My first foray into career exploration was looking into becoming a chef.  I enjoyed cooking and baking although I was admitedly not the worlds greatest master.  My thought was simple, go to school and gain a great skill to cook.  Seemed simple enough even though I will still simply exploring.  After interviewing with the Culinary Institute I was rejected because I didn’t know if I wanted to be a chef or not but I did know I wanted the training.

Moving ahead, I have recently taken up photography.  Personally, I enjoy it as it is a way to be a creative outlet.  Once again I wanted to try for some education in order to potentially get to a professional level.  The city has an art institute which has an excellent digital photography school.  Today to fill the time I called them up to arrange a tour.  The gentlemen was very polite and once again I was told that unless I really want to go full time into professional photography then the program wasn’t right.

During the conversation the term accreditation came up several times meaning all prereqs were required.  My question is simply at what point did education become so elitist?  Instead of allowing people to take classes to learn and expand it is required that you become a professional in the field.  It is quite sad that you cannot take classes just because you enjoy it.  Thank goodness we have community college who enjoy teaching not reputation.

For today’s image I have included a very interesting look at a chess piece.  One of the things I most love about photography is its limitless ability to make us see the same world we always in totally new ways.  From taking it all in from a landscape to focusing to a single object it is amazing how one point in time can mean so much.

So for this little experiment I am going to attempt to simply post something each day.  The goal is for each post to be something substantial which means at least a few times you will see a post that consists of “This is my post”.  A for effort though.  The main theme of these posts will be a look into a month off for a workaholic like myself.

Now a week into my sabbatical and I have totally stopped being able to tell what day of the week it is.  This time lapse is probably due to the fact for 8 days every day is completely open.  Below is a picture that was taken at an bird sanctuary which has apparently reclassified donkeys as flying creatures.  Getting creative I took a wide angle show up close getting a fun big nose shot.

During the blogging revolution one software seems to have emerged triumphant for its ease of use and flexibility.  In fact this site even uses it.  The system is Wordpress the blog diety of millions of sites.  Now many have used this software and lament its god-like power.  Thanks to its popularity countless scores of themes and plugins exist for it.

Unfortunately, despite its incredible versitility often times people do not use this.  All over you can see the default theme provided by wordpress.  For people who are not tech savy this is an understandable thing to do.  Why would you put up a different theme if you just want to tell your friends what you are doing on a daily basis?  It really would be too much effort.  However, my pet peeve is when the blog that is giving long winded reviews and discussion topics in technology has this same look.  There is a quote: “Never trust a skinny chef”.  I posit that perhaps the same holds true for a tech guru who does not take the time to simply personalize his or her blog.  This apathy indicates either they are too lazy, which makes me wonder how much research they would put into an article they write, or they do not know how which would make me wonder how they could understand any technology.

So, in conclusion I say comon guys take the 15 minutes and install a nice theme so we are not looking at a default site asking ourselves “Why the hell am I listening to this guy?”.

So when your company offers you to go to an affiliate summit in Santa Barbara, CA your only choice is to say “let me get some less sweaty clothes”. For fun I will be sending in short blog posts through email via iphone or maybe straight browser. Will have to see what the iphone divinity has the capabillity of. All hail the iPhone.

Alas, with trial and error I cannot seem to get the wordpress email posting working with pictures which is very unfortunate.  So just assume I am having a great time.

I come today with the first small step in my war against giving up.  It is the Google Hottrend Aggregator (echo and reverb effects added here). A few months ago the almighty Google created a site with the current hot trends from their searching.  It shows all of the things people are searching most for.  As far as I can tell often it is based on a sudden spike to an otherwise normally dormant search term.  For sheer interest I have completed an aggregator with every day’s terms all in one spot allowing searching to see where the term appears as well as links to the specific Google trend page for all of the nity grity details.  It is totally free and at least interesting to see what weird things people are currently searching for.