It’s Elemental

After much waiting and toil, I have completed the online version of my thesis, completely customized for the web.  Adopting hundreds of pages with images, tables, and outlines is not a terribly fun task; more a labor of love, but I am happy with the result and hope that it can provide a useful resource to any interested parties.

After working on this thesis for, well, let’s face it, WAY too long, I am finally DONE.   It’s actually kind of hard to believe, and I’m pretty sure that my wife was thinking that this day wouldn’t actually arrive.  I should have made a bet.

Basically what this means is that in the next… um, period of time, I will be converting my thesis and posting it on the spiritalchemy.com site.  Then I guess the question is, will anyone want to read 240 pages online?  Probably not, which is why I have a PDF version ready to go as well.  Boy am I optimistic!

I also get to categorize this entry as relevant to all my included categories except for poetry, as my thesis contains original work in all the other areas - let’s hear it for generalists!

Oh, in case you were wondering, I decided to call it: The Elements as an Archetype of Transformation: an Exploration of Earth, Water, Air, and Fire.  You can get a basic idea of the table of contents (not quite updated to match the final version) at http://www.spiritalchemy.com/thesis.html.

I transitioned from the built-in 1&1 wordpress blog to a standalone upload of the lastest wordpress version, so I can have more control over everything, particularly the look and feel, although the widgest are cool too… :)  For example I can easily include photos from flicker like this:

I added a few tools from freefind.com: a internal search, a what’s new page, and a site map.  They come with some minimal advertising, so I might not keep them, but for now they work, and they let me use the Spirit Alchemy template to make them look decent.

Through Scientific American I found a way to offset the carbon footprint of my website.  The company, CO2Stats, provides a free carbon offset counter that automatically counts the carbon footprint caused by visitors to the site, mostly from the energy consumed by the computers used to access and host the site.  What is great is that on the basis of the counter, CO2Stats invests in renewable energy projects from web advertising and sponsors.  Whew, one more thing off my back!

Just a tiny update: I added a randomized image of some of the products at the Spirit Alchemy CafePress store.  Had to learn a little bit about javascript to do so, but was easily successful.  I hope this isn’t too commercial and/or annoying for the front page.

I opened a store at CafePress to offer a variety of products (T-Shirts, Sweatshirts, Bumper Stickers, Mugs, License Plate Frames, Journals, and MORE) that have designs related to the spirit alchemy website.

The store is http://www.cafepress.com/spirit_alchemy - (there’s an underscore  between the words, as ’spiritalchemy’ was already taken, but my stuff is WAY better!)

One of my interests is photography, and periodically I might put a photo here. 

Feel free to see some of my other work at http://www.flickr.com/photos/spiritself/

For example, this was taken on a recent hike to Multnomah Falls… just a tiny fern (?) growing from between the cracks of two rocks forming one of the retaining walls.  The hike to the top is nice - short and steep, but with lots of interesting plants, rock formations, and views.

I’ll periodically mention here any updates to the Spirit Alchemy website.
In this case, today I added a mostly unobtrusive counter to the front page, a link to this blog, and a test page that has dynamically updated news content and a comic. Wheee!

Well here is the inaugural post of a new blog.

Does the world need another blog by a random guy?  Of course not.  But then again, what if this blog isn’t for the world?  Maybe it’s a way to see myself through a new lens.  Maybe, like any lens, it works both ways, and I can use it to project as well.

Maybe all of that is irrelevant, because as of yet there is no express purpose that i have in mind for this blog.  Maybe that means that what it is now will change based on what happens to this space in the future.  Maybe your reading of this post in the future (now?) changes what I am writing in the past (which is, of course, now).

Maybe you need to go get some coffee and read the regular newspaper if this gives you a headache, because it’s only going to get worse…