unregimented.com – Brian Paris

Virginia has posted a lot of new pictures on Joy’s website. Check them out at JoyAlisonParis.com. Joy is such a cute kid and always looks so happy. She is growing up so quickly.

The days keep going by in Doha. It is the start of Ramadan. The students start back up to work tomorrow, and we have another person to help out our department. I think that it is going to be a good year. I am looking forward to seeing the progress of the old students, and getting to know the new ones.

I am in LA for a workshop. Workshop starts tomorrow morning, so I had some time to get out today.

Went out to the Museum of Contemporary Art today to check out the Robert Frank exhibit. They had prints from his book The Americans. Great to see his work up close and personal. It has been 50 years since the book was published. He was doing things that were new for the times, but have become mainstream today.

After the museum, I went out to get some food. Got on the subway and wound up at Universal City for a burger. The place is like a themed open air shopping mall. Not the best place in the world, but the kids seemed to like it.

Follow me on the my new tumblr site fsotd.tumblr.com. I’ll be posting my links to my favorite sites that I come across on any given day.

So, I am trying to figure out what I am doing with my life. Of the many possibilities, I am not even sure what criteria to use for choosing. Today, I thought about what I could do to make money. I have a couple of years left on my contract over here and was wondering what I could do to make a lot of money in that time. I came up with an arbitrary number of one million dollars in addition to my regular salary. Seemed like a nice round number to me. I did an assessment of my skills, knowledge, and talents to come up with money making ideas. Then I estimated how much money I could make for each. I was pretty reasonable with the estimates, but even under the rosiest scenarios it turns out that I would probably fall short of my goal. Looks like I could make about $400,000 if I spent all of my time doing the most profitable work. Not a bad amount of money, but not up to what I was hoping for. I’ll have to go back and see if I can think of something else to make money or decide if a lesser amount is enough.

I’ve been checking out a lot of blog, social media, and video streaming sites lately to get a good grasp of what the “kids” are doing these days. I am a little chaotic right now, trying to remember where I am all over the web. If you want to see where I have been, here is my list and thoughts so far.

Twitter: @bwparis – Not really sure what the big deal is. I want to like it, but I just don’t. It is extremely easy to post now that I have the firefox plug-in and the iPhone app, but not really sure where is is better than tumblr.

Tumblr: brianparis.tumblr.com is a completely different story. I am a huge wordpress fan, so I didn’t really see any need for another blog platform. I went in with a negative attitude, but now am blown away. I love it. Not only is it a blog, but it is so much more. An aggressor of all of my sites: I am currently feeding it all of my unregimented.com post and my twitter tweets. A social network: this is twitter’s idea of following people done right. Instead of a list of short tweets with an unrecognizable URL, you can see real information posted by the people that you follow. Reposting: like something you see, tumblr makes it easy to repost it to your own site. Simplicity in reposting just the start. Putting up multi-media content is quick and simple also. You’ve got to love it when they make it easy for you.

Facebook: facebook.com/papaparis – I was a big fan of myspace (myspace.com/bwparis) back in the day I had a facebook account, but never checked it. Then about a year and a half ago, everyone was requesting to be friended on my facebook account. Pretty soon it seemed like no one was left on myspace, and everyone was contacting me on the facebook side. Facebook has grown slightly on me, but I am not in love. It is a nice place to see what people are doing, but I don’t understand the joy of giving virtual gifts and taking quiz after quiz.

Netvibes: netvibes.com/bwparis – an interesting idea of placing lots of source feeds into a nicely organized way. I use it as my home page, but don’t check it very often. I think that there is a lot of potential for use in an education environment. If a class has a central place where they can learn collaboratively, I think that would benefit all. I am working on ways that I can best use it in my work.

Post is getting long, so I will hold off on posting video sites until later, but just keep in mind that there is more than YouTube out there.

The best thing about not being in the states for independence day is that I don’t have to deal with Fireworks. I hate fireworks. I know most people think that is odd, but I don’t know why people like explosions going off. They seem odd to me. I guess the colors are nice, but I’d rather look at a painting or something.

photo credit: Kevin Lawver

My boss took my co-worker and I to a Japanese restaurant for lunch today. It was really a nice atmosphere. Nice decorations, good service, and good food. I didn’t venture into trying sushi, but I did try some octopus. Not something that I would normally do. I am usually pretty safe when trying food. I stick to chicken if I can. I have to say that the taste of the octopus was not bad, but the rubbery texture was just something that I don’t think I could ever get used to.

Farrah Fawcett died, but then so did Michael Jackson. Everyone is talking about Michael Jackson, but no one is mentioning Farrah. I hope that I am not overshadowed in my own death. Although it probably wouldn’t matter since I would be dead.

There was a group of high school teachers here from Oman who were learning new techniques in teaching journalism. They were such a great group. Very quick to catch on and inquisitive. It was so great to help them learn some of the tech stuff in Journalism. I went over some photojournalism ideas, made some slideshows and looked at blogs and online newspapers. I am looking forward to seeing the results they get when they go back to their students.