That piece of motivation is being able to link a Tumblr blog to a subdomain name of a website (yeah, pretty lame…). What I have done is synched my 10k blog and a photo blog to the subdomains 10k.alexlemont.com and photos.alexlemont.com respectively. I’m not sure why I find this so fascinating, but now those blogs seem as if they are built as a part of my site and not on Tumblr.

The plan of each of these sites should be fairly straightforward. I will be using this site to post a variety of things that I find interesting, the 10k blog will be my stories about running, and the photos will be essentially a log of my world via photos.

The past few days I’ve been working hard on a new project for my A290 class. It’s been a few months since I was last really excited to be working on web design and it’s great to be back.

This project was the first time I’ve ever programmed in C#/ASP.NET and from what I’ve done so far, I really enjoy it. The site is a riff off of the word game Mad Libs and uses labels/text boxes. All of the images were done in photoshop and the design is basic CSS. I’m hoping to add more content on it than what it has so far to make it more “complete”, but as it stands right now, it’s fully functional.

We’ll see how ASP.NET treats me as I continue to work on it. Who knows, I might switch over to it entirely in the future.

Even though I believe setting personal goals should be a constant thing throughout the year, I can’t help but join the bandwagon and set a few resolutions/goals for 2012. In the past I only set a few small goals and never wrote them down or kept track of them. This year I want to switch things up a little bit and write them out and see how I do. Consider that my first resolution.

2012 Goals/Resolutions

No Soda – A continuation of last year. This is something that is fairly easy for me. I’ve done it multiple times before in highschool. I define soda as any carbonated beverage with a few exceptions. Some punches are made with carbonation and some slushies are as well, but I usually only have them 2-3 times a year.

Geocache in 5 more states/countries - Now, before you label me as a nerd and completely write-off the validity of this goal, let me explain. Yes, Geocaching is somewhat of a nerdy hobby, but it’s more than just a hobby for me. I look at geocaching as a way to travel and explore the world around me in a different way. Traveling has always been a strong interest of mine, and I want to continue to explore the world throughout my life. Many times in the past year geocaching has showed me parts of new (and old) cities that I would never have seen or known about. I feel that this goal is a great way to continue exploring the world and work up to my other goal of going to all 50 states.

366 miles – To stay on the note of traveling, I not only want to travel to new places, I want to travel by foot. What I mean by this is that I want to average a mile a day of “strenuous” travel by foot in 2012. So basically going on a run or hiking would classify as “strenuous” for this goal.

5k – In continuation of the last goal, I want to work up to running a 5k. You know what, let’s make it a 10k. For 2012 I want to complete a 10k and not just walk the whole thing like I normally do at 5k fundraisers. I already have my eyes on the Minster Oktoberfest that’s held here in Ohio. October will give me plenty of time to work up to it.

This post might change a little over the next few days as I add/change goals, but this is what I have so far.

Last Monday at the annual band banquet “Colonel” Woodley announced to the Marching Hundred that we will be performing at the 2012 Super Bowl in Indianapolis, Indiana on February 4th. Once this announcement was made, the band erupted. Personally, I had absolutely no idea that this was going to be announced and I still have a hard time believing that this February I’ll be in Lucas Oil Stadium performing for the biggest sporting event in the world.

With that announcement in mind, the past few days I have been thinking about all of the places the Marching Hundred has brought me. The past four years has tallied up quite a few unique performances and I’ve decided to lay them all out here in this post. We’ll start with the obvious places first.

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Before I dive into how great The Combine was this year, please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Alex Lemont and I am a Senior majoring in Informatics at Indiana University. I am from Westerville, Ohio (just north of Columbus) where I plan to go back to once I graduate spring 2012 and work for a large financial firm. I am an avid Geocacher and do web design in my spare time. Last year was the first year for The Combine which was my first tech conference. I loved it so much that I made sure I was able to attend again this year.

My main three takeaways from this year’s main speaker event came in the form of challenges that different speakers asked the audience to do in their own lives. The first of which was by Christian Briggs, Co-founder of SociaLens. Improve the digital fluency of those around us. Something that is becoming more and more necessary in every aspect of our lives. The second challenge came from a second year Combine speaker, Micah Baldwin, CEO of Graphic.ly. Simply put, tell a story. Micah gave a great talk on the power of storytelling and illustrated the importance of being able to tell a story. The final challenge was dished out by our last speaker, Cincinnati native, Merlin Mann, who is the man behind 43 folders. Merlin challenged us to rethink how we use the word “priority” and not call anything a priority unless we gave up 5 things to accomplish it. All three of these challenges are exactly what the Combine is about.

Digital Fluency
Christian’s talk about the need for improving digital fluency was a great projection of what it means to not only be literate, but be fluent with technology that is all around us. He defined literacy as knowing how and what a certain technology is used for, and being fluent as knowing when and why we should use a technology. With an increasingly tech-based society, being digitally fluent is paramount to being a successful business owner. Are the people around you digitally fluent?

