Sushi Writes About Things

Before I kept a blog, I kept a paper journal. I still keep a paper journal, partly because I happen to like writing on paper. In fact, I started an online journal because it was just like a paper journal, except on the Internet. This was before I knew about Internet drama, the permanence of the Internet, and the popularity of these things called blogs. It was also before WordPress existed and before web space was as inexpensive as it is now.

The paper journal to blog progression was a natural one for me. But what about kids these days who’ve grown up online? Some of them started blogging, then moved to Facebook or Twitter or what-have-you. Some of them grew up in the age of Facebook and Twitter and automatically hopped on those sites. Places that don’t even function as long-form blogs. (Okay, Facebook has its Notes feature, but how many people do you know who use that as more than “Post the soundtrack of your life” or “Stripper names/Steal my identity because I’m giving you everything except my social security number”?) Kids these days are buried in their iPhones and video games and never knew a life without a computer. To them, the Internet has always existed, and with that, all the modern conveniences they’ve come to know.

If not for all this modern technology, some of these people may have started paper journals or even blogs, and with that they’d get an archive of everything they’ve written. For me, that’s the main perk of keeping a journal. I’ve traveled back in time to that one time back in high school math class or to that middle school science class (can you tell I did a lot of writing in class?) or to the middle of life stresses. I could never accomplish this with a Twitter or Facebook feed. The character limit can’t communicate what a full journal entry can. Compare a full entry about the excitement of traveling to a new country to something like “In nine hours I will be in PARIS! I can’t believe I’m going to be in a new place where I can speak French and no one will think I’m weird!” Obviously the full entry would be more convincing, and you haven’t even read it.

Yet Twitter and Facebook are the archives of choice for most people. As Paul Carr put it, immediacy is trumping posterity. It’s time to turn that around. Let’s take back posterity.

You know those TV-B-Gone controllers that you can buy? They usually go for around twenty bucks, and I’ve always commented on their usefulness because I cannot stand watching TV.

I think I’ve just found a solution. It definitely costs less than twenty dollars. I’m not complaining there. Now to get the materials and put it together.

Let’s hop in the time machine and go through some of my really old Delicious links. I started using Delicious in May 2007 and imported my Firefox bookmarks. Delicious assigned a date to these bookmarks–17 September 2006 for most of them. You won’t be able to see these bookmarks in my account unless you click the right tags since you can go back only 400 pages, so let’s get started. I went through my links from 2006 and 2007 and picked the finest links for you.

Play Mancala online. This is the very last link in my archive, and it’s only appropriate that I include it. One of my best friends from high school introduced me to the game, and I am surprisingly bad at it. You play with six small bowls (or pits in a board) per player lined up two by two, one large collection pit at each end for each player, two players, and some pebbles. The objective is to collect as many of those pebbles in your bin as you can by scooping all the pebbles from a pit and dropping one pebble in each pit, going forward. If you reach the end, you drop a pebble in the collection pit. Let’s hope that was yours. If you still have pebbles, keep going around. If the last pebble lands in your collection pit, keep going. Whoever has the most pebbles at the end wins. This is one of those games that is best described in person.

How much is inside? A group of curious people find out how much goes into everything, from the air in a bag of Cheetos to the number of bacon bits in a pound of bacon. A guaranteed day-waster. Come to think of it, I haven’t finished reading this page yet.

Googlewhack: the search for a two-word query with exactly one result. Not zero, not two. One. Both words must be recognized as words by Google’s search. I’ve tried this for years but have yet to come across one.

All about the 404 page and a collection of interesting 404s.

The problem with being a celebrity is that if you throw something in the trash, there’s no guarantee that it stays there. Even leftover spaghetti can find its way to eBay and give its finder some extra cash when sold. Apparently writers aren’t exempt, even dead ones. Especially dead ones.

And especially J.D. Salinger. His toilet is for sale on eBay for only a million dollars. An excerpt from the description reads:

This vintage toilet is from 1962 and is dated under the lid. It will come to you uncleaned and in it’s [sic] original condition when it was removed from Salinger’s old home!

