I often lament the dissapearance of casual reading from my life. During the school semesters I almost never read casually. This is sad for me, I really enjoy reading casually. While on break I will often consume several books. Over christmas break I read the whole of “The Count of Monte Christo” and began reading “The Brothers Karamazov”. Since returning to school I have probably read no more than 5 pages from Dostoevsky. I simply don’t feel that I can set aside the time to read on a regular basis. Television has taken and even lower priority than reading, so I guess I don’t feel that I have become a total slob.

Now something most unusual happened last night, I spent well over two hours studying. In my entire life I doubt I have ever studied for that long consecutively. I have spent far more than that amount of time working on a project, or writing a paper, but just sitting down and studying!?! I copied my notes, I read the book, I had Becca quiz me on stuff. It was crazy. I feel like I still need to spend some more time getting ready for these midterms though. Yes, that’s right, I just said I should study more!

There is one exception to my almost complete lack of reading, and this is some Bible study. It’s something that I honestly should be doing a lot more. I am lucky if I can read from the bible more than a few times each week. Everyone says that you should have a regular time each day to sit and study the bible by yourself. I rarely take more than a half-hour to do that, and it’s not on any set schedule. The one time that I have the most fun reading the Bible is at a Monday night bible study where we all meet at Daylight Donuts for an hour and just read and discuss a chapter. It’s probably the most fun I have had with a bible study in a long time. It’s so informal un-structured that I feel like we are all learning together and having honest discussion.

Well, time to go to work. I hope I get a chance to write something again soon.

Good evening. It is now a little after 10. Ten o’clock A.M. and I feel like it’s pretty late at night. This week I took a trip aboard the Graphic Design Airlines and now I am suffering from jet lag. Wednesday I took a nap in the after-noon for an hour, attempting to catch up on the sleep I had missed the previous 3 nights. I knew there was no way to prepare myself for Wednesday night and Thursday morning. I have not been to bed since that nap around 1 P.M. yesterday. I spent 13 hours in the lab last night, that’s a lot.

Sunday night I really started to gear up for this project. 2 and a half hours in the lab that night. Five hours of my life were spent Monday night working on a part of the project that was completely obliterated Tuesday morning. Tuesday’s toll added up to about 9 hours in the lab, and 13 hours last night makes for 29 hours of work in half a week, that’s another part-time job folks.

I don’t know if I should be complaining though, I honestly feel pretty good, caffeine is doing the trick for now. As long as I don’t linger in any dimly lit rooms I should be able to make it to 2:00 this afternoon when it’s time to say bye-bye to the conscious world. Also, the time I spent on this project was totally worth it. My professor, yes the same one who terrorized us all last semester in Graphic Design 1, actually liked by project. He didn’t have anything to critique about it in class. He just said it was very good and that I should go ahead and put it into my portfolio. Thank you, I think I shall.

Of course it helps to be a little bit of a brown-noser too. My prof is a huge Mac fan, so I did my photo documentary on the history of Apple. I also borrowed some design elements from the work that I have seen him do, it couldn’t hurt. There were quite a few rough edges that I would have liked to work out, but I was pushing to get this thing finished by 7:15 this morning as it was.

So, I suppose I should try to stay on track now. I doubt this rant has stayed to a very firm track, I don’t have the energy to proof read it.

The descent into madness began yesterday. Actually it has its origins on Sunday. I have been working on this Electronic Imaging video project a bit. By the time I finished up Monday night around 2:00 I had spent probably 6 hours working on this assignment. In reality I should have put in more like 10 hours or work for it, but I am always a little behind with these things. So I am working on this big Photoshop file, that has pretty much every element for the video contained in it, during class Tuesday morning. At the end of class I do my final save of the file onto my extrernal Hard-Drive and lo, Photoshop freezes. Several minutes of waiting convinced me to Force Quit photoshop and even unplug my hard-drive without being able to cleanly unmount it. When the drive was plugged back in, surprise, file-size is Zero KB. No photoshop file there. Six hours of work, gone. Backups! Backups! Backups!

So that pretty much ruined the rest of my morning. No disc recovery tool could find the file, I would have to start over. I left work a couple hours early, went to the lab, and stayed there until 7pm. At 7 Becca invited me over to her house and had prepared a delicious supper of Parmesan Potato soup for me. Becca is the most awesome fiancé in the entire world. Tuesday night is supposed to be our date night each week. She totally understood and helped me out when I was panicked and upset about this project. She even came into the lab after supper and spent the rest of the night with me helping out a ton on my script and staying with me late into the night again. But with her help we didn’t stay as late as could have happened. By 1 am we were done with the script the graphics layout, and had recorded all of the narration.

So tonight I will be in the lab for many hours actually putting this thing into After Effects and animating it. Which is actually supposed to be the challenging point of this little assignment.

Anyways, today I woke up and feel much better about everything. I feel refreshed and ready to go for the day. Work , school, anything. My mind, or the coffee, may just be fooling me into thinking I am fine though. Sometimes I think I can feel my blood pulsing through the vessels in my skin. That might be a sign that I am tired.

So a quick forum search found the explanation, google’s new search algorithms are trying to index every single internal link that piCal uses, and there are a lot. Here’s the damage it had already done this month:

/portal/modules/piCal/index.php (2980 visists) 59.35 KB average

So, I hope that explains it. I put a line in the meta tags to prevent crawlers from indexing those pages. If my bandwidth is still soaring for the unkpikes.org account then I don’t know what to do.

Gosh! Googlebot, grandma called and said you have to go home because your ruining everyones life and eating all her bandwidth!

