In times of crisis
It’s funny the way that the role of the student works out. It is our job to look ahead and expect to place ourselves within a role as a catalyst of change. We learn the things that we do expecting to use them later in life as a means to make that difference in our world. I have been constantly reminded about this a good deal this week. This is because every time that I turn the television on I see something about the economic crisis. This constant reminder has both been interesting to watch unfold but also reinforcing my belief i the ideas that I am doing something that will make the world a better place. As a person who works in communication, I feel that I have a place within the base movement of improvement of society and the world at large. Though it may seem to those who see doctors and teachers as the only vehicles of change that I don’t have any real hand in bettering the future, I see it as otherwise and let me expand on this a little bit.
When in time of crisis we look to those things within our lives to find some kind of truth that may lead us to a better life in the years that follow. My work right now is giving me plenty of things to think about with regards to my contribution to the bettering of the future. It may seem strange to readers but I find my own work with seo, or search engine optimization to be something within that vein of changing the future for the better. There is little doubt that the future of technology and communication is placed heavily upon the shoulders of the internet. Those of us who are working to better web site optimization are part of the same movement as those who worked a century ago to make business work faster and the economy grow. My job is is quite similar in tat I am working to ensure that people can find information faster. For the short term my work will help businesses work better and makes those who work in web site marketing much easier, but in the long term the benefits could mean quicker access to vital information in all situations. We are working to make technology understand how we as humans think in order to become an extension of ourselves.
Posted on Thursday, October 09, 2008 @ 10:43 AM by Carolyn Norris
Missing out on my insurance settlement
It’s never a good time for things to come creeping up from the past to bite you, but of course you never have choice about the timing anyway. I have been working quite hard this semester and things have been working out surprisingly well in most areas of my life. I have also managed to keep myself locked in to my exercise routine with more regularity than I can muster for any other habits I try to form in my life. Of course when I find myself in this place and this positive way, something must have come back to get me again and it did this week.
I had gotten in to a car accident in May and had since gotten the repairs to my car already finished. The accident was a minor fender bender and was really the other person’s fault since I was stopped at a light and they rammed me from behind. It was no big deal to me at the time because I was promised a settlement. I had gotten the repairs out of pocket at the time to just get it done before the settlement came from the insurance company. I waited all summer as letters of confirmation were sent back and forth and things were discussed. When things like this seem to be resolved I did as any normal person does and just put it away in my mind as something that was finished.
On monday however I got a letter from the insurance company telling me that the settlement would not be sent since too much time had passed since the accident for the claim to process. I was furious and I called to ask what the deal was, and of course I got nothing but empty words. I am not much of a grudge kind of person, but fifteen hundred dollars is a lot of money for something that I didn’t do. So I spent the entirety of my free time this week talking to my lawyer about working on getting my claim settlement. all of this law advice has given me such a headache but I have managed to stay somewhat together. Right now we are pressing them before actually going foreword, but I won’t hesitate to sue insurance company if I have to. I am just not one to back down when I know something is wrong.
Hopefully everyone else is having a much better week. If you’re having similar problems in your life maybe we should start a club. I think that I need some companionship on this issue because spending so much time with a lawyer is starting to make my skin crawl.
Posted on Tuesday, September 30, 2008 @ 10:35 AM by Carolyn Norris
financial education
If you are someone of my age and experience, you probably would have also woken up last Sunday morning with a bit of a fever about you. When I walked out to get my paper I looked at the front page and there was no way I could miss what seemed to be the only story out there. Some of the world’s biggest investing and trading banks have gotten in to even more trouble. These giants that have been around for longer than I have are all starting to stumble and even fall. This week has just been sort of continuing with a trend of bad news that we’ve been getting for a year or so now and I wonder if many of my younger readers are even a little calloused to it. For you all this is probably the biggest financial education you could ask for because you have never lived through a bigger time of insecurity and possible recession. It is sad that it had to come in the form we’re seeing now instead of a slow trickle when you ask your parents for investment advice.
Now today I don’t want to really hand out any stock market advice or anything because as you can imagine I am just as worried as you are and maybe more. Since I have the reference of my age, I have seen some difficult financial times. In the same vein I have never been so educated and invested in my own life to worry this much about what may happen to the market before I wake up tomorrow morning. I don’t have to tell you all that now is not a good time to invest in real estate or that stock market investing is very risky at the moment. I am sure you have all seen and heard the stories. What I do want to throw out there though is the feeling that calms me when I get to dwelling on this type of stuff.
