Sunday, December 5, 2010

Just another day in the life

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Wake up in the morning feeling like a sloth. Grab my backpack; brush my teeth I’m on my way to class. Come back to the crib to grab some lunch, hop back on my long board to do it again. Music rings in my ears with my ipod pumping, sitting in class I can’t even function. Open up the laptop to check out my email, I have to make sure that I do not fail. Distractions kick in let me hop on facebook, o shoot here comes the teacher to come take a look. The day continues and I get weary, crash on the couch as my eyes get teary. Wake up in a daze everything is a maze, grab the laptop to check out the new twitter craves.

I wake up to a loud, obnoxious ring blaring from my desk. I sluggishly locate the source of the sound and immediately mute it. The sound came from my phone, my 9:00 o clock alarm telling me it’s time to do homework. This morning I have to write a 2 page paper for COR since I was too lazy to do it the night before. I reach over for my laptop and boot it up. Procrastinating a little, I hop on the web to check my Facebook and email. Social Network sites like Facebook allow me to connect with my friends and stay updated on their latest news (53). After an hour or so I finally finish my paper and it is time to get ready for class. I pull up Youtube and play “Little Lion man” By Mumford and sons, my latest obsession. I get dressed, brush my teeth and head out the door.


The class I’m in is marketing with Elaine. We are required to have our laptops and are encouraged to use it as a resource for live-tweeting, and other online sources Elaine might show us that day. I usually tweet interesting articles I find on Yahoo! and iGoogle. These two popular search engine sites offer multiple tools including shopping (Froogle), mapping (Google maps), email (Gmail), and blogging (blogger) (57). Using the Twitter app TweetDeck, I am able to tweet and update information in my other classes like Media and Society and Internet-based Marketing.

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- Great scene of the outrageous Ari Gold from the HBO show Entourage

After a long day of classes,I come back to the crib and plant myself onto a couch. This is the time where I relax and re-fuel myself while watching some nice television. I will watch a variety of channels, flipping through th guide to see if anything goods on. Maybe if regular programming sucks, I will flip to the HBO and ENCORE channels to watch a movie. I love these premium channels because they offer me a wide range of special channels that lures customers with the promise of no advertising (199). I've really come to enjoy their original shows like Entourage and East Bound and Down. My roommates and I religiously watch the new episodes of our favorite shows. It's become a great tradition to look forward to every week.

With class come mounds of homework constantly being given to me by my professors. The work load can get to be pretty hefty, depending on what week of the month it is. A lot of my work includes reading the required textbooks assigned to the class. Textbooks are very useful to teachers as they serve as intent on improving literacy rates and public education (325). The reading is never too bad in on single class, but with a combination of 6 courses at once, one can see how the work load adds up.

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Another responsibility as a marketing major is to keep up with all the latest in the general world news, newest social media, and marketing trends. I accomplish this by having Yahoo! as my home page and visiting other various news sources like CNN.com. I, like many other Americans now a day’s, use online journalism by simply logging on to the internet and scanning a wide variety of news sources including the sires of print papers, cable news channels, news magazines, bloggers, and online-only news sources (261). It is the fastest and easiest way to stay up to date on the latest trends, without having to subscribe to a traditional newspaper. Many of my news related information is shared with and found through Twitter.

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On a Saturday or Sunday day we usually sit down and enjoy the new Netflix movie for the week. Netflix is a great movie rental service that shows the shift to a digital age. It offers countless movies for a low monthly fee of $9.99 a month. Another great option they provide is the use of instant viewing, which allows customers to instantly stream a variety of movies to their computer screen. (241). I find this feature great as I can watch premium series like “Dexter” or “Lie to me”.

With the oncoming cold weather brings the wonderful season of Snowboarding. I go every possible chance I can with my roommates and friends. It is essential to have a gnarly playlist to rock out to some great beats while shredding the mountain. For these days I prepare my itunes with my favorite songs and upload them to my ipod. I love music and Apple has done a great job on capitalizing this industry with itunes. It doesn’t surprise me that in 2008 iTunes sold more than 4 billion songs and became the No. 1 music retailer in the United States (79).

-S n

Snoop Dogg ft. Soulja Boy - Pronto, one song that gets me pumped to ride

The ride to the mountain is always very interesting. Sometimes it becomes unbearable going there when there’s no ipod connect and the only thing you have is a CD you’ve listened to a million times, and the relentless radio songs that are over played a billion times. With the added commercials every 5 minutes, commercial radio has become a secondary, or background, medium that follows the rhythms of daily life (129). I desperately need to buy an iPod connect, or use the ancient technology of burning new CD’s. Either way, unless its satellite radio, with Howard Stern, I’ve come to really despise the radio.

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After a great and exhausting day of riding, I like to come back, relax and rest up for the next day. Usually coma-toasted I will flip through the television for a while as a let the rest of the night wind down. Often I will spend my time looking up random things on the internet. I will frequently check online snowboarding magazine sites like Transworld Snowboarding. Here I find all the hottest and latest news about the snowboarding community. I find that online magazines are great because they allow for blogs, original video and audio podcasts, social networks, virtual fitting rooms, and other interactive components that could never work in print (302). After all the excitement of the day, the time finally gets late. I throw on a mellow Pandora station and doze off into dream land, only to wake up and do it again.

Weekly episodes of Sunday in the park can be found on TWSnow