Jared W. Smith

I hope everyone had an enjoyable holiday weekend. I know I did; it was nice to relax but also get out a lot and meet up with people I haven’t seen in a while. Family time is also a big win, too.

So this is it — four more classes and my final “regular season” as an undergraduate is over. Then we move on to the exam period, and then to the Carolina First Arena for commencement, bringing to a close a six-year journey of epic proportions. Then, I look forward to a two-week hibernation in which I will do as little as possible — something I rarely get a chance to do. And in 2009, well — January 1 will be the first day of the rest of my life, as they say. I’m really looking forward to the free time I’ll have — free time I’ve never had before, ever! I’m super-excited, in case you couldn’t tell.

However, I can’t look that far ahead — got to plow through the next few weeks first. I’m hoping to resume a regular blogging and broadcasting — yes, broadcasting, Serious Business is on its way back — schedule shortly after my exams conclude in two weeks.

Admittedly, this is a cop-out blog post. I have some real meat about the merits of Internet anonymity, some thoughts on how I’ve used social media to become smarter, and a whole lot more stuff that I’m sure is deep in the recesses of my brain that are being reserved for the post-crunch period. Stay tuned…

No, this is not an April Fool joke, folks, this is for real. Welcome to the new JaredWSmith.com. :)

In the course of two days I have managed to code and draw up a brand new look for the entire site. I’m pretty pleased with this look. There’s still work to be done, and that work will continue, albeit at a bit of a slower pace. However, a full bio, full information about me, and all that fun stuff will be here in short order. As time goes on, too, more features will be rolled out that take advantage of the new interface. Go ahead, roll over the menu near the top; you’ll like it, especially if you use Firefox and IE 7. You’ll see a lush dropshadow with subtle transparencies…mmm, nice. This is definitely more graphically oriented than I have done in the recent past.

I’m using WordPress as the CMS now. It didn’t make sense to have one set of static pages at one subdomain and the blog at the other, so I combined the two. If you have bookmarks, links, etc., that go to blog.jaredwsmith.com, don’t worry — those will all still work. www.jaredwsmith.com is mirroring blog.jaredwsmith.com’s contents now. While blog.jaredwsmith.com will still function for things like RSS feeds and permalinks, I strongly, STRONGLY suggest updating your bookmarks to use www.jaredwsmith.com, as that’s where all the stuff is now going.

Drop your feedback in comments. I hope you all like the new look — and please be patient. I’m continuing to add more stuff and make fixes and the like. :)

J