Abandon Nest

Yesterday I was pleased to find an email in my inbox from Kira over at Penny Foolish. The content of the email intrigued me quite a bit. She was asking me to join a community of sorts for people under 30 who write about life and how to live it.

Now, generally I’m not really a fan of huge networks of sites, but this was different. Kira was assembling a how-to guide for life, based on the experiences of many bloggers. It was something that was refreshing to see and quite interesting. Based on these observations, I decided to join.

So here’s how it works. You can visit the website Under 30 Honor Roll and read excerpts of articles from the many bloggers that have contributed content (including me). Usually there is a little teaser (a paragraph or two) and then a link back to the main article. The best thing about this is that all these articles came with consent. There was no scraping and spamming. These aren’t RSS feeds imported into the database. These posts are hand selected for quality and
practicability.

So I encourage you, if you’ve got some extra time today, to go ahead and check out Under 30 Honor Roll. It’s a great little site, and one that I’ll be visiting more and more often.

What do you do all day? This is a question I found today over at OKDork.com. When you think about it, it’s a really great question, and something that you should be able to answer right away if you’re doing things right. So what do I do all day? (I’ll pick one of my more interesting days so you don’t get as bored.)

1. 5:00-5:30 - Wake up and get dressed for the gym. Eat some cereal (usually generic) or eat some eggs. Grab my lunch and run out the door.
2. 5:30-5:42 - Drive to the Louisville Athletic Club.
3. 5:42-7:11 - Ride the bike for 7 minutes before hopping off and hitting the weights hard. You can see what I do in this post on working out.
4. 7:11-7:25 - Shower and get dressed for work. Leave the gym.
5. 7:25-7:48 - Drive to work and endure the recklessness that is Louisville drivers. Seriously, every morning I fear for my life.
6. 7:48-8:00 - Go into work and put my lunch in the community fridge. Empty all my pockets and sit down at my desk.
7. 8:00-8:30 - Check emails from over night, mostly from India and China. Review the things that I have to get done that day.
8. 8:30-8:45 - Respond to all emails and make sure I have all the information needed for my next meeting.
9. 8:45-10:00 - Weekly update meeting with my boss and my boss’s boss, and my boss’s boss’s boss. Yeah, that’s a lot of bosses.
10. 10:00-12:00 - Miscellaneous work on my projects. Usually I’m either collating financial information and figuring out if I can save the company money or coordinating testing. Its not exciting, but its work.
11. 12:00-1:00 - Eat the lunch that I brought and surf the internet. Occasionally I’ll work through lunch, but not often. Sometimes I read during lunch.
12. 1:00 - 5:00 - Meetings, meetings, design work, updating, spreadsheets, and other miscellaneous engineering work.
13. 5:00-5:25 - Escape from work and drive to my local frisbee field.
14. 5:25-6:00 - Practice with my frisbee teammates before the games start.
15. 6:00-9:15 - Two games of frisbee (which is basically a lot of running and I get exhausted.
16. 9:15-9:35 - Drive back to my apartment.
17. 9:35-10:00 - Eat dinner while checking email and writing a post or two. I’ll usually listen to music while doing all of this.
18. 10:00-10:35 - Read or watch a movie on my computer
19. 10:35-10:45 - Brush my teeth, take out my contacts, and get in bed.
20. 10:45 - Fall asleep and wait for it all to happen over again.

Well, that’s my day. Sometimes less busy, but sometimes more so. Overall, its a good life to live. So WDYDAD?

So for the last two days I’ve been playing with the new software I just bought.  The Adobe Web Bundle is a fantastic collection of software comprising Creative Suite 2 and Macromedia (now Adobe) Studio 8.  It combines all the great image editing programs like Photoshop CS2, Illustrator CS2, Fireworks, and Flash together with web and print publishing software like Indesign CS2, GoLive CS2, Dreamweaver 8, and Acrobat Professional 7.

Frankly, I’ve just been going through Adobe Photoshop CS2 One-on-One for now, but I have dabbled in the other programs a little bit.  Last night I bought Adobe Illustrator CS2 Classroom in a Book because of the high ratings that it received on many illustration
web sites.

I really made a tough decision to buy this package of software because it cost so much, but now I’m really glad I did. It’ll make me more productive in my hobbiest web development and the tools will allow me to learn new skills that I couldn’t have otherwise. I can treat this purchase as an investment in my future. Plus, it’ll help me make this site more attractive and usable for my readers. Now, how about that?

If you have the money and you’re interested in web or print publishing and graphic design (and you’re a student) then I would highly recommend picking up the Adobe Web Bundle. I ordered mine from the Academic Superstore and it arrived in 4 days, including academic eligibility verification.

For those of you who are currently using this software, does anyone know any good Flash Professional 8 books? I couldn’t find any at the Borders that looked worthwhile, and I’m quite fascinated by the possibilities of Flash animation. Any other learning suggestions would be much appreciated also.