I’ve decided I’m going to consolidate my other websites, thripp.com/blog, composersjourney.com, and iseeafish.com under the richardxthripp.thripp.com domain. Nobody goes to them anyway… they don’t have the PageRank to rank high in Google’s search results… this site does, so why should I try to fight Google?

It’s really better to have all your sites under one domain anyway. I’m not going to merge daytonastate.org, since its value lies largely in the domain itself (similar to daytonastate.edu), but my other websites will be consolidated here including previous content over the next few months… I might even sell off the domains! But probably not.

On a sad note, today my half-sister Anna would be 11 years old. I only met her once, and she passed away in an accident at six months. She died on Father’s Day… 1999-12-16 / 2000-06-17 never forget.

I’ve been having a lot of fun tutoring and meeting people at Daytona State College even though my classes ended Oct. 22, 2010 since I took Fall A classes. Next semester I want to be a tutor at the Academic Support Center or Student Disability Services for math and English… should be fun and help me to relate to people.

I met Trina Chakravarty at Rotary Int’l. last week. She was Miss India USA 2005 and Miss India Worldwide 2006, she’s going to be an M.D. (medical doctor) next year at 24, and she even writes a blog! So amazing…

I have been slacking posting newly re-edited photos here, but I’ll have some this weekend.

Finally, I have decided to disable Infolinks on my sites. Infolinks is an ad network that double-underlines words on your site with ads. They are just too annoying, and they make next to …

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I gave away about 800 four-by-six prints of my recent pictures at Daytona State College today, so if you are visiting because you received one of those, give me a shout in the comments!

While I haven’t attended the college besides online classes in a year, next year I am taking the pre-requisites for the education program, so I will be at the Daytona Beach campus four days a week. I met a lot of old friends today and am looking forward to working on DSC in Motion, the college newspaper, after being the Features Editor in fall 2009.

I got my driver’s license on Monday after having a learner’s permit for over a year, so now I can travel wherever I want in my father’s van. Previously, he would have to go with me, drive home, and come back to pick me up, which he only wanted to do if I had class, but not for meetings or socializing. The only downside to having a license is the ridiculous insurance costs, which are currently averaging to $87.26 per month for me. I’m going to try to go somewhere everyday, because if I don’t I’ve basically wasted $2.90 because that’s the daily cost of the insurance. I don’t even have collision or comprehensive coverage and I have the highest deductible, so I think $20 per month would be a much more reasonable price. We are using Response insurance, so please let me know if you know a cheaper company (Progressive quoted us at over $150 per month).

To recoup some of the costs of insurance I’ve added Infolinks to my blog, so if you see words double-underlined those are advertisements and I earn money when they are clicked on. Please don’t click on them unless you are genuinely …

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If you typed in my web address from a print I gave you at Daytona State College, make yourself known by leaving a comment here.

I’ve been giving out a lot of prints I had made in 2007 when it was very cheap. These are the ones I backprinted in the same year, with my old and very long web address, richardxthripp.richardxthripp.com, which now forwards here. At the time other family members had other subdomains and the home page was a portal, but now I have thripp.com and I’m the only one left blogging.

If you come here again, type rxthripp.com instead which I use in all new print advertisements.

Have a look around at my photos and personal development articles. Feel free to comment on anything you see with the link at the end of each post; I read and respond to everything.

The photos I’ve given out so far are Leafy Droplets on Monday, Symmetry today (Wednesday), and on Friday I’ll be giving Ketchup and Ketchup 2 out as a set. This is on the Daytona State College main campus between 10 A.M. and 2 P.M.

If you need me to take photos for you, I am offering my services at a reduced rate of $20 per hour (min. $20) with free editing and a CD. The economy is bad now so we all have to pick up the slack. I have a DSLR with two good lenses (portrait and zoom).

Enjoy and keep studying!

I went back to school yesterday. I’m blogging about my school life over at DaytonaState.org now, so take a look at that. The reason to split it up from here is because that site is more targeted, and ranks higher in Google and makes me more money. But I’ll be writing more here and posting a few photos this weekend. The learning is keeping me busy.

2009-12-20 Update: There is value in higher education but there is a lot of baggage that goes along with it. Consider both sides before quitting college or going to college.

A college education is thought to be a requirement for success in modern America. We swallow, hook, line, and sinker, that higher education is an unassailable good. But what if it isn’t?

• Revisionist history. You get to learn that our founding fathers were unchristian, that the American Indians were peaceful savages, and that the Earth would be better off without humans. Then you’re tested on this, and you’ll “fail” if you don’t give the right answers.

You got enough of this in high school; do you have to subject yourself to four more years of it?

• All the great entrepreneurs skipped college, or dropped out as soon as their idea went big. (Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, the creators of Google and Facebook, etc.) If the college experience is so inherently valuable, why would anyone leave as soon as they started making lots of money?

• A continuation of high school . . . The modern Associate of Arts degree is nothing more than a repeat of what you were supposed to be taught in high school. You aren’t gaining any “specialized” skills for your place in the workforce, nor any “life experience” that you wouldn’t be better off acquiring on your own.

• The whole idea of going to college to get a job, to “appeal” to your employers, is all that higher education stands.

• Algebra. Who ever thought that you should mix letters with numbers in math? In the computer science degree I’m working on, I have to go through five courses of this nonsense (algebra, precalculus algebra, trigonometry, calculus 1, calculus 2). All of it completely unuseful to the math problems that …

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