blargh. that is what i have to say about my data right now. i will not bore you all with details the way i did with poor dana earlier today, but suffice it to say that it is being uncooperative. so yeah. blargh.

tomorrow is the official start of the spring semester, which is the first semester in eight years in which i will not be taking any classes. that is not a typo. believe me, i wish that it were. so on one hand, this is very exciting. i don't have to take any classes! no more boring lectures! wheee! however...this is a very drastic change in the routine that has been my life since 1998. and really, i suppose, since i was five if you want to get *really* technical. but i'm just talking college here. so it's very surreal to think that the semester is starting, but that it really doesn't mean anything to me at all aside from TA-ing. which is no small potatoes, because you certainly don't want to be the one reading and grading the 15 page papers. although, it is fun to write comments with my little red pen such as "a tureen is something you serve soup in. i believe the word you are looking for is terrain. please proofread your work--just because it's a word doesn't mean it's the right word." that makes me sound like the editing nazi, but i'm really not. if you'd been editing that paper, you'd have been cranky by the time you got to the 'tureen' incident as well. i really want to write things like "you keep using that word. i do not think it means what you think it means," but i think they're too young to get the reference.

but i digress. what i was getting at before i went off on my little tangent was that holy crap i'm almost done with college. which i've said before, and i promise you i will say again, and you're just going to have to bear with me because that's kind of the biggest thing in my life day-to-day right now.

moving on. new neat-o website: http://liveplasma.com. in a similar vein to pandora, which i posted about the other day, you type in a band you like (or a movie, director, or actor, unlike pandora), and it gives you a sort of flow chart of related bands/directors/movies/actors that you might like. you can click on any of the bands that come up, and it will re-expand further, which is nice for when you already know that you like all or most of the bands that it comes up with. also unlike pandora, it doesn't actually play music for you or link you to a resource; it's just a flow chart. but it's neat and visually appealing. and i'm a packaging whore, so visually appealing goes a long way with me. click on the image below to see the chart it gave me when i typed the band Spoon in the search box:

pretty accurate; of the other bands shown, i own (and like) music by eleven of them.

okay, that was a wicked long post. i'm out like a fat kid in dodgeball.