Category: general

The other day on my way to work, I was headed up the I-20 Exit 1 offramp to Martintown Road when I looked to my right and saw about a bazillion birds camped out on Frontage Road.

Hey look; I have a YouTube account now. I like the fact that I can upload movies straight from my camera without converting them to mpgs first (the site does the conversion, to Flash, for me).

Check it out: at first the birds are just hanging out, chirping like crazy. Then, in the third video, they start to organize…and in the fourth, they’re outta here.

Chicken nuggets, beautiful fall leaves, and ladybugs.

I have the TV on at work so I can cut out the commercials for the web videos. There was just a commercial on for windows. The guy said, “Custom sizing to fit your openings.”

I heard “ovaries”.

Mari held her pumpkin carving party again this year, and I took some pictures.

At first we sat around eating all the fabulous food Mari and others had made. Some people played card games. Then people gradually started carving pumpkins; I was in the first group.

My pumpkin:

More pumpkin carving:

There was a little family there that was so cute: a husband and wife and their 3-year-old son and 13-month-old daughter. I had some stickers that I had previously passed out to everyone, and I was pleased when they arrived so there was actually a kid to give stickers to.

I asked parental permission first, then gave the little boy a sheet of stickers. He put a pumpkin sticker on his forehead, and pointed at it and said, “Head!”

:)

Here’s Brooke and her new boyfriend:

Oh, calm down. It’s just Mari’s dad.

Someone at the party asked me if Brooke and I were related, because she’s seen us together a lot. That was kind of cool.

Mari’s house was once again done up for Halloween, and it looked awesome.

After I got home, I stuck a candle in my pumpkin and set it at the kitchen window.

I hope people can tell it’s a bat :>

Try not to schedule two big, important projects over the weekend of a Halloween party you’re attending. Even if you’re not dressing up or anything. It’s just not a good idea.

I googled “blog meme” and found a meme about blogs. Scary.

1. Do you like the look and the contents of your blog?

Yes, I love the template I designed. I will someday redo it without tables, and web designers everywhere will cry for joy. I think that will have to wait until border-image is implemented in all the browsers, though.

And yay for the contents! I get far too much enjoyment from going back and reading my old posts.

2. Does your family know about your blog?

My immediate family, and some online members of my extended family, know. My grandmother, who doesn’t own a computer, doesn’t, but that’s not because I’m hiding it from her.

3. Can you tell your friends about your blog? Do you consider it a private thing?

I always tell my friends about my blog, because I crave comments. Comment, people. Feed that ego.

I do write about intensely private things here, but that’s because I’m very open. I don’t care who knows. In fact, I’m interested in hearing outside opinions about my life.

4. Do you just read the blogs of those who comment on your blog? Or do you try to discover new blogs?

Well. I don’t always read the blogs of my commenters. Alas. I will always go to their blog when I first see their comment, but that doesn’t mean I’ll blogroll it. And for those I do blogroll, there’s no guarantee I won’t unsubscribe later. There just isn’t enough time in the day; I have to set priorities.

I do seek out other blogs, usually through the blogrolls of bloggers I already like.

5. Did your blog positively affect your mind? Give an example.

Yes. I was insane, and my blog cured me.

;>

Well, in the years I’ve been blogging, I have built up the good habit of writing every day, which is a positive effect on my brain, I suppose. I don’t know if my blog has made me smarter or more stable in any way, however.

6. What does the number of visitors to your blog mean? Do you use a traffic counter?

pair offers logs, but I hardly ever analyze them. I lost all my old logs because I had downloaded them and deleted them off the server. Right now I have an automatic Analog report here, which covers the logs that I have left, but it doesn’t really tell me much. I am interested to see what posts people apparently came in on.

7. Do you imagine what other bloggers look like?

If I do, it’s not consciously. I instead have kind of a feeling about people. Sometimes seeing a picture of a blogger changes the feeling, but not in a harmful way.

8. Do you think blogging has any real benefit?

I hope it does, or I’ve wasted a lot of time!

Actually, yes, I think blogging provides a valuable resource for my future biographers. So too will Dandelife (which Will pointed me to the other day) as soon as I actually put some information on it.

9. Do you think that the blogsphere is a stand alone community separated from the real world?

It’s not completely separate, but in the sense that I do not talk on the phone or in person with the people I interact with on blogs, yes. Bloggers are affected by what happens in the real world, though. In some cases those real world events can bring bloggers together, and in others they can cause rifts. Just like they can in regular relationships. Really, the blogosphere is more like a club than an alternate universe. It’s a subsection of society, but it’s still part of society.

