Not that it really never was, but my gawd, with gas and food prices going up every day, I can hardly pay for bills anymore!

Gas around here is now at the fabulous price of $3.56+ (last time I checked, it changes during the day) and the cost of bread, milk, and even rice has gone up by a dollar! It’s terrible. Just last week, I went to buy just a couple of foods to last us the week, spent $60 dollars buying practically nothing! I bought all the essentials, milk, ham & cheese, bread, chicken, beef (which were both on sale for less then $4 bucks), juice, eggs, and a few more things, that I tried making sure were under the $5 dollar range, but no, in the end it all adds up to $60 dollars!

I put gas in my car this weekend, almost full tank, $35 dollars! Usually I can fill my tank with some leaking out at like $30. This is really sad and already its almost gone, I have like a quarter tank left and have to wait till tomorrow to get my check. Horrible!

Yea, this is basically a rant and rave blog post, just wanted to write out my frustrations and what not…lol. So how are things in your neck of the woods?

I was recently invited to join two advisory boards for my old school, Winter Park Tech. One is for the Web Design program and the other for their Digital Design program. Both were very interesting to go to and learn about all the new trends and happenings within the industry, especially from professionals.

In the Web Design ABM, they had presidents and lead web developers from local design companies around the area, also from local radio stations. We were all able to talk about the new trends and what employers are looking for these days for entry level. I was really surprised by some of the answers.

The Digital Design ABM was a little larger then Web designs and was more informative. Everyone had really outstanding responses to some of the questions that students asked and also that the instructors asked the board members. I felt much more comfortable responding to some of these questions more so then in the Web Design ABM and I feel a little bad for it. In the Digital Design ABM there were presidents, senior art directors/designers and head managers from Disney World, SeaWorld, and local graphic and print companies. I was really impressed and honored to be invited to attend this meeting.

Contacts like these in this industry are highly wanted and I was lucky to be able to meet all of these people and hear what they have they have to say about the industry. Remember, networking is a key feature to success in the multimedia industry. To be able to know people higher up in the scale then you can sometimes get you by in certain aspects in life believe or not.

Wow SPAM sure is moving on up when it comes to comment posts. They look so believable, until you read it and wonder what on earth they are relating to. In my last post, I actually think I got one of those “smart-spam” comments, but not too sure, so I left it up, but going over to one of my “online friend’s” blog convinced me that it was a fake. In her latest blog entry she has two SPAM comments, that if you didn’t really read the blog post, could pass for a legit comment. Another way I knew they were fake, their URLS matched. Dead give away.

Comments on the post

The worst is seeing forum spam and not knowing if they are an actual member or just a spam bot…or both! This happened not too long ago on my job’s forum, Surmunity. A client had just signed up and in posted in the welcome board, but instead of saying the normal “Hi, I’m new” he went into his favorite band that he liked and some other stuff about their music and posted even posted links. Now what is the first thing that comes up in your mind when reading something like that? SPAM! But it turned out after posting about it that he wasn’t spam and just a really big fan that wanted to publicize about his fave band. Hey no shame in that, just should have paid attention to the board you were posting in and first introduced yourself.

Other then that, I just have to hand it to SPAM bots these days, they sure know how to fool someone.

Any odd SPAM comments or post you have seen that you thought they were legit until you figured out they were fake?