Category Archives: Blogging

Blogging, Geography, PhD

13 Questions for 2013 [Part 1]

1 Comment

1) If you weren’t doing whatever you’re doing with your life right now, what would you be doing?

I think if I weren’t in grad school working on my PhD in Geography, I’d be doing one of two things. If I were still on the academic path, I’d probably be studying math/physics/astronomy/some combination thereof. But, alas, science is hard. The other choice would have to be music-related, though I can’t exactly say doing what. It probably depends (in my alternate universe) if I made different decisions in high school (I’d probably be a professional trumpet player/band nerd) or in college (I’d probably be a professional singer/choral guy). Either way – I’d probably have about as much money (and that’s not much!)

Isn’t playing with alternate timelines fun? But, as they say on Lost, Whatever Happened, Happened.

2) What’s the oddest term of endearment you’ve ever used or that someone’s used for you?

To understand the answer to this, you have to realize that Karen and I are slightly crazy when alone… That said, I can’t even remember half of the crazy nicknames and terms of endearment we have for each other, but I think one of the top ones has to be Bread Head. I don’t remember the entire back story for this, but I know it involved the Bunny Bread slogan… “That’s what I said: Bunny Bread!”

3) Is the country you live in really the best fit for you?

Ha, this is a tough one! I’m inclined to say no, given that I find plenty of things wrong with the United States (and something new to dislike/frown upon seems to pop up every week). Sometimes I really wouldn’t mind living outside the US for an extended period of time, especially if that meant working (teaching) in Canada, the UK, Norway, Germany, Australia, etc. But for all its faults, I do think the US is where I am supposed to be for this period of my life. The whole graduate education in another country thing does not really suit my fancy, which is why I never seriously considered it when applying for PhD programs. That, and in conversations with Karen it has been made perfectly clear that she prefers to visit and not live in other countries. Oh well.

Those are all the questions I’ve come up with so far. Have some intriguing questions of your own? Leave me a comment, and I’ll get back to any questions deemed worthy in the next installment of this series!

Blogging, Grad School

Hello 2013!

1 Comment

Well, it looks like a new year is upon us. Karen and I saw 2013 come in with Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve… but mostly for the NYC ball drop and the aerial shots of Times Square. Seriously, if Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift are the best “musicians” we can find (and I use that term loosely) then maybe America is not worth saving.

But now I’ve gone and started things on a negative tone, and that just won’t do! So sorry for that. Anyway, before Ryan Seacrest and Jenny McCarthy helped us rock in the new year, Karen and I had Christmas with my parents and we went out to eat at Don Pancho’s. Hey, don’t laugh if that’s not exciting enough for you! That’s more activity than we usually do! Then we followed that up with three hours of watching House from Netflix. Love it.

Anyway, I intended for this post to be more about my resolutions for 2013, as it has become something of a tradition around here to write them down for the world to see. (Behold, I give you 2011 and 2012.) 2012’s resolutions were, as you might imagine, a bit hit or miss. I played my trumpet some (thought not enough to be good at it), I did indeed run a couple of races earlier in the year (and then basically lost the time, or the will to make time, once the PhD started), I ended the year no healthier than when I began it (probably, at least weight-wise, because of the running trend!). I did travel quite a bit. That one I can really and truly say I accomplished. It’s funny to look back at the beginning of 2012 when I knew I’d be going to NYC for AAG and I thought I’d be moving for my PhD studies. Ha, good one! There’s no need to recap my travels here, but feel free to go back and look for my posts on New York City and Norway.

For 2013, I decided to simplify my resolutions into two broad categories, something that a lot of “resolution advice givers” (aka, “experts”) suggest is a bad idea. The thinking goes that if you make smaller, more achievable goals along the way then you will be more likely to achieve them. I tend to actually agree with this line of thinking, but my resolutions are really more like life mantras that I am adopting, and mantras are, most often, by their nature very broad.

So here you go. Matt’s Mantras for 2013. (Hmm… has a nice ring to it. Maybe I should market this.)

1. Be better to myself.

I think everyone can agree with this. It’s a not difficult, in theory, to see why being better to one’s self is a useful mantra to adopt. After all, who better to take care of yourself than you. Am I right? This concept takes into consideration a number of my previous resolutions, most obviously to live a healthier life. No one else should be responsible for making sure I make healthy decisions, with perhaps the exception of doctors who are paid to help in this quest! But being better to one’s self does not stop at the corporeal. There’s the mental, the emotional, the spiritual to consider. There’s even the financial. All of these, and plenty more I’m probably forgetting, are areas to consider improving. Consider being better to yourself as well this year – just don’t make the mistake of confusing being better to yourself with (selfishly) living only for yourself. The two are not mutually exclusive!

