My Samsung Cell Phone

Over the summer, I was re-initiated into American culture by degrees. It started with the usual eating greasy foods, going to amusement parks, using a GPS. As time went on I began to get closer and closer to normal and by the time the summer was ending I knew the time had come.

I had to get a phone.

I knew my service would be AT&T. That was the plan some relatives were on and I would be able to tag along. This in mind, I went online and began careful research to determine which phone I was interested in. I had several very careful criteria I would be basing my decision on:

1) Is the phone aesthetically pleasing?
2) From all angles?
3) In terms of the software as well as the design?
4) Were the texts organized into conversations?

By the time I finished my research, I ended up discarding criterion #4. That left me with one very clear choice: the Samsung Impression.

This phone was everything I could have dreamed of in a phone. It looked good, it had a slide-out keyboard, it looked good, and it was aesthetically pleasing. The marketers cleverly concealed the fact that it didn't organize texts into conversation threads, but that wouldn't have mattered. This phone screamed sophistication.

We went to the AT&T store shortly after my research was concluded and, sure enough, there it was. The Samsung Impression, as gorgeous as it was online.

It sat there with that confident, I'm-sophisticated-enough-not-to-be-flashy coolness. I picked it up and held it in the palm of my hand. Perfectly balanced.

I glanced down at the card that articulated its features. And oh man. That phone could do anything but fly.

There was no need to look at other phones. My mind was made up.

My older brother, Cole, was also in the market for a phone at the time. He went for the Pantech Pursuit, to avoid us having the same device.

What a fool.

It might have been free with the service plan instead of costing almost $200 extra and it might have had conversation-threaded texting, but oh, he was the loser in this game. My phone was sleek and black and sophisticated. His phone was green and wide.

What a loser, I said to myself. Ha ha ha.

This was not the case, as time would prove.

However, at the time I was overjoyed and I made us race home to read the manuals and download apps and discover all the marvelous options our new technology offered. As soon as we got home, I wrung the manual open and scanned through. Oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy.

"Yeah," said the Impression. "Dude, check this out. You can get on Facebook and Twitter from anywhere in the world, and you can hop on the internet and YouTube and you can put widgets on my home screen and you can move them around and you can change my background and stuff, and you can take pictures with three megapixels and you can edit them on the go."

I was the happiest kid in the world.

I didn't care that the conversations weren't threaded, which meant I had to spend a minute and a half scrolling through the inbox to find any given message a person had sent me. This phone was the best part of my life.

I texted anyone I could whenever it was possible. This was sort of a limited activity because I had approximately one friend in the United States with a cell phone. But I made it work.

And over time more of my friends from Thailand started to come back to the States and get cell phones and I started to make friends in America and I downright abused my texting faculties.

And then one day something funny happened.

I didn't get a text.

Which wasn't weird in itself because I was accustomed to long time spans where no one acknowledged my cell-phone-self's presence. But it was weird because my mom said my dad had sent me a message. And why in the world hadn't I gotten it?

No worries. The Russians probably just shot down a satellite or something right as the message entered it.

No worries. My phone was fine.

And then a couple more days went by, during which I, for some reason, entered a texting lull. I didn't send or receive any texts during that time because my life was kept occupied, so I didn't notice anything unusual. Just that I wasn't texting much.

And then came the day when Mom and I were at Taco Bell and I needed to tell Dad that Mom and I were done shopping and would be home soon and to put the meat on the stove. I punched in the message, hit send, and then my phone got weird.

It just sat there on the Sending... screen, the little periods scrolling out and disappearing like the phone was thinking. But nothing was happening.

I sat staring at my smug little phone for a whole minute. And then I canceled the text. I checked the reception.

Five bars. Pretty good reception for Nebraska.

I tried sending the text again. My Impression just sat on that Sending... screen, so I gave it some time to work things out and ate a few tacos. I checked back.

That was a lie. This message was not sending. Lying little Impression. In my anger I turned the phone off to give it some time to reflect on its behavior. When my anger had subsided, I turned it back on.

It spent some time initializing its messaging capabilities and then all of a sudden its alert screen popped up.

7 NEW MESSAGES!!

Oh my gosh. Seven new messages! That was 3.5 times as many messages as I had ever had unread on my phone at one time.

