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Notice: I have neither posted nor updated any content on this blog since the mid 2010's. (😱) Please check out the homepage and my bio, for more recent things. Below is the original content of this post:

Okay! I think I've just about cemented my claim as a New Media Douchebag by virtue of the ridiculous domain name I acquired for this site:

miketigas.com
↓
mike.tig.as

I've heard that in this day and age, "your name is your personal brand." I'm glad to say that I've successfully taken it to THE EXTREME. (Note: all caps means SERIOUS BUSINESS.)

Ahem. Apparently extreme coffee intake has a direct effect on my usually-latent ego? No, that can't be it. The domain name and phone number have been in the works for months now. Oh, I'm an iPhone and MacBook Pro owner now — yes, for the first time in my life, I own an Apple product that isn't just a music player — maybe that's added a bit to my smugness.

Related to the ego front

Spokesman.com — the Web site of the Spokesman-Review and the Web site I've been working for over the past 15 months — is a finalist in the General Excellence (Medium site) category of the Online News Association's Online Journalism Awards.

For a newsroom of our size, I am thrilled by the amount of multimedia we produce each week (and it shows and looks great on our site). More than anything, the people who create all of our awesome content deserve the shout-out.

Now, moving on in somewhat-less-narcissistic fashion… (Warning: cliché, "this is what I'm up to" personal blog post coming your way.)

School outlook

I have a 9am class this semester. I'm not a morning person; hell, I normally started work at 10am all summer (with the trade-off of staying long after 6). Previous semesters have seen me falter under start times as late as 11am.

Last semester I visited a counselor a few times because I couldn't tell if I was depressed or what—for a pretty long stretch, I was entirely disinterested in school, work, and socializing. (If you interacted with me at the time, you may or may have noticed just a bit of reclusiveness. Just a bit.) And I think it basically boiled down to a lack that rewarding feeling from anything I was doing at the time. It was a matter of me being disenchanted and not being able to suck it up and go anyway. Missed a lot of class, let a whole bunch of things slip by. I done fucked up, to put it lightly.

But back to today: It's going to be good semester. Yes, even with the 9am. No, really. It's going to be different this time.

My class schedule is essentially anchored by that 9am — an inter-division iPhone development class with CS/IT and J-school students. You really can't convince me that the concept isn't right up my alley.

Similarly, my capstone class wraps up most of my school days; and that's another long-term, team-based project class. I've convinced my team to do a Django-based app that does things with Census data and various datasets from Data.gov. That is going to be fun — and a lot more interesting than most of the standard-issue class projects out there.

If anything else, I have one goal that I think (or rather, hope) will get me through: the sheer idea of graduating and actually being done with it. Mathematically, I'm going to barely get by as it is — dragging my feet through these final two semesters will definitely result in failure.

I've got a good feeling about this. I've got a lot of momentum going into week three. And hell, as a superstitious baseball fan, I believe in momentum.

Coming soon

I'm writing some brief tutorials on Git (and using it with GitHub) for my capstone team (some of them have used it, some of them haven't), chances are I'll actually get around to finishing and posting that. And hell, I might tease some things I've been working on recently. We'll see.

Now, excuse me while I put my ego away.