Wow, the wind sounds awesome right now. I have my window open and can hear it sweeping through between this building and the apartments across the way. Leaves are rustling, but the main sound is the wind itself, gusting and then fading away.

10. Do some political blogs scare you? Do you avoid them?

They don’t scare me, but I do avoid them. I read blogs to hear stories and to learn about art and culture and design and things of that nature.

11. Do you think that criticizing your blog is useful?

I prefer the word “critiquing”, and sure. But then again I love analyzing everything, so I will always say that more analysis is good.

12. Have you ever thought about what would happen to your blog if you died?

Yes, but I haven’t written out instructions for that yet. I should.

13. Which blogger has had the greatest impression on you?

Jeff Laitila of Sushicam. (Ha, you thought I was going to say Magazine Man, didn’t you?) Jeff’s was the first “photoblog” I ever read (I put that in quotation marks because he always had stories as well as photos, and not all photoblogs do). His photos inspired me to take more pictures and try new things. I don’t know how long it will be before I’m at his level, or if that will ever happen, but I’m positive that if it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t have tried.

MM does come in second. His blogging has shown me that everyday occurrences and childhood memories can be epic. I already knew that, to an extent, but having the fact demonstrated over and over again leaves a big impression.

However, unlike with Jeff’s photos, this impression hasn’t yet moved me to actually do anything. Many of the bloggers who post over at MM’s place leave comments like, “You’ve inspired me to work harder at my blog!” I’m not one of them. (Unfortunately?)

14. Which blogger do you think is the most similar to you?

Oh, bleh. Most bloggers are similar to me. They follow memes, they fill out questionnaires, they write about what’s annoying them or why they’re in a good mood. They use their blogs as a diary/journal, with no overarching theme or purpose other than to make themselves happy. The main difference is that I’m not sure all those other bloggers feel like failures for it.

And yet, as I’ve stated, I do like my blog. If I wanted to have a successful, high-readership blog, I’d start a new one with a plan and stick to it, rather than try to reposition this one.

This blog will always be my baby, and I’ll always come here first. Even if it’s only for me.

I was surfing around today and happened by SCAD‘s website, and that made me remember a couple years ago when my cousin Cary, her mother, a family friend and I all went to Savannah together. Cary was excited to see a SCAD building while we were there, though we didn’t go in or look around the area.

Looking at the SCAD website made me wonder if I’d like an MFA, and thinking about Cary made me wonder if she had one too. It’s kind of funny how our interests have coincided over the years. We both played piano, we both like photography, we both have two undergraduate degrees, and it seems we both have design interests too. Would I be following in her footsteps here as well?

I googled her name to see if I could find out, and it was surprisingly simple. She was interviewed on this blog. Turns out she has her Masters in art management, which is pretty cool!

The blog also reminded me that she organized a conference called Technology in the Arts, and that conference also has a blog. It was there that I found the reason I’m writing: a very interesting post about globalization’s effect on art.

Check it out.

Last night I dreamed I was in North Korea, in the drive-thru of a place that sold chicken sandwiches. I wasn’t really hungry, but I ordered one anyway. I’m not sure why.

When I got to the window and the guy handed me my grilled chicken sandwich, I asked for a cup of water. He handed it to me, and just as I was about to take a sip, said sarcastically, “Don’t worry about the radiation. I’m sure it’s gone by now.”

Then I “remembered” that all water in North Korea was contaminated by radiation (I don’t know if that’s even possible ;P), so I poured it onto the ground. “Do you have anything else?” I asked. He held out a bottled water, which I didn’t want to buy because it would cost extra.

Now this is one of those dreams that takes a little effort to analyze.

It’s pretty obvious where North Korea and radiation came from, but why was I there, and why did I buy a chicken sandwich when I didn’t want one? Interesting.

All you have to do is teach English (natch)…or be a chef, massage therapist, au pair, or caterer.

Where are the international page layout/graphic design/editing jobs?

I have two bachelor’s degrees, one in Linguistics, and the other in English. I tacked on the second degree because as I started preparing for graduation, I realized I had more than enough credits for two degrees. I just needed to satisfy a couple of requirements and finish out a focus in Creative Writing, which only added a semester to my stint at UK.

I minored in Japan Studies, and I also earned a Certificate in Applied Linguistics for Teaching English as a Second Language.