I eagerly leaped into the inbox. There was the message from my dad from several days ago, a message from my future roommate and then several more from an assortment of other people including a couple "text me bak wut are yoo doing fool?" messages.

I freaked out and started texting everyone to clear things up as fast as I could. I sent all the messages without a problem and then, relieved, set down the Impression and glared at it.

What are you up to, phony?

"What are you talking about? I'm just doing my thing. Sending messages and stuff wanna check Facebook?"

Okay sur- No! Look me in the eyes.

It didn't. And after a few more test messages to myself I was convinced that it was just a random fluke and that my Impression was still a sophisticated piece of high tech gadgetry.

I was so wrong.

The problems developed over time. About a month went by and things seemed okay -- but every now and then I realized that I had typed two letters where I meant to type one, or forgotten to insert some letters. This was unusual because I'm the world's biggest perfectionist*, but I wrote it off as human error.

Foreshadowing.

One day I was expecting a text from a friend and it just wasn't coming. I felt like I was being stood up and I was starting to get peeved. Finally, my annoyance building, I wrote them an angry text, capped it with exclamation marks, and hit send.

Sending.... . . . . . .

Oh man. I'm the world's worst friend.

I turned the Impression on and off as fast as I could, waited for the messaging to initialize, and sure enough -- 3 New Messages.

"Mr. Impression," I said coldly. "What are you playing at?"

"You know very well what I'm talking about. Is there a setting I have wrong? Is this a user feature? Am I hitting the wrong button? Talk to me."

It didn't. And so I went home to talk to Mr. Internet.

I googled "samsung impression issues" and I just wasn't even prepared for the onset.

"Why won't they recall the impression?"

"Almost daily errors with my samsung impression!"

"Samsung impression errors???????"

"Shouldn't have bought this phone!!"

I followed a link to a forum where dozens of users were all complaining about the issues they were having. "It stops receiving messages and I have to turn it off and on to get it to work again," said one guy. "The frequency that this happened with increased over time. Right now it's every 37 messages."

What a specific, fateful number. Thirty. Seven. Messages.

I read on. That was the most prevalent problem, but certainly not the only one. "Sometimes it types two letters when I hit it once," said another forumer, "or else it doesn't recognize a key press. Makes me look like a sloppy typer."

It wasn't my fault. I was still typing like a pro. It was this demonic little device.

I stared coldly at the evil little gadget. It had cost me respect and joy. It had sabotaged my texting life. And the worst part -- it was only going to increase its reign of terror.

In response, I declared war on my Impression.

It was under the two-year protection of AT&T, but thankfully it only had a few weapons to use.

It had the fact that every certain number of texts, it would refuse to accept more texts until it had undergone a reboot. I quickly reached the 37 message limit, which appeared to be the lowest it would go.

Second, it would mess with my grammar.

And finally, it would occasionally disable the alarm clock without warning in an attempt to sabotage my morning schedule.

It had a variety of lesser glitches which would crop up from time to time -- disabling silent mode, changing the alarm times, forgetting about tasks I entered -- but I could ignore these.

The other three glitches I took on in force.

Whenever I had gone a day without any new texts, I would text myself or reboot the phone to make sure that I was still getting texts.

I started telling my friends that using multiple letters in my texts was my new style. "i doo ths on puurpose"

And I bought a clock.

We started a war against each other, me and my Impression. We threw our worst blows at the other, but in time we reached a stalemate. It couldn't sabotage my life and I couldn't coerce it into behaving like a normal phone.

And that's where we are today. An uneasy peace. A careful truce.

Me and the Impression.


-----
*not entirely factually accurate
Note: Cole's Pantech, threaded-conversation and all, still runs perfectly to this day.

Late Night Paper

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Orgo

Orgo. Good stuff.

Today I had a midterm in organic chemistry. That was enough to basically ruin my whole day.

I had squandered all my keeping-up-with-schoolwork time writing raps over the past week or so, so I was left with quite a pile of work to do before my midterm. Thankfully, I got back on task last Saturday, which gave me the slightest hope of getting caught up.
But.

I had to read a chapter of orgo and do problems out of two. When it's put that way, it doesn't sound like that much. Which is what I thought when I sat in the library and developed sick lines for hours. But that actually entails about 12 hours of work -- maybe a little more. And so even though I managed to buckle down and hit the homework load hard, I still found myself swamped, and there's always too much to do on top of homework, and sometimes a lyric is so poignant you have to jot it down even when you're working and then you work a little slower and then even after glaring at organic chemistry pages for hours there's still practice exams and flashcards and six hundred (ish) other things and you're not even sure if you're remembering what you're reading but you just have to read read read and-

The point is, I was in no way prepared for this exam.