Whenever I worry about money and finances I think about my own great grandmother. She was a woman who grew up in a company coal-mining town in West Virginia. In her lifetime she saw two world wars, the great depression, a life of zero chance for mobility, and then financial freedom when she remarried. She is an inspiration when it comes to the complete ability of humans to survive at all costs. When I worry that I may lose some money or my job I just think about how much more comfort I live in now than she did at my age. I just think every day, “It could be much worse.”
Posted on Wednesday, September 17, 2008 @ 9:11 PM by Carolyn Norris
Learning ins and outs of web design
In my line of work and study there is plenty to do with computers and technology at large. I have on my plate right now not only work as a teacher and a student, but also as a researcher. My research right now is centered around web design and the ways in which various ideas are conveyed better with different programming. BAsically I have taken on the role of an amateur web site designer and I will launch different student sites and attempt to register how usable and helpful each of the web domains are. Web programming is quite an interesting field right now because everyone out there who is trying to build a web site is concerned with the ideas I am trying to study.
There are tons of sites and web domains out there to help people with their ecommerce web design strategy. My work will probably go on to continue the journey through evolution to find out what types of sites appeal to what types of people and how to offer those sites to them with better ease. We are also working in conjunction with search engines through the study of search engine optimization. This is a relatively new field and is basically what I was just talking about. Sites like Google are always trying to refine the ways their sites pull in information depending on what words used in the search. It is essentially the study of how to get people where they are going faster within the context of the internet. This research can also be brought back to web site templates and web site architecture theories in order to fit all new sites in to this hierarchy of search optimization. What we are striving for is to get all web sites with in this huge web at a much smaller distance for the average or advanced user.
This is very interesting research and I hope to keep it going till I finish. I may even want to do this for work after I graduate because I think that there is plenty of groundwork to be done in the field of search optimization and it is all quite interesting to me right now. It is sort of a mixture between psychology and technology to try and unite desire with the means to satisfy such a desire. I have been trying to talk some of my technology students in to the field but many of them seem to be more interested in just working with the code and programming than working with groups of random users and huge companies like Google in the same day.
Posted on Sunday, September 07, 2008 @ 4:18 PM by Carolyn Norris
First Home Football Game
Today I realized something about myself. There are times of the year when I feel better than others and this is for any number of reasons. I think that I prefer this time of year because of the energy that the students give off, especially the younger ones, and I prefer the ways in which faculty behave as well. That is not to say that I don’t enjoy all of you beautiful people during the entire rest of the year, there is just something about coming in to a new place or a new experience that gets everyone in such a great mental state. For now I can relish in the eye contact and relaxed smiles of those who are no buried in their work or studying quite yet. I am personally in that same space myself because I have been sticking to that exercise routine I talked about last time, as well as on top of my own course work. Now I can just see us all slowly slipping in to that abyss of loathing all of the obligations we have and missing all of the things that we could be doing instead. That’s life I guess, so hopefully we can just all keep moving foreword.
For now I think I have done a good job for the first week , so I am just setting things to autopilot for the weekend. This saturday is our first home football game, as I am sure you are all aware, and so I am going to be in attendance with the rest of the college. I got my tickets today from a ticket scalper on my walk home from class. The decision to not buy some season tickets this year may have been a poor decision on my part, but I have to live with it. Luckily for me, football tickets are not hard to come by when you are just looking for one and you don’t care where you are sitting. I generally don’t even pay any attention to sports but the general knowledge of being at the game and sharing that experience with everyone else is sort of a good frame for interaction throughout the rest of the year. From here on out I will have to find tickets every weekend but I don;t think that this is so bad. IF I have to miss a gamer for some reason, then I don;t have to go to all of the trouble of finding someone to take my ticket(s).
Hopefully I will see you all there this weekend and if you have not found your tickets I would assume there is a ticket seller somewhere on the corner out there waiting just for you to come along.
Posted on Monday, September 01, 2008 @ 10:31 AM by Carolyn Norris
Weight conscious
This morning I woke up and looked out the window and everyone out there was rushing around and feeling the pace today. Classes just started and everything is moving. Coffee is flowing from taps to cups and from mugs to bloodstreams. Lot s of young fresh faced boys and giggling girls are everywhere and I am trying to nail down my own thoughts on the semester in front of us. I know it will go by fast and so I have to really get all of my habits in order and get in to my groove now before I end up limping to the finish. This is especially important because I am teaching a communications class this semester which started Monday. If I slack off or lose my focus, then it isn’t just my mental health that will suffer.
