Sorry for the long absence - I’m trying to get about a million things in order, in addition to adding a few things to the site. Hang tight! I’ll be back, I promise.
Playtime at a local offroading spot! Short (dark) video of a friend and me riding this evening. This was taken with a digital camera, so don’t hate on the quality too much! Of course, post proccessing was done with more powerful tools. Enjoy!
For those of us in the good ‘ole US of A, today is Thanksgiving, a celebration of our ancestors’ successful voyage across the Atlantic almost 400 years ago. Today, families from Georgia to Washington stuffed their faces with food and reminisced about the things for which they are thankful.
Myself being a member of a typical American family, I also spent the afternoon with some of my extended family. As the day draws to a close, I would like to mention a few things that I find myself thankful for:
A great family
Friends
A warm place to sleep
Great opportunities
A car that works
And so much more…
I only wanted to touch on the high points, as a comprehensive list would be quite boring for most. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!!
This year’s recruitment program was a great success fueled by both the brothers’ enthusiasm and the excellent gentlemen who participated in the recruitment program. As mentioned in a prior article, I am the 2006-2007 recruitment chair for my chapter. I also shared some of my ideas on building excitement amongst the brothers and the recruits during and prior to the actual recruitment event. In the article I mentioned a few materials that I created for recruitment, which I will be releasing for the first time to the public here. Please note that these are released under a Creative Commons license, meaning that you are free to use them or modify them to suit your own recruitment strategies. This was the sort of resource that I was hunting for when I began preparing my recruitment program, and I hope that these items will help you succeed in your own. (Continue to the next page for previews and downloads!)
I’m neck-deep in senior design and not happy about it. At the moment, my group is hard at work on our Preliminary Design Review (PDR) and it is due on Monday. I’ll attempt to muster the strength to post all my long-overdue items sometime after that.
If you havn’t tried Google Reader yet, I recommend giving it a spin. It’s been my RSS viewer of choice for some time now, due to its simple interface and the fact that I didn’t have to signup for another service (its one of Google’s many web apps). Recently, Google Reader has been updated with many new features that make staying on top of the latest updates a breeze. Recommended!
As I sit here writing this post, the mountainous tasks that lie between me and the weekend appear insurmountable. When I actually try and think clearly about things, my mind feels numb and unresponsive – and I’m already halfway done with that mountain of tasks. This week seems to be the culmination of the slowly growing backlog of work that has been assembling since the very first week of school. Senior year – wow; but let us run back to the beginning, seeing as how there have been so few updates since the beginning of fall semester.
It’s been a few days since my last post. Never fear, I’m still alive and well, although a tad on the stressed out side (which you should find rather odd if you know me) as I am in charge of recruitment. On the bright side, we’re doing quite nicely and I believe I’m still on track for my goal of thirty pledges.
Since I’m so horridly busy, check the archives for interesting stuff and then check back later for new goodies. I’ll be sure to post up more recruitment info after life calms back down a little. Additionally, pictures of “Lake Day” should be coming around soon.
The world needs more determined artists like young Amy Thomas. Miss Thomas is protesting against the British Phonographic Industry, the British version of our very own RIAA. The reason? The BPI has decided not to include her latest single in their charts because because of her stance on file sharing! Bravo! Success in the digital age will come to people like Amy who explore new ways of doing things, not organizations like the RIAA and the MPAA who are trying their best to slow technological advances and maintain a grip on their outdated model.
Amy’s upcoming kid’s single, Just Smile, should be out shortly. [link - via here and here]
As once said by the great Sir Winston Churchill, “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” And on that note, summer break comes to a close. Today marks my last day at Emerson, and tomorrow the first day of real semester preparations. Its been an amazing summer (and one I won’t soon forget - stay tuned for my “summer story”), and I’ve had some great times, met some great people, and seen some great places. I wish to thank everyone that’s helped make it so amazing, including my cousin in Columbus (for keeping me), the Flandrys (for letting me play and hang out), Justin (for the good times), Ryan (for the exercise and the good times), Amy-Elizabeth (for letting me come hang out in Atlanta), and everyone else that I crashed with, annoyed, and partied with this summer!
Despite the wonderfulness of the summer, I have missed everyone from Macon and I’m looking forward to the many adventures that I’m sure await me over the coming months. On another note, I’m going to be focusing on class and rush a lot over the next few weeks, so the updates probably won’t be quite as frequent. However, I will try to keep up with the posts as I get into the thick of it - I have all sorts of exciting things to post about (like rush and senior design projects). Also, be sure to check back for my collection of ATO Recruitment/Rush Posters, which has been one of my “side projects” this summer.
Oh, and congratulations on your beautiful wife Ryan!
Some may remember a recent posting about the new Sony DSLR-A100 (aka Minolta) camera that I almost purchased. I managed to wait around and see what Nikon had waiting in the wings (after their annoying little teaser) and from the look of things it will be worth the wait. According to various sources, the D80 (while sharing the same/similar 10MP sensor as the Sony) has much better high-ISO noise response, better features, faster sync speed, and the backlog of nice Nikon lenses. And that little SD card caveat isn’t that big of a deal in light of current prices.
I initially read some material at DPReview, but then strayed over to Ken Rockwell’s site, where I have become fasinated by his large body of practical advice on camera selection and photography tips. Highly recommended and a great help for putting things into perspective.
Reviews (that I’ve been reading) are at DPReview and KenRockwell.com (though Ken’s site is not as flashy, there is a ton of great info there. I have highlighted a few articles below, but I highly recommend sticking around and reading what he has to say.)
