Hi shambers,

I am employable! I’ve been worrying a bit lately ’cause i haden’t found a job yet (despite most of the other students in my department having jobs all lined up since February. But yesterday my luck changed and I got an awesome offer from Target! I’m excited! I get to work in a big tall building downtown and wear suits to work. Interestingly, my job will require very little computer-code writing (they outsource that to India.) Instead my job will involve… well, i’m not entirely sure. From what I understand it will involve designing systems and working through the details of solutions, as well as fixing things. Exciting!

On another exciting note, I’ve had this idea for a website kicking around in my head since Christmas. The site pulls articles from blogs using RSS feeds (sites like Shambot, as well as news sites like www.arstechnica.com and www.cnn.com.) It then keeps track of which users read and recommend each article, compares the users’ reads and recommends to each other, and suggests articles for you to read based on these other similar users. It’s kinda like www.digg.com, except instead of using universal recommendations, they’re customized to you and people like you. I came up with the idea when I realized that Digg, which used to be awesome, was beginning to suck because most of the people who ‘digg’ things like things that I do not.

Well, my instructor assigned my Advanced Web Design class a project, but left it up to us to decide what the project would be. I pitched this idea to the class and they liked it. So we’re going ahead with developing it. We’re using the name Jovial right now (it doesn’t really mean anything, so don’t bother asking.) Unfortunately we’re all CS people and not design people, so the site will probably be butt ugly. I’ll post a link to it when we get something working. Oh! But since so many of you people are artists, i’d appreciate any suggestions for a color pallet. Since the site is named Jovial, and it’s a news site, think Jupiter and readability as far as colors are concerned (milky reds and yellows maybe, black text?.) We need colors for the title bar/borders, page background, and article background. Exciting project.

Well I’m off to play some sports on this nice day (no snow in Bemidji.) Happy April Fools everybody.