Apparently that’s a selling point. The writer of the auction also asks a rhetorical question, wondering how many of Salinger’s works were penned while he was on the throne. And before you put on your tinfoil hat, the toilet comes with a letter from the current owner of the house, who installed a new toilet after Salinger died. The toilet auction brings up more questions than it answers, though. Did she save the letter just for the owner of the toilet? Did she write a letter for the new owner of every item being replaced? (And if she did, wow. This woman has patience.) What makes the toilet so important? And finally, I must descend to lowbrow humor and ask what everyone’s wondering: did he flush?

Facebook just launched a new feature called Places, which has been in the work for around eight months. TechCrunch discovered Places back in May, when everyone in the tech community was speculating about the possibility of a similar feature for Facebook. At the time, the Facebook team was in the middle of developing Places, and the touchscreen version (touch.facebook.com) of the site threw an error because of the then-nonexistent feature.

Places is currently available on touch.facebook.com and will be available on the Facebook iPhone app. There’s no word on its functionality elsewhere yet, like, oh I don’t know, for Blackberry or Android. The premise sounds just like the many other check-in sites available: go to a place and check yourself in. There’s one other thing Facebook will let you do: check your friends in. This will not end well.

Gizmodo covers the consequences quite nicely. With Foursquare, you’re checking yourself in, and the user–one person–chooses to broadcast or hide those check-ins. With Facebook, an entire network of friends is involved. If a friend checks you in, their friends see your check-in, and depending on your friend’s privacy settings, the entire Internet could see where you’ve been. And if you’re not checking yourself in via Facebook, why would you want your careless friend who doesn’t give a flip about what they broadcast to do so on your behalf?

I thought so. Go to your privacy settings and make your decision. Friends don’t let friends check each other in on Facebook.

I’ve gone by sushimustwrite since around 2002. Its origins are murky, but I do remember that I registered for NaNoWriMo under a sushimustwrite email address, and at Hotmail! I never really used that name until NaNo entered my life and I needed a username. At the time I didn’t realize what an impact a simple choice of username would have, but now I’d have a really hard time changing it.

This name has seen me through most of my teenage years and my early twenties. It has seen me through thousands and thousands of NaNoWriMo and Script Frenzy forum posts, an everyday life blog, too many site registrations to name, and this website. What started out as a casual nickname for my preteen self turned into part of my identity, one that if parted with, would cause more confusion than good.

So when Google CEO Eric Schmidt told the Wall Street Journal that today’s youth may have a chance to change their name upon reaching adulthood to escape their online hijinks, people started to wonder: was he serious? And if he is, should this be limited only to budding adults? Doing crazy things on the Internet isn’t limited to minors, after all. I still have my old cringeworthy blog entries from my teenage days online, and the NaNoWriMo site archive has my old forum posts. That doesn’t make them anymore cringeworthy than my blog posts or forum posts from my early adulthood. It only takes a quick search of public Facebook statuses to see the crazy stuff adults are posting to Facebook. I think they’d want to disassociate themselves with statuses stating how much they hate their boss or what went down at that club last night more than any teenage shenanigans. Sure, some teenage postings may not always be legal, but adults are the ones who need the lesson now, lest important people in their lives see it. Kids just need to learn that what they and their friends post will be up for a very long time–oh, and that their parents could be watching what they post.

As for a name change? No thanks. My unique name (and I really do mean unique–searching for my real name gives you only three or four pages of results, all of which are actually me) may be a curse in the search world, but it’s also a blessing. I registered a six-letter dot-com today, saving people seven letters of typing.

Remember how the judge in the Prop 8 case denied the stay and allowed same-sex couples to marry starting this Wednesday?

A lot of same-sex couples in California and Prop 8 opponents everywhere are crushed right now. A San Francisco federal appeals court blocked the right for same-sex couples to marry until more questions are answered about the constitutionality of their right to marry.

So let me get this straight. The debate over whether two people who love each other should marry is actually happening when the (primarily heterosexual) divorce rate in the US is already ridiculously high? And this is for so-called moral reasons?

Ridiculous.

