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. . . I won’t be blogging here anymore. I’m permanently at tomandalissa.com.

So long and farewell, but come on over for lots more of the same.

Filed at 3:47 pm under Links
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Okay, folks - this is a big day in the life of alissaclark.com!

As you should know by now if you’ve been paying any attention, Tom and I are getting married this Saturday, September 2, 2006 at Loudonville Community Church. We’ll be heading to Cape Cod for the week and then back to New York City to take up real (and improved) life at home in Brooklyn.

So, I’m changing my name. I won’t be Alissa Clark anymore. I’ll be Alissa Wilkinson. (It sounds like a writer, right?) This URL has therefore become obsolete.

Therefore:
Update your bookmarks to tomandalissa.com!

We’ll be co-blogging there - I’ll be writing the vast majority of the content, as I spend more time in front of the computer, and Tom will be popping in and doing a good bit of photoblogging. We will also be adding richer content, including reviews of film, music, and books, combined photo albums, and general mayhem and fun. alissaclark.com will remain active for at least a year so that people can find me.

So update your bookmarks! tomandalissa.com.

Filed at 9:44 am under Links, Wedding
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Very cool rings, shirts, etc., all girly and flowery and stuff. Love it!

Filed at 4:52 pm under Links
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In my free time at work, I’ve been going through the inspiring archives of Girl at Play and found this sweet little article about taking a minivacation. Enjoy.

Filed at 12:17 pm under Links
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Excellent article - “What On Earth is Christian Film Criticism?“.

Filed at 12:55 pm under Links, Writing, Film
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• Hygge House: I think this will be a cool site.
• Feel better about yourself: I’ve been looking for this site for a while (I’d seen it once, but neglected to bookmark it). Note the before/after gallery.
• It’s amusing that all my favorite pictures are of coffee.
• If I had unlimited resources and a bit more free time, I would get an MFA. Because I’m just that nutty.
• Starting to drool over this.
• Bending to my feminity, I made an Anthropologie wishlist.
• Johnny Depp and Tim Burton team up again - this time for Sweeney Todd!
• Lastly, people keep sending this to me, so I’ll blog about it: RPI makes Kaplan’s “25 New Ivies” list. Please note that this doesn’t mean it is an Ivy, but it’s like an Ivy - overpriced and tough to finish sanely. I am amused that the picture on the first page of the article is the McNeil room, as taken from the third floor of the RPI Student Union, also known as Home during college. Literally. If I wasn’t there for a day, people would call me and email me, wanting to know if I was ok.

Filed at 11:51 am under Links
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Disclaimer: Don’t get me wrong, I love and miss my alma mater, good ol’ RPI. I miss the subculture, the intense geekitivity, the late nights in the Union playing WebBoggle, the stupid jokes that nobody else would understand unless they’re from someplace like MIT. I have wonderful memories from there, like the really late Friday nights running around doing crazy scavenger hunts on campus, the incredibly delirious awesomeness that was Student Orientation advisor-world, senioritis-induced spring afternoons spent stretched out on the grass with the Wall Street Journal crossword puzzle, and all the time we spent making fun of the professors during Creativity & IT class.

It’s just, the longer I’m gone, the more I realized how it really messed up my head.

Add it to the list of “the ways RPI messed me up” - I become easily obsessed with projects. I can’t rest till it’s done. I feel horribly guilty if I’m doing anything other than working on the project.

Case in point; I’ve been working on the IAM website, doing some major brain surgery. I’m rusty on my PHP/MySQL code, but the gears are slowly creaking and turning. So I’ve been spending a lot of time working on it in the last four days or so - in fact, most of my time.

Now, this is a good thing. I like doing this work (it’s creative and it lets me try new things at a relatively low risk and they’re actually excited about implementing web 2.0 ideas). I’m enjoying it.

But suddenly, I’m back in RPI mode. What is RPI-mode, you might ask? The best example is that infamous capstone project of the fall of my senior year, for which I did a whole stinkin’ lot of coding, architecture, and documentation. I was also working two jobs (both coding), as well as interviewing for full-time employment (which meant I was booked up or out of town a lot more than I should have been, as there were a LOT of companies who interviewed me), and oh yeah, I had three other classes.

In other words, if I wasn’t sleeping - and that was “usually” - I was coding, or talking to people about coding, or sitting in classes where we talked about coding. I often spent eight to ten hours a night after class and work coding. Sixteen to seventeen hours a day.

I couldn’t read a book, I couldn’t watch a movie without feeling guilty about not coding. My social obligations dropped to the bare minimum because of work. I remember sitting down and working out that if I stopped sleeping, I might have a chance in hell of actually finishing all that work.

Of course, it ended, and we got an A, and I did graduate that spring, and all is happy. And I think it’s important for people to work their butt off in college, if only to realize how not-hard they have to work when they get out into the “real world”. This whole full-time job is a piece of cake compared to earning a degree at RPI. And by gum, when you earn a degree there, you really earn it.