I think it’s probably not entirely googlebot’s fault. I think there is actually an error in this calendar module I have installed in Xoops on the Pikes website. It seems that the piCal module is have thousands of random URL’s indexed by our friend google. I dont know what the heck it’s indexing but it’s taking up 5K every time it does, and now we are only 10 days into the month of feruary and already pushing into the 1 gig bandwidth limit. Not cool.

My good friend Chris was just scammed. Perhaps the old addage applies, if it seems too good to be true, then it probably is. He is the fundraising chairman for the House this semester. He thought he had found a great fundraiser for us all, unfortunately Campus Fundraisers misled him and said that the amount of money that we made did not depend on the performance of those people going around and getting applications filled out. Unfortunately when the credit card selling advisor came today she said that everyone in the group had to get at least 10 signatures in order for us to get the amount we were told. Totally misled by the guy at Campus Fundraisers.

There has been several people in the past few days who are on the periphary of my sphere of acquaintance who have died. My closest friend Jon had his grandfather pass away this weekend, the brother of one of my clients and friends Keith Becker died in a car accident this weekend also. Then today I found out that a person who went to college here, and had been in several classes with me had committed suicide on Monday.

All this week I have felt pretty good though. I have been spending a lot of time with Becca and things are going really well there, but I have a lot of other stuff going on too so sometimes I should probably muster the motivation to do my homework too. There are probably about 10 websites that I am responsible for right now. All at different stages of development. It kinda gets to be a lot for my senior year. Priorities are never easy to figure out.

Perhaps we could petition God to add another day to the week. Preferably a weekend day. Yeah, we could call it Jaunterday. I don’t know why I picked that name, just because it sounds cool. Three day weekends and a five day work week, that’s my campaign platform for president. I heard once that the Nazi’s did experiments to see if people were more efficient or less with different work week schedules and they found that the 7 day week was the best one, 5 on 2 off. So I guess that may not actually work.

I heard that there are high-schools that have switched to a 4 day school week and extended their terms. Man I really did not like high-school. Seriously this is turning into a rant, but highschool pretty much sucked everywhere I went. I attended 3 different high-schools and they were all craptacular in their own special ways. Hickville (Wakefield) Nebraska was enlightening, Sergeant Bluff, Iowa was preppy and offensive, oh and let’s not forget Lawton, Iowa. Thats the school where the highest goal of graduating seniors is to make it to the five year reunion without getting a felony. College, hah.

Ummm… weird, I don’t know what happened to my last post. I went to delete the stupid comment spam that was on my site and I apparently deleted my last post. Freaking comment spam.

So, today I have been applying to several job postings that I was notified about through CareerBuilder.com, none of them required a philips head screwdriver, so I might stand a chance of getting some replies to these. I’ve just been submitting my resume to pretty much anything related to graphic design or multimedia. It only takes a few seconds to apply for a lot of these places, but I have been thinking alot about trying to focus my job search more on what I really want to do, work for a christian ministry in Colorado Springs. Becca and I have discussed out future plans, and I am certain that I want to serve in some sort of Christian organization or business when we get married this summer.

I just recieved an e-mail about my dream job, here are the requirements.

Requirements:

Minimum 6months Technology experience preferred

Reliable transportation and a valid driver’s license

Excellent customer service skills.

Phillips head screw driver

This is a one day only opportunity for me to go to wal-mart and replace some locks with my mad phillips head skillz yo. Signing up for careerbuilder.com has brought me a lot of unwanted spam. Yet the search for a real job continues. I have been seriously checking out some businesses in Colorado Springs. That is where Becca and I really want to go. My goal is to find a Christian Organization that I can do Multimedia/Web work for. Ah, the fun of job searching.

In an unrelated note, we seem to be having a problem with comment spam. I have tried to stem the tide by requiring all comments to be approved by me before they are posted, this should help.

Aaron has totally blasted me out of the water with his superior photo gallery. Dude, why you gotta go and do that sort of thing, showing me up.

Well time for spaghetti. Peace out.

The photo album has returned. You will see a link to the left that points to my photo album which right now just has old pictures from the summer of 2003. Once I get around to doing the wedding video for this summer I will scan in all my pictures and post those to this photo gallery. Setting up the gallery really makes me want to buy a digital camera, perhaps such as this one that Jason has just purchased. He should have his tomorrow.

As you can see there is yet another change in blogging software here at timbly.com. The short version of why is that Mambo apperantly has some vulnerability that was allowing an attacker to use my site for a PayPal e-mail scam. Yes, thousands of fake e-mails were being sent to people trying to convince them to visit a site a enter the username and password. Obviously the site they were sent to was not a real PayPal site. So, our hosts shut down my account for a few days until I figured out that it was Mambo that was causing the problem. I shut down Mambo and changed passwords, cleaned up the server a bit, things like that, now I’m blogging on WordPress, if this doesn’t work out for me I may just go ahead and return to faithful old MoveableType.

The most frustrating part of all of this is that now I have to figure out a way to post all of my old blog entries that I dumped out of Mambo before the end. It may just be a text file for the timbly.com archives. Sorry about the inconvenience.

In the meantime you will notice that this site is XHTML compliant and utilizes many of the latest cool blogging technologies. Comments, TrackBacks, Pingbacks, RSS, and a bunch of others that I have yet to figure out. For instance the links on the top left have some sort of field for what my relation to the person is. (assuming the link is to a blog) I don’t know how this is used, but hey, cool beans.

This is the first post on this system, I really like it. For now…

I don’t know if this is going to work out, I really liked Mambo, I may have separation anxiety or something with a new blogging system. Well, have a look around, I’m sure my blog will be changing quite a bit throughout the next couple of weeks as I get things pinned down. All I really want from anything is some security. Let’s hope wordpress can deliver.