MatthewMeyer.net

At last! Here are the paintings I did for my senior thesis. I present to you:

Chickens Throughout History (…history, history, history…)

I’ve suddenly come across a slight roadblock in my efforts to finish up this semester: Stronghold came out yesterday. I bought it immediately after I got out of work, and alternated between my thesis and playing every so often. It’s a very fun game, much more complex than the original. I was really getting antsy for a new video game, so I’m glad to finally have one worth buying.

Oh yea, and you may notice that I’m playing around more with the site layout. What do you think?

So today I had my thesis presentation. I don’t know what the hell was wrong with my, but I forgot to dress up for the presentation. Worse, I forgot to spit my gum out during my presentation. Oy! How stupid can I be? Well, that’s that and despite those blunders I think I did a good job. My classmates didn’t seem to mind my foolishness (I can’t believe how rude it was of me though… I felt awful afterwards). Thank goodness for that.

I thought the stress would melt away after my presentation, but if anything it’s intensified tenfold! My next step is to trim my paintings to fit my frames (and I already messed up on one of them). After that I need to paint the edges and frame them, write an artist statement, shoot some slides of the pieces, and write up a category page for the school’s records. I also have about 6 book reviews to write, and a term paper on China/Taiwan relations due pretty soon. Aside from my schoolwork, I have to burn some DVD’s for a friend, create a few different portfolios for different types of clients, visit some of the campus recruiters (now that I supposedly have the time), and begin working on a professional website… all of this before I graduate and start the job hunt! It’s quite a feat to accomplish. So much for some R&R before “the real world” starts.

Thinking about getting a job stresses me out so much. Not so much fear of getting rejected at this point; for now it’s the fear that I am absolutely 100% unprepared to go job hunting. My portfolio needs serious fixing up, my website has no online portfolio, I have no self-promotional materials yet, no business card, and my body of work is not diverse enough for the different types of jobs I want to apply to. Once I solve all of those problems, then the fear of rejection can begin it’s toll… Oh how I wish that was the only thing plaguing me. I’ve also got a bad case of cynicism towards starting out with any new venture (of which there are plenty) because I was ripped off by three companies that I’ve done work for. And both of those were found through my school’s career services, so it’s not like they didn’t appear to be reliable sources. It really sucks to do a bunch of work only to have your employer run away without contacting you, without paying you, and very likely illegally using your work somewhere else. Grrr…

I also want to write letters to my host family and friends from Japan, and some serious Thank You letters to my relatives who helped pay for my education.

You can see that I tend to ramble more when I’m under stress.

I just want to get that stuff done so I’m in a good place when I get home for the summer. Then I can spend the summer looking for a job, working like crazy on broadening my portfolio, and playing D&D (for which I have been dying for a fix).

Whew! I finished my thesis today, and it’s due tomorrow. Woohoo! There are a few pieces that could use a little bit more work, but oh well; they’re good enough to be called done. When the paint dries, I’ll scan them and upload them.

Now I’ve got the rest of the year (2 weeks left) to frame my paintings, start work on a portfolio website, and create a better physical portfolio in preparation for the job hunt. I also need to finish up (read: start) my work that I haven’t done in my liberal arts classes.

Frances visits on Thursday as well, which will further hinder my work But it’s a well-deserved break, I think.

My senior thesis is due on Monday… O_O I’m quite stressed out right now. I’ll finish it, of course, but who could be not stressed on the last week, especially when there are so many other things I need to worry about: getting my car fixed before I drive back north, finding a job, finding a place to live, making a portfolio (both online and physical) and a professional webpage, graduation, and buying frames for my paintings (which is turning out to be even harder than I thought it would). Add to that I have a few final papers to write in my other classes. Oy.

You may have noticed I’m not posting very much right now either. Same reasons, and in addition to that, any free time I’ve had to spend on my webpage has been spent learning php and playing around with the stylesheet and layout of this blog. You’ll notice that the posts with “(more…)” are now expandible, so you don’t have to load a new page to read the rest. I’ve also been working on my archive and category templates; I’m not near done yet, but at least the Japan and Senior Trip pages are nicer looking now. There’s a lot of other things I’m working on, but time is the key right now.

I’ve also been adding more humor, as you may have noticed. I’ve still got around 200 more jokes to upload before the entire collection is back online… so it won’t happen any time soon. I’m trying to space them out. I’ve also been posting some into past dates, when I know the date that I actually uploaded the file.

Alright, that’s it for now. Wish me luck finishing up my chickens.

It’s finally complete! The matthewmeyer.net domain has repropagated and I am now the proud owner of it, which gives me much more control. As you can see, the new address of this blog is www.matthewmeyer.net (much easier to remember than the freeshell address).

So now I’m running WordPress, and I must say… WOW! This software is GREAT! It donkey-punches Movable Type in the nuts and then laughs at it!

I’m still exploring all the plugins available for WordPress, and I still need to redesign the stylesheet of this site (it probably won’t be the same as the MT blog), as well as re-form the Japan archive, Senior Trip archive, and then the Humor Archive… but everything on this site works and all the posts have been imported, so things are all “Go” from here.

In case you’re wondering where I’ve been for the past week, there was a problem with my Movable Type installation last month and it finally hit a climax last weekend… and it set up a huge fork and nearly took down the freeshell server I’m hosted on. ^_^” Woops…

It seems to be fixed now, but I haven’t been using my blog very much in the meantime. Besides the fork bomb, the reason for that is that I am moving to a different server and switching from Movable Type to WordPress. The site will be up and running very soon, but the transfer of matthewmeyer.net to the new server is taking a lot longer than I had expected (grr) and so I can’t finish setting up the new website.

But anyway, since it looks like MT is working again maybe I can post a few more updates before the whole site moves over.