Random Update on Life and Things
It’s been a really long time since I posted anything, I know. I would try to make some sort of lame apology, but I don’t really have one. Last time I posted, I think I was 6 weeks or so into the Spring Semester. That semester ended around the first week of May. I did pretty well. I’m not going to complain. Near the end of the semester the department asked me if I wanted to grade over the summer. In order to do this though I needed to take a class to be officially considered a “student”. I ended up taking Intro to Archaeology and World Prehistory. I’m pretty sure that it’s one of the most awesome classes I’ve ever taken. I definitely plan to take more classes on it in the future.
Anyway, that was during “maymester”, which went for 4 weeks from May 17 to June 11. My grading job started today, but nobody here at Purdue assigns homework the first week, so it really doesn’t start until next week. It seems like it’s going to be a pretty awesome gig and I’ll have a lot of free time over the summer to do my own thing. So, what is my “own thing” that I’m going to be doing? It’s pretty much going to be a mix of things. Here’s what I have so far, and I’ll expand on them all below the list.
- Write a complete novel
- Write a complete handbell piece
- Read/finish at least 10 books
- Figure out what I would be interested in archaeology-wise if I decide to pursue that as more than a fleeting interest
- Make $1 online from internet marketing shenanigans
If you know me or you’ve read some of the random posts on this blog, then you know that I’ve done NaNoWriMo for the past two years. Each time I mean to continue on writing after it’s over, but each time I never do. This summer I’m going to do it. I had an archaeology/mystery type novel started at the end of NaNo ‘09 that I’m probably going to use as the project. I’m not sure if I want to make the goal just to finish the first draft of it, or if I want to make the goal to write the rough draft and then rewrite it to the point where I wouldn’t be embarrassed to show it to people. So, more of that to come.
As some of you know, my brother is a composer. He mostly does handbell stuff, but recently he’s branched off into small ensemble and choral/organ type things. Anyway, in the past he’s told me that I should give it a try as well because it’s fun and he thinks I’d like it. So, I have a demo of Sibelius downloaded to mess around with this summer. The only downside of it is that I can’t save files with the demo, but I’m hoping to find a magical way to work around that (I’m hoping I can print it to pdf and just enter it in manually each time I work on it… or never close Sibelius so it’s not a problem…. yeah… great plan, I know).
I always have problems reading. It’s not that I’m slow or anything, I just don’t take the time to sit down and read a story, even if it’s something that really interests me. So, I’m determined to read and finish 10 books this summer. The reason I say finish is because when I came up with this goal I was about 450 pages into George RR Martin’s A Game of Thrones, which is an 800 page book. So, I figured that I could technically count finishing that as one of the 10 books since it will be 350 pages and some of the other books I read will be shorter than that. Although I’ll probably read the other 3 books in A Song of Ice and Fire as well, so more 800 page books are in my near future.
I liked the archaeology class a lot. A whole lot. I talked to the teacher after class one day and asked what I should do if I really liked the class and was interested in pointing my career in this direction. He basically said I should take more classes and figure out what I would be interested in studying. So, I already have a long list of websites and articles bookmarked to go through this summer in the quest for finding the piece of the archaeology world that interests me more than all others. There aren’t any classes I really want to take right now over the rest of the summer, so figuring out what direction I’d point a thesis in is what I plan on doing at this point.
This last one is sort of interesting. A lot of you know that I’ve been interested in internet marketing for about two years now. Some of you didn’t, and that’s ok too. About a month ago I interviewed with a company who is responsible for optimizing companies webpages and getting them to rank highly in the search engines. They wanted somebody to statistically analyze the difference between what they do and what their competitors do. I never heard back from them, so no idea what happened there. Still, it reminded me that I actually like sitting and futzing around with wordpress themes and changing the sidebars and tweaking them. I don’t know a lot of code, but enough to be dangerous. Sometime you should check out how this theme is supposed to look. Here’s a link to it: http://www.dynamicguru.com/freebies/the-last-fall-a-dark-wordpress-theme/
So, that’s what it used to look like until I messed around with the theme. Now some of the images are gone and the sidebar is on the other side. I really enjoy this stuff and trying to optimize a blog. It’s like a game. So, recently I pulled out some of my stuff from other times I’ve gotten heavily into the internet marketing world, and I’m in the process of messing with some stuff and toying with the ideas. I have a few things up, but haven’t done nearly enough work on them for anything to happen yet.
Also, I plan on doing the new and improved thirty day challenge this year. I’ve looked at it for the past two years, but never participated really. In the past right around this time pre-season stuff would start off. This included videos showing how to get some of the browsers and plugins that were required and any programs that we’d need. Basically everything that you needed set up before August 1st was covered in preseason. Then, during August there would be a video a day showing you how to build a blog and what to optimize and how to get backlinks and how to submit your articles to directories and all that sort of cool stuff. The thing is that 30 days was too cramped of a time frame to do this. People got too behind too fast and gave up.
This year Ed Dale (the ringleader/puppet master) is going to do it in 7 day shifts starting on July 1st. Basically the premise here is that people can do anything and work on it for a little each day for 7 days. Then you get a 7 day rest before the next week of training. The new thirty day challenge site isn’t up yet, but I’ll put a link up here when it is. I strongly encourage anybody who is slightly interested to try it with me this year. It’s all free training. You’ll need to pay for a domain and hosting pretty much, but that should be it. So, it’s not a big monetary commitment and I think it’s actually pretty cool stuff to know. Even if you’re not really a technically-savvy person, Ed and the crew are awesome at explaining these things. For those of you that are interested that know me personally, I can do my best to help you with the technical things that you’re not so good with. With this and my other things that I’ve been working on, I’m pretty sure I should make at least a dollar online this summer.
So, there are my goals. Some of it might shock you. Some of it might have been a given for those of you that know me. Now you know what my summer plans are though. Somewhere in there I’ll be grading some papers or something, but really I don’t see that as being a time-consuming activity. That’s about it for now. Since I’ll be busy doing a lot of random online-type things during the summer I’ll try to work on also keeping this blog up to date. The posts will probably have to get way shorter for that to happen. If this were part of a NaNo novel, I’d be almost done with my day’s writing by now.
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