Archive for January, 2010
6Well, that attempt to blog every day went smoothly. I should have known that my mother doesn’t approve of extensive typing on family vacations. But it’s okay, I’ll make it up to you now that I’m back on land… with an awesome photo summary of the rest of my adventure on the Carnival Pride.
This is me standing on deck for the Safety talk. As you can see, we are not yet in the Bahamas. Even cruise vacations must obey the laws of latitude.
At night the ship is all lit-up, pretty-like. Even the garish colors of the Lido Deck seem bearable in this context. In the far distance you can see the Chesapeake Bay.
OK so! Day one on a cruise! Would ya know it, it’s fun.
We left the exotic tropical port of Baltimore, MD at 5PM, sashayed down the Chesapeake Bay at a marvelous 20 knots, and are now, at the magical hour of 1pm, somewhere in the middle of Malevich’s Black Square, a.k.a. the Atlantic on a starless night.
Lots of things that I expected: being lost in the corridors, totally over-the-top decor (complete with—you guessed it—breasts), near-constant caloric input, acceptably crowd-pleasing entertainment, hidden expenses everywhere you look, etc. etc. But there were some surprises too, number one being near-constant 3G connectivity for pretty much the whole day.
My grad school apps are officially done!
I survived it unscathed, except maybe lost a few brain cells from lack of sleep along the way. But no matter! This means I can finally tackle the list I’ve been making of “Stuff to Do After Grad School Apps.” This also means whoever mans the SVA Interaction Design Twitter account will stop thinking I am a sad workaholic of a Tina with no life. =D
svaixd @tinabeans Congratulations! Hoping you can have some time for yourself now.
I think I will end up with some time to myself after all! As of tomorrow, I am going on a Carnival cruise! My professorial buddy from Tufts demanded of me, “How did you allow yourself to get into this mess!?” I know I know, cruises have their issues (one of them being that they contribute to the World’s Largest Marine Plastic Collection), but I do expect this to be a worthwhile trip, if a little surreal. I have never been in the middle of an ocean on a floating building, but I expect the stars will be stunning. I will also have no internet and absolutely no way to be productive. On the other hand, there is a 24-hour ice cream bar, so I might as well recoup calories from accidentally starving myself during portfolio crunch week.
While I am on this boat getting fat, I will try to start on one of my New Year’s resolutions in earnest: blogging daily. I’m gonna cough up the $55 to pay for 100 minutes of internet (I know, this is practically thievery), just so I can check my work email twice a day as well as blog. Blog about how much ice cream I am consuming, that is.
I’ve also downloaded 2 Kindle books, which I will read and hopefully finish in the span of 7 days. I only wish they made the Kindle waterproof so I can read while hanging with the fishes in Nassau. Clearly, I am not a “relaxing vacation” kind of gal. Sorry Jess. Old habits die hard, or just not at all.
On that note, I’m off to bed. It’s a long day of “embarkation procedures” ahead, and I need to get up early to do last minute packings.
SEO! The Teenage Zombie Brain Sucker Topic From Hell. If you’ve talked to me before you already know that I think it’s a sham. I don’t hate it per se, but I think it’s definitely one of the most over-hyped, over-paid-attention-to subjects of the decade.
So in light of recent resurfacing of this topic (a.k.a. we have to pitch our webservices to a client tomorrow), I finally put together some of my thoughts on it in a semi-coherent way. But get this… not only will I be semi-coherent, I will even borrow a page from marketing blogs’ book of clichés. (Do blogs have books or are they books? Hm.) I give you…
Tina’s Easy 4-step Cure to the Common SEO
1. Search engines aren’t the only way you should be marketing your website
Think about it this way: how many of your friends actually became friends with you because they were a stranger randomly yelling your name from the top of mountain? Probably not too many, except for the one that is a professional yodeler. On the internet, the search engine is like the random name-yelling. “Give me a blog!” “Okay here are 21 million blogs! Hopefully one is what you want!” A better way to tell people about your site is to use business cards, word-of-mouth, trading links (LEGALLY), and even email marketing if you have to. Search really should be a last resort.
A while ago, I blogged about the problem of organizing and remembering the vast quantities information I encounter every day on the Internet. Since then, I’ve become an assiduous user of Delicious.com and Google Notebooks, with YouNote on iPhone as a backup plan, but it doesn’t seem to help. I still feel overwhelmed. More than that, I still feel like I am reading, perusing, and admiring things but retaining none of it.
I’m starting to feel like technology is actually the culprit here. Rather than helping me index information for easy retrieval forever and ever into golden posterity and as a result making me a smarter, happier, more informed individual, it’s just making me darn lazy. I’ll admit it, I’ve developed Instapaper Syndrome. The variety of organizational technologies out there enable me to see something cool and think “Ah, I’ll note this down so I can check it out later.” Later never comes. Don’t even look at my Instapaper account; it’s embarrassing.
