Flood!

Well, it has been quite the few couple of days. On Sunday night, Morehead experienced some pretty torrential flooding, especially my apartment complex, which was under about a foot of water. Since I am living on the second floor, the water didn’t make it up to my place, which was shockingly a bit of a concern for a moment, as the water did start to make its way upstairs. Unfortunately, my friends’ apartment flooded, and we moved all of their stuff upstairs into our apartment, but luckily most of their stuff was salvaged. The next day, we saw how incredibly damaged all of the local businesses and other houses and apartments were. One of the guys who was helping with the cleanup said that something like this hasn’t happened since 1932. Pretty crazy.

What’s worse is that this is finals weeks for the university, and friends of mine are trying to both finish exams and straighten out their living accommodations as many of them are displaced from the flood. It’s awful to see friends who should be happy that they will be graduating on Saturday, now reduced to moving their stuff into cars and using hotel rooms until they walk across the stage this weekend. Well, I guess it happened at a hard time, but at least it wasn’t at the beginning of the semester, when it could have really made people go crazy.

As for me, still no word on any of the job prospects I had, but maybe something will come across soon. Only time will tell.

Hope for a Job and Other Nonsense

I woke up this morning with an e-mail response from an application I submitted the other day, which is a rare occurrence for me. The position is at a newspaper where I’ll be designing ads, and laying out the paper. I’m definitely interested, I just hope that I get an interview soon.

In other news, I’ve been making pretty good progress on the website redesign. I’m really digging the look of the site; it’s really simple without looking amateur. The Flash elements are a little tricky to work with, and time consuming, but they look really awesome.

I’m also shocked by how quickly CS5 came out. I saw that Content Awareness video about a month ago, and my jaw pretty much dropped. It’s a little daunting, considering that I felt like CS4 didn’t come out that long ago, but it has been about two years, so I can’t complain all that much. I also checked price, and it looks like it’s going to cost around 900 to upgrade all my software. I’m definitely going to upgrade Photoshop, but I haven’t seen enough of the other programs to make a good judgement call.

The problem with my blogging, aside from it being inconsistent, is that I don’t have a central theme to talk about. It’s pretty much whatever is on my mind, much like a journal, which is nice and all, but isn’t exactly all that thrilling. I suppose I could focus on writing reviews as I did in the past, I enjoyed those, but I kinda like writing without limits. Well, I’m sure when my life gets supremely awesome and interesting (which will no doubt happen!), this blog will find its focus.

Neil Gaiman

I was privileged enough to sit in at a telecasted conference with renowned fiction writer Neil Gaiman, who wrote Coraline, Stardust, American Gods, and The Sandman series. Mr. Gaiman spoke regarding Libraries, and their importance in Democracy. It was really interesting to hear about Neil’s experience in school in Sussex, where he became enthralled with The Lord of the Rings books. He mentioned that his school library only had The Fellowship of the Ring, and the Two Towers, but not Return of the King. Regardless, he reread those two books constantly, enjoying them tremendously. However, he had won a school contest later on during his high school career, and had earned the privilege to ask for any book to be included in the school library. Naturally, he chose Return of the King to see how it ended. I thought that was a great anecdote on how if you’re passionate about something enough, eventually it will pay off.
Also, another great aspect of the conference was when he talked about his writing and creative process. He said that he uses genre in his writing, in the same fashion as a chef would use a certain type of spice. I thought this was really a profound statement regarding creative arts, not just solely writing. People can combine genres and styles and sometimes it makes a unique and great blend, while other times they simply just don’t go together.
It was just great to hear a great author speak about his work, his philosophies, and in general his viewpoints on various aspects of society.

Graphic Design Update

I’ve been a bit busy with a few different projects, but fortunately, I think I’m going to finally be getting a freelance project that will be fairly in depth, and a good piece to add to my portfolio. I will be creating a fully functional website from scratch for Advantage Modular, a rapidly expanding housing company in Upstate New York. It’s going to definitely be a challenge with all of the different components I’ll need to develop, design and implement perfectly, but I’m looking forward to testing my abilities as a designer.

Also, I’ve decided that my current website should get an overhaul. I think that while my fully interactive Flash online portfolio serves it’s purpose, it might be too large of a file for potential employers to sit through and wait to load. I’ve tried loading the page on other computers besides my own, and noticed that it takes upwards of a minute to initialize. It may not seem like much, but to the busy individual I send to link to, it’s time their losing looking at a loading screen. I’ve got a good idea for the redesign, which will still incorporate some Flash elements, but it’ll be built in CSS/HTML. Hopefully, in the next few weeks, I’ll be able to throw up a working beta version to my domain.