I actually started a post about The Matrix, but I didn’t like where it was going. One of the few times I’ve written a post and decided not to upload it. Also one of the times I’ve described a future post and then failed to deliver it, but that happens a little more frequently.

I started the summer job. They keep me busy there and – surprisingly – I’m glad that they do. At some other jobs I’ve had, I either had too little work to do or too little supervision or both, and those things often lead to playing solitaire or posting to WCIFT about the movie I saw over the weekend. And doing stuff like that often leads to worrying that someone is going to walk up behind you and catch you wasting “company time.”

Plus, the people who I work with are actually pretty cool. I’ve worked a total of six days, and already I have had to revise my opinions of several people from my initial take. Kind of like how I thought Brown was a jerk the first time Morash brought him to RIT. Additionally, at this job I have actually managed to learn just about everyone’s name … I think this is influenced in part by the fact that I actually interact with them. At other jobs I’ve had, I basically went to one person for all my tasks, or went to no one at all.

What else? I feel like I want to write more but I feel like I have very little to write about. I hopped on IM about ten minutes ago and everyone was either idle or offline. Okay, this brings a topic to mind. I saw a headline a few weeks ago – it was something along this lines of “Cursive disappearing under weight of typing.” Something like that. I’ve also read article about kids actually submitting papers for school in which they made errors such as: writing “u” in place of “you,” writing “4” in place of “for,” etc. Basically, the gist is that some kids are typing IM shorthand so much that it is compromising their writing skills.

I’m sorry, but I really can’t get bent out of shape about this. I mean, slang has been diluting people’s formal speech for centuries. Now we’ve finally reached a point (in the industrial/post-industrial age) where kids communicate with each other regularly via written (or typed) text. And now we’ve got text slang.

Like I said, I can’t get bent out of shape about this. Why? Try logging on AOL at 5:30 PM. Busy signal? Slow connection? Why? Yes, there are a lot of people using it, but there is also just a whole lot of data getting thrown around the network. If people type “u” instead of “you” and “4” instead of “for,” it might just save some ones and zeros, and it might just cut down on Internet traffic a little bit. And it might actually save time in the real world. Did you know that Teddy Roosevelt wanted to change the spelling of “through” to “thru?” I hoped that he had also wanted to make further changes. I did a little Google and found two versions of what is most complete here … Read as much as you want. I got about halfway down and gave up. The gist of it is is that in the written English language, you can make the same sound with more than one spelling (g and j, s and z, qu and kw), and you can also make more than one sound with a single spelling (g, ough, oo, ast). This makes for a written language that is very difficult to learn. So the link I mentioned provides descriptions of three reforms to the written English language (TO, or Traditional Orthography). The problem is, a whole lot of people use the current system, and there are a whole lot of documents written with the current system. So it’ll probably never change.

The keyboard will never change, either. But at least the written English language wasn’t intentionally designed to be hard to use. I was going to put a link about this, but there is really just too much to read on the subject. And I have to go to sleep.