I have a graph for proof.

I caught up with the reading and problems at 5:25. The exam was at 6:30. That meant I had like 15 minutes to glance over my notes and flashcards before grabbing a quick supper and heading to the exam.

To put this in perspective, most of the class started studying in earnest last Thursday. They were done with the chapters before we started them in class.

And the whole class is graded on a B- curve.

I was sure I was toast. Which meant that my entire day was awful. It was like there was a big black cloud of misery just- just pooping on me. All day long.

Even when our seminar today proved to be excellent.

In this seminar, we had a professor come in to tell us about biochemical research. Earlier in the year, I had gone to a Biology Students Association meeting and, weird coincidence, this same professor had given the exact same talk there. He's a really in-your-face, engaging kind of guy and he likes audience participation so he always asks lots of questions about things.

Which meant that when he gave the talk last time, I remembered almost everything he said.

Which meant that this time, I came off as an absolute genius.

Meade: "Blah blah blah science science. And in conclusion, we can now identify four different kinds of genetic diseases. Now, what do you suppose would be the problem with this?"
Long silence.
Nolan, with confidence: "Health insurance costs."
Meade: "Exactly."
LATER
Professor Meade: "What do you think these black and speckled shapes are?"
Honest Class: "Neurons? Bone fragments?"
Nolan: "Huh, they look kind of like tadpoles to me. Like tadpoles with two heads or something."
Professor Meade: "That's exactly right. These are genetic mutant tadpoles."

I knew what these were.

Actually, the hardest part of the class was tempering my confidence. I had to try to throw in umms and uhhs as I answered every question right on the money. But I think I was successful because he showed no recognition of me and seemed genuinely pleased with my competence.

But. As fun as seminar was, the misty gloom of orgo was still pervasive and it didn't take much longer than lunch after class for despondency to set in again.

I tried to lift the gloom by heading to SPAC to work out, but there was still that sinking feeling in the bottom of my stomach, like when you're about to start in a basketball game or perform in front of a crowd. And it was all the worse because I knew it was my fault and that I could be on top of things if I hadn't wasted so much time writing raps.

And then I had afternoon class, which cost more study time, and then I was cramming in the last little bits of knowledge before supper -- and my head just couldn't hold all the facts and I knew I was going to get like 20 percent on the test, and every part of the future looked like a long black tunnel full of misery.

And that's when my day started to get good.

The funny thing about orgo is that as bad as it is, everyone knows how bad it is. They've heard from someone or another about the twelve thousand reaction mechanisms you need to memorize and the six thousand other compounds and the pages and pages and pages of benzene rings and catalyzed hydrogenations and Diels Alder reactions and Wittig reagents and Friedel-Crafts Acylations and maybe not that specific but they at least have an idea.

Which is really cool.

Because it's kind of like being a gladiator or on death row. Everyone who knows you have a midterm is like, "Oh, man, orgo today? I'm so sorry for you." Or, "Wow, that bites. Best of luck. I don't envy you at all." Or, "I would conceivably trade one of my children not to go through what you're going to go through in a couple of hours."

And if anyone's laughing or joking, you just tell them that you have orgo and then their faces get as sad as yours and they're like, "Oh snap. That's the worst." And you've ruined their day too for a bit.

On a totally sincere note, it's really awesome. Friends are encouraging, they say nice, untrue things about your intellect, they pray for you, they empathize totally. In some ways, having an orgo midterm is sweet.

In other ways, I probably just failed that test.

But I would gladly have another midterm tomorrow -- just so I could tell everyone

Nostalgic

Today was a Sunday, which means church. And that means Maywood Evangelical Free Church or, That Church I Went Too When I Was Wee.

This was a crazy experience. First of all, it was like a total nostalgia overload. The carpets were the same, the classrooms, the coat racks, the stairs, the foyer, the sanctuary, most of the people. It was all like just the same as five years ago when I went here. Second, everything was so small. It was like, "ohmagoodness, Maywood got hit by a shrink ray." Like, I mean, those words actually went through my head.