Other recommended reading material for those interested (from Ken Rockwell):
I would like to know a few things; first, whatever happened to “innocent until proven guilty?” Second, how would the situation have ended if the van was driven by a few nice non-Arab folk? I think I see those fundamental American rights flying out that window over there. I’m ready for something new, cause I’m getting tired of this.
It’s another wonderful Friday afternoon, and I feel like making a quick “review” post. Ready?
Dave and Des are engaged! Wow - I knew it was in the works but not when (when a guy follows his woman to another school, what do you expect?). Congrats to them!!
I went wakeboarding this week and landed a mute grab. Nothing huge, but hey, its my first grab evar!! Now I just need to get this photographed…
I almost bought the new Sony DSLR-A100, but stopped at the last moment. I then read the preview of the new Nikon D80 (released this week). Now I have no idea what I’m gonna get - I have to wait for the production model review to decide - and that’s at least another month of waiting.
Some terrorists almost blew up some planes. Now I can’t take liquids or electronic devices on my next flight. Good thing I wasn’t planning on flying anytime soon…
Well, I suppose that covers most of it. I’m spending the weekend in Columbus to attend Ryan and Jenna’s wedding, so I’ll try and take some photos to post up (along with a little narrative, perhaps). With all these weddings and engagments, I’m starting to feel a little “behind the times.” Ho well… ’till next time, “be cool!”
If you’ve been following the random stories throughout the site, you might just remember a mention of my summer co-op job at Emerson Network Power (if not, you can refer to this post). The summer has gone well; I’ve made some cash, learned some new tricks, and added a nice new section to my resume. However, there was one little problem that arose…
While I recently finished up my first K2 stylemodification (and I’m not too disappointed with it), I believe that not only can I do better, but K2 feels a little “bloated” with a bunch of extra “features” that I don’t use. In addition, I’ve slowly been accumulating more and more plugins to provide other “features.” Seeing as how my very first web pages were hacked together in notepad, I appreciate clean, well structured HTML code that is easily readable and debuggable. The code produced by K2 (at least with the various mods that I have installed) is far from pretty.
Given these considerations, I have decided to embark on a new endeavor - the creation of a new theme from the ground up (or almost the ground up) that will have my own personal flair, provide an appealing presentation of my material (whether it be text, photos, or other media), and still look nice under the hood. As I construct this theme, I will be going through my plugin list and removing the unnecessary ones and hard coding the features provided by a few static plugins into the template itself. Sure, this will result in less flexibility if I were to redistribute my theme, but I am currently intending this to be “for personal use only.” If I later decide to distribute the theme, I will strip it down to the necessities and release it for others to customize to their own tastes.
While blogs and blogging platforms present a powerful medium for everyone to publish their thoughts on the web, the additional overhead of a “heavy” setup simply seems excessive. I do have an ample bandwidth limit on this site (one that I never even come close to), but that doesn’t necessarily mean that a visitor also has huge amounts of bandwidth, or, more importantly, time. Please bear with me as I prepare this upgrade to digivation.net. Along with the theme upgrade, I hope to fix the long-awaited photo gallery feature and clean up a few other areas of the site.
As some of you may know, I am a proud brother of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity and I have been a member of the Alpha Zeta chapter for a little over a year. After being noticed for my dedication, spontaneity, and go-get-it attitude (though occasionally lacking focus), I was named recruitment chair for the 2006-2007 year. Tasked with this great responsibility, I began mulling over ideas for the promotion of my chapter. After some thought and speculation, I realized that one overlooked aspect of rush is the current focus of recruitment campaigns, which lies soley on new recruits. This is one-dimensional and will lead to sub-par results. What is needed is a three-dimensional approach.
While the topic of this post is very specific (Greek recruitment), there may exist parallels to advertising in general. Hopefully this article will be of use to many different readers, not just those looking to become more effective recruiters.
Since the initial post, I have been keeping an eye the on results of the Google searches and have noticed a few changes. The search of main interest (for the overall site) is for Matthew Smith, as this is the most common way for friends to find the site. After a few re-indexings, digivation.net now ranks as result fourty, quite an impressive improvement over the original page seven listing. Now such thoughts as “Can I become the coveted #1 result” are being entertained, but at the moment this is only wishful thinking, as I am but one lonely Matthew in a ocean of Smiths.
On another, possibly related note, I have suddenly seen an increase in the amount of attempted comment spam and content scraping. I am not exactly sure what to attribute this to, but it does serve as a sort of “ego-booster,” in a twisted way. On the bright side, the scrapes do link back to this site, so I’m getting a little bit of link love - maybe this also helps my rankings.
Whatever the reasons and results, the ensuing trends and the never ending quest for a better search ranking is quite an interesting study, and one that I will be following. As I notice other surprising tidbits, I’ll be sure and post them up.
After reading Mr. Phil Askey’s excellent review of the Sony DSLR-A100, I almost plunked down $999.99 today. However, I managed to talk myself into waiting a few days; after all, I do have a few bills to pay. I am pretty sure (unless Nikon’s new DSLR really kicks butt) that I will be buying the A100 within the next few weeks, so be prepared for some of those long-promised media updates to finally land at digivation. Stay tuned for more, and if you’re bored you can check out my Flickr or Zooomr photostreams.
Hot off BetaNews, Xdrive (owned by AOL) is planning to offer 5 Gb of free online storeage starting in September. Sounds like it’s time for Google to get a move on with their “gDrive” service.
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