a much larger, nastier can of worms has been opened…

In the past week, instead of relishing the free time most students enjoy while on Spring Break, I have been busy doing homework, researching for future projects, designing a variety of artwork projects, and selling ads around town. Not to say that I haven’t had a few hours of “me” time, but the majority of my break so far has been spent working on the computer or out around town selling things. All this, only after my last blog which joyfully sang the praises of Brawl and how I planned on spending the majority of my Spring Break playing it with my friends. Boo!

I spent the greater half of this afternoon trekking around town talking with small businesses about possibly advertising with the Spring 2008 edition of Beanswitch. And even though Beanswitch is an established Literary Magazine on campus, and has been for a good number of years, hardly any small businesses or their employees know anything about it. My apologies, oh Martin townspeople, for having over-estimated you level of cultural awareness. Needless to say, not many businesses were interested or could afford to purchase even a half-page advertisement. The joys of living in a tiny and seemingly economically declining town… I haven’t given up yet, though. I’m getting back up on that horse tomorrow to market to a few other businesses in town, and possibly in Union City.

Note: The Women in Communications Organization at UTM is holding a 5K Walk/Run on Saturday, March 29th from 10 a.m. – 12 p.m. at the UTM Fitness Trail. If anyone would like to sponsor the event, it would be $20. Entry fee is $5. However, we are also taking donations as well!

Other homework/projects of mine include:

1. Researching information concerning Online Advertising. (note the blog title…) At first it was all quite intimidating, as I didn’t really have much prior knowledge on the topic, but the more I read up on it the better I feel about all of it. =]

2. Writing my speech for the Japanese Speech Contest at Vanderbilt, sometime in April? Either way, it’s speeking for 5 minutes in straight Japanese, without your manuscript in front of you… probably in front of a ton of people. Because of this potentially nerve-wracking situation, I’ve decided to talk about a personal experience of mine that the audience will probably find humorous, and that will also be easy to improvise with if I forget a lot of my speech: Learning How to Drive in Japan. There are a lot of funny or interesting things I could talk about, and since it’s my own personal memory, it will be easy to improvise with if I blank out.

3. Poster and Flier advertising my Japanese 111 SI Sessions. I made the flier earlier this evening, and I’ll probably use the same type of art/design for the poster. I’m really pleased with it, too =]

4. Worksheets/Lesson Plans/Reviews for my JAPN111 SI Sessions. I haven’t done such a good job structuring my sessions as of yet, or of making tangible assignments/reviews for my students… hopefully this will raise attendance henceforth.

5. Getting all my graphics and artwork off of the Pacer network and on to my external hard drive so that I can ultimately put them online (hopefully my own personal website in the future!) and to my Carbonmade online portfolio. Right now it’s pretty bare, so I’d really like to beef it up.

6. Better develop my HTML/CSS skills so that I can put together my own personal website. Until then, I’ll have to depend on my wordpress/facebook/carbonmade/linkedin/virb etc.

7. LAUNDRY. bleh ><

8. Math Test Corrections. Yet another reminder that I’m far, far from perfect… =]

9. If I indeed sell any ads for Beanswitch, designing/laying them out in the publication. Fun Fun! Work I like ^^

That’s all I can remember right now. Hopefully I can get my work consolidated soon so that I can finally start uploading it online. I’d enjoy seeing the final product!

brawllin’ ^^

Last night, around 11 p.m. as I was about to go to bed, I was informed that Super Smash Bros. Brawl was being released at 12 midnight to select stores. I knew that it was coming out sometime soon, but I wasn’t aware that it was last night.

After Dylan (my boyfriend) got off of work, we decided to check the local Martin WalMart to see if they were going to sell copies at midnight. Unfortunately, our local WalMart is always a few days behind on the uptake, and so they weren’t expecting copies for another few days. BLEH. We proceeded to call the Union City WalMart, and were surprised to find out that they 80 copies that they were going to begin selling at 12:01 a.m. We got ourselves to Union City, hoping that there wasn’t too big of a line. Ofcourse, in our metropolis of culture, there were only about 20 closet nerd-hicks just standing around, either dressed in Brawl costumes or hunting gear. We ended up being 5th in line.

 At 12:01 they began the sales, and I was happy to hear that they would let me buy 3 copies! Usually they only allow 1 per customer with limited numbers of merchandise. I had previously agreed to pick up a copy for Eric (my sister Cheryl’s boyfriend) and Brandon (our mutual friend). We returned to Martin with 3 copies of Brawl, a Brawl user’s guide, and a receipt bearing a large total amount spent… haha.

First, we went to Iman’s where Brandon was working. We dropped off his copy, and returned to Dylan’s apartment where a few hours of Brawling ensued. I could tell right away that I was going to enjoy this new version much better than the previous… and for these reasons!:

 1. It has a slower pace. My timing on Melee was never really on or fast enough, so Brawl is better suited for me.

2. I love the new items and Final Smashes! They are so much fun.

3. The graphics are amazing!! Leave it to a VisComm/Graphics kid to geek out over appearance ^^

4. Frog/wall jumps, new characters, re-vamped moves and specialties, awesome stages, and fun/challenging story mode (that is ACTUALLY a story… woohoo!).

5. Brawl parties will rock.

 So, my entire day has been pretty much devoted to Brawl thus far. I really need to get some homework/graphics work done… but I’m preoccupied by Brawl’s awesome glory. Yay, spring break = week of free time!

Happy Spring Break/Brawl Week to all!

I feel like I Just Opened a Huge Can of Worms…

So ever since SEJC, I (as well friends of mine who also attended the conference) have been busy getting networked online, and “living on the web,” as our keynote speaker Paul Conley suggested. During his presentation, it was hard to keep up with him as he was dropping website names left and right, naming over 10 websites that any serious “new media” journalism student should be aware of. The more he spoke, the more ignorant and unmarketable I felt. I jotted down the website names he threw out, and made it my own personal endeavor to finally get networked online, and to start visiting the sites he highlighted regularly.

Since SEJC, I’ve created accounts at wordpress (^^), twitter, wired journalists, linkedin, virb, newsvine, SPJ, and SND. (::gasps for air::) Not to mention that I already had a facebook as well…

In summation, it’s all pretty overwhelming. Now that I’ve created all these accounts, I need to work on keeping up with them, customizing them, blogging, networking, marketing myself, etc. Every time I created another account and browsed around on the site, I ran into more things that existed on the web that I had never come in contact with before. It has definitely been a humbling experience, but it has also motivated me to work harder at becoming better acquainted with what the web has to offer, and learning how to utilize those resources to my advantage in the future.

As of right now, I really want to become better acquainted with RSS feeds and how to utilize that stream of information best. I also want to customize all my account profiles and pages so that I can use those to market myself in the future. I’m just glad that I had this slap of reality to the face as an underclassman, and will not jump out into completely cold waters whenever I near graduation.