The ceilings were way lower. The classroom gates were knee-height. The coat racks were short. The foyer was claustrophobic. And the sanctuary was tiny! I remember a giant sanctuary that could easily fit like six thousand or seven thousand people with elbow space, and a ceiling so high that if you managed to get to the pinnacle and then you fell, you could live an entire life in the time it took to fall.

This was not that church.

It was so much smaller. The walls were closer in, the pews were crammed into each other, the ceiling fans almost brushed our heads. It wasn't the same church!

Now, the characteristics were all the same. There was that same soundboard that my cool friends got to use. There was the white stage that I wished was a big huge mint on many a Sunday because the little white mints my mom had were entirely inadequate. And all the people who sang were the same people, just barely perceptibly aged.

But it just wasn't the same church.

That aside, everyone inside the church was the same. We'd been gone for five years and in that time my brothers and I got a lot taller, my parents aged a lot, my dad put on some weight, my mom got shorter, Cole got facial hair, I got handsome, Seth got broad shoulders and Grant-- didn't actually change much.

Which means he fit in well at Maywood because every single person was exactly the same! They all went to the same church, wore the same styles of clothes, sang the same kinds of songs, listened to the same types of sermons, had the same faces. Weird. Weird weird weird.

This led me to some ponderings about spiritual stagnation I'll probably elaborate on later.

But anyways, Maywood was strange because it was like my family's house. On the one hand, everything is so familiar and just the way I remember it from five years ago. And on the other hand, so much stuff is different that it's not my church any more.

So that was my little piece of nostalgia for the day, if that is the appropriate word which it might not be.

Segue.

After church, I got to meet up with some friends at the Culver's right across from my family's house. It was cool because I made them drive all the way from their church to meet me there because I have to get ferried around by my family. And then it turned out their church was actually closer to Culver's than Maywood. And then we had butterburgers!

I had an intramural basketball game back at Northwestern and plenty of studying to do, so I decided that we should just eat from 12:30 to 1:30 to get to briefly see each other's handsome/beautiful faces again, and then I would leave and be back at Northwestern in time for the 3 o'clock game.

This was the stupidest idea.

1) It takes more than an hour and a half to get to Northwestern from Rockford, and when I got there I would have to unpack and change and get over to the gym. And leaving Culver's at 1:30 still entailed going home and packing up. No way that's possible.

2) I hadn't even started doing financial aid and tax stuff with my dad, which was one of the main reasons I went home for the weekend. I still needed to do that before I left.

3) We ended up talking for four and a half hours straight without pausing.

Stupid, stupid idea.

The talking was great, though. It was just three of us, and although one of these friends was a lifetime-ever-since-we-were-in-diapers-we-were-best-buds friend, the other was a girl I barely knew except from random encounters throughout our lives, so I anticipated the conversation being kind of awkward and eagerly abandoned.

Instead we discoursed on everything from relationships to parties to judgmentalism to college plans to relationships without stopping for breath.

It was awesome.

By the conclusion of this prolonged conversational encounter, I knew these friends ten times as well and as a bonus I broadened my perspectives on drugs & drinking.

(But not very much.)

But anyways, it was a great afternoon and then I went home and slaved furiously and FAFSA told me I would be a prince one day, and then I managed to leave by 6:15, and the timing on this was just perfect because right as I pulled up to Hinman (my dorm), a group of friends from community group appeared at the door like elves to ferry my luggage to my room and then I accompanied them to Whole Foods for no discernable purpose and I felt like I had good friends at college, which is a good thing to come back to.

And I didn't do any rapping today, but I discussed this habit with my mom in the car on the way back to Northwestern and she confirmed that my dad disapproves.

I will prove them wrong.

The Start of a Rapping Career

So right now I'm at my parents' house.

Let me break down how weird that statement is. 1) I said "my parents' house" instead of "my house" for the first time in basically my entire life. For 18 years or whatever -- maybe 17 years; I don't know how often I talk about residences -- it has always been "my house," and now it's "their house."

Weird.

Anyways, that's the breakdown.

This conceptual turnaround is probably just because they move so much and I haven't actually had time to live in this particular house so it feels all "theirsy" instead "miney." Like, if they would just stay put I would probably still claim partial ownership.

