April 2011

It seems like every few years someone I know dies. It started with my grandmother and ever since her death I’ve lost friends, teachers, and family members every few years. This week a friend from high school, Diedre Banovich died in a housefire. I’ve been really shook up the last few days and have gravitated toward people who knew her and reconnected with some that I haven’t really spoken to a lot lately.

It sucks that when you grow up you also grow apart from people who you were close to when you were younger. People I consider brothers I barely talk to anymore, but this week I have been trying to talk to them on XBox and on the phone due to this. Bob asked me if thought this was the Collier Curse or if this is something everyone our age goes through, losing good people in your life and eventually it stops for a while. For those who don’t know the Collier Curse is something that Collier High School students claim happens when kids leave the school. I have to admit thatsome weird and awful stuff has happened to a lot of us, though we seem to grow together and be a family years after we graduate high school, which I think is unique for a school of any kind to do. Maybe it is the universe’s way of telling us that no matter what this will be a part of your life and make up who you are, or maybe it is all just a huge coincidence. Either way I just know that it sucks and that these bad things shouldn’t be happening to such good people.

As I mentioned in my last post, I have been going through and trying to make my site more SEO friendly. I will be the first to admit that when I started this site years ago, I had no idea what SEO was and I just built it with bad SEO on top of bad SEO. Now I am going through, trying to change things and better optimize things for search engines. It’s a pain though since I have to go through each section and try and come up with unique content for things like the the gallery images and whatnot. I think I am getting a good handle on things though, it is just going to take a while to redo a lot of these pages and sections.

SEO isn’t the only thing I am working on though, I have a big marketing strategy for the fanlistings that I did last year, so hopefully the strategy pays off again, if it does as well this time then I will continue the strategy on a more consistent basis. I am actually not expecting things to be AS good since I am tweaking it a bit, but if it does even half as well, then I am definitely going to continue it.

I am also looking at a spider work its way through the site to create a sitemap for me. Last night it stalled when I tried to stop it, but today if I just let it go by itself I think it will be fine, it just might take a few more hours to complete.

So I know I have been talking about work, a lot, but since I have had a bit of a break today as far as what needs to be completed goes, I decided to just work on a few clients and while I was waiting on them to get back to me, I would work on my site. It’s not going to be this easy the rest of the week though, tomorrow I am heading into the city to hopefully be up with phase one of this big project that has been on and off since September.

So I finished that big project a while ago, but I have been swamped with other things. I have three major clients in the city, all working in the same office, but divided up into separate companies. The big project was for one of them, but the other two have keeping me busy since September. On top of being an independent contractor for them, I also have other clients, including one from last year who I went to Tech Crunch Disrupt to represent, a Local site, working on a site for a friend’s client, and a client in England. To say the least, I am very busy. I am basically working seven days a week, trying to get as much done as I can. I have another big project that I am undertaking at the moment and I should be finishing it up soon, it shouldn’t be too difficult, just minor cosmetic things at this stage since all the development is basically done.

This Friday I head off for vacation though, Kris has the whole day off so we are heading out really early. It’s going to be the first time in a few months I take a weekend off, let alone a three day weekend, so hopefully I can be well rested during it.

In other news, I bought a new laptop and iPod. I would have posted pictures, maybe next post, since I didn’t take any yet. On top of the new laptop and iPod, our room is kind of more of a mess than usual since we bought an armoire that is bigger than the dresser we used to have and we are trying to sort everything still. My favorite new toy is my laptop, naturally. My iPod is a pain because I need to convert a lot of my music from Flac to be able to be used on it. My laptop is a beast, 6 gigs of RAM and the Beats Audio. It just sucks that the most I have used it is for work when I am in the city. I am thinking about booting up some Halo 2 on it though, I do miss that game and I imagine that the laptop could handle it well, plus I am curious to see how many people play it on PC.

Yes I know I am behind on comments and I haven’t updated my site in a while. Well actually that isn’t true, you will notice that I have added a jquery featured slider to the home page, and on some of the pages I have been trying to add in some better meta tags for SEO purposes, as well as other things to improve the SEO of the site. So far I have seen a bit of an improvement, but I just did a few sections and it improved, once I can get the rest of the site optimized, I imagine I will have a lot more traffic.

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I am just going to come out with it, up until Smallville, live action Superman films and television shows were boring. Even Superman Returns that came out a few years ago, directed by the very talented Bryan Singer, was very boring, maybe even more so than Superman 2. I don’t necessarily believe that is any one person’s fault, I blame the way it is handled. Smallville did something that to my knowledge has never been done before, it’s taken Clark Kent and made him interesting. Coming up on the last five episodes of the series you can go through the last ten years and see the journey he has faced, from being one of his only kind on earth, to being a hero only because he can do things others can’t, to finally accepting his fate and fully embracing it.

A lot of people are complaining that Clark should be wearing the suit already and stop being the Blur and embrace Superman already, but that character Clark is still turning into. Once Clark embraces being Superman and fully making Clark Kent the disguise, then it is no longer the story of Clark, it is the story of Superman, and once it is that story then the story of Clark completely changes. Once Superman is born, the story of Clark Kent in Smallville ends. He no longer is a guy who goes out saving people because he can, he becomes a super hero who disguises himself as Clark because he has to, and we’ve seen that story five times in movies before and every time the scenes with Clark are boring.

Think about the Burton and Schumacher Batman movies, in those movies I know personally I couldn’t wait for Batman to come on screen and for Bruce to hide his face, because in those movies Batman was the focus and Bruce was the secret identity that we had no interest in seeing because like Clark he is a disguise and not who the character really is. I think Nolan’s Batman movies really embrace the idea that, like in Smallville, the hero and the person are really the same person, at least to those closest to him.

For those of you who don’t know, Nolan is producer on a new Superman movie starring Hendry Cavill, Amy Adams, Diane Lane, and Kevin Costner, Zack Snyder is directing the movie and has given big praise to Smallville recently. He says his story will be more focused on Clark becoming Superman, so hopefully they will do what was done with Batman and hopefully it will at least not make me want to fast forward through all of the Clark Kent scenes. Either way, my one main hope for this movie is that it has more action in it than an episode of Smallville and that it is not boring in the least.