2. Create (or produce) more, consume less.

This mantra was inspired by a blog post I recently read from a creative-type (photographer/video/web content creation stuff) guy I follow on Twitter. The unfortunate thing is that after I read it, I didn’t email it to myself or bookmark it or anything…so now I can’t find the particular post AND I can’t remember which person on Twitter posted it. (One problem of following a lot of creative types on Twitter, I suppose). But the gist of the post was something along these lines: “The world we live in thrives on consumption. If you aren’t producing something worth consuming, then you are not much use to the world. Therefore, create more and improve your usefulness to the world.” That may be a little bit of a simplistic reduction, but that’s what I took away from it. From my studies of political economy and geography, it’s also pretty true. The world we live in (ESPECIALLY in the US) is so ridiculously full of consume-consume-consumers that it does seem to make sense that if you aren’t producing, then you are part of the problem. However, this particular blog post was specifically speaking to producers in the “creative economy” (or “knowledge economy,” if you prefer). But I think this mantra is applicable to so much more, just like Mantra #1.

Produce more food yourself (this fits right in with Karen’s goals of having an even better garden and eating even fewer processed foods) and consume less (which my waistline could use).

Create more content (whatever that may be – more blogging, more photos, more scholarly articles) and consume less junk. I already started applying that some this year (for example, it quickly became apparent this fall that 3-4 hours of my life each Saturday could be spent in some better fashion than watching UT football), but there is plenty of room for improvement. I only blogged 13 times last year, and I probably posted less than 200 photos of the thousand or so I took all year. Room for improvement? Definitely. But it’s not all bad, of course. I submitted my first peer-reviewed journal in 2012, and I will see it through to publication in 2013. I’m already planning the next couple of articles down the road, and I’d like to see a couple of those submitted and accepted this year as well.

Create more/consume less can take many forms, and you should join me in taking on this mantra for 2013.

In summary, I’ve already hit 1,000 words, and I’ve probably lost bored some of you to tears with a post this long. If you had the fortitude to make it through, I commend you. Happy New Year! Let’s make it a great one.

Blogging

Eclectic Musical Tastes

2 Comments

This idea was borrowed from a friend (Life According to Me).

30 Day Challenge: Day 11

Put your iPod on shuffle and write 10 songs that pop up.

Welp, I decided to just use iTunes because my iPhone (which doubles as my iPod) doesn’t have my entire music library on it. And if you’re going to do this post the right way, I feel you should get to experience the full force of craziness that is your own musical tastes. Then I had a second thought. I have a lot of music in my iTunes library (606 songs, to be exact) that I have purchased, downloaded, imported from a CD, etc. that I have not listened to even once. The first song that popped up on shuffle happened to be one of these, and I decided that those shouldn’t count either.

So, here you go. (UPDATE: 12/5/12 – now including links to YouTube/other recordings)

1. Chocolate City – Parliament

2. Factum Est Silentium (by Dering) – Voces8 (Can’t find a playable Voces8 recording, so I give you Tennessee Tech’s choir)

3. Paranoid – Ozzy Osbourne

4. I Get Along Without You Very Well (by Hoagy Carmichael) – The King’s Singers (Can’t find the King’s Singers version, so I give you Frank Sinatra instead)

5. Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely – Backstreet Boys (WHY do I even HAVE this?? Ack!)

6. The “You’ve Got Mail” Suite – George Fenton

7. Hitch a Ride – Boston

8. Pat a Pan – Mannheim Steamroller

9. 11 Blue Egyptians – Jason Becker

10. Dare You to Move – Switchfoot

 

Some of you may be asking why I did this, but I think it’s pretty self-explanatory. It’s a pretty LOL-worthy list!

That, and I needed some stress relief after finishing the first of my three term papers. But let’s focus on the LOL-worthy.

Blogging, Geography, Grad School, PhD, Research

It’s been a long time, now I’m…coming back home.

1 Comment

Name the song for which this blog is titled.

If you said The Beatles’ “Wait” (from theRubber Soul album) then you are correct!

I don’t even know why I used that for a title; of all the Beatles’ songs out there, “Wait” has never been one of my particular favorites. In fact, it sometimes grates on my nerves. Part of is the nasally singing from Lennon and McCartney. Maybe also the incessant tambourine.

