A lot has happened here in the last 6 months since I last posted an entry here. Let me do a bit of a rundown on all the fun that's been happening here.
School:
I started back at school during the summer, partly to stave off the student loans, partly to work on a new direction for life and work. I started in the direction of Business Management, but I found that I wanted to go a different direction than that, so after the Summer Semester, I switched my major to Software Engineering. That's where I started back in 1991, when I first started in college. It's going ok. It's hard to keep going to school when life just gets you tired. It's good though. I finally get to learn something that I hoped that I could have learned back 20 years ago, C++. It should be a good thing if I can survive another 3 years of school... granted, I'll be 38 years old by then. Not sure anyone will want an old graphic designer and programmer at that point, but we'll have to see what happens there.
Work:
A little over a month ago, I quit my part-time job at BYU and was brought on at a new company that had a full-time job there. They had me on a one-month contract, which is fairly standard in the design industry. Things were going ok until the guys that brought me in quit. When all was said and done after the month was up, ultimately, things didn't work out. So I'm running in unemployed/self-employed mode right now. Fortunately the financial aid from school and the money I made from the full-time will keep things going for a while, so being out of work won't hurt too much, but I'm going to need to get some freelance stuff going to make life a bit less painful.
With all that in mind though, I've been planning to work on an iPhone application for a while now. I'm working through the initial production phase for the app. I got all my iOS developer stuff set up and I hopefully will be able to get something going in the coming months.
Cons:
I also have been cranking away on stuff for the anime con here in Salt Lake City, Anime Banzai. The con is this weekend, so it'll be a good distraction. It'll be good to have it done as well. It's been a long year of prep.
Books:
A couple months ago my Kindle died. I decided that with a dead Kindle I was going to evaluate my eReader setup. After doing a bunch of research, I went with the Barnes and Noble nook. The ability of use ePub documents was the thing that pushed me that direction. And the fact that the nook has a user-replaceable battery, which is what ate itself on the Kindle. Having an actual brick-and-mortar to go to for parts is good too. I've never really been a big reader since I got out of grade school. I did something the other day that I haven't really done in years (probably close to 10...) I read a new book. I broke down and tackled The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. It was an excellent read. I have the other two books in the series on my nook. Just need to take some time to finish them.
Writing:
Reading The Hunger Games reminded me one reason WHY I hate reading. It reminds me that I have all these ideas for stories and don't have the stuff to get them into a form that is meaningful. I admit that I don't have a great fondness for writing, even though I'm fairly decent at it. I'm playing with the story that I wrote back almost 20 years ago, working on a re-write. I think there's a good base there, but it needs a lot of work to be something that is even close to readable and exciting. Where that will go, I don't know. We'll see how THAT ends up.
Art:
I'm never sure what to do here. I want to draw, but I'm a lazy person. It's hard to want to draw sometimes, especially when you're feeling like you're at a wall. I have a set of drawings that I want to do. I've got some generic sketches for a beginning, but I need to get some drive to want to actually DO it. Need to work on that.
Overall, things have been kinda strange around here. I'm kinda glad for a break from work right now, but we'll have to see how things will end up. Only time will tell.