To confront this problem I have decided to make my habit this semester to be weight conscious. Weight is typically not an issue for me, but I am getting older and if you don’t stay active, then you will get old pretty darn fast. I don’t want to end up like my grandmother who is basically chair ridden and has been for a decade or so. She was a housewife who just stopped doing anything once her kids left the house. I have the advantage of not having children and being able to glean this lesson from her lifestyle.
My efforts began this morning and I plan to keep them consistent for as long as possible. I took my multi vitamins with my breakfast. My diet will be a lot stricter that I am used to since I also want to try to lose weight. After my breakfast which was just fruit and veggies, I went for my exercise. Every morning I will go on a nice long bike ride and then in the evenings I will go for a run. After I finish here I will do the first run and then it will be dinner time. All of my dinner will be low carb because I will be getting all of my carbs over lunch. All of the books I have read say that this is the best way to lay out you daily diet to burn your energy in the correct way. This will be my daily plan for healthy weight loss and basically keeping my fitness up. All of these practices should make me healthier if not lighter.
Wish me luck everyone. I have to be off now and get to running. I am really happy about how motivated I am about this. I really want to keep this much energy about all of my efforts.
Posted on Tuesday, August 26, 2008 @ 4:02 PM by Carolyn Norris
Credit Crunch
It is not in my nature generally to be the kind of person who either just jumps in to a lot of things, or bites off more than she can chew. I do live quite an exciting life I feel ,but it is nothing you’d find in any action packed movie or novel. That’s quite evident in my recent forceful move to buy a new car. In the first week of June, right after I bought my new computer, I was driving and got rear ended by a driver who was talking on their cell phone. This event in itself was enough to rattle my bones, but I remained at even keel even after my mechanic told me the next day that the repairs would cost me upwards of forty-five hundred dollars. I took my keys, smiled at his face, and left without another word.
Yesterday morning I finalized the transaction with a local used car dealer to buy a used Audi sedan for a reasonable price. It is in good condition and I figure that it will last me for a long time. I would have bought something a little more recent and just taken out a loan, but I ended up coming to terms with my bad credit. As I said before, I am pretty even in my decisions and my pace of life. That is not to say that I don’t sometimes have poor judgment or make bad decisions on occasion. Due to the purchase of my last car and my staggered ability to make the payments when I was in college, I have ended up with a bad credit score. Now it is really difficult for me to get new credit cards and concurrently to even try to build up a good credit score. That’s why I had to basically change all of my transportation plans for the summer over to biking because I couldn’t afford to do anything but pay off my cheap car in two big lump sums.
This little financial set back has its advantages though. With all of the problems with rising gas prices lately, it wasn’t such a hard decision to conclude that I should just ride my bike and forget about cars for a bit. Now that I have gotten in to that groove of riding, I think that I will only use the car as a sort of supplement to my obligatory uses every once in a while. Now I am saving some money, riding in a new car sporadically, and feeling good about the bad credit to my name.
Posted on Monday, August 18, 2008 @ 8:16 PM by Carolyn Norris
vacation
The end of the summer is here and I am ready for my vacation. I have not taken a vacation all year long and my last final of the summer session is this Wednesday. After that test I will have one and a half weeks till I have to schlep back in to the classroom and keep this whole thing moving foreword. The big problem for me now is that I need a vacation but I generally have very little patience for crazy, busy vacations. Most of the time I would prefer to just stay home for a whole week and just relax rather than killing myself on some beautiful island trying to make it to the next tourist stop in time for my snorkel trip or my dinner reservation.
This year I am planning something totally different. I want to try and combine the two sides of my idea of what a good time can be, and resist the urge to overbook myself right through my vacation. Since I am really loving this nice warm climate we have here in California I figured I would try to keep it similar and not go to any destination where the mercury is going to shoot up real quick at any point. I also just want to make sure that I can afford my vacation without destroying all of my chances of getting my rent paid for September.
In keeping with my demands for a cheap and warm vacation I have decided to try out and Italy tour. I know that I said I didn’t want to book my schedule too full but I realized that the problem is not the schedule but the fact that I have to take all of the action. On a group tour you constantly have someone there to drive you around and tell you where you’re going. I will kick back and enjoy the sights of Italy while never going out on my own to overstretch myself. With the tour I have chosen they have selected all of the hotels and villas for you and you pay one flat rate. I also managed to find cheap airfare which just sold the whole thing for me. The only thing that seems like it might become a problem is the type of people who might be a part of my tour group. IF they turn out to be a bunch of people that I can’t get along with then it may turn out to be less enjoyable that I had imagined. Either way, this girl is going on vacation and there is nothing that is going to stop me. I just have to finish studying this week and I am out of here.
