Tuesday, December 11, 2007
1:55 PM
(Firstly, to anybody coming by from the SXSW Interactive website, hello!)As always, let me start this with something like, "oh, wow, it's been a while!" Seven months, to be exact--and today's my 3-year anniversary of graduating from Georgia Tech. Life after college has been pretty crazy, for sure.
A lot's changed, site-wise and generally. I've done a really hasty clean-up with this update but there's a lot more to be done. The Japan journal is actually still active, but just barely. The fanlistings subdomain is totally gone--I lost interest in those long ago, and with my overseas life, updating once every two months actually wasn't that feasible. I also took down my quotes site (kind of cheesy anyway) and my art/writing and archived Star Wars/anime sites, with the intention of cleaning up and restoring both of those.
I'm moving away from using the screen name "Andorus," which was a high-school/college thing, and towards using my real name, now that I'm a "professional designer." It's interesting to see my friends making similar transitions, too. This site will probably be renamed (after nearly 10 years, wow), though the domain name will stay the same. And now that my two years in Japan are over, it's also time to come up with a new design, which'll probably be up next year.
I also would like to reevaluate what it is I want out of this site. The Pirates of Dark Water site will be up forever and ever, but I'd like there to be more meat soy to this domain beyond just hosting that.
As of mid-August, I'm back in the US and in Atlanta. I've been working as a graphic/interaction designer for an internet security company since September (similar to what people say about how you meet significant others, this job just fell in my lap a month before I left Japan, and it's been excellent thus far). I miss Japan like crazy, though, and I think about it every single day. By the time my departure arrived, I was ready to leave, but it was still really rough.
I'm currently planning a trip back in mid-March, in time for my junior high's graduation ceremony and the annual Tokushima musical. It should be interesting, though, because it'll be following hot on the heels of SXSW Interactive (which was what prompted this shove-everything-into-the-closet style of update, since I won a free membership (!!)). It'll be a crazy but awesome month, for sure.
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
7:33 AM
Oh, wow. I had no idea it's been over a year since the last time I posted an update to this page! As you can imagine, I've been busy and haven't done a whole lot sitewide since February 2006, when I'd last updated this.Sitewise, I've redesigned the about me section and the Pirates of Dark Water site, and...that's about it! Oh, I've been keeping my portfolio and Japan journal updated, and my fanlistings, sporadically.
I just reserved my plane ticket back to the US this week. It's been over 1 year and 9 months since I moved to Japan, and...yeah. A lot's changed. I can safely say that I consider Japan to be my second home now. I know I need to move on, but I know it's going to remain a part of my life, and I want it to. There are some amazing people here, Japanese and foreigner alike, and I feel so fortunate to have lucked out in so many ways. I've done so much in that time that it's really impossible to sum it up. Another musical has come and gone since Peter Pan last year, and I've had the fortune to be able to travel to at least a dozen places since then (Tokyo, Takamatsu, Okayama, Nagasaki, Unzen, Aso, Kagoshima/Sakurajima, Seoul, Okinawa, Kochi, Hyogo Prefecture, Osaka and Kobe, Hiroshima and Miyajima, Himeji Castle...). I've also bought a car, had a fainting spell in the aisle of a plane in the middle of an international flight, had several friends pass away, had many more friends get engaged and/or married, started teaching more elementary school students, and played mentor to a whole new batch of ALTs, who are now no longer "first-years" and are now just "ALTs" and "friends," and who are taking the baton and preparing to pass it on to the ALTs coming in this summer.
I'll be returning to the US in mid-August. I'm hoping to go out with more traveling and participating in the big and annual Awa Odori dance festival in Tokushima. Some friends from home will be coming in at the very end, too, and possibly one or both of my parents. That'll be nice--my perspective now and my knowledge of the area is very different than it was when I'd just been living here for a few months. Anyway, updates will continue to be as rare as they have been. I'm doing some web commission work and looking for a job and preparing physically and emotionally to switch countries again. The next few months will be very busy indeed.