But enough of that. I’m actually writing a blog post for the first time in ages. I guess that’s really why I used the lyrics in my title – it has indeed been a long time since I could make time for this blog. This semester has been hectic, to say the least. It took a good month to really transition back into the swing of taking class, working as a research assistant, etc. but I’m glad to report that “the old Matt” is back, as Micheline likes to say.

So what have I been up to? Well, a number of things. My course work is primarily outside of Geography this semester, so I’ve been doing a lot of reading in political economy and political science. I’ve been finding really good connections between that and my geography reading and dissertation ideas, so political economy/theory/stuff will play a big role in my research over the next couple of years. Yeah, hard, to believe – but I’m on track to finish my PhD in a mere 2.5 more years. I metaphorically pinch myself sometimes at that thought, and it’s been a frequent one over the last few weeks because I’ve been planning my PhD “Program of Study,” as all first-year students have to do.

Other than the coursework, the dissertation planning is coming along. I don’t have a complete project, but I’m working on research questions and thinking about the short- and middle-term plans for accomplishing the research. The most obvious part of the planning is fieldwork. Karen and I will go with the “research team” to Oslo, Norway, again next summer. The plan at this point is to go a little earlier in the year, probably mid-May after UT’s finals. We may also go to some other Norwegian cities where the oil and gas sector is more active (Stavanger and Kongsberg are potential options.) The most important part is to get the plans nailed down early enough to get cheaper flights and find housing NOT at the last minute (like last year, when my fellow research assistant and I nearly caused Micheline to have a stress-induced stroke. Sorry about that, again!)

As for mid-term planning, I will apply for grants for more research funding starting next summer/fall to fund fieldwork in Berlin. I’m not sure how long fieldwork in Berlin would take (again, I don’t have a dissertation proposal complete yet), but I would like to spend the entire summer of 2014 over there, if not also part of that fall semester. Given how much time I know went into planning the Oslo fieldwork – at least two summers of fieldwork to plan, organize, establish contacts, etc. – I’m not ruling out any time period at this point. That is why I need to start securing funding so early.

Well, I’ve got to run. I hope you enjoyed my brief update, and as usual, I promise to try writing more often… but we all know how that goes.

Blogging, Grad School

Avoiding the New Year?

5 Comments

Story

So, it’s already the first Friday of the New Year, and I haven’t posted my New Year’s Resolutions. It’s not for lack of trying. At first, I made a very simple list of things for resolutions, and most of them were borrowed from last year. I even started to write about them, but then wasn’t exceedingly happy with my mediocre list, so I deleted the blog post.

Well’s here’s attempt #2. Sometimes it helps just to write them out for myself, if for no other reason than to sort things out for yourself. As my friend Melanie recently posted, “My advisor’s advice is that ‘you can edit crap, but you can’t edit nothing.'” That sounds relatively similar to advice I’ve gotten during grad school, too… My attempts at New Year’s Resolutions are as follows: (though perhaps not as well developed as last year!)

  • Play the trumpet more. (This was also a resolution last year, but I only played a few times. Doing better on it so far.)
  • Run more consistently. (And I had better. I’m running a 15k at the Biltmore in May, and my long-term goals are to run a half-marathon this year and a full marathon next year.)
  • Be healthier. (This was only a partial success last year. Lost some weight, gained it back, started losing it again… and ended the year up 9 pounds in all. Weight loss isn’t the entire story though, because Karen and I have also made it a goal to eat out less this year, eat fewer processed foods, and make/cook/bake/etc as many things as we can ourselves instead of buying them. Well…the last part is actually her goal, as I am mostly useless in the kitchen. But eating out less was my idea, after I calculated that we spent a small fortune on eating out last year. I’ll be intentionally vague, but suffice it to say it was a four-figure number, close to half of my pitiful salary. Embarassing to post, I assure you.)
  • Travel, as always. (Shouldn’t be a problem. Going to NYC for the first time in February for the AAG Conference, and there’s a good chance I’ll be moving out of state to pursue my Ph.D. Fun times!)

That’s all for now. Since I didn’t do as well at posting or developing these ideas this year, I’ll try to appease you with some music instead.

