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Where would this world be without stupid people? Check out this eBay auction and be sure to look at both the price and the description very carefully. Obviously the buyer didn't, and I'm sure somebody is going to be awfully surprised this Christmas. If you wish to join the insanity, currently you can get a chance at your own Xbox box here.

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My heart is in Boulder but my brain is needed in Denver, so I'm putting my body in Broomfield

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I wasn't really joking when I told people the university hands you an eviction notice with your diploma.

The university doesn't do this for everyone, of course, just those of us who live in student housing. I lived in Smiley Court for more than 9 years, longer than I've lived anywhere other than the house I grew up in. It was home, and home can be hard to leave.

Admittedly, the apartment had gotten a bit cramped. It was tight from the start, since I was downsizing from a two-bedroom apartment into a one-bedroom. Adding an extra bicycle and a few hundred books along the way didn't help. The apartment was also miserably hot in the summer, with south- and west-facing brick walls and a location on the top floor. Even with a small air conditioner wedged in the too-small windows, running all day, the temperatures could get over 85 degrees and stay that way past midnight. So it wasn't perfect. But then again, it had this view:

From this apartment I managed to turn myself …
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Y2K + 20

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I have made a habit of posting on December 31, if for no other reason to ensure that I've posted at least yearly on this blog since 2001. I found an old post titled "Y2K + 10" that I wrote 10 years ago, so the logical title for this post must be "Y2K + 20." I only have a few hours before the year, and the decade, comes to a close, so I'll try to pick a highlight from each month to show what I'll remember most from 2019.

January A year ago I was closing the door on my old apartment at CU Boulder, bringing to a final close my long tenure there as a graduate student. And what a wonderful tenure it was! That meant I spent a lot of January trying to get settled into a new apartment. In hindsight, it's been a really good move for me. I do miss aspects of Boulder, but I have a more comfortable living space here and it's cut my commute by about 15 minutes.

February I was on the road quite a bit for work in February, something that's continued throug…
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Last.fm and Ten Years of Web 2.0

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Ten years ago yesterday I scrobbled my first tracks to last.fm. What's scrobbling? On last.fm, scrobbling refers to automatic music track logging to the internet. For me, uploading a record of my music listening habits was my first real experience with "Web 2.0." Remember Web 2.0? It referred to websites of user-generated content that enabled virtual communities and interoperability. Now such sites are too ubiquitous on the web to warrant a special designation — they're just the web. But that wasn't true in 2006, and even though I'd been putting content on the internet since 1996, at the time it was enough to make me a little nervous. What did these strangers want with my data, and what was in it for me?

Ten years and 24,941 scrobbles later, I have my answer: I have a really cool record of all the music I've listened to the past 10 years! Well, not "all," technically: I've certainly listened to music in places and on devices that didn't …
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