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
2:00 AM
Happy (super-belated) new year! I've had some free time at work lately, so I've started bringing my laptop in to work on a few different projects. As you can see, I've revamped the index "site"--the image was taken not too far from my apartment here in Japan. This site is also coded in standards-compliant CSS and XHTML (well, the JavaScript for the mouseovers is throwing an error, but besides that!).I've also redesigned and renamed the Japan journal, to Kore wa Tokyo ja nai desu ("this isn't Tokyo"). There's an explanation behind it, which I've since posted. It's about time I updated this layout and name, since the previous name, "Nihon ni iku tsumori," means, "I intend to go to Japan."
In the time since I last updated, I went to India for 2 weeks, caught pinkeye, hosted my family for 2 weeks in my super-tiny apartment, went to Osaka (the veggie food was nice, at least) and Kyoto (♥! Crappy veggie food situation, but amazing city), attended our mandatory mid-year conference, decided that same weekend that I would extend my JET contract for a second year, figured out how to successfully teach phonics to my elementary schoolers, booked a long weekend in Tokyo and started booking a trip to Australia for 2 months from now, and started going to an insane amount of rehearsals for the upcoming Tokushima AJET musical, an annual tradition which will be performed in March. This year is Peter Pan; I'm playing the Anime Otaku Lost Kid, and am one of the graphic/publicity designers.
And...that's all for now. More to come, hopefully soon! Thank you for visiting.
Monday, November 14, 2005
5:20 AM
Long time no see! I hadn't updated the blurb on this page since June, but it's not for lack of trying. I've been living and working in Japan as part of the JET Programme since late July, and due to a variety of factors, laziness being the big one, I only got internet set up several weeks ago. I've made a few site updates, mainly to fanlistings and my profile, but I have a lot more I'd like to make (particularly to PoDW, but sitewide, to keep myself fresh), but the one site I do update regularly is Nihon ni iku tsumori (I need to change that title, haha).To be honest, now that I'm working from a laptop and living in an apartment that doesn't allow for a traditional desk setup, it's much, much more difficult to motivate myself to make regular/major updates. I definitely have a lot of ideas for the site, the biggest being getting everything to actually be standards-compliant and semantically coded; there's a difference between no W3C errors and being truly standards-compliant. (This site incorporates tables when it would be a lot better to use CSS, for example!) After graduating and before coming to Japan, I worked as a web designer, and at the very least, it taught me that much of what I knew about web publishing was incorrect/incomplete, but it also taught me how to make it right. It'll take a lot of time, but I want to implement those standards across my entire site.
Anyway...thank you for reading this. I'm just checking in to say that I'm still around, and I'm doing my best to keep on top of all of this, so please don't give up on me!
Saturday, June 04, 2005
9:44 PM
There've been a couple of fanlisting updates I didn't get around to mentioning here--and I redesigned Nihon ni iku tsumori, my JET Program blog. And I don't know if I ever mentioned it here, but I've been updating the Dark Water site on a weekly basis, as I rotate low-res copies of the episodes, as well as the standard updates.Saturday, April 30, 2005
4:08 PM
Two new fanlistings in a month? Dang. ;o) A FL for Sting's "Shape of my Heart" is now up.Sunday, April 17, 2005
6:57 PM
There've been some fanlisting updates today and yesterday (including the launch of a new one).I also found out about a week after the last update that I've been accepted to the JET Program! I leave in July to teach English in Japan for a year! As a result, I've started a journal to cover my experiences with JET, from the application process through the preparations and my actual experiences in Japan.
I'll be spending the rest of this week working, running around town finishing up my Reply Form for the JET Program, and packing for Celebration this coming weekend! This week's going to be awesome.
Saturday, March 19, 2005
10:10 PM
There have been a few fanlisting updates (I update once a month) that I haven't mentioned here. I also updated some main-page info and added a few links, and updated Kokoro--it's an incomplete update, though. I hope to add more soon, but since I spend 40 hours a week in a cubicle doing web design (I am now a CSS goddess--fear my mad CSS skills!), it's hard to spend a lot of time on the computer when I'm off work these days.Oh--and since I probably won't update again till after it passes at this rate, I'll be attending Star Wars Celebration in Indianapolis in mid-to-late April. Let me know if you'll be there--I'd love to say hi and talk for a bit. :o)
Saturday, January 29, 2005
4:35 PM
I updated the layout of the weblog a couple of weeks ago--or downgraded it, rather, as an experiment-in-progress of letting text and type dictate the layout instead of images. I also (finally!) revamped the "about me" section--I really never know what to put in there, so the content may be changing.On a personal note--I have a job now! And I've made it to the interview stage for the JET Program application process. Wish me luck!