Though I talked with my professors about what a person with a linguistics degree might do in the “real world”, I never got a clear idea of what I would do after graduation. The only thing I did know was that I was moving to a new city and getting married, so I focused my attention on graduating and planning the wedding.

Now I’m a Web Producer and freelance designer. I manage content and design graphics, web pages, and print materials. I find design work challenging and fun. Content management appeases my obsessive-compulsive need to organize things. I’m also interested in advertising and the sheer creativity required, and business, largely due to growing up working in a small business and then befriending a local businessman here in Augusta and acting as a sounding board for his ideas.

I didn’t go to school for any of that.

This is not rare in today’s society. However, it does present me with an interesting question.

Is what I’m doing now what I want to be doing long-term? Because if it is, I should really go back to school, or find some other way to fill the gaps in my knowledge.

I truly enjoy design. I love having different projects to work on, rather than doing the same thing every day. I don’t prefer one medium–print or Web–over the other. I’d actually rather not be exclusive. But if I want to commit to doing Web design at least part of the time, professionally, there are quite a few things I need to learn more about.

For example, I was reading a very exciting-sounding job description for a Regional Web Manager. This person would coordinate content for several websites, including working with sales departments to develop advertising, and would train local Web Coordinators on design software. I don’t know that I necessarily want to do something like this, but I find the idea of managing and designing for multiple websites, and having subordinates, appealing.

The point is that the job requires proficiency in Photoshop, ImageReady, Flash, Dreamweaver, HTML, and XML. I have used all of those save Flash, and I’ll start teaching myself Flash here pretty soon. However, I’m not sure I can argue that I am proficient in any of them. There are plenty of things I haven’t done with Photoshop, and pretty much all I know how to do in ImageReady is create an animated gif from frames created elsewhere. My HTML is pretty solid (and as compliant as I can make it), but there are tags I don’t know, and while I understand XML, I’ve never actually written any.

The list of required technologies seems short. I guess that’s why it makes me feel so inadequate.

I don’t want to downplay my success up to this point. I have done well in teaching myself all this stuff. I’m also self-taught in PHP and CSS. But I know my knowledge could be far more complete.

So I just need to decide if this is really what I want to do. And if it is, I need to take the necessary steps.

And here’s some evidence.

My dream last night was almost like an episode of a TV series, or maybe a movie.

I was part of a group of a little over a half dozen or so of people being held hostage. Or rather, we were in the wrong place at the wrong time. The bad guys were trying to do something–steal something, sabotage something, I’m not sure–and since we happened to be at the scene, they decided to use us.

Our main task was to find each and every last miniature Batmobile in the place and cover it so that Batman couldn’t see what they were doing.

There were many mini Batmobiles.

I wasn’t sure if I should point out all the ones I saw, or conveniently overlook one. I played it safe and pointed them all out.

There was a love subplot in the dream as well. One of the hostages was a girl named Heather, who I thought was my friend Sam’s fiancee. However, she kept complaining about him, so I spent a lot of my time talking him up, pointing out how totally awesome he is.

In the end I seemed to have moved her…only to find out that she wasn’t his fiancee at all, but a girl who thought she’d been set up on a blind date with him. So rather than help his relationship, I had introduced an annoying variable.

Also, in the dream, Sam was Batman.

…my DVD drive decided to freeze on this image.

Just thought I’d share.

I haven’t dressed up–I mean really put effort into it–since I stopped trick or treating. I’m not sure when that was, but I’m sure I was in elementary school. In high school I had a costume party where everyone was required to wear a costume, and then I threw mine together ten minutes before people arrived. I’m not even sure what I was supposed to be, but it involved a blue shirt and a patterned skirt. I think I put a brown robe on over that for part of the time (gee).

I did something similar while I was at UAH. I put on a peasant blouse, hoop earrings, and a skirt, and tried to convince the young daughter of the ASME president that I was a gypsy.

I bought a “geisha” outfit for a party I went to sometime after UAH–I think it was a party with people from work, before cancer and UK. Could have been after cancer and before UK, though. I’m not sure. Anyway, the costume was terrible…I put zero effort into it and was embarrassed the whole night.

Other than those, I haven’t really done Halloween. I haven’t dressed up, other than looking a little better to go to an opera or something. And I’ve been thinking lately that I’d like to start doing it, dolling up and looking different and interesting for a night.

I’m going to a party on Halloween. I don’t have to dress up for it, but it would be fun. So I’ve been thinking about costume ideas.

Right now I’m pondering dressing as a Japanese ghost, or as a ninja.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Advice?