Since I posted part 7 of how to start a blog yesterday, I assume most of you already realize I’m back from my blogcation. So, why am I writing this today instead of yesterday? Quite simply because the other post is more useful to my readers but just in case you are wondering why I went on a blogcation, I though I would share.

My life has been pretty hectic here lately. As a recent college graduate, I’ve started my first “real” job. That isn’t much of a drastic change from going to school full-time and working part-time, especially while trying to graduate at the top of my class. The big difference is time I spend driving (not working). I spend way too much time in traffic. All of that has been limiting my time online the past couple of months.

This past week I had a variety of things come up that really cut down on my time. I knew I had several things I needed to be done and that if I didn’t make myself step away from computer some, they wouldn’t get done.

During the week, I helped my mother and Lauren decide on a laptop configuration. My state had a tax free weekend for back to school supplies. This happened to include computers < $ 1,500. They both have been wanting a laptop and decided this was the time to do it. After speaking with Robert Evans, I advised them to only purchase 512 MB of RAM from Apple and upgrade to 2 gigs on there own because it is considerably ($275) cheaper. Researching where and what kind of RAM to buy took up part of my week. I finally decided on Corsair Value Select from ZipZoomFly.com. Also, I researched other various accessories (got an iSkin duo for Lauren�s free iPod Nano that is coming with the laptop and a Wi-Fi Repeater to extend the wireless network at my family’s house).

Thursday night/Friday morning I downloaded and installed Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Express Edition. I’ve been wanting to learn more about programming and this looks like a really good free application. Visual Studio is what many of the large corporations use and C# is one of the more popular languages (Visual Basic is another). I don�t plan to write web applications in ASP.Net because of hosting cost, open source availability, etc. I prefer PHP and MySQL for that. However, this week I decided to bite the Ruby on Rails bullet. For future web programming I�m going to try to use Ruby on Rails. I’ve spent a little time starting to learn Ruby and getting ready to install Ruby on Rails.

Friday night I celebrated my mother’s birthday at Carrabba’s Italian Grill. Pretty good food by the way, though a little more expensive than places I usually go (unless I�m on a business trip when my company pays for everything).

After getting home from Carrabba’s, I upgraded my Wordpress setup from version 2.0.2 to version 2.0.4. Since it was a big security update, I thought I should go ahead and take the time to do it. The upgrade was surprising simple, though I backed everything up right before installing the upgrade just in case.

Saturday, I got around to cleaning my car. My dad owns a small-used car dealership and I worked there growing up, spending a lot of my time cleaning cars. So, I refuse to pay someone to clean my car when I know how to do it. Plus, I’m extremely picky about how people handle my car I always have been. I don’t write about cars much, so you probably didn’t know that they’re one of my favorite things besides computers and the web (excluding God, family, and friends of course). I also spent part of the day updating my dad’s website, VanceAuto.com.

I also listed my first item on ebay for my mom. Check it out…it isn’t the coolest thing to sell, but I thought it would be best to start small and see how it all goes. Another thing, I worked on throughout the weekend was getting my computer in order. I deleted unwanted programs, cleaned system files, and my registry. Hopefully, my PC will be back to running as fast as it was when I first got it. If not, I’ll have to reformat. I dread reformatting because it takes so much time to get all the files and programs restored.

As usual, I spend my Sunday’s at Church worshiping my wonderful Savior. If you would like to know Him too, I would love to share.

All in all, I had a hectic week but all was good. It�s good to be back in the swing of writing. The blogcation was a good chance to step away from it all and get re-energized to bring your increasingly better content. I just hope that I have enough time to devote to God, family, friends, learning Ruby on Rails, and blogging.