IOU.

Apologies for falling behind on blogging and my monthly stats. I've been quite busy these summer months. I work many, many hours throughout the week and the rest of my time has been divided between job hunting and two moves: one for myself next week and one for my mom when she's finally moving to England to join up with my dad. I've been keeping up with my stats on Excel but haven't had the time to put together the presentation part of it. So right now, I owe you stats for May and June, and hopefully I'll be back to blogging once the summer is on the decline. Hopefully employed with a non-seasonal job too.

April 2009.

The Texas Rangers fan.

A description of Texas Rangers fans as told by Will Leitch, founder of Deadspin, in his book God Save the Fan:

"Can't figure out why Roger Clemens never signed with them. Liked the younger, skinnier Sammy Sosa better. Confused how that whole "fire Buck Showalter, enjoy World Series title" strategy didn't work. Loves Chuck Norris and would like him to be the mascot."

I'd say that's pretty accurate, wouldn't you?

March 2009.

Your walk out song.

Baseball season is upon us and I can't wait. This is easily my favorite time of the year. The weather is gorgeous, the birds are singing, and the Coors Light guy is only a "Hey Beerman!" away. I find it so relaxing to go to a baseball game and just enjoy sights and sounds of the Ballpark. It helps when the Rangers win, but let's not kid ourselves here.

Something I've always found interesting in baseball are walk out songs. For those that are unaware of what that is (even though I'm sure all of my small audience are baseball watchers), the walk out song is played over the stadium sound system when a particular player goes up to bat. Generally players pick about 3 or 4 songs at the beginning of the season that they feel will pump them up as the walk out to the batter's box. Only about the first 10 seconds of the song is played, so they need songs that start out strong, or ones that they find inspirational to their lives.

I often find myself thinking "I wonder what I would use as a walk out song if I were a Major League player?" So, in anticipation of the upcoming season, I pulled together five songs that I think would be great "get psyched" songs for when I step up to the plate. (Hopefully the links will work. If not, feel free to Google them.)

1. "Supermassive Black Hole" -Muse
2. "Cobrastyle" -Teddybears
3. "Icky Thump" -The White Stripes
4. "Empty Like the Ocean" -Midtown
5. "Escape the Nest" -Editors

What songs would you pick to pump you up for your next at-bat? Post your five song playlist in the comments and lets see what psyches everyone up.

The hunt.

Well, finding a new job is going, but not quickly. So far I have put my resume in over twenty different email inboxes, but have yet to hear back from a single one. Silence is not a good thing to hear during these times.

Here's a quick breakdown of the hunt so far:

-24 applications

-16 cities (Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Chicago, Minneapolis, Denver, Atlanta, Charlotte, Southlake TX, Irvine CA, Bellevue WA, Emeryville CA, Holliston MA, Morristown NJ, West Bridgewater MA, and London)

-10 states (Texas, Illinois, Minnesota, Colorado, Georgia, North Carolina, California, Massachusetts, and New Jersey)

-2 countries (US and England)

-0 responses

Hopefully something will come around soon. I don't think my tax refund will be here in time for my next rent payment.

February 2009.

A little reminder.

Today when I was driving home from volunteering in Dallas, I saw an old woman standing on the side of the interstate holding a sign that says "Jesus loves you." During the hard times in life, it's always nice to be reminded of that.

The internet is a terrifying place.

I googled myself this morning. It's been a couple years since I've last done it, so I had no idea what would come up. Turns out, a lot. As far as I can tell, I'm the only person with my name. Anywhere. So if someone were to do a search on me, they wouldn't have to look very hard.

The search turned up links to a bunch of my online accounts, such as Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm, and this blog. It also pulled out accounts that I haven't used in over a long time. Even my Webshots account made the list, and I haven't used that things since the end of my freshmen year in 2004. I also found items about me that I didn't know were on the web. You can see what awards I won in a few design competitions, what year and and which district I made Eagle Scout, my grandmother's obituary, and even a list of 1984 births for the county in which I was born.

I think we forget how open the internet can be. Since I'm back in full job hunting mode, I wanted to see what kind of stuff a potential employer could find out about me just by using Google. Granted, I'm not a scandalous person by any means. I don't have any arrests or charges to worry about showing up, nor do I present myself online in any way that can be taken in a negative light. But it's best to be safe as far as what you put online, because you don't know when or where it'll turn up again. The internet was made in part to make our lives easier and put the world at our fingertips. You don't want to put too much of yourself at their fingertips, though.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go post a Tweet and update my Facebook status to tell everyone I wrote a new blog entry.

The year so far.

I'm not really impressed with 2009 so far. Since the year rolled over 53 days ago, not a lot has gone my way. Aside from the small things like people hitting my parked car and my electric meter breaking and recording my electric usage way to high, I've also been hit with two whoppers that have changed a lot of things for me.

The first, chronologically, is that a large part of my life from the last few years is now on the other side of the planet. I think the hardest part of this is the removal of something that's been part of my everyday routine for three years. What do I fill that space with now? It's especially been difficult because I live in another city than everyone I know all by myself. Granted it's still part of the DFW metroplex, I usually only see my friends about three days a week. I used to be content with my time alone at home during the work week because I knew I had something not too far away to look forward to every weekend. But now, I just feel lonely. Even after a fun weekend with my friends, in the end I have to go back to my lonely apartment in Irving and carry on by myself.