On top of it, as any RPI student knows, illness, bad weather, terrorist attacks, family conflicts, sleep deprivation, and pretty much anything short of death is no excuse for not showing up at class or turning in an assignment late. Several professors would drop you an entire letter grade for missing more than one class.

In short, RPI turned me into an involuntary workaholic.

So anyhow. I am learning, right now, that it is actually ok to take time off for recreation and enjoyment, even if you have a project in the works. It’s ok to schedule some time to do the work, and then to stop doing it when that time is up. It’s even ok to have to push a deadline off when you have family/life conflicts. People are nice and they understand and they will not drop your letter grades if you can’t finish everything.

Other ways RPI messed me up:
- I’m still a solid A- type. We didn’t have grade modifiers when I was there, so a 90 was as good as 100, and a 90 was about all I could pull on the energy I had left (except in the infamous-and-still-bitter-about-it cases of Computer Science 1, Calculus, Introduction to Literature, Database Systems, and Introduction to Logic). At any rate, I want to be better than that.
- Saying you earned a “business” or “management” degree still prompts involuntary snickering, even though I know that, in all reality, you probably worked hard and learned a lot for your degree.
- I am only now recovering from a serious allergy to the color pink.
- I’m constantly catching myself mentally referring to technology as a “real job”.
- The sheer amount of women on the street and in the subway still surprises me.
- I have a hard time keeping myself from getting all patronizing when people ask me technical questions.
- I snicker at people who use IE.
- I’m still figuring out how to act around girls who didn’t go to RPI.
- I am never going to be able to settle for a “good” computer. I’ll always need an awesome one. :P

Filed at 4:42 pm under Life, Geekitude
5 Comments

If you’ve read my blog for any length of time, you probably notice that I steer clear of politics and world news in general, reasoning that a) you can get it from many many other more knowledgeable sources, b) it’s not that interesting to a lot of people (I don’t read political blogs), and c) I disagree with most of what I read and I’m not terribly interested in starting catfights on the web.

That said, I had to chuckle when I was dashing through the Rockefeller Center concourse this morning and saw “Castro Cedes Power” as a CNN headline. (NYTimes article here). I personally have long maintained, mostly at parties, that Fidel died years ago - shouldn’t he be, like, a hundred and seventy-two by now? - and there have been look-alikes in his place ever since as puppets. I mean, Saddam Hussein reportedly never went to his own political appearances. It was always a stand-in, in case of attempted assassination.

Hey, it’s not that far-fetched.

Filed at 9:28 am under Links, Facepalm
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Two small observations:

1. It’s amazing that a site as inherently and miserably ugly and messy as MySpace is so popular. (Add me! Haha!)

2. Wikipedia = best free entertainment ever, as I was reminded while reading the New Yorker article this morning.

Filed at 3:45 pm under Geekitude
3 Comments

One of the few things we actually registered for were some cute espresso cups (a set of four, because espresso makes you wittier and therefore should always be shared with friends). But if we hadn’t . . . aren’t these ones from Nestle (of all places) great?

Filed at 3:29 pm under Links
2 Comments

Senator should never be allowed to talk about the internet. (via Wired News)

Best quote from the article:

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.

-Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK)

Filed at 10:02 am under Geekitude, Facepalm
3 Comments

I am a girl, and as such, I am coveting two adorable makeup items.

Lip glaze in six delicious colors. And they’re named after coffee!

This stuff is amazing, as it’s got crayon-style eyeliner, eye shadow, and a smudging brush all in one neat little package that even completely-makeup-illiterate I can manage. I think I want it in lapis, lilac, and ivy.

Think I can get it and write it off as a “wedding expense”? ::wink wink:: Just kidding. Sort of.

Filed at 2:43 pm under Links
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Remember Ken Jennings? The Guy Who Essentially Beat Jeopardy in 2004? He has a blog, and it is quite good. He is a witty and interesting writer. Books, Ken! Books!

Filed at 12:44 pm under Links, Geekitude
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SPIDEY!

(Worth the wait time.)

Filed at 6:04 pm under Geekitude, Film
2 Comments

I’ve been very busy lately, but I have been greatly enjoying my hop back into web programming & design. I decided that on this iteration (haha, haha) I would ditch tables altogether and make the jump to CSS positioning, which is what I should have been doing all along.

A few sites that I’ve found recently that I love:
» Squidfingers - check out the great pixel patterns.
» Kaliber 10000 - also includes a lot of great pixel patterns.
» A List Apart - everyone knows this site, but it’s worth repeating.
» Design Method - just because it carries the tagline on the right, “Made with Flash . . . and a Brain”.