But still. I mean, it's so familiar on the one hand -- half-unpacked boxes in the corners, stocked bookshelves and counters, homeschooling books and Gameboy games on the coffee table, a mess of linguistic materials on every flat surface.

But on the other hand, it's a weird house with a weird shape in a weird place right next to a hill, and we've never had a house right next to a hill. It's definitely not home.

So in conclusion, my family's nomadic nature is driving me out of identification with them.

In other news, I spent four hours yesterday writing raps when I should have been doing homework. This is terrible. It's stupid, it puts me behind in work, I feel vaguely dissatisfied at the end of it .... But I just can't stop. It's insanely addictive, like playing Minecraft at 3 A.M.

And the worst part about writing raps is that the flow is fickle. Some days you can sit and write down garbage-y little end rhymes for an hour straight without popping out any really catchy lines. And then other days your pencil hits the paper and it's a lyrical laboratory inside of your brain. And when that happens you just can't stop, because you're Drake and you know you're going to get that call if you just keep laying down flows.

Actually, as grim and depressed I sound about this habit, I don't really regret the time spent. It's fascinating, and you improve so quickly that it stays entertaining. If I didn't have homework, I would write raps every hour of the day.

In other other news, my family left me alone for a few hours today to do homework and I decided to test my verbal efficacy without the inhibition of human presence.

Pros: I got to hear what my voice sounded like saying raps. And the rhymes actually translated to audio pretty well.

Cons: I had to hear what my voice sounded like saying raps. It was pretty awful.

No, but really. I was already kind of psyched up because I had listened to a dozen or so white rappers on YouTube and it sounds ridiculously bad. But then at the same time I had Eminem going through my head. And so I wasn't sure what to expect. And then I kind of spat a few raps just out loud and my voice sounded like a cross between, like, Kanye and Drake and Weezy.

And I've recorded my voice before and listened to it -- even singing -- so I know that what I hear isn't what reality hears, but when I recorded my voice and played it back, I just didn't have my expectations in the right area.

First of all, my voice is so deep. And not even mellow deep. Just like cracky "I'm a golem" deep.

Second, I sound super unconfident. Even when I spit lines like I'm angry, which I've learned makes them sound stronger. It still sounds all timid and white suburban.

Third, I have a lisp. Weird. Weird weird weird weird weird. Like, I was kind of prepared for how deep and cracky my voice would be. I was kind of prepared to be less confident-sounding than Eminem. But a lisp? Honestly, genetics? That just came totally out of left field. Like, when I talk normally it's only sort of audible, but when I try to rap it's just ridiculous. It sounds like I have a fat lip, or maybe half a tongue.

So in conclusion, there are many impediments to my rapping career at the moment. I would say quality of lyrics is kind of a low priority at the moment. That's not as hard to improve in. But nature has left me with a few obstacles to being able to captivate with my presentation of these flows and I'm going to need to sort that out before I contact Lil Wayne or Dr. Dre.

In final conclusion, it is only 12:15 and I'm headed for bed. Being home has huge advantages.

Life's Like a Big Snake

This metaphor plays out in a lot of ways. First and foremost, life has the ability to choke you whenever it feels so inclined. Like forcing you to stay up until 4 A.M. last night working on a pre-lab for the worst lab in all of history. That lab took four full hours, by the way. Four entire boring, sleep-depriving hours. Dreadful.

And now tonight it's 2 A.M. and I'm writing a blog post again. Which is actually okay, because I'm doing this just before I embrace unconsciousness, as opposed to just before I begin working on pre-lab report that I should have done four days ago.
tldr: I can sleep soon.

Today was quite the day.

For one thing, I was so tired that it was like the longest day that has ever happened on the entire Earth. Honestly. And it made concentration difficult in everything. Thankfully, there's only two classes on Wednesday. But there's also the big fat lab on Wednesday, and that's the pits.

I'm so tired my thoughts are all convoluted and are coming out accordingly. What I'm trying to say is: after I barely woke up in time for orgo this morning, it was cold out and I had to eat a donut for breakfast because I forgot to bring a pop-tart, which I'm not complaining about because it was delicious and sort of nostalgic with sprinkles on top.

Then I went and looked up philosophy topics in the library for two hours between classes because the activation energy to open my government textbook is significantly higher than the amount of energy in a standard sized donut, even with nostalgic sprinkles. That was a good waste of time because I creeped myself out a smidgen and also remained conscious which means I was accomplishing something.

