For those of you who are unaware (that would be the majority of you), my hard drive gave up the ghost Friday morning. It just came back to me this morning.

The good news is, I managed to back up the most important things that hadn’t been recently backed up as the drive was in its death throes. The bad news is that it never occurred to me to back up my application data. Fortunately, we had backed that up in December when the laptop popped a resistor, so reconstructing Firefox has not been nearly as painful as it could have been.

Reconstructing my music collection, on the other hand…well…let’s just say we discovered that the folder containing one of my favorite artists hasn’t existed in a while. I was planning to re-rip both CDs anyway. Now I have an excuse.

I’m also in a losing battle with an allergic reaction, so this whole experience has been quite fun. I’ve decided for now to take a couple of days to make sure everything is up and running, and to allow myself time to adjust to my new OS. I am happy to say I am braving the wilds of Ubuntu! (Thankfully, I have a very patient roommate who tolerates my silly questions.)

The blogs will return next week. I’ll try to blog a little extra to make up for losing this week.

Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 11:18 PM EDT

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Rosa Say has tagged me with a meme. Now I typically keep my memes to my personal web spaces, but it took all of a heart beat to realize I could make this one work over here.

What I’m supposed to do is come up with a song that makes my heart sing. Something that lifts me up.

Well, I can’t function without music, so this was almost going to be harder than it looked, right up until I thought about the past month or so. See, the last half of May didn’t go so well for me. There was a lot going on, some of it good, some of it really rotten. Once I shook the rotten bits away, it was June, and all I really wanted to do was sit here and stare out my window at the remnants of the Pacific Northwest spring.

But my to-do list was getting longer and longer because I just couldn’t find my motivation. It was becoming a bad situation.
The night I snapped in May, the night I realized I couldn’t handle things anymore, I came home from work with the intention of finding one song to perk up my mood. Paint the Town Tonight is just a fun, upbeat song that I love singing along to, and I knew if anything could shake me out of my funk, it was that song. But I wanted to settle a bit after work, so I wandered around the web dealing with emails, my aggregator, and some of my personal web spaces.

It turned out that the Eric Stuart Band, the group behind Paint the Town Tonight, had earlier that day announced the release date for their next CD and had a track from it on MySpace. It’s a sad song, but a fairly good one. I think I ended up listening to it a few times before I finally sent Eric Stuart a note thanking him for brightening my awful day, and then went and listened to Paint the Town Tonight.

Oddly enough, when I just need to sit down and get work done, I listen to Eric’s music because I find a lot of it uplifting, well written, and it just keeps me running. In fact, the night before I snapped, I’d spent four solid hours listening to Eric while working on a rather challenging freelance editing project. When coworkers asked me the next day how I managed not to be a zombie after that, I replied honestly: “Chai and Eric Stuart on repeat.”

It’s good music, and more often than not, it makes my spirit sing.

Now I’m supposed to tag people, but not many people who read this blog leave comments, so I don’t know who to tag. If you read this, then please consider yourself tagged!

Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 8:07 AM EDT

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Lorelle on WordPress has issued her newest blogging challenge: talk about who you read, where you get information from. For me, this is a difficult question. I have a number of topics I want to stay read up on for myself and for my blogs.

For example, I read up on career issues. Finding your passion, changing jobs with a thought toward your passion, writing resumes, developing skills, leadership and management. I like blogs like Occupational Adventure, Talking Story, and the Monster blogs.

I also like to read tutorials for web design and Photoshop because occasionally I find time to work them back into my schedule. That causes blogs like the Sitepoint blogs, A List Apart, and mezzoblue to appear in my aggregator.

Despite the fact I am a teacher now, my passion is creating informal education experiences. I’d love to break into educational media and working on educational games. While I’m exploring the necessary skills for myself, I’m also trying to keep my ear to the ground for information on e-learning, information architecture, and just trying to keep an eye on what’s going on. Some of my favorite blogs to follow include Boxes and Arrows, elearnspace, and Stephen Downes.
Finally, what fun would stressing over my own writing and editing work be without following people who do it on a much larger scale than I do. My favorite blog from the publishing world is the recently retired Miss Snark, but I think I’d be lost without Lit Soup, Practicing Writing, and Copyblogger.

I do also follow a number of feeds that reflect my recreational habits, too. Some of the more fun ones include Girls Read Comics, WWdN in Exile, and She’s Such a Geek.

Of course, then there’s my favorite pair of feeds: Lifehacker and Wired.

This is quite possibly the most link-heavy post I’ve ever written, and that includes back when I was doing weekly link dumps.

Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 8:24 AM EDT

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You may have noticed that I’m a huge fan of to-do lists. Now that I can run Todoist through my iGoogle page, I’m even happier.

I maintain a large number of my to-do lists and their sublists through Todoist these days, each one with nice, neat names to clearly identify what project they organize. But I still run my daily list on my whiteboard because it’s helpful to just have everything in front of me.

The whiteboard list has a bit more flavor than my computerized lists. It started off as just “To-do list”. Then, it became “The deal with (date)”. Over the weekend, it ran around under the title “Today I think I’ll…”. Right now, it’s called “Plan of Attack” in the hopes it will finally motivate me to do what I’ve been putting off all weekend.

Naming the constantly visible to-do list differently does a number of things for my mind. It lets me know what mood I started the day with. It tells me whether or not I feel the list is light or ambitious. Because I often write the list right before I fall asleep the night before or right after I wake up that morning, it often amuses me once I wake up and see the product of my half-asleep state.

In some cases, the name of the list is a total motivator. Other times, it just makes me feel better that I can’t locate my motivation. It’s just one more way to have fun overorganizing my life!

Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 11:39 AM EDT

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If you’ve been following this site for the past couple of months, you know that I’ve been trying to take a good, har dlook at myself and then try to pull my life into alignment with who I am.

I don’t know if I’m any closer to figuring out who I am at my core and what I bring to any table, but I am learning that some of my interests and focal points have changed. As a result, you’re probably going to notice the Niches struggling through a bit of a shift as each one gets refocused to match what I’m finding out about my own interests. This may show up as intermittent blogging, or a change in topics, or both.

If you see a Niche being unusually quiet, it’s likely going through some sort of growing pain related to all of my work the past couple of months (except JewelryNiche, which is going to move away and resume at some point).

Thank you for your patience and your support as I work through this.

Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 2:49 PM EDT

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