robglazebrook.com

I spent a good portion of the day today over at my parent’s place. My niece Lilly was visiting for the weekend, and we hadn’t given her a birthday present yet (her party was a couple weeks ago, but we couldn’t make it), so we figured it was a good chance to remedy the situation. As luck would have it, Eric and Renee were also visiting with Caitlyn, so it was a chance to see both of my nieces (as I’m going to think of Caitlyn) at once. :)

As I recently decided, being an Uncle is pretty darn cool. All of a sudden, I get to visit toy stores, buy little shoes the length of my thumb, and read books I haven’t seen in twenty years. It sort of rocks.

Take yesterday, for example. Amanda and I were in Ames sort of spur-of-the-moment to satisfy a long-standing King Buffet craving. Afterwards, we headed across the street to the Borders to pick up some books for Lilly’s third birthday. I managed to find a few of my favorite books from when I was that age, as well as rediscover a few I’d forgotten about. In the end, we settled on these seven:

• The Very Hungry Caterpillar
• Where The Wild Things Are
• Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
• Tuesday
• Just Go To Bed
• When I Get Bigger
• Just Grandma and Me

I think that’s a pretty respectable library for a 3 year old. Do any of you have any favorites from when you were a kid that I should know about? There’s no reason I couldn’t start stocking up for next Christmas. :)

As I mentioned in passing yesterday, I’ve come up with what should be a fairly fool-proof plan to encourage myself to blog more frequently. And that plan involves one word with three syllables (or, more accurately, three words fused together in a sort of primordial portmanteau): PayPerPost.

I’ve been considering signing up for a program like PayPerPost for quite some time now, and when my own mother recently jumped on the bandwagon, I figured it couldn’t hurt for me to give it a try. As I see it, it’s a great way to encourage myself to blog more frequently. How so, asks you? Fantastic question. Here are answers three:

1. PayPerPost works by connecting advertisers with bloggers who can create buzz about their products. Bloggers are then compensated monetarily for their efforts. In other words, I can make money just by blogging. And money is a pretty powerful incentive at times. Most times.
2. However, PayPerPost also recognizes that blogs consisting of nothing but promotional articles don’t carry a lot of weight in the blogosphere. So they have a wonderfully insightful restriction already in place: promotional posts must be preceded and followed by non-promotional articles. Thus, if I want to get paid with any frequency, I also need to be writing non-promotional articles at least as often. Pretty smart, neh?
3. The promotional opportunities on their website are constantly changing. Every time I log in, there will be new options. And what I’ve found so far is, as I read through the list of things advertisers want people to write about, little ideas for articles that I could write start firing off in my brain. The opportunity list is also an idea list. Suddenly, I find myself with more ideas for entertaining posts than I’ve had in a long time.

In other words, things are looking up for good old robglazebrook.com. Assuming you wanted to hear a lot out of me, at least. And if you’d like to give PayPerPost a try yourself, just click here (or on the ad in the right sidebar). You’ll get paid to blog… and I’ll get a referral bonus. :)

This year, I managed to come up with four resolutions for the new year. I didn’t manage to post them within the first week ~of~ that new year, but you know. Baby steps. My resolutions, in all their lazy glory, were to:

• Work out at least once a week,
• Either take or teach a class,
• Speak better Spanish than I did at the end of last year, and
• Blog more frequently.

And I realized this morning that, even though we’re not quite four weeks into the new year, I’m already making decent progress on my resolutions. Go me, eh? Here’s how they’re going so far:

Work out 1X Weekly

This one was probably the easiest of the bunch to manage, because I’m signed up for a weekly “boot-camp style” (their words, not mine) exercise class through work. Basically, every week I pay a nice woman named Sarah five bucks to hurt me for an hour. Which I consider a great bargain, considering businessmen around the world pay easily 20 times that amount, and all they get extra is a bit of leather and perhaps a whip. I’ve also managed to get to the gym at least one other time every week – usually Monday or Tuesday evenings. So I’m doing all right!

Take or Teach (Sink or Swim?)

As my exuberant post yesterday mentioned, I’ll be teaching a couple of web design classes starting in late March. I’m still really excited about this opportunity. And also a little nervous, now that I’ve had time to consider all the planning I need to get done for the class, on top of planning our upcoming Eurotrip (which I’ll be blogging more about in due time). And if this class goes well in the spring, there’s always the possibility of teaching it again in the fall. So yay there. :)

Speak More Gooder Espanol

Well, I certainly don’t speak worse Spanish, at any rate. This one is going to be a slower work-in-progress. I’m hoping that immersion will help me along a little bit – Amanda and I will be hanging out with Hannah and Tono on Sunday afternoon, and whenever the four of us are together, around 1/3 to 1/2 of the conversation is in Spanish. Personally, I’d prefer if the ratio were higher – I need to work on picking up new words. Of course, I worry my ears aren’t helping me out on this one. My hearing is getting worse these days, and sometimes I struggle to understand English.

Blog More

Luckily, it’d actually be difficult to blog ~less~ than I did towards the end of last year. And I’d say I’ve made good progress so far. This is my eighth post this month already, in less than four weeks. That’s pretty darn good for me. And I’ve also come up with a way to help encourage myself to blog with greater frequency. But I’ll talk about that in another post. :)

I remember when I first started teaching composition in Grad School, one of the toughest problems I wrestled with was what to have my students call me.

Mr. Glazebrook sounded a little stodgy and artificial to me – at that point in my life, the only people who called me “Mr. Glazebrook” were telemarketers, and they usually didn’t even get my last name right. And while I was perfectly content to just let my students call me “Rob” (you know, like the rest of the world did), my colleagues warned me it would be more difficult to appear as an authority figure if I just went by my first name. Note that we weren’t interested in actually being authority figures, just appearing as such.

So what did I settle on? I didn’t. I essentially gave up on the whole thing. On the first day of class, I told my students, “You can call me Sir, Rob, Mr. Glazebrook, Instructor, or any derivation thereof that isn’t somehow naughty. I’ll even respond to hey-you for the first couple of weeks.” You can just hear the authority oozing out of that cop-out, no?

And what was the result? Well, for whatever reason, most of my students ended up calling me “Mr. Rob.” Which I found fairly awesome. A thoroughly authoritative prefix rendered entirely ironic by the completely casual name following. Right up my alley.

So why do I bring this up now? After a few weeks of talks with the Program Coordinator for the Des Moines Public Schools (DMPS) Community Education department, it looks like I’ll be teaching again starting this spring. Mr. Rob is making a glorious comeback!

I’ll be teaching two classes, both about web design. I’m titling the first one “Intro to Modern Web Design.” It will meet twice a week, for two hours a night (6-8pm, probably), for three weeks. I’ll cover the basics of contemporary XHTML – what it is and what to do with it, essentially. I’ll also touch on some rudimentary CSS. As much as I can cover in three weeks.

Then, I’m going to Europe for two weeks.

But when I get back I’ll start in on my second class, the aptly-named “Modern Web Design II,” which will meet on the same nights and times, but for four weeks instead of three. Here, I’ll teach more in-depth CSS techniques for layout and whatnot. What “whatnot” entails has yet to be planned, but it will undoubtedly be cool.

I’m really looking forward to the class. Ever since I left ISU, I’ve really missed teaching. This gives me the opportunity to start teaching again, on a subject I know and love, without having to quit my day job. And while the pay will by no means make me independently wealthy, it will give me a little extra money for a couple of months with which to make ends meet. In short, it’s all-around great.