Someone asked me about my Myers-Briggs type indicator (MBTI) recently. I replied that in my completely unprofessional online testing, I test as INT (Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking), but with wavering between J (Judgment) and P (Perception), probably because I’m so indecisive and don’t take in how I act most of the time. Sometimes it’s a 50/50 split or close enough, sometimes I really don’t know, and sometimes my life is in such limbo that it’s hard to tell. Tonight I decided to take four completely unprofessional online tests in a row. The results:

1) Hunch’s personality type topic scored me as an INTP, with INTJ right behind that. Hunch’s test is different from the others, so let’s take care of it first. It shows all sixteen types and sorts them in order as you take the quiz (or decision, as it’s called on the site). It uses the results to show neat correlations, get smarter, and make recommendations, so I wasn’t the least bit surprised at this result.

Then I took all three free quizzes linked to from Wikipedia’s MBTI article and found some surprises.

2. HumanMetrics labeled me as an INTJ. I received a breakdown as follows:

Strength of the preferences (%)
Introverted: 33, Intuitive: 62, Thinking: 25, Judging: 22
You are:
* moderately expressed introvert
* distinctively expressed intuitive personality
* moderately expressed thinking personality
* slightly expressed judging personality

All right, fair enough. The judging part is less distinct than the other parts, which explains why I hover so.

2. Then I went to Personality Test Center, where I tested as–get this–ENTP. No statistics here, but I think my appreciation of crowds is what pushed me into the extroverted category. This quiz was particularly frustrating because of the “Would you rather” and “Are you the kind of person who” questions.

3. Last up was Similar Minds, which cast me as INTJ. The stats:

Introversion: 70.83, Intuition: 66.67, Thinking: 66.67, Judging: 62.5

A few things to note again. Once again, the judging is the weakest trait, but this time introversion is the strongest. Also, I’ve seen several different percentages for every personality type, so I won’t put too much weight on this particular one. This one was less annoying because it let me rank on a scale but still irksome because I got only four radio buttons instead of five. I guess I had to rank myself somewhere.

So, four personality tests, three personality types. Even after taking the majority rules type breakdown, this still tells me absolutely nothing. Even reading the descriptions on the Myers-Briggs official website helps none. In the description for J vs. P, the official site writes:

Structure: In dealing with the outside world, do you prefer to get things decided or do you prefer to stay open to new information and options? This is called Judging (J) or Perceiving (P).

Well, I like getting things decided, but I’m okay with letting things stay open, too. I’m open to the idea of staying open to things. How’s that?

Today we’re going to look at job rejection letters. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the job search, it’s that job rejection letters vary very little from company to company. Let’s look at a few.

Thank you for your interest in joining the $Company team. We are fortunate to have many well-qualified candidates apply for this position. After careful consideration, we regret to inform you that we will not be moving forward at this time.
We’re really excited about our growing company and we will keep your resume on file in case an opportunity comes up that is a better match in the future.
We wish you continued success in your career.

Okay, that sounds standard. Let’s look at another one. “Continued success in your career” is a bit tacky given that I don’t have a job right now, so really, what career?

Here’s another one.

Thank you for giving us the opportunity to consider you for employment. We have reviewed your background and qualifications and find that we do not have an appropriate position for you at this time. We appreciate your interest in $Company and wish you success in your job search.

Going through my jobsearch:denied tag, the first sentence shows up in four other messages. The second sentence shows up in two other rejection emails.

Here are a few very basic rejections.

Thank you for applying to $Company. After reviewing your background and qualifications we find that we do not have an appropriate position for you at this time. We appreciate your interest in $Company and wish you success in your job search.

Thank you for your interest in $Company. We have reviewed your qualification and unfortunately we have decided not to move forward with your candidacy. Thanks again for your interest and we wish you the best of luck in your search.

Thank you for your interest in $Company. We have reviewed your background and qualifications and unfortunately, they are not a match for our current needs.
Thanks again and we wish you the best.

That last one. I know it’s probably an autosend, but still.

Oh, here’s a good one.

Thank you for your interest and effort in applying, however we are moving forward with other candidates who we feel match more closely to what we need right now. While we know these messages are never welcomed, we hope that you (like we would ourselves) appreciate knowing the status.
Again, thank you for your interest in us.

At least they acknowledged that I wouldn’t like receiving the rejection message.

Grammatical errors in the letter aside, what does it mean? (Cue Double Rainbow voice) It means a job rejection letter generator must exist. Anyone?