I'm not sure if that actually logically follows.

Math was so boring, but Kal Nanes knows my name and he doesn't know some other peoples' names and I'm sure that counts for something and Michael didn't come to class for the second day in a row and maybe he's sick or he dropped it! Which means I now have 1.3 friends in math class instead of 2.2, which is sort of unhappy.

And there's not enough time to eat lunch on Wednesdays but one manages, and then it's time for lab and the next four hours are a muddled blur of frustration, anxiety, frustration, fatigue, temporary emissions of alertness, and long, subdued periods of gazing at noncompliant vials.

By the time a four hour lab is over, you feel like you just fell off the edge of the Earth and everyone you know managed to keep their balance and not fall with you.

And then they hopped into Formula One cars and drove off to dinner and texting and fun affairs that are difficult to participate in from Lab D-221.

Anyways, where was I? Oh yeah. Danny's car had a flat tire so we had supper and then we shared manly conversation and frustration at the Wildcats.

And then I went to my room to waste time gazing at pixels and I realized that worship is tomorrow, and that I haven't actually practiced, and that we're singing Meant to Live by Switchfoot, which is not a simple tune, and that last week I sucked at electric guitar because I hadn't practiced and also possibly because I was tired -- and I only had control over one of those variables, and so I got out my guitar and OH MY GOD MY TINY LITTLE AMP DIED.

It had sort of had one foot in the grave for a little while. But there aren't words to describe it when your own tiny little black box of magic that can clip on your belt and be sunshine gives into illness and dies. And then you feel like some kind of sick fiend because when you play he wheezes and rattles like a poorly revitalized corpse and you can't change any settings to make him come back to life, and you try to strum some more and he sounds like he's throwing up and he just isn't alive at all.

An hour of Amazon and USPS hoops later, I had my little guy tucked away in a cardboard box, going home to his parents in exchange for money, which is kind of twisted.

And then it was a late hour and I had to get practicing for that difficult song, and I really did give it a go. I spent almost three hours working away at it, watching the YouTube video like actually literally nine hundred times and looking up so many tabs and strumming away. But somehow the sound was just not adding up -- and any goodness I can achieve on my own with a guitar is cut down by about seven eighths when I play in public. By this standard, I was likely going to cause temporary blindness when I played tomorrow.

But I still wasted more time fiddling away at that guitar and then we changed the setlist and it turned out that I didn't have to have spent all those hours, but somehow it was less frustrating than it should have been because at least I knew Meant to Live. Slowly. Alone.

And then I worked on a project until now which took too long, but will be over soon.

And holy cow, this blog is about a snake.

Okay. Life is also like a snake because it goes in different directions depending on what part of it you're on. That makes less sense written than imagined. And life can buck and throw you off, or raise you to a great height unexpectedly.
And it can.. bite you.

For a variety of reasons, I'm abandoning this analogy.
G'night.

2 A.M. Is Powerful

It's two in the morning at the moment. I don't know how it got to be this way. There was a combination of inefficient project management, time used deleting Facebook and further time spent checking out Blogspot which led me to this moment. And 2 A.M. is powerful.

It inexplicably drains all of one's initiative and hope. I still have to do a lab write-up. I might get a terrible grade on this lab. I might fail organic chemistry. I might be so exhausted tomorrow that I inadvertently pour hydrochloric acid onto my lab partner and then fall asleep like a deaf narcoleptic puppy. In lab goggles.

Life could be truly terrible.

Life could be absolutely the worst. And you know why? Because it's 2 A.M.

Oh, it's been coming on. Midnight starts to flex its muscles. Half past and the sickly, dull talons of the early morning are beginning to get hungry. One o'clock and there's already that subtle collapse, that drooping of the eyelids and miserable outlook characteristic of the wee hours of the morning.

And then everything rushes along like an exponential curve tightening into Sheol and before you know it you're gazing with bleary eyes at a monitor for what feels like minutes but is actually hours and you know that time's slipping by and people are falling asleep on every side and not staring at LCD pixels, and tomorrow you're going to be so tired, and you're behind on sleep anyways, and there's four hundred different assignments to do tomorrow and there is no conceivable way life is going to be okay.

And then you hit Blogspot and everything is good.


Or else you stumble into StumbleUpon. And then you're hosed.