Posted on Monday, August 11, 2008 @ 10:04 AM by Carolyn Norris
Time for an upgrade
It's no use. No matter how you spin it, my computer is dying. To be honest, I'm surprised it's lasted as long as it has - ten years to the month. That's a long time in technology, and it's really beginning to show. It's a mac, which means it's pretty much built to last - but recently Apple have been stepping up their game considerably, updating software at a ridiculous rate, and slowly but surely retiring older models by making their newer software completely incompatible with my old, rusty hardware.
Trouble is, I've gotten used to the cosy world of mac, which means getting a new computer is a pretty expensive business. Still, whenever I have a go on a friend's PC I start freaking out. Call me a doofus, but I just can't figure out Windows. Too many options, too much 'stuff' going on. Where macs keep everything buttoned-down below the surface, PCs where their inner workings on their sleeve, just for the heck of it, it seems. Too much. PCs are, however, a heck sight cheaper than macs - according to a friend of mine I could get something just as powerful for half the price. What he doesn't understand is that I'm willing to pay that extra just for the peace of mind, the ease of use, the uncomplicated system, that goes with the mac.
So, if I really want to hang on to my mac habits - which I do - I'm going to need a loan. I reconcile this need with the fact that my old computer lasted so frickin long! All that time and I never spent a penny on her. The old beauty. Time to put that horse out to pasture now, though, and get my self one these new, gleaming-white stallions. (Metaphor over) I discovered that because I'm a student, Apple will give me some money off, and even throw in some freebies. Sucks that they cost so much though. My PC-lovin' friend told me that Apple make such a huge profit on their computers that they could afford, if they so chose, to sell them for the same cost as PCs. It's just that, because they have a monopoly on making the parts and manufacturing all the bits together, they can pretty much charge what they like. And so long as they have that holier-than-thou attitude and the designer thing going for them, they can charge what they want for what is billed as expensive quality. I'm dubious, really, as to whether they really are that much better; but I'm going to get me one anyway, purely because I am such a klutz when it comes to computers, and I figure it wouldn't be too clever to start learning a new system at this stage of my education.
So, loan it is. Not too big (not too small either), so I figure I'll easily pay it off later on.In fact this time I'm determined to do a bit of online loans research rather than settle for whatever rip off loan my bank offer me. Hell, this may be the last entry written on this hunk o' junk. If so, Farewell my dear. You've been a doll.
Posted on Wednesday, June 11, 2008 @ 11:12 AM by Carolyn Norris
Summer Staples
Here in America we have some rather interesting and sometimes destructive obsessions. There are a few areas of our daily lives that are so buried in history and primal thoughts that we have just allowed them to become parts of our lives forever. Many things such as our cars are have become much more than a utility as they are in Europe. Here they are like they opinions; everyone has one whether they are well taken care of or not. A whole subculture has grown out of our obsession with cars. This is one one example that could be extrapolated out and scrutinized all day but I have something much more interesting to talk about today.
Every year where I grew up there was a carnival that would come to our neighborhood and set up in the park down the street for a whole week. It began in the week before memorial day and would last all the way through till the next tuesday. Though we all had school and our parents still had work all week long, it felt different. It felt as though something special had blown through town and we had to soak it up as if this fantasy would slip away right before our eyes.
In other countries the carnival scene is nothing new. Our own design and roots of carnival culture comes from Europe without a doubt. The difference here, as with our love of automobiles, is in the way our history has transformed the carnival in to something of a myth. It is one of the few parts of our own culture that still exists as a nomadic system. This can partly explain why we are so excited when we see the same old rides and the same games every year. We know what we are going to do and we know what the foods tastes like, but it’s not about that. Our love of the carnival goes much deeper than that. We like the transient nature of the carnival that exists right to its core in the vacant lots and firehall parking lots. When you see the rides setting up you can almost hear the laughs and see the smiles from the last town and when they go they take something from you down the road while we stay.
I don’t think that I will ever get over the carnival culture and I hope that our country doesn’t either. This is one tradition of the past that I think just serves to bring us together as a culture. If we let the old world of cowboys and circus freaks slip away then we lose a big part of the American myth, even if it wrought with troubles and inequalities.
Posted on Tuesday, June 10, 2008 @ 10:31 PM by Carolyn Norris