Update. (Two days late.)

Today is a good day to write a blog entry about my new campus bookstore job. Why, you may ask? Because today (recently) Amazon announced that they are going to offer textbook rental on their Kindles. So, students can rent a textbook, for 20% of the cost of purchase, and it will download to their Kindle. They can make notes on the book directly on their Kindle, and even when the rental expires they will still have access to their notes via the Amazon cloud. Holy shit! So my Bookstore job is going… fine.

I'm just kidding. The bookstore is also going the way of rental books and they will be priced to compete. We're also releasing an App for iPhone, Windows Phone and Android.

Freelance continues. The Canadian Mathematics Society has touched base with me to arrange a meeting. I hope that works out. More business is always good. Charlie Smith has also told me that he'd like to set up a freelance arrangement. I'm skeptical that anything will come from Mr. Smith but it would be fantastic if anything did.

I'm learning constantly at this new job. It's ridiculous. The office is filled with very motivated and resourceful people.

I've found and used two cool services in the last two weeks. www.surveymonkey.com has some awesome survey tools and tiny.cc lets you track click-throughs on your microlinks for free.

The Bookstore purchased a new copy of Office for me because I had to do up a Powerpoint presentation. Fun! More exciting though is that I will have to create messaging for the internal monitors at the bookstore. Powerpoint was suggested but I said that video would be cooler. They liked the idea and asked me what I needed. I said After Effects CS5 and so they bought me After Effects CS5. Now the only problem is I have to learn to use After Effects CS5!

I still can't help but feel like I'm still in someone's desk, on someone's computer, doing someone's job. I'm really hoping that it starts to feel like home soon. I have a meeting with HR tomorrow to set up my salary and benefits. Signing something that says that I work here might help me to feel more like I work here. Plus, when I get a staff card I can sign up for the gym, have a place to shower, and start biking to work immediately.

The Queens Campus is amazing. I've always loved to walk at lunch. Bank Street offered me homeless and urban decay. The campus offers students and ivy covered limestone buildings. I'm much more serene here.

As far as what I've been doing here, I've been busy. The Facebook page hasn't budged. I put up a video and that surged impressions and traffic but there wasn't much else I could post so I've put that on the back burner for now. As for Twitter, we're booming! I'm creating an annual tweet schedule for incoming and outgoing students. I started requesting feedback from my followers and have been getting it. So, based on the feedback, I'm creating simple infographics to post on Facebook answering some of the most frequently asked questions. I've also received quotes for a bookmark I designed and am going to be working with Kingston's DigiGraphics to produce them. I spent a great deal of time yesterday attempting to capture video of our new silk-screen printer's arrival to post on FB. I'm also a bit of backup IT so there's been some printer troubleshooting. No shortage of hats to be worn over here.

If anyone out there has good After Effects tricks or resources I'm all ears!