Danny's Blog

Choosing a good camp site is one of the hardest decisions to make when camping. There might be hundreds of sites to choose from, but you can only choose one for the night. The three most important factors are legality, safety and comfort. I listed these factors in the order of importance. The absolute most important thing you need to check is whether you are allowed to camp in a location. To determine this, you can start by assuming you can’t camp on private land without asking. Camping on private land is usually paid, I like to avoid it when possible. In terms of camping on public land, there are a few major public land categories where camping is generally allowed and free. These are National Forest Service (NFS) land, National Park Service (NPS) land and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land. There are tons of different policies for different segments of the land that belongs to these organizations, so Google is your friend. “Dispersed camping” and “backcountry camping” are keywords

Chapter 6 of Charello’s Essentials of Social Media Marketing covers marketing with Twitter. Twitter is fairly similar to Facebook and Instagram in terms of crafting good posts. The base component of a post is text. Twitter allows up to 280 characters of text as opposed to the unlimited length allowed by Facebook and Instagram. The next component is a media attachment. Twitter supports regular photos, videos and GIFs. However, Twitter only allows four images per post. Twitter also limits videos to 140 seconds. Just like on other platforms, including some form of media improves the performance of the post significantly. One part of a post that is also important is hashtags. Again, just like Facebook and Instagram, hashtags can greatly improve a post. On Twitter, one or two hashtags is ideal. Any more than that and the post will be negatively impacted. It is important to keep the ideal number of hashtags in mind. Facebook posts perform best with one to three, Twitter one or two and Insta

  Back in the summer of 2020 when gas was cheap and roads were empty, a friend and I decided to go on a cross country road trip. You may be concerned that we were flaunting COVID-19 restrictions, which we absolutely were, but over the course of the two weeks I interacted with maybe a dozen people. If I had stayed home I am certain that we would have interacted with more than that in the same time period. Either way, what’s done is done. A screenshot of most of our trip is shown below. There are some missing sections, though. We had issues with our GPS recording app in those sections. Map of our trip Now, the big thing to consider when planning a road trip is costs. This trip cost me around $1,070 total. Of that $1,070, around $70 was a speeding ticket, $200 was car repairs, and around $100 was gift shop items. That means that the trip itself was only $700. I could have saved another $100 if needed but staying a place with a shower occasionally available really isn’t optional in m

Chapter 5 of Charello’s Essentials of Social Media Marketing covers marketing with Instagram. In Section 5, hashtags are discussed. Instagram allows use of up to 30 hashtags per post. However, one should only use between five and 11 hashtags per post. Outside this range, engagement tends to drop. It is important to use hashtags on most posts. A post with a single hashtag will do more than 12% better than a similar post without a hashtag. One potential downside of hashtags on Instagram is that there are banned hashtags. It will not harm your account if you use a banned hashtag, but it will be as if you did not make the post. This is because the post was shadow banned. When something is shadow banned, it means that it was banned, or in this case, hidden, without notification. When someone searches for a banned hashtag, no results will appear. When Instagram’s algorithm is deciding what posts to display to a user, the post with the banned hashtag will automatically be removed from the

The past week I have been feeling stuck in Ada, so I’ve been going out and just roaming around. I just hop in my car and roam around until I either find something cool or get bored. On one of my trips, I went north of Ada to explore at night. I didn’t find much cool stuff, but I did find a graffitied overpass. I stopped to check out some of the graffiti, but I also figured out it was an overpass for Interstate 75. It was very awesome to see semitrucks go rushing by at 70 miles per hour. I have seen regular trucks go by from a few feet away at 55 miles per hour, but it is a whole other experience with semitrucks going 70. The fact that I was under the overpass also meant that the acoustics were different. I can’t imagine what it is like to be an animal with no understanding of what is going on to when they hear cars going by. I do feel bad for them though. Some of the graffiti I also decided to explore to the south of Ada. I have explored a good amount this way, so I was somewhat fa

Chapter 4 of  Charello’s Essentials of Social Media Marketing   covers marketing and Facebook. An important consideration in posting on Facebook is post length. In general, a shorter post works better. This is because, from the perspective of an unfamiliar user, it may be worth it to read a short post but not worth it to read a longer post. Longer posts will also result in a “read more” button which requires a viewer to actively choose to read the post instead of just browsing and reading the post. Media is also an important aspect to each post. There are three main categories of media: photos, videos, and GIFs. A photo is just a basic image. In general, images should have a resolution of 1200x628 to be optimized for mobile viewing. Videos are the next media type. In fact, 79% of Facebook users would rather watch a video than read information about a product. It is also important to include subtitles because 85% of Facebook videos are watched while the audio is muted. The last media ty

Over the summer I installed a lift kit on my 2004 Jeep Wrangler. It took about two weeks to complete due to a variety of issues related to the fact that the vehicle was 17 years old and spent a few of those years in the great state of Ohio where salt is used in the winter. For those who are unaware, salt greatly increases the rate of corrosion leading to broken and stuck bolts. During my install I broke five bolts and had to cut off about 10 bolts out of the 30 or so involved. However, that install is done so I will not be covering it here. I haven’t completed finished it yet, though. There are three things that I still need to do in order fully finish it.  The first task was aiming my headlights. I’m sure everyone has had the experience of someone driving their car and having oncoming traffic leave their brights on, so you flash your brights to have them turn theirs off. But, instead of the traffic turning their brights off, they flash theirs back at you. A lot of the time this is cau

Chapter 3 of Charello’s Essentials of Social Media Marketing covers social media marketing strategies. There are a lot of parallels between the strategies used for social media marketing and strategies used in software development, especially in user interface design. A big component is using a persona to help drive design decisions. A persona is a method of creating a fictional person based on a group of real people. The first thing to be done to create a persona is to determine what demographic the persona will be based on. For example, a population can be split into different groups based on age, gender, income, location, job, hobbies, and values. This is by no means a comprehensive list, but it is a good starting point. Once the group is defined, start creating the fictional person. Give them a real name first. This will allow a greater degree of relating to that persona. Give that persona an age and a family. Based on that information you can start defining more personality tra

As I was reading Section 3 of Chapter 2 of Charello’s Essentials of Social Media Marketing , I learned about building my personal brand online. Two big components of building an online brand are LinkedIn and Twitter. LinkedIn is the biggest professional network, so looking for job or career opportunities will be greatly impacted by one’s LinkedIn profile. There are a few things that should be completed to have a proper LinkedIn profile. The first is a profile picture. According to Hebberd, a LinkedIn profile with a profile picture is seven times more likely to be found than a profile without a profile picture. The next important feature is the headline. This is a short blurb to describe oneself. Many people will simply put their job title or description here, but it should be more than that. It is an opportunity to quickly describe yourself as a professional as well as your aspirations to help differentiate yourself from the rest. The next section, the about section, is similar to th

My first visit to my apartment was two full weeks ago today. One of my roommates moved in early so I wanted to visit him, along with some other friends who had also moved onto campus early. I was super excited to see our apartment for the first time. It is so much better than the dorms I had lived in the past two years both in terms of quality and size. It is different not having a meal plan this year, but so far making all my own food is going well. It is also interesting to spend money weekly to get food instead of one bulk purchase at the beginning of the semester. In terms of courses, I am taking six classes this semester. This is the same as most semesters, so this doesn’t concern me, but so far these courses seem like they will be harder. All my courses this semester have much more writing as well. Of those courses, four are ECCS and two are in other departments. The first ECCS course I am taking is Networks. It is going very well so far. I have a little bit of experience with