Blogging

A note about no comments…

2 Comments

Just a quick update here everybody: A few of you have noticed that I made commenting a little more difficult by requiring an account. My apologies for the extra step, but it unfortunately became necessary after some less-than-pleasant comments earlier this semester. I haven’t had a lot of time to think about the blog this semester anyway, but do know that I appreciate your (constructive) comments and I don’t want the conversation/feedback to end because of the sign-in requirement. So, I’m going back to the open commenting that was in place before, with the exception that initial commenters will have to have their first comment approved before future posts are automatically posted.

This may not mean much of anything to any of you, but suffice it say that we’re going to try the old way of doing things again.

Blogging, Busyness

Revisiting Resolutions

1 Comment

I got curious today about what my New Year’s Resolutions were from back in January. I remembered that I publicly declared those resolutions on this very blog, so I thought today would be a great time to revisit them! Some are accomplished, some are going poorly. Such is life. At least there’s still 5/12’s of the year left to accomplish them, right?

(Note: I’m going to copy/paste the resolutions straight from the January post in italics, before updating them in a red font.)

• Lose 30 pounds. Sure, why not? This time… I think I won’t rely on Crohn’s Disease to, ahem, assist me, so perhaps they will stay off a little longer this time? I haven’t gained it all back, but if this trend continues I should be able to be a contestant on the Biggest Loser by 2013.

This one is not going well at all. Thanks to the wonders (and stress) of grad school, combined with the Geography building being right across from the University Center, I’m currently +8.6 pounds for the year. I told you I was on my way to being a Biggest Loser Contestant! In somewhat more encouraging news, though, I am down a couple pounds since May. This is probably closely correlated with Resolution #2…

• Train for and run a race of some variety. 5k, etc. Preferably more than one, but that will all depend on how more time I can devote to training. The good news is that Karen has agreed to do it with me this time. The bad news? We’re both really good at wimping out after a few weeks.

The training began in January…and ended in January! Trying to start running again in the cold and at the beginning of the semester was a good way to set myself up for failure. So there’s the bad news. The good news is that I started again this summer, and although Karen wimped out on me after a few weeks, I’ve kept to the Nike+ Beginning Running program without her for several weeks now. I’m not quite up the “Running Obsessed” level, but I am at least on track to run a 5k before the year ends. The biggest challenge ahead will be maintaining my running schedule once the semester begins.

• Travel the world. (As a geographer, this is pretty much always a goal, not really a resolution. And since I’m planning on going to Berlin and other parts of Germany for thesis research this summer, this one should’t be too hard!)

Mission Accomplished. This one was completed with my summer fieldwork in Berlin and our mini-vacation in Paris. I can now check France off of the list of countries to visit, though I wouldn’t mind returning in the future to visit some French locales not named Paris!

• Read something other than the literature for my Master’s research and/or class. This one might actually be sort of hard! I’m thinking of reading the Lord of the Rings, but I seriously doubt I’ll find time for it this year, so I may stick to a few Star Wars novels I’ve been saving. Wouldn’t hurt to read some of the photography books I’ve amassed over the last 2-3 years either!

Believe it or not, this one can actually be checked off the list as well. I made it a part of my summer plan to get some leisure reading in and it worked. I only got around to reading D.H. Lawrence’s The Prussian Officer and Tina Fey’s autobiography Bossypants, but it was a start! I’ll definitely have to save LotR and Star Wars for another day/month/year.

• Play my trumpet. Regularly. I’ve decided to break it back out from hiding/storage. Cleaned it up nicely last year but never played it much. The first step, however, is to get Story used to it so she doesn’t freak out and bark every time she even sees it.

This one is a work in progress. Story is a little less scared of the trumpet now, but I’ve only played it twice all year. I did, however, start to teach myself piano from Karen’s beginning piano books, so at least I’m making some musical progress!

• Become more fluent in German. The two German courses I’m auditing this semester should help with that, but I’m still slightly terrified that I won’t be able to interview people in German this summer!

This one never really reached fruition, because I found a way around being terrified to interview in German during my fieldwork: First, speak English, and Second, find a translator. I may have gotten a little better with the help of the my two audited German courses, but I ended up dropping one midway through the semester because of the busyness. Which leads me to the last bullet point…

• Somehow, find a way to not “overdo it” this year. I came close to overdoing it this semester, but I was able to stay on top of all my various projects, papers, performances, etc. by the skin of my teeth. I’d like to take a step further back from the edge, but I know in all likelihood that I may actually be inching my way closer to a plunge, given my course load and responsibilities this semester alone. I know Summer and Fall won’t be as bad, but there’s still field work and comps and thesis writing death to think about then.