And worth noting:
Google plans to roll out some sort of Gmail for every domain thing. If they succeed with this, I think it’s going to kick the whole webhosting world way up. I put my name on the waiting list.

Filed at 10:50 am under Links
1 Comment

My favorite T-shirts on Threadless right now.
- Impossible Love
- Cheese (LOVE this one)
- Cookie Loves Milk
- Spanish
- So Far

Filed at 9:08 am under Links
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YAY INTERNET FOUR DAYS EARLY YAY

Filed at 1:29 pm under Geekitude
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The Google Office is coming.

Filed at 2:21 pm under Links, Geekitude
2 Comments

Last night, after work, I struggled home with bags of cleaning supplies and attacked my kitchen, with a brief distraction to the bathroom to figure out what I need to do about the tiles-in-the-bathtub situation. They are rather mildewy. Actually, the grossest part is the curtain over the window IN the shower. I had originally planned to just ditch the curtain, as I thought it looked out onto a very nearby exterior wall of the next-door house, but apparently there is also a window on that side. Not so good to have people able to look into the house.

But, the kitchen is mostly clean now, and most things are put away neatly. There’s JUST enough space for all the dishes. We will be renovating our dish collection eventually. We also need a microwave cabinet of some sort for the microwave (duh), toaster oven, blender, recipe books, stuff like that. And some clear jars for the myriad of pasta, rice, and beans.

Mugrat - er - my college friend Margaret called around 9:30 and I talked to her for a while. Haven’t talked to her in like a year! And she grew up in Park Slope, a few blocks away. Smallish world.

I finally got to bed after 11pm (had to find clothes to wear today), only to rise at an hour I find painful in order to get into Manhattan for my 7am women’s group. I had no idea that the sun was up at 5:30 am. Wonders never cease. I made it at more like 7:15 am (I don’t think I took the best route) to the new and delightful Think Coffee, which apparently does awesome things like screen indie films and host a Thursday Scrabble night. Anyhow, it was good to see everyone and chat and drink awesome iced coffee that early in the morning.

I generally lack the discipline to rise a second before absolutely necessary in the morning. And it got worse when I moved to New York. At first, I had training at 8am in Times Square, so for six weeks I got up at 6:30 am. But once I moved to the office, showing-up time got later, and I got more lax. But now, being in Brooklyn, I have to be up early . . . and I want to try and make it to the girls’ group on Tuesdays and to IAM on Wednesdays, so maybe I can overcome my slothfulness. And maybe I can go to bed earlier. (Ha!) Once I’m up, I am completely fine, especially now that I’m fully recovered from mono. But convincing myself to get up is a serious battle.

On the wedding front, we are still looking for a reception location that is big & inexpensive enough. Once that’s found, we’ll have a date. And I think most of the other things will fall into place.

I’d like to take this opportunity to sing the praises of Method cleaners. They are chemical-free, smell good, and come in pretty, design-savvy bottles. Because, really, why must cleaning solution simultaneously murder brain cells and look horrible! These are bottles you can leave out on a counter with pride. I particularly recommend the Pomegranate Handwash. Yummy shade of red and smells great.

Filed at 10:29 am under Life, Daily Goings-On, Geekitude
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We went to Fishs Eddy yesterday to poke around at the dishes. What great stuff! We’ll go back for glasses and possibly some baking dishes later, I think. But I thought these dishes were incredibly clever - they are Pantone color dishes, which is both ironic and pretty, especially for people who are into design.

Filed at 12:47 pm under Links
3 Comments

Webmonkey has an article about building a blog with WordPress.

Webmonkey was the last word in web design instruction awesomeness, at least in my little world, for my first few years of getting into techiedom. Enjoy. (BTW, this blog is run on WordPress, which is infinitely superior to Movable Type, in my opinion.)

Filed at 1:13 pm under Geekitude
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Because I’m moving into a teensy space today:
Apartment Therapy’s Smallest, Coolest Apartment Contest 2006 Finalists. Pretty cool stuff.

Filed at 11:10 am under New York City, Links
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I will be without internet at home until June 13. Kids, can she make it? (Of course she can. But still.) I don’t think I’ve been without internet for that long . . . like . . . ever!

Filed at 9:10 am under Geekitude
5 Comments

This is a great kick-in-the-pants article for writers. Also check out SlushPile.net.

And someone, please tell me this is a joke. Please.

Filed at 8:23 am under Links, Writing, Facepalm
2 Comments

Ok, I admit, I am up this late because I made the horrid mistake of starting to watch Gilmore Girls Season 3, and I have a teensy little fake celebrity if-I-was-Rory-only crush on Jess (because he likes books and you should always prefer the literate men, they are better kissers, they are!). And I thought maybe, just maybe, they might get together soon. So I kept watching.

And they did! TOO CUTE!

</fangirl>

Filed at 1:23 am under Geekitude
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