make a conscious trip out to go do laundry is a bit of a new concept for me. The idea of having to give up an afternoon a week to sit in a laundromat waiting for my clothes to get clean is a bit scary.

My biggest fear is that the local laundromat doesn't have wireless internet... The only laundromat I know that definitely DOES offer free wifi is South End Village Laundromat (on the South End of Concord, of course). Does anyone know if the Soap Bubble Laundromat in Suncook has wifi?

It's 2 AM on a Friday morning in mid-November. What would you guess the weather would be? Hovering around the freezing mark? Possibly threatening to snow? 

No, no, of course not. My weather widget on my computer is telling me it's 66 degrees out, raining and there's a flood watch. Ummm... I'm not a scientist or anything, but my gut instinct is that this is NOT NORMAL.