I miraculously pulled this off, and finished the spring semester with flying colors, all A’s, and new-found responsibilities of being entrusted to teach a section of Geography 101 for the department this upcoming year. How did I do it? Mostly, I saved my sanity with a combination of Sbarro’s in the aforementioned university center and Eric Whitacre’s latest CD, Light and Gold. I was also greatly blessed to receive three scholarships/grants from various sources at UT to fund my fieldwork, so part of my stress (rushing about to meet various deadlines!) paid off.

Now this resolution has to be extended to this fall semester. I’ve already blogged about how busy I have been just getting ready for the fall, but it will definitely pick up the pace in a few weeks.

Blogging, Geography, Knoxville

Summer Update

5 Comments

I’m sure the few of you faithful readers out there might be wondering how the summer is going for the in-between-semesters grad student, so I’m going to try to update you with a brief post.

After returning from a month in Europe and two more weeks on the road to West Tennessee, I finally took the time for a real summer break. Whether or not this was actually a good thing is open to debate, because while my mental health greatly appreciated some down time, my work ethic has not yet recovered. And that is a really big problem, given all that is upcoming this fall semester!

During the downtime, Karen and I have lazed around the house, started watching LOST on Netflix, and last week had a Harry Potter marathon, culminating in seeing the final movie at the downtown movie theater yesterday afternoon. We also went to Sevier County (read: Gatlinburg, Pigeon Forge, Sevierville) on Saturday to get our Pancake Pantry fix and shop the outlet malls whilst we had Gap and Banana Republic store-wide 30 percent off coupons… Banana Republic has become my all-time favorite clothing store, but only when shopping through the outlet store.

In a close second, my next favorite store has become Nike, but again, only the outlet/factory store variety again. (Note the grad-student-on-a-budget theme running here?) Speaking of Nike, most of you have likely seen my occasional post to Facebook about running with Nike+. I started the fifth week today, and though Karen dropped out on me after serious knee pain last week, I’m going to keep this up as long as I can! I don’t know if any of you are using Nike+, but if you are and want to add me as a friend, my username is matrcook.

In the last two weeks, I have slowly gotten the ball rolling on my to-do list for the fall. It’s quite extensive because I’m teaching a section of Geography 101 – World Regional Geography to approximately 120 students. Tuesdays and Thursdays at 8:10 a.m.! It’s slightly daunting for my first real teaching assignment, but at least it’s only one class and I have had a lot of time to prepare for it. Last week I laid out the rough draft of my syllabus and this week I plan to hammer out the rest of the nitty-gritty details. The course focuses on five world regions: Africa, South Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania. For those of you who know me best, you know that I have never been to ANY of these regions. While that is not a major problem, it does make it a little more difficult to gather materials, and it makes me a LOT more dependent on the textbook and other sources rather than my own experiences, photographs, etc. Still, my goal is to help my students have a better understanding of the world by the time the course is over, while having some fun along the way.

Also accomplished last week was the beginnings of what I’m calling my “List of Ph.D. schools under consideration.” At this point it stands at seven schools in the U.S., two overseas, and (surprisingly) *none* are in Germany. Not saying it couldn’t expand at this point, but I will have to start narrowing it down once the semester starts. Application deadlines for some programs are as early as Dec. 15, though a majority are in January. I’ll keep you up-to-date as often as I can throughout the semester, provided busyness doesn’t have me hanging from the ceiling by my ears.

In other news, my biggest concern for the remaining part of the summer is my thesis research. I have seriously neglected it for a few weeks, and it is now time to remedy that. I’ve started by writing down the common themes that kept popping up in my observations, interviews, and conversations while in Berlin, and from there I will start to work on transcriptions that fit into the different themes. This qualitative data analysis is definitely difficult if you’ve never done it before, but my advisor pointed me in the right direction last week during a two-hour meeting! I’ve now got a couple of books to help steer me for the next several weeks. Beyond this analysis work, I’ve quickly got to start working on a paper for some conferences I’m attending this fall. I was accepted to present a paper on my Stolpersteine research at the MTSU Holocaust Conference in October, and I plan to use many of the same ideas from that paper in another to submit to the Southeastern Division of the Association of American Geographers (whew. That takes a while to write! That’s why we just call it SEDAAG – pronounced “see-dag.”) The SEDAAG conference is in November, but I have to submit the entire paper in about a month. Scary!

That’s all the time I’ve got for now, so I hope you’ve enjoyed the update. I’m sure there are things I’m forgetting, but they’ll be saved for another day!