Friday, December 31, 2004
3:00 PM
Happy New Year, Europe and everything east of there. ;o) (It's 6:00 PM EST/GMT-5 right now.) Design archive has been revamped. The pop-up's been touched up, and there are a bunch of new entries, and the individual pages have been redone. Take a look.Tuesday, December 28, 2004
7:40 PM
There've been a few updates over the past few weeks that I didn't mention here--mainly fanlisting and "about me" updates. The navigation imagemap also changed a little; the active and retired site links have been combined as "sites," "site" was renamed to "domain" to avoid confusion, "andorus" was renamed to "webmistress" to avoid redundancy, and there's a new link: "portfolio," a link to my professional portfolio.And I'm officially an alum! I graduated from Georgia Tech with a BS in Science, Technology, and Culture and a minor in Japanese a couple of weeks ago. It feels good to be out, but I wish I'd spaced my final semester out so that I had more time to look for a job during school. I'm looking now, but I also have a lot of free time, so I've been doing a lot of site-related work lately.
My major "project" now is to update everything I've been meaning to update for a while--get the design archive as up-to-date as I can, convert the site over to standards-compliant HTML and CSS, and so on. Anyway, that's where things stand right now.
Monday, November 15, 2004
5:22 PM
Fanlisting update.It's crunch time...but one of the final projects I'm working on is a professional portfolio. As in, not professional-but-still-fun, which is what Kokoro is trying to be, but an actual serious one. Once I complete that (which'll probably involve purchasing a 3rd domain just for it), I'll probably redo Kokoro again and aim for a lighter but still sophisticated approach.
Less than 4 weeks till graduation, and I'm still scrambling to find a job...wish me luck, because I'm really, really going to need it!
Monday, November 01, 2004
7:44 PM
piratesofdarkwater.net was down all day, but it's back up now. It was some error on my host's side. Sorry for the inconvenience!Sunday, October 17, 2004
6:56 PM
Updated Kokoro with some new content from my design classes and with a prune of some mediocre work--it'll be a little less informal from now on, since I need to give prospective employers something to look over. I've also done a couple of fanlisting updates that I forgot to mention here, and I finally took down the retired Sailormoon Drinking Game, because that was honestly an embarrassment to still have up.That's about it, though...I've been really busy with my courseload this semester, to the point that I honestly haven't had the time to begin my job search until the past couple of weeks. Just 55 days until I graduate...how intimidating, to think that after spending over 5 years at Georgia Tech, it's coming to an end so quickly.
Tuesday, September 07, 2004
10:14 PM
piratesofdarkwater.net is now active, and is the new home of Andorus's Pirates of Dark Water Page.Tuesday, August 31, 2004
7:17 PM
The domain's successfully propagated, and to celebrate a new host (and my 23rd birthday, which was Sunday), we have a new main-page layout. There were problems for a couple of days, but the subdomains and e-mail addresses are all working, and the forums are back up as well. In other news, I'm going to be a panelist at Dragon*Con this weekend--look for me on the Classic Cartoons and Women in Animation panels (on the Anime/Animation track) on Saturday afternoon in the Vinings room. :o)Tuesday, July 27, 2004
11:47 AM
There was a fanlisting update a couple of days back that I forgot to mention on the main page...oops. In other news, "-ings" is gone, and I'd like to finally introduce Kokoro, my new semi-portfolio that's taking its place. Enjoy!Summer term's out, and I'll most likely be back on campus for the fall, so I hope there'll be more updates then. There's always a lot I want to do with this entire domain, and there just never seems to be enough time. In the meantime, though, listen to me on the radio! I'll be doing classical music from 6-9 AM (Eastern) on Tuesday mornings (Wednesday this week, though) at WREK Atlanta, 91.1 FM, Georgia Tech's campus radio station. You can listen to a live stream or archives from the past week.