Alishah Novin's Blog

Posts

Showing posts from August, 2006

The Transition

August 28, 2006

By some strange miracle, your son has landed a job. He is working in the adult world. I am a professional now. Exams done, and a week later I've landed my first job (a miracle because for all the news I've been reading about the difficulty recent grads are having in getting employment, the fact that I have a job 7 days from writing my last exam, I have to consider myself lucky...) Lately I've been thinking about how I live in a very strange world. I'm in a transitional time. I'm currently in a period in my life, where I'm transitioning from university student to a 9-5 professional, and wearing a tie I bought with the last of my cash, until I get paid. I wrote about this before - but the unfortunate timing is I'm having this experience on my own. I wish I could trade notes with someone. My closest friends are still students. All my colleagues (that's a fun word) are...full time adults. I end my work day and return to my apartment where all my roommates ar

Where is MySpace Headed?

August 07, 2006

MySpace seems to be trying to condense the internet under a single domain name. Pearl Jam has a MySpace account. Weezer has one. Just about every band has a MySpace account to host their music, and operate as a fan club. Their own websites used to do this, but with MySpace their websites have become redundant. I'm thinking this will cause MySpace to collapse. It's trying to offer too much while not offering much. It's trying to BE the internet, but by simplifying it down to what the majority of users want on a website. Thinking back to websites of 1997, 1998, the more personalize websites which may have had a lot of dancing hamsters, midi songs playing in the background, silly scripts that changed your mouse icon and had stars that followed the mouse, and yet offered no real content. That feels like what MySpace is today, only now it's even easier to set up, and even less likely to house meaningful content (he wrote on his all important website; I get the irony.) Many

Temporal Thoughts

August 03, 2006

How late have you stayed up? Sometimes it seems that sleep just won't cut it. There's so much work, and rather than sleep, you'd much rather just get it all done. It can be a little overbearing, but also quite exciting. Nighttime, I find, is a great time to get some work done. It's especially impressive how much work you can get done, even when you've already worked throughout the day. The only bad thing is you have to make sure you have no early morning commitments for the next day. But the quiet of the world, the fact that it is dark out, so you're not drawn by the beautiful day, it all tends to being very productive. Plus there's something quite seductive to the thought of being that quiet genius, huddled in his room, working frantically until hours in the night. I suffer because I'm a night owl, but also a early-bird. The night can be magical. I don't quite mean it in the childish sense, but more in the sense that it allows for possibilities. Eve