Forever-Digital is a look inside the life and mind of 
Archive for November, 2007
11.30.2007 | EcoTetris!
‘Ello there!
Sorry for my extended absence. We’ve reached the last week of classes and things are getting super hectic. I have 2 final projects, 4 final papers, and an exam. Boy is this going to be a fun week. I’ve spent most of this week engrossed in a project for my Environmental Interventions class. Our goal was to have it launched by, well, today! After a late night last night, I’m excited to say, it’s up and ready to go! We’ve finally worked out all the bugs and tweaked things here are there.
I’m proud to introduce to you: EcoTetris! EcoTetris is not your average Tetris game. Ours pulls in data from the Cornell Facilities website and translates our actual energy usage over the past few years into Tetris pieces! Each building is color-coded so you can see who the energy hogs are. (And to those of you at Cornell, it’s not really a big surprise!) We calculate your score in the number of trees you could save by eliminating the amount of energy in the row of blocks you just cleared. (There’s actually an equation out there for that!) EcoTetris hopes that players will spend a little time not only playing the addicting game, but taking in the EcoTips and other information provided around the site. So what are you waiting for?! Go play! See if you can beat my high score! And please please please send us some feedback! We want an A+ on this project! 
11.20.2007 | 8 Hours Until Freedom
For now that is. Thanksgiving break is on the horizon. All I have to do is finish this paper, get through today’s classes, come home for a much-deserved (or maybe just much needed?) nap and then drive home tomorrow to continue it there.
For some reason I’m craving sushi. Of course, by sushi I mean some California rolls, but it’s the thought that counts when it comes to sushi.
On the food front, I’ll be making my now-famous apple crumble for Thanksgiving. I’ll also be stirring the corn on occasions, because, though I’ve learned to cook since last Thanksgiving, I really couldn’t be bothered. You’ll have a hard enough time scraping me off of the couch as I dose in and out of a “nearly end of the semester but I have a few days to sleep” coma.
I’ll try to check in at some point with a more lucid, coherent posting.
Until then…
11.10.2007 | Feed Cleanup
Organizing my various feeds and getting a “portal” page up is something that has been on my to-do list for a long time now. I’ve always been either too lazy, too busy, or rusty in my PHP to actually get it done. I’ve made various attempts, including pulling all of my feeds into tumblr, but as Phil and Dean are always quick to point out, tumblelogs are for tumbles. While I agree, I couldn’t find a better solution.
It wasn’t until yesterday that I realized enough was enough. My namesake domain was just sitting there with a default WordPress install and the accompanying “Hello World” post. Not exactly the face I want to put forth. I finally got to it, figured out the wonderful world of SimplePie and made myself a portal site. It’s in “beta”, of course, because I’m still tweaking things and making sure things are loading properly, but overall I’m pretty satisfied with the result. Have a look for yourself: jennvargas.com.
Along with organizing that site, I finally had reason to reorganize and clean up my feeds. There were too many floating around and there was a lot of overlap. I decided to break it down into 3 main feeds: This site, my aggregate feed, and my tumble feed. You can see more details on the breakdown and actually subscribe here.
Forever-digital is now at my aggregate feed’s address, so for those of you who want to stay subscribed to the whole enchilada, please subscribe to Jenn:Aggregated. This feed will now only bring you the most recent postings from http://forever-digital.net.
Still confused? Maybe this wasn’t the best way to organize it? Please let me know!
11.02.2007 | Project 365
Project 365 has been around for a while now. The basic idea is that you take a photo every day and post it to your photo-sharing site of choice. I’ve been thinking about starting for a while now, but I never really got excited enough to actually put my thoughts into action. Now that I have my new Canon 40D and a new lens that I absolutely adore, I’m finally ready to get to it. So today, I posted the first photo in my Project 365. This will be an entirely new way for me to chronicle my year through photos. If this coming year proves to be anything like my last year, I think it’s going to be one amazing collection. I’m going to try to be very descriptive in my captioning as well. It’s like a mini, photo-illustrated diary! Check my Flickr often, even daily!