Where I Stand

So, given my little blog hiatus, I’ve been sitting on this post for a few months. Right at the beginning of September, frequent reader/commenter Vince decided to compile some data on my blog (which you usually have to pay statisticians for) and emailed me the results along with a handy graph to illustrate this. Here is what he had to say (my commentary is in red):

Hey SG,

I was bored today (clearly grad school is treating you well), so I decided to compile a chart of how much you have blogged month to month over the first 20 months of “Where I Stand” (I was inspired to do this when I checked your blog for new posts, saw that there were none, and noticed the “In The Past…” section on the side).  Here is the chart, and some things I have noticed: (alrighty — this will hopefully answer some questions I’ve always been too lazy to ask)

Some data (click to supersize!)

• Orange represents months in school where finals are not being written.
• Green represents months where final exams are being written.
• Blue represents summer months.
• Generally speaking, there is more bloggin’ during the school year (orange months) than during exams or the summer (by and large, Where I Stand is a platform for wasting time at school so this makes perfect sense).
• January 2010 had many more posts than January 2011, which may be due to the phenomenon that I like to call “new blog enthusiasm” as that was your first month of blogging (yeah, and I had a lot of ideas building up that needed to come to the surface).
• In exam months you always write half-minus-one posts as the month preceding.  (Ex. March 2010 = 20 posts, April 2010 = (20/2) – 1 = 9 posts).  I find this amazingly consistent (WTF?!? I’d like to claim that this was intentional …).
• Blogging generally drops over the summer months, then picks right up in a hurry once school starts (this can be attributed to my personal quest not to misuse company resources for blogging purposes coupled with my distaste for computers after working all day on one).
• March 2010 had many more entries than March 2011, likely due to enthusiasm over the debut of the “In Other News” feature in 2010 (yup, and then I discovered Twitter as another platform for small musings).
• May 2011 does not exactly agree with the declining trend for summer months since it is lower than June 2011, but I did notice that May 2010 saw the launch of “Blogging at Work”, while “Office Follies” was not launched until June in 2011 (the source of most of my content for work blogging was partly my partner in crime, Greg who started at the same time as me in 2010 but his arrival was delayed until June in 2011).
• “Song of the Week” continued through the entire summer in 2010, but only made it until the end of May in 2011, which also explains some of the difference between the month to month blog totals for the summers of 2010 and 2011 (I empathize with TV writers taking a summer break — it’s tough to keep the content interesting every week and also there aren’t many albums released in the summer).

I hope this answers any questions you had in the back of your mind about your blogging habits.  There are a few other trends that I am working on, but more data is required (I’m pretty sure you should apply for a research grant to continue this study).

Vince

P.S. Remember that a scientist told you this (thanks for putting this in his head, Greg).

So now three years in a row I’ve posted about the Canadian University Press national conference, and I really don’t have a whole lot to say about this one that is so different from previous installations. The conference had spectacular speakers and it was all wrapped up in good times with some great people and perhaps a little too much to drink, but such is CUP conferences.

Then on the last day, this happened

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2012/01/15/nb-bc-virus-outbreak.html

For the record, I didn’t get it but as of CUP’s last official statement, about 75 did.

But still, good time. No complaints. I mean, no one could have seen this coming, right?

3D movies piss me off. They were really cool at first, but then after a while, just got really annoying. You pay more for them, wear uncomfortable glasses, get a headache, and honestly they don’t really enhance the viewing experience much. And I was really hoping it was just a trend that would die off quickly, but sadly it looks like they’re here to stay for a little while. While I may not be crazy about 3D movies, I suppose I can at least tolerate them. Particularly when it is the realm of animation and stuff where, being such a fictitious environment, some unnecessary special effects can be sort of warranted, but I don’t think they have much place in say, classic live-action dramas. This leads me to the point where I think the line needs to be drawn.

Last weekend while watching the trailers for Tintin, a couple massive 3D faux-pas came to light. The two movies that were advertised, much to my disgust, were Titanic 3D and Star Wars Episode I 3D.

SERIOUSLY?

One is a classic drama that has absolutely no business adding another dimension (other than to pad James Cameron’s wallet) and the other was just a terrible movie. Either way, the whole thought that movies are now all going to be remastered in 3D is a really scary reality that I frankly refuse to participate in. I mean really, have we collectively run out of ideas that we need to just start re-using old ones and making them worse?!? The sad part is, I really don’t know what to do about it. Sure, I can boycott these re-releases, but there will still be a plethora of new movies out there that I’ll have no choice but to see in 3D if I want the experience of seeing it in theatres. I’m not about to wait for the DVD (er or Blu-Ray) releases of all of them and I really don’t want to descend to the point where I start torrenting all the movies that are still playing in theatres (not to mention the biggest screen I have access to is 55″ — which is awesome, but not a theatre). I suppose I’ll just have to grumble through an era of useless 3D movies until it hopefully comes to pass and we can once again get in touch with the medium of cinema as we know and love it. But please, to all the financially hungry film makers out there (because I’m sure they ALL read this), can we leave the third dimension for live theatre where it’s supposed to be?

Hello internet friends*,

Guess what,  Where I Stand is BACK!

Yeah OK, I know, it’s been a very long hiatus for this. A lot was going on in the past few months — I had a photo editor job at The Griff, and then it was destroying my life so I got rid of it and put myself in to an eternal state of “catch-up” for the latter half of the semester. And then by the time I could actually bring back the blog, I figured that a new year would be a good time for it. So here we are, January 2012, and the much anticipated return of everyone’s favourite internet nonsense. On that note, I’ve been thinking — why not open this up a bit. If you have an idea for a regular column on here, please let me know and we can make that happen. The format is … er um basically just crazy opinions that people dream up and want the world to know about it. So if you want to take a stand on something (on a weekly or semi-weekly basis), please get writing!

Now, down to business.

Today is the last first day of class I ever will have (OK technically it was yesterday, but I had one class, it was an elective, and I’m dropping it so it doesn’t count). This is of course assuming that I’m not going to go to grad school or any other programs, which I might, but not anytime soon. So, for the foreseeable future, this is the last first.

Being a student is a strange bubble. Since I was five years old, I’ve always had a first day of school to look forward to, a summer period, which was first for fun, then became time for working, and then with decent summer income became time for even more fun, and then the cycle would repeat the following year. Everything was naturally measured against the academic timeline and imagining a time when that is no longer the case is rather frightening. One year from now I have no idea what I’ll be doing or where I’ll be doing it. I’m consciously trying not to get tied down to a job here to hopefully leave the figurative door open to some sort of wild and crazy (and profitable) adventure. And if that’s the case, there’s a very good chance I’ll fall flat on my face, have to dust myself off, and start all over again — but I think, for me anyway, that’s the best way to go. One place for too long is enough to make anyone stir crazy.

At the risk of this becoming one of my typical rambling blog posts where the discussion just dissolves in to nothingness, I’m going to end this here. So cheers everyone, to the exciting and terrifying, last first.

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*One time I received a spam email that began with “Dear internet friend,” a phrase which I have forever thought was hilarious