Also I think that Facebook chat (as well as texting) are greatly impacting the quality of writing in younger generations. In my time teacher assisting I saw many kids abbreviate things in ways that seem to be common in texting or IMing.

On top of that I had the opportunity to look through some literacy tests done at a school middle school in MI. The writing was atrocious. The majority of these 8th grade students were testing at the level of a 4th grader (according to the test’s scoring requirements), and largely in part to the abbreviations they used. This often lead to misspellings as well. As a frequent text message user I have made it a point to use proper grammar and spelling as often as possible due to these tests. I am curious to hear your thoughts on this RR. Let me know what you think when you get a chance, I hope your summer is going well.

I recently began pulling pictures from Facebook and uploading them to Picasa, instead, because they can be made private, sorted more easily, and are of better quality (the space restrictions are crummy, though). I’m more a fan of Orkut and the ability to use Add-ons than Facebook’s clunky plugins (though Scrabble is my poison), and wish some work would be done with it.

The blog/note thing angers me a bit, too. I thought to start blogging more to keep up with writing, and I think that people’re more open on their blogs, but they post notes and status updates, instead. And Facebook’s formatting for notes is terrible.

I’ve been thinking of switching over to Chrome, myself. I didn’t like it much on my Windows machine, but I don’t remember exactly why. Maybe because it seemed a little bare-bones…which is kind of what I’m going for, now, as long as “it works good”. Firefox for Mac is doing me just fine, however. Still – if Chrome has some Google functions built in (I haven’t looked at it for awhile), that may make me switch over – I’ve been keeping my life on Google for awhile, and accessing it more and more, too, since I picked up my Droid a few weeks ago (which is an amazing, priceless little gadget!)

One of my complaints is that the newer Macbooks don’t have the same analog video-out that the old ones did, so I either need to a) get a new TV, or b) spend $100.00 finagling up a set of 2-3 different adapters and converters to hook the thing up to my old one. Lame.

Samuel