Blogging, Knoxville

Blogging. On the iPad 2.

1 Comment

Hi everyone! I know you probably weren’t expecting to read a blog from me any time soon, but I just couldn’t resist blogging from my new iPad 2! Karen and I stood in line for about 3.5 hours this afternoon at the mall. I couldn’t believe the line of people waiting! We were about 88-89th in line and we ended up in ahead of the middle of the line by the time the doors opened at 5 pm.

Well it looks like it is past my bedtime. Writing on the iPad for extended periods of time like this will take some getting used to. Thank goodness for autocorrect, right???

Blogging

Switching to WordPress

2 Comments

(To those who might be expecting a somewhat useful or insightful post, come back soon for a post about my acceptance at UT Knoxville.)

As you can see, I finally switched over to WordPress from Blogger by Google. It’s been a long time a-coming, so to speak. It started out as an idea to purchase my own hosting and run WordPress as a blog/CMS after I started using the platform to develop a couple other Web sites websites (Gah! Darn AP style changed to “website” instead of Web site. Takes some getting used to.) The FBC Martin redesign was done using WordPress and a simple theme. The ByGrace website is also run using WordPress and a little more complicated theme. So after those set ups, I was sold on WordPress. And why not, because it is simple to use the most basic functions!

However, my set up was a little more complicated, so my apologies for those who are technically “uninclined” who are about to read how this process worked. To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, let me summarize by saying that I am a “web guy,” but even I had to chat twice with tech support, make a tech support call and read a few tutorials.

It started by wanting to switch from Blogger to WordPress. My old blog was pretty good (you can still see it here) but it was limited compared to the power of WordPress. Those of you who use WordPress will understand.

But it would be easiest to move (or so I thought) after my domain name, matt-cook.com, expired. WRONG! I let the domain name purchased through GoDaddy expire on or around April 14 only to find out that I needed to access it through GoDaddy’s control panel to start a domain transfer process, so I could migrate the name to Fat Cow (my favorite hosting site). That was tech support chat number one. I couldn’t figure out how to start the domain transfer since I couldn’t access the old domain. It turns out that either you can wait about 60 days for the domain to be COMPLETELY released (GoDaddy and other domain sites hold on to expire domain names for a while after they expire in case the owner decides to renew after the expiration) or I would have to renew the domain name with GoDaddy for another year to migrate it over. So this is when I called GoDaddy tech support to buy a one year renewal.

Then I went back over to Fat Cow and started the domain transfer, and then waited for about 5 days. On Monday I received the email saying that the transfer was done, but for some reason the old domain still pointed to Blogger and worse, the simplified domain I plan to use with WordPress, http://matt-cook.com (without the www. subdomain), still pointed to a parked GoDaddy page. I figured out that Blogger still had ties to  http://www.matt-cook.com and once those were removed I was very pleased to see a 404 (page not found error) for perhaps the first time in my life! Then came tech support chat numero dos. I had forgotten during the five day wait that I had to switch the name servers from GoDaddy to Fat Cow’s name servers. I’ll spare you the details of what name servers are, but suffice it to say that a couple hours later, the parked domain page was gone and my blank WordPress page was there instead!

So that was the first half of the battle. I then had to find out how to roll over all my Blogger posts and comments (Tutorial #1). Then I took the time to update the categories and tags on my posts because the import caused all of the tags from Blogger to become categories in WordPress instead of TAGS. That may sound a tad bit asinine to those of you who could care less about organization, but to my OCD self it was first priority. Now I have a nice, neat list of categories, as you can see on the right of each page.

After the import, I had to choose a WordPress theme, which is in-and-of-itself a challenge, given how many good themes there are out there. This particular theme, eDegree, looked both fun and challenging, and I liked the graphics and layout as well. Win/Win. Here’s where a couple more tutorials came in handy, because setting up the slide show on the first page took a little finagling to get right. (And by finagling, I mean installing a plugin, modifying a JavaScript that the writer made a mistake in, figuring out the correct dimensions for the page, figuring out how to specify which posts show up, etc.) And then voila! it was done. I think it’s pretty awesome that the slide show even works on the iPhone. Go. Check it out.

Then lastly I worked some magic to make the About Me section look right and added an RSS feed to my tweets over to the right.

Whew.

Well that’s all for now. With any luck, I’ll find enough writing prowess to pump out a more interesting post later today about heading off to UT Knoxville for grad school.