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This summer for me has been the summer of total boredom. At the onset I thought that it would be really fun to not have a lot of obligations on my first college vacation, but I think I should have planned for a lot more. I learned that campus is not all that fun when practically all of the other students leave for the summer and I am one of like five kids that stayed behind. Playing solitaire gets pretty old very fast when you have absolutely nothing else to do with your time.

The only thing that I really did find to keep myself occupied was to just surf the web in search of some things that I find interesting or that might help me along in my career goals. What I was really led to were a series of blogs that were directed at various things. The two that were pertinent to my education were an actual education blog and a rehab blog. www.educationthoughts.com and drugaddictionthoughts were just a couple of sites that I had found which were all about various aspects of education and rehabilitation. I didn't really expect to learn a whole bunch of new stuff, but they really did give me little chunks of info to start me off in research studies of things I was interested in. I also looked at www.homeimprovementthoughts.com which is of course a home improvement blog. I have always dreamed of building my own house and I thought it was cool finding someone with the same sort of interest and the same sort of expertise on the topic.

Other than my dorky research of school related things, I didn't do anything this summer. Now I am literally counting down the hours until the semester begins next week and I am beginning to get really excited to get back on to some sort of an organized schedule since it has been so long. For now I think that I will go back to my daily ritual of sitting and flipping through the channels until I fall asleep for the night. I hope that everyone else's summer has been going a lot better than mine has.

Hey all! I hope that everyone out there is doing alright since I have not seen any of you since may when finals hit and I flew out of town. Since then my roommate and I have been spending some time here in Pittsburgh taking classes to get ready for the fall. We both have some family here so we just chose to sublet a place to pass the time and take a class each to get ahead of our education goals. We have also been playing lots of music while we're out here. I only brought my acoustic guitar and my pedals so I have been trying my best to make some interesting noise with my limited supplies. He brought his electric keyboard with him and we have been writing a good bit of music. When we get back in to town you will all have to come out and see us. Right now we haven't been recording much of it since we really only have a tape recorder and limited time and money to get in to a real studio. Instead we have been focusing much of that kind of energy towards writing and towards playing with street musicians we find around. There are a couple of places we have gone every week to play with a couple of guys who play guitar together all the time. It's been a really enriching experience in that way.

The real life saver for us out here in terms of just keeping us in our little apartment and out of trouble has been our computer. We if you have been lucky enough to get email from me this summer you have gotten a lot of them I bet. Both of us have gotten a job online doing some freelance writing for and independent advertisement firm and so a lot of our time is spent online. We always joke about having to pawn an instrument to keep our Pittsburgh internet access but it is true that this has been our primary tuition money, food money, and our spending money source all summer long. If you haven't gotten an email from us yet then please hit me up and we'll chat before I come back in September. I hope all is well out there wherever you all are.

Have you ever noticed that the bigger the company the bigger the promotional gifts that they offer? I have seen some pretty incredible promotional gifts from just donating money to organizations and companies. I have received in the mail, playing cards, calendars, blood pressure cuffs, magnifying glasses, umbrellas, and coffee mugs. Many of the items are very useful, which I really think is what they are counting on. For instance, many people ask questions about the umbrella that I use which I got from my insurance company. It is a gorgeous umbrella done in multi colors and it is one of those umbrellas that you can fit like 10 people under. I not only use this in the rain, but I also use it as a sun umbrella in the spring when I attend my kids ball games. It is a great item, that I am very thankful that I have. And to think I would have purchased insurance without the free gift. What madness! Anyway, I think that some companies just send you stuff to get donations. For instance it always seems that before Christmas some organization prints up and sends me some beautifully printed address labels and what better time of year to send these. Getting ready to mail out Christmas cards, going to write your address on each and every envelope and then like magic these labels appear. Well, then I want to use them, hate wasting them, and yet, I can't use them unless I send them a donation. It drives me crazy because I know that they sent them to me just so I would feel this way. After all, it is wasteful to throw them in the trash, and it is wrong to use them if I don't send them a donation, so there I go, sending them in the guilt check every year. I guess their method works though, because I send them money, and they never even really asked me for it.

Well, in my opinion promotional gifts are really neat, especially when they are handy little everyday items that I can use. They do help remind me and others about their company and I don't mind giving them some advertising, after all I did get the item for nothing, right?

A passel from last years crop of graduates from the Theatre Arts program at my school moved together out west, to California, over the summer. They room together there and most of them are trying to make it in the entertainment industry, in one way or another. I know that some of them are doing relatively well, others not so hot. I try to imagine the way their life is right now and it’s a bit hard to picture. The ones who are doing well are taking classes, working hard and long hours on film production crews to get a little experience and get their name and face out there in the film industry in the hopes that maybe they’ll hear about film auditions and not have to turn out for giant cattle casting calls. The ones who are not doing so well...who really knows? At least it’s warm.

All I can say is, I am glad I am no longer trying to be an actor. I really wanted to do it for a very long time (though it has been years since that time), but thinking about my friends who are currently trying to make it...well...it makes it start to seem like not too much fun. Spending all day every day combing papers for movie auditions, and finding only modeling auditions and advertisements for film production crew? Turning up at an audition hoping they are looking for real actors, and finding all that is available are extra roles? Registering with a modeling agency to do some commercials and modeling jobs on the side and make a little extra cash, and find that becomes what you spend the majority of your time doing? It does not sound particularly artistically rewarding I can tell you.

