Jayeblog

For the past two academic quarters, I’ve been on a co-op job doing web development work. My primary task was to take websites from a number of departments in the organization, already designed and populated with content, and rebuild those sites in Drupal (see previous bloggery). After almost six months on the job, you learn a few things about web-dev jobs. The co-op ended on Friday, so I think this is a good time to talk about a few of the things I learned.

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What people choose to do with their personal websites varies considerably. A lot of people use their site as a blog; some people use their site more like a portfolio; some people use it for a little of both. Others use it for comics, or for music.

I want to use my site, Jayeb.com, as a jumping point to all of the places I inhabit on the web. But my own web-presence is a bit, shall we say, scattered. I blog at Jayeblog.com, I Twitter, I post photos to my Flickr page, I make comics at UGMadness.net, and I maintain a portfolio and resume at Jayeb.com.

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Musical genres are so blurred these days that we have to invent increasingly-granular new genres to categorize our favorite music. The musical landscape gets wider and wider every day, thanks in no small part to the always-on worldwide open mic night provided by MySpace, Last.fm, and Pandora (among a dozen others). With massive exposure just a “Fwd:Re:Fwd: Check Out This Band” away, the barrier of entry to musical stardom has never been lower. In order to stand out in the crowd, bands bend and mix genres to create new sounds, carving out niches for themselves in this swiftly-growing music-soup.

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I’ve been into rock-climbing “for-reals” for about a year now—I’ve been going to a rock-gym steadily since last September. Before that I had taken a “course” at school and done some outdoor climbing on the granite cliffs at Denrock Park near my hometown. But I’ve been climbing for the past year at the rock-gym at RIT, the aptly-named Red Barn. As far as indoor climbing goes, this place is the tops. First off: for students, it’s twenty dollars for three months of climbing. That can’t be beat.

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I have three applications on my laptop that I use every single day. Office is nice to have, I open up CS2 whenever I’m working on web stuff, and Paintshop Pro is a very close friend of mine (maybe I’ll explain later), but these are all ultimately expendable in my day-to-day computing experience. The three applications that I cannot do without are my browser, my IM client, and my music player. I have a feeling most people could probably say the same thing.

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