Go ahead, live a little

I'm starting to think of my blog as a side project that I don't have time for. Thanks to the advent of Twitter, my thoughts can be put out faster, in shorter snippets, to a larger audience. Three or four years ago my thoughts would have been put out into a LiveJournal blog but that was kind of boring.

Ok, really boring. I was not a great blogger in high school...but what has changed, eh? Ha!

Then, of course, came Facebook status updates (did I join in 2005 or 2006?), but until about 2007 or so, Facebook didn't do a great job of parsing those out for other users to read. Users had to go to each others' pages to see what was up (gasp, I know!) Thanks, Facebook, for feeding our inner stalkers by adding the News Feed and Live Feed. They make it so easy to find out what's going on with friends (not that it's always useful). Plenty of people had problems with the ease-of-stalking Facebook has enabled, but I for one have it to thank for helping my mindless drivel find its way into the "cloud." Also, kudos to Facebook and Twitter both for working seamlessly together.

Thinking of side projects that I don't have/make time for anymore, aside from neglecting the blog:  photography and reading.

As far as photography goes, I'm in that rut where I keep taking photos (several hundred in fact) but I lack the time, and often interest, to go through marathon processing and uploading (and then naming, describing, tagging, etc.) sessions to get the final product on Flickr. I'm doing well if I get up 2-3 photos a month here lately, so needless to say, I'm falling behind. I've already mentally checked off some photo shoots that I'm not likely to ever touch again from 2009, but there is still about half a year of photos piling up in Adobe Lightroom.

And then on the reading front, suffice it to say that I've had four geography texts checked out from the UTM library and I've renewed them four times already. That doesn't sound like a lot, but when you consider that one of the renewals included the Christmas break so it was about a month long... You see where this is going. Fortunately, I think faculty/staff can renew books indefinitely, instead of the three time max limit for students. Mostly, I read Twitter and the news. I even get the news from Twitter (CNN, BBC).

I hate to end this in a circle, but going back to blog subject, I've been thinking of switching over to Wordpress. Problem is, I don't know if I want to have them host it and just migrate my matt-cook.com domain over, or pay for cheap hosting and run their content management system (CMS) from the host. Then there's the whole issue of having to migrate the content from this blog over, which shouldn't be a big nightmare, but is still a few extra steps.

I didn't make any resolutions for 2010, so I'm not going to promise that I'll blog more or post photos more, etc. ...

But I'll try, on occasion. You know, before I get to grad school and have no life for 5-7 years.

Visualizing the Weekend Ahead

I know I often post tweets or blogs about how busy I am, but since I made a to-do list today on a digital sticky note (gotta love Macs) I thought I would post it for everyone to see what I'm doing between the time this is written and Sunday night. The good news is that not all of this has to be done by Monday, but most of it is due by Tuesday or Wednesday.

I have a feeling this won't make sense to a lot of you, considering this is a mixture of putting together a rough draft of my senior communications portfolio, a Communications law test, Photojournalism assignment, Comm and the World Wide Web project, and Scholars project writing. Whew.

To Do:
Finish Berlin's 4-5 lives
Photo Essay Topic Brainstorm
Examine Comm Law Study Guide - Determine what to study/read
Gather 20 oldest portfolio clips and put in template with art.
Study Session I - Comm Law
Finish personal Web page template
Write Berlin's 6-7 lives
Make Divider Pages and Executive Summaries in Indesign
Study Session II - Comm Law
Finish Berlin's 8-9 lives
Gather 20 more clips and put in template with art.
Finish personal Web page content
Write Berlin's 10th life
Gather remaining clips (20-30 stories + editorials)
Copy Edit
Gather published photos and any other docs needed for portfolio
Print portfolio
Study Session III - Comm Law

At some point: Make sure The Pacer is ok, go to church, sleep.

In other news, Karen and I signed for an apartment today and got a lot of wedding planning stuff done this week, so that's a little less stress on our plates now.

Peace.

Half a Month Later...

How can it possibly be August 9 already?

Things have been really, really busy since coming back from Berlin. Catching up on sleep. Catching up on work. Catching up on Karen-time. You get the idea.

Work has been insanely busy. I have updated a ton of Web sites in the last two weeks: Psychology, ECCE, ITC, Financial Aid, Honors Program, Visual and Theatre Arts, etc. The last two weeks have been the final weeks of my co-student worker, Hannah Burcham, who is going to Mississippi State University with the National Student Exchange program. In the mean time, we've been training her highly capable replacement, Jen DeYeso in all of the wonderful jobs (and the tedious ones, too) we take care of on a daily basis at the ITC. Mix into this helping the occasional professor who wanders over for help, working on the registrations for three different training topics coming up in August and September, and planning for the training session I am doing this coming Tuesday — you get the idea of how busy it's been.

I've also spent some time working on the TNGIC summer newsletter, getting together the stories we will be covering for the end-of-August publication. Now I need to start laying it out in InDesign this week before things get even more hectic with The Pacer and that little thing called school.

Speaking of my favorite newspaper, I worked the last few days of this week with The Pacer's adviser, Tomi Parrish, on buying the remaining iMacs we need to fully handle our computing needs for the coming years. The good thing about these Macs is that we should be able to get a lot more use out of them than we've been getting out of the PCs we've used for years. Now they just have to be shipped and have software ghosted onto them by the Technical Services folks and brought over to our office. I'm looking forward to kicking off the new year with lunch and training on August 18. Then we start working on our First Flight edition for the incoming freshmen...and then off we go!

In other news, Karen and I have discovered the addicting Web site Nutrimirror — an online food journal that can really help ANYONE trying to eat healthier. As Karen saw on a newscast on her Destin vacation, keeping a food journal is one of the best ways to eat healthier and get/stay in shape. Nutrimirror is doing just that, and with time it should be a big help.

Finally, with all this going on a few of my other projects are still hounding me to start/finish them, including: more research and reading on my Scholars project, a photo-video for a wedding at the end of August, posting more photos from Berlin, and buying my books from Amazon/Half.com. Anything else...? This is more than I can keep up with in my head. Good thing I have to-do lists!