A giant leap backward, indeed

School's out, and I celebrated by picking up a new MacBook (the black one, natch) with some research money I've been saving up. The worst part so far? Discovering that Time Machine doesn't back up to AirPort disks. (Note Time Machine's tagline: "A giant leap backward.") My cynical self says it's not some kind of technical difficulty in getting it to work, it's that Apple wants to sell Time Capsules (tagline: "A leap forward for backup."). But I bought an AirPort Extreme + external 500GB drive last year, and dammit, I'm gonna figure out how to get this to work.

The best part: I was able to take advantage of the current promo -- "Buy a Mac for college and get a free iPod" -- and of course I got the iPod touch. This time last year I still hadn't even joined the 21st C. with a cell phone, and I was seriously considering getting an iPhone (which were brand-new). I decided at the last minute not to get one, primarily because I didn't want to get stuck with the $20-a-month data plan (now moving up to $30, I hear, compensated somewhat by the significant drop in price and boost in awesomeness for the new 3G iPhone). I thought at the time that if they'd just make something like the iPhone that didn't require that data plan, I'd be happy -- I just wanted a wireless handheld device, the phone was secondary. Then came the iPod touch. I resisted getting it at first, but I finally gave in. And I'm happy I did.

Making my move

For a little while there I had my own blog. It's hosted on a university-owned server, and so the posts tended to be more academically-oriented (but by no means always). And, frankly, it was mostly pretty boring.

At some point I thought it would be a good idea to cross-post my Language Log posts there, both as a way to index them (as opposed to Geoff Pullum's by-hand method) and as a way to allow comments (which Language Log Classic did not). Eventually, the inevitable happened: I was very rarely posting anything other than Language Log cross-posts. Then Language Log moved to its new location earlier this year, and it now encourages comments and has indexing capabilities. So I stopped cross-posting, which basically meant I stopped posting altogether.

So now I want to start this blog to post about stuff that I wouldn't post about on Language Log (or on phonoloblog, for that matter). It might still be academically-oriented on occasion, and frankly, it will probably still be mostly boring. But maybe it'll encourage me to be better at what my friend Ed is so good at: being himself.