Storytelling
Micah’s talk this year was right to the point. No matter who you are, you are a storyteller. Personally, I’ve never considered myself much of a storyteller, but his talk made me rethink what being a storyteller actually means. Of course, people sitting around a campfire swapping tales are storytellers, but what about the 26 year old interviewing to get his next job? Micah is right, no matter who you are, you need to be a storyteller to be successful. Being able to tell your own story to others is an extremely powerful tool.

Priorities
What does it mean to have a priority? Why do we have so many of them? This is exactly what Merlin Mann was trying to figure out during his talk. His showmanship and personality had the audience engaged throughout the entirety of his talk where he broke down what it really meant to have a priority. I fall accustom to exactly what Merlin was arguing against. I trap myself in a false list of “priorities” and ultimately never get anything that I want to do accomplished. Merlin did a great job of using humorous stories to convince us that we need to say “no” when accepting new tasks a lot more often than we say “yes”.

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These three speakers are just a hint of what The Combine is, and shows exactly why I love going to conferences like The Combine. It gave me a chance to be around leaders in the tech industry and hear them speak about compelling topics that really make you think. Already looking forward to making it out to The Combine 2012.

The Geocaching Club went on a canoeing/hiking adventure today for an event hosted by the DNR of Paynetown State Recreational Area. It was their first time hosting a Geocaching event in the area, and it turned out to be a lot of fun! There were a few minor details that could have been organized better, but everyone had a great time and that’s what matters.
It was a bit chilly and too windy to be out on the water, but that didn’t stop us from reaching the caches that were only accessible by boat. We also managed to pick up a few real caches around the area. After the event, there was a pot-luck and live music that I unfortunately had to skip out on because of my shift at work where I’m at now.

“The Combine is a display of talent, entrepreneurship and creativity. It’s an event about tech, specifically the people, ideas and environments that drive technology. We’re bringing together top thinkers and doers to explore the spark that occurs at the intersection of community, culture, creativity, capital and code.” – http://thecombine.org

For the second year in a row, I will be attending The Combine. Last year was the first year the event was held and it was my first actual conference that I had ever attended. I was able to go last year because the School of Informatics had a few “Scholarship discounts” for student tickets and I was selected as one of the recipients. However, this year I signed up to be a volunteer to receive a discounted ticket. This evening was the volunteer meeting at City Hall and now I can practically taste the cookies from Blu Boy Bakery right outside of the theater where the event is being held.

It’s such an amazing privilege to live in a city that has so much hype and community about something that I love. There aren’t many other places in the mid-west that has this much excitement about technology and community. It’s hard to believe that there aren’t lines of people fighting over volunteer spots.

As a volunteer this year, I will be up in the balcony of the theater blogging and tweeting about the speakers during the main speaker event on Friday. I’m not exactly sure how the posts are going to turn out, but be sure to follow me on twitter on Friday October 21st where I will be posting updates about the conference or on The Combine’s Blog where I will be guest posting. I’ll also be sure to post any blogs I write for The Combine on here as well for you all to check out.

Three weeks into the Serve IT internship and it’s been nothing but great. There’s honestly nothing I’d rather be doing for credit in college than working with non-profit organizations in a city that I have gotten to love in the past 3 years at IU. The work that we’ve been doing is real-world work that affects real people. Something that sitting in a classroom is near impossible to replicate.

This fall I am the team lead of the Boys and Girls Club team. We have a few different projects that we will be working on, but the one I’m looking forward to the most is developing a “Tech Week” for the kids that are involved with the club. The week will be an activity based educational event for a few hours each day. The activities will be fun for the kids to do and will be centered around various technologies that the kids would be interested in learning about. We’re also going to reach out to other organizations within Indiana University to get more students involved in helping the community. We are still in the planning stages now, but I’m really looking forward to watch how this project evolves from start to finish.

Time really does fly. It is hard to believe that this will be my final year at IU.

Sitting here at home thinking about it so much has spurred up the idea to keep track of everything that goes on this coming school year. I am going to try to capture the year by using this website and blog. Like with most of my ideas, I hope to keep this one alive and moving, but we’ll have to wait and see if it can withstand the many distractions life can bring.

I’ll try to keep the rationale for starting this blog short, but the main reason is to simply have something to look back at. I hope to give not only my future self, but my friends and family an idea of what is going on in my life during my senior year of college. I plan to include things that I do on a semi-personal level as well as current events and anything else I find interesting.

To those who decide to keep up with this project, realize it is a living and breathing conversation of my life to whoever is interested. I absolutely love receiving feedback, questions, comments, requests… anything!

For now, I will leave you with an article about the London riots that have been happening over the past few days. [article] These riots make no sense to me. Why would people willingly want to destroy the city they live in for no reason at all? I understand if there was a reason behind it all. Come on London… really?