The second and most recent event is when I got laid off. Because you can never be too sure on the internet, I'm not going to go in to details, but I feel I was unfairly let go. And it was so sudden. I was on my way home less than fifteen minutes after I'd been told I'm no longer in their employment. Now, I face a lot of uncertainty as I try to regain my composure. What's next? Where am I going to be? When is this next phase of my life going to come about and what am I going to do until then? I did plan on moving on in the near future, but I counted on it being a transition, not an abrupt end followed by a quick scramble to get back on my feet. This is certainly not a great position to be in and I will be glad when it's over.

Please don't take this as a "woe is me" post. There's just been a lot of turbulence in my life recently and I wanted to get my thoughts down. We're only a few weeks into this new year so who knows? Maybe the remaining 312 days will be more than exceptional and blow away this first bit.

Work in progress.

Changing up the look a little.

I owe you a post Sunday.

January 2009.

Statistics.

Statistics have always been an interest of mine. Maybe not to the degree that I wanted to do math for a living, but when you tie it in to my line of work, you get information graphics. There are so many ways to illustrate any and all types of information. They range from something as simple as a bar graph comparing the number of apples to the number of oranges at the store, to a virtual community representing the "Village of 100 People" statistical breakdown. Statistics themselves don't do it for most people, but when displayed properly through design, the numbers are then given a greater sense of meaning.

One of my favorite groups that creates info graphics is GOOD magazine. I browse around image banks on the internet quite often and whenever I run across a graphical chart that catches my eye, more often than note it came from a GOOD magazine spread. They bring to light a variety of social issues by using information graphics that are otherwise lost in the myriad of numbers that most people don't grasp. One of my favorite graphics they put out was a timeline representation of the all-important first 100 days in office of our last 12 presidents. They say that time frame is a good indication of how the rest of the president's tenure in office will turn out. Factors included in the timeline are major events, what they inherited when coming into office, and popular vote. (Source: http://awesome.goodmagazine.com)

Another chart that I've stumbled across that's amazing when considering the sheer scale of it is Chris Harrison's "Visualizing the Bible." His graph links all the textual cross references found within the Bible, more than 63,000 of them. It wasn't really built to be a functional chart, but the visual impact that it brings is immense. The bar chart along the bottom represents each chapter in the Bible, and the two different tones divide each book. The distance between the two chapters referenced were color coded, giving the chart a rainbow-like effect. This project was quite the undertaking, but the results are beautiful. (Source: http://www.chrisharrison.net)

Really the thing that got me to write this post is the annual reports that Nicholas Felton designs. The twist is, they're not annual reports for some national company. They're annual reports about himself. He painstakingly logs many details about himself throughout the year: the number of miles he's walked, the number of restaurants he's been to, etc. And he's been doing this for a couple years. I decided that I wanted to try this too. Yeah, it may be a lot of trouble, but it'll be a learning experience too. I'm sure I'll find out new things about my habits and personal traits, especially when putting it on a one-year scale. To keep me to it along the way, I'll probably post a spread of a few items each month before compiling a large one at the end of the year. We'll see how it goes, right?

Hello again.

It's been awhile. I apologize for the absence.

Welp, it's another new year. Almost a new decade too. Have the come up with a name for this last one yet? We had the 80s, the 90s, and then the 2000s? Do we call the next one the 10s?

Anyway, as with 91% of the US population, I've come up with a list of resolutions for the new year. One of them happens to be blogging, which is why I'm suddenly back on the web. Onward with the list:

-Start blogging again. I think I'm going to give myself a fresh start on this. I'm not sure if I want to keep using blogspot because anything with "blogspot.com" in the URL is blocked at work, yet I can still access and use my blogging account at blogger.com because it doesn't share the same domain name. Bizarre, I know. Anyway, I'm debating either this or Wordpress. I'll keep you posted with what's to come.

-Get out of credit card debt. I had to charge a lot to my credit card back during Christmas of '06 because I didn't have any money to give gifts with. Two years later, it's still there. I've made a plan to pay X amount of money from my paycheck every Friday to get out of the red and put it into effect on the 2nd. At this rate, I'll be done by March 14.

-Start saving money. As well as paying off my credit card, I want to be saving money regularly. I have had a savings account set up for a long time, but the money in there slowly depleted throughout college. I did the math, and I've 12% of my income is a reasonable starting point. I think I may also make a large deposit at the end of every month so I don't have an excess amount sitting in my checking.

-Work out regularly again. This is probably the most generic bullet point on everybody's resolution list. It's something I really need to get back into too. Living in Irving by myself, I do a lot of sitting around. When I get home from work, I turn on the tv and watch Wheel of Fortune while I cook dinner, then usually watch whatever Netflix sent me or play video games of some sort. Not a very good habit at all, but that's what I do when I'm bored. And I'm bored a lot. Well to get on track with my resolution, I signed up to be able to swim at the North Lake College natatorium. Their campus is right across the street from my work place, and their membership is very affordable for me ($45 for 9 months as opposed to $45 per month at LA Fitness or 24 Hour Fitness.) I'll be going in every morning to get in a mile-long swim before work. Hopefully soon it'll be refreshing and not tired for the rest of my day.

-Meet new people. I haven't really figured out how to do this one yet. I've lived many places throughout my life, but I've always had to go to school then. That's really how I met people. But now, I'm in the adult working world, so I don't have this common factor that made it easy to get to know people. Everyone I work with is at least a decade older than me, so that one can be crossed off the list. Anyway, I need to get this one figured out before all my current friends move away.

That about sums them up. Hopefully I'll stick to them. And hopefully you stick to yours too.