The major theme of my few articles on here to date has been that of change. Emotional change, professional change, geographic change etc... I've graduated from college, getting ready to move into the working world and move to a place I've never been before, where I don't know anyone and I'm hours away from the nearest friend or relative. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't terrified, that the mere thought of changing this much didn't make me want to climb back under the covers every morning and j...

I haven't seen any new articles posted at all today and the recent forum posts list doesn't seem to be updating properly... Is it dead here or are we getting some glitches?

Last night I saw an interesting Japanese film on campus called Afterlife , the idea is that when you die you go to this large building and you are assigned to a worker. What you have to do is select one memory from your life that is the most happy/meaningful/important to you. You have three days to consider your memories and then select one and describe it in detail to your worker. The next two days are spent creating a film recreation of that memory. The deal though is that this is the ...

Weblogs, refered to often simply as "Online Journals" (to avoid confusing the less technically literate among us) have become a huge craze in recent years as everyone and their brother, aunt, second cousin and dog have started to use them. Look around you in the average HS or Univ campus computer lab, or in the nearby netcafe, chances are a few people are either writing in, their own or reading someone elses weblog. Politicians, movie stars and television personalities have gotten in on the...

Six months after graduating from college I'm still looking for a job. Combine the fact that I'm not a programmer by any means and I'm a new grad coming into a terrible IT job market, and it's little surprise that I'm still out there beating the bushes. I've had a few good leads, several interviews and follow-up interviews and I've come within inches of a really good net security gig that fell through at the last second due to internal corporate issues. In the past 6 months I've developed a...

I'm sure a lot of you have already discovered this, but in case you haven't, you should check out the Darth Vader Blog: http://darthside.blogspot.com (The Darth Side: Memoirs of a Monster) The thing is an absolute riot. It's a half comedy half philosophy journal covering Star Wars A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi from the perspective of Darth Vader. I highly recommend it to everyone, regardless of whether or not you like Star Wars, this is just funny and excelle...

This is a spin-off from Dharma's article on what your blog means to you. The discussion in the comments strayed more into why people blog at JU, so instead of continuing the digression, I decided to write up why I'm here in a separate article. I've experimented with online journals of one variety or another for probably close on 7 or 8 years now. I've done my own on my personal site, I even did LiveJournal for a while but they all were kinda unfulfilling. I wrote, but no one read any ...

Wow, I mean... WOW... We've reached a level of hatred and animosity that I think surpasses even what we had during the elections last fall. It seems like the past few days have been completely dominated by spite and venom filled posts where everyone is attacking everyone else. From my own article on JU Libs, to the rash of responses to Myrrs Sad Conservatives article, the anger and animosity is just building and building. It seems like little else is being discussed here at the moment,...

We've all seen it, someone posts a blog on some topic that really gets people going. It either rouses some passionate response, or some insult, or sometimes it's simple disagreement. This is actually what makes JU so much fun at times, getting feedback (both positive and negative) on what you write. Why then, are there people who post about something, and then get mad over/delete any comments with which they don't agree? You post something to a publicly accessable site, you leave commen...

This is an edited/photoshopped strip I found on a friend's LiveJournal. It's an incredibly sad image for someone like me who grew up with Calvin & Hobbes. Calvin, despite his disposition (which my parents say matched mine pretty well), was the greatest example of the unlimited potential of a child. He visited far off worlds, different places in time... he had the best stuffed animal/friend in the whole wide world. He was six and he was having a good time. Sure he was a handful to hi...

First off, yes, I know this article falls in the category of "noise" Now, this is a separate complaint from the issues we used to have with people flooding with advertising spam. This is an issue of there just being a ton of useless crap being posted. The main reason I like this site so much is because of the general high-quality of the articles and comments. Though I disagree with many of the opinions of people like DrGuy, Moderateman, drmiller or heck, even Brad himself, I can stil...

I often forget that my style of humor (dry) often doesn't go over well with others. Many miss the joke or the humor and think I'm either being serious or disrespectful. This is a problem I've had to grapple with my entire life as I encountered new people in school, and now in the workforce. Well, last week we had some rather nasty weather here in New England... ice, snow, the works. Since I was merely doing online research for my upcoming project (the ASP.NET one), it was work I could a...

Brad and other gods of JU, please find it in your hearts to give us the ability to filter blogs so we NEVER see their articles! After Diamond-d's recent spam fest, and similar acts by other bloggers, it's getting harder and harder to find the interesting articles on here. They're all burried under a wave of crap because someone wants to get a higher score or user rank. PLEASE let me filter these morons from my sight!

We did a little bit of clean-up work on a few of the databases connected to JoeUser today.  Here at the office, it feels like the site has been snappier in pulling up articles. How does the site speed "feel" to everyone else now?  Were you even noticing any slowness the past few weeks?