Of course, I never had any interest in being a movie actor, and these things are different if you aren’t trying to make it in film. If you are trying to make it on the stage you have a whole different, though probably equivalent, set of problems. But it is not for me. I am happier steeling myself for the playwriting route: rejection letter after rejection letter after rejection letter...but at least I am not going to end up modeling granny panties in a glossy magazine by chance.

My friend did baby modeling when she was...well, a baby. I can imagine her at that age: giant blue eyes, downy baby swan hair. Casting directors oohing and aahing all over her and other stage moms fuming in a secret jealous rage. Further removed, older stage moms standing with their teenage daughters, waiting in line for modeling auditions for teens, and hoping that the adorable baby cooing in the audition room will grow into a gawky, awkward teenage girl with crooked teeth and everpresent elbows. Of course, she did not, and she still has those giant blue eyes that blows everyone away at the theatre auditions she goes to. She has an electric personality and an uncanny, unconventional attractiveness that probably would not get her cast at film auditions – though she is very photogenic – but melts stage directors to butter. Of course, who knows? She does not really do the movie auditions thing now; she plans to move to California soon and try her luck there, so we’ll find out. Maybe her unconventional look will translate well to film. Maybe she is the next Scarlet Johanssen. And yet her real love is, or was once, the violin. She was practically a virtuoso in high school, one of those kids who practices for hours a day. She adored playing the violin. She had long lithe fingers that danced on the strings. Problem was, she also played sports – basketball. She broke a couple of those long lithe fingers during a game and was never able to play the violin the same way since. She is still good, but she was once incredible. She is still lovely to listen to, but she once had the potential to be a really remarkable violinist, could have played with a big name orchestra somewhere, probably would have been first chair one day. She had the drive for it, the love, the hunger. What she was born with, though, are those giant blue eyes. She is not going to lose those in a basketball game. It is just strange to think that it is not what she loves the most; that performance, in the acting sense, is one of her loves, but it is not the love – and she could have done what she really loves most, she had the chance, and it’s lost now. She does fine with that knowledge, outwardly. I wonder how much she thinks about it, though.

A few months ago a friend of mine decided to start his own online business. It seemed like a good idea at the time. He had a lot of novelty items, nicknack's and gift items and was getting tired of selling them in his little shop and on Ebay, so he thought he would open up the online market for himself and if all went well, he was ready to close his shop and just sell online. Selling full time online would help him to stay at home with his son and still make enough money to support his family. He didn't have much capital, so after he started up his website and learned that he needed about $2000 to get some marketing going to drive business to his website, he came to me and I decided to invest in his business. I thought it was a sound investment, he gets his items for a really good price, and I really thought that he would do well. Anyway, neither of us really knew much about running a site, but we worked together and things finally started rolling. I really thought that we had this thing in the bag.

There was one thing that we really didn't account for. We did not know the PHP security on our website was no good. We thought we had everything taken care of and then we received a phone call telling us that our website was not as secure as we thought. We were informed that hackers tend to target shopping cards and online payment forms and that they have gotten really good at breaking through the standard security on these forms and that we needed to get a web application security system for our site. I looked more into this and found out that they were right. Hackers could be stealing our customers information without our knowledge, and then using behind their backs. It could take months even years to locate this problem and people would not even know who took their information.

I think it goes without saying that we purchased a web security application for our site, and now we can have piece of mind knowing that our secure forms are truly secure.

I grew up always eating fast food. The thought of a drive-thru makes my mouth water, and I am always open to eating some golden fries and washing them down with a creamy, vanilla shake. I dont really eat fast food all the time, but I eat it pretty often. After I finish a big task or come back from exercising, grabbing a combo meal is usually the first thing on my mind. Unfortunately, this type of eating habit can be bad for the waistline, let alone harmful for your health.

When I look at TV and billboards, it seems like there is more information about eating more food and more tasty food, rather than information about losing weight. Thats why I think that for every advertisement for the latest dinner special at the local steakhouse, we also need to see some weight loss tips. Although there are more important things in life, our physical bodies are still very important. Weight loss tips can come from a variety of sources. I see some in magazines, some from pamphlets, and some TV programs. But probably the most often place we get these tips are from people around us or from our doctor. There are so many different opinions out there about losing weight. I think its important to think about where this information is coming from. Usually one way to check is to see what their expertise is. On what basis are they offering these tips? Also, you should check what they have at stake in giving you these weight loss tips. What have they to gain in giving you these tips?

One interesting phenomenon in weight loss is the use of weight loss pills. I don know much about these pills, but it seems that some dont work at all, while others may work. In any case, I think its important to combine the use of weight loss pills with other activities, such as exercise and proper diet. Still, these pills may prove to be of some benefit if it helps burn some fats or supplement our bodily enzymes that help fight fat. Im still not sure about this, but it wouldnt hurt to check out some websites, talk to doctors, and see what other peoples experiences are in using weight loss pills. I would imagine that using weight loss pills that are naturally derived would be a safe place to start.