Something Requisitely Witty and Urbane

My Roommate to Me, yesterday

"The Chili Peppers are really the Beach Boys for today."

I don't know why that seemed so revolutionarily simple to me, but I'd never considered that. You could make a solid argument that the Chili Peppers have out Beach Boy'd the Beach Boys for that West Coast, groovy sound.

A simple statement, and I'm not sure I'll ever look at either band the same way because of it.

What did you do today?

Me? Oh, not much really... went to school, took a test.  Had some lunch....

Oh yeah, and I interviewed Kevin Smith.  That's right.  Did I forget to mention that?

Snoochie Booches.  Transcripts coming, but it is taking some time.  I'm about 10 minutes into a 40 minute long conversation, and I'm at 5 pages in word.   Don't know if you've ever noticed this, but the dude knows how to spin a yarn.

It was great, though.  He was really funny, really relaxed.  I got over my star-struckedness fairly quickly because, when it comes down to it, he's just a dude.  He likes what he does, and he likes talking about it.  It was a lot of fun.

New Articles

For the June paper, I wrote quite a bit.  Some of this was just due to there not being as many people around during the summer, and the paper, due to some events on and around campus, ended up being quite a newsy little issue.  Of the four articles on the front page, three were mine.  Here they are!

Disgruntled Student Says Financial Aid Inconsistent - Each month, I've been taking one comment from the publically available suggestion boxes on campus and exploring it.  This month, a fairly common complaint about the Financial Aid office led to this article.  I had a lot of fun doing this one (mostly because I pissed a few people off).

Burglary Suspect Does Not Get Far - Some dude got caught breaking into cars on campus, got away, only to be pulled over and arrested in a seperate incident  10 minutes later.  After another city was slow to get a warrant to him, he was released, only to get arrest for speeding 2 days later.  Criminal Mastermind.

New Hot Spots Keep Students Connected - The entire campus is going wireless... Here's the details.

Teachers vs. Internet: Why Are We Fighting? - I've heard that some of the professors around campus didn't particularly care for this article.  That makes me very happy.

Success is Hardwork - An uncredited editorial I wrote about the school's basketball coach.  He really has accomplished quite a bit from his meager junior college digs.

Coach Hosts Youth Camp - The same coach is hosting a basketball camp this summer for the kiddies.

Clerks II - My review of Kevin Smith's new movie.  Press screenings are a really cool perk.  Even cooler, my once cancelled interveiw with Smith has been reschedule for this friday... Boooong!

Blogiversary II

Grins abound.  Happy birthday to your blog.  But beware.  The toddler years are on their way, and they're rough.  -- Summer Smith, 1 year ago yesterday.

It is apropos that I'd be a day late in mentioning this blog's 2nd anniversary.

The quote above, which was probably tongue in cheek, was left by Summer in the comments on my Blogiversary post last year,  and has turned out to be all to prescient...  This was not a great blogging year, because this blogger's performance was less than stellar.

Comparing some stats...

My first year, I wrote 1210 posts and received 1580 comments.  This year I wrote 412 posts and received 1043 comments (the majority of which were in response to the Aaron Brown Posts... who knew that this blog would become the Aaron Brown Central... hell, who knew that there were that many people who missed Aaron Brown out there?)

In it's first year, this site garnered 58,197 visits according to Typepad and 44, 597 hits according to Sitemeter.  This year, it received 73,641 visits according to Typepad and 67, 898 according to Sitemeter.  That surprises me.

What doesn't surprise me is that average daily visits are down, last year at 237 per day and this year at 210 per day.

The terrible two's were difficult indeed.

While my blog has suffered, I have had some successes in my life personally.  First of all, school has been an absolute success.  As of this writing, I've completed 13 hours, and will have completed 20 hours by the end of this summer.  I started back in school in the Spring semester, so I believe I'm making some headway.   I should have a 4.0 by the time the Fall semester begins.  For a chronic collegiate underachiever, that's saying something.

I've also been writing for the school paper, and was asked to be the editor of the paper, beginning with next month's paper.  I was hoping something like this would happen, but I didn't believe it would happen this quickly.

And while my writing hasn't been as prolific on this blog, I've been fairly prolific for the paper (some new article links will be up later today).

I've had a great relationship with the SRWG.  There have been some rough times lately, but we're still standing.  That can only be a good thing.

This blog was also nominated, for the second year in a row, for the Best Liberal Weblog... again, though it was the second year, this has to be a fluke... Just go look at the company I was in.  It's ridiculous that I was even there.

I'm very proud of this blog, even if I haven't been paying attention to it as closely as I should have over the past year.  I think my issue has been, because I have so much more to do in the real world, with school and the paper, etc, I've had trouble keeping up with all the reading that I used to do with ease.  Once I fall behind, it is easy to stay behind...  snowball... blah blah blah...

But I'm still here, and I intend to keep things up.  As always, my readers have been the best readers ever, and I'm glad that there are some of you still here, even though I've been letting you down.

I've started in on my third year.  Unreal.  Thanks for sticking around.