For those that don’t know, Leah is a Sociology major at Ambrose University College. It is a Christian institution, but an accredited one. I have a tendency to look down on Christian schools because they usually like to twist things a bit. Truth be told, I am quite impressed with Ambrose. For having a fairly conservative student base, it offers (at least on the academic side) a Liberal Arts education. Leah has applied to do her masters in Sociology at the UofC and we are fairly certain (fingers crossed) that she will get in and this has a lot to do with how her prof’s have rallied with her and helped her through the process. Having said that, there is still the fairly conservative student base that frustrate Leah. In reaction to the discussion in her Social Stratification class today she wrote this and you can trust that these are reactions to real comments:

Discriminatory attitudes are the same no matter who the object of discrimination. Prejudice is prejudice, no matter if it is against the colour of skin, lifestyle choice, religion, or social class. Discrimination against black people is the same as against First Nations people, and is the same again as against poor people, homeless people, immigrants, Jewish people and the list continues. Asking why immigrants don’t just “go back” once they have found that life in Canada is not what they were expecting is the same in effect as asking why First Nations people don’t build a rich cultural life on their reserves if they don’t want to be a part of our culture, or asking why black people—prior to the Civil Rights Movement—didn’t just go back to Africa if they didn’t like their place in society. The effect is this: it removes all responsibility for the way things are from the White people, the rich people, the Protestant people, those in the upper social classes—essentially, those with the power over society and its structures; the people that have the influence over cultural ideology. We can ask such questions and thereby remove any responsibility for changing our discriminatory attitudes, practices and policies. We can congratulate ourselves on how far we’ve come and feel sad that there are children over there in those countries that are hungry and poor. We can talk about grace in our churches as it applies to our own eternal souls and not think about how it is supposed to be extended to our community and culture. We can talk with compassion about what the absolute poor in other countries need from us, and we can attend community meetings to fight low-income housing from being built in our neighbourhood. It’s a good life we live here, maintaining our Protestant Work Ethic and living the American Dream. It is so good, in fact, it makes me weep. – by Leah Soveran

My life is changing. 2008 has been a pretty good year so far. Lee and I launched Epiblogger. rockstarpoet has a beautiful new theme. And I am happy to announce that I have accepted a new position at Zoom Productions as the new Web Project Manager. I will be overseeing or “managing” website and web-related project development. As you know or as you could easily guess, the internet is a huge passion of mine. I love the idea of getting to work for the web full-time. I know a lot already, but there is also so much to learn in moving into this professional web realm. Zoom seems to have a really great team (from the few I met) and I look forward to getting to know everyone there and starting a new career. I start on Monday.

Leaving Marketwire is going to be tough. We editors are a real team. We work a lot of weird hours together and have the chance to become pretty good friends. It’s been a great year and a half and I have learned so much. Not only have I learned, but Marketwire really re-instilled into me a confidence I had forgotten about. The confidence to know that I can work hard, succeed and grow as a person. I will also miss all of our great clients. Calgary is definitely full of friendly people and they always made my day a lot better because they took the time to get to know us as well.

I rarely blog about work because it is a tricky thing to do. Today, I am breaking that rule because I wanted to share with you the good news of my new position and the sad news that I am leaving a great team at Marketwire.

rockstarpoet has finally been redesigned with a touch of green. This is the sort of theme that I wished I had when I started. However, I didn’t know half the things that I know now. It’s taken two years of fiddling and working and re-working and playing with style sheets, photoshop, etc. for me to get to this point—a place to call home. Wonderful, welcoming home.

First, I have to say my thank yous. Jai Nischal Verma designed the Techicon theme and it is has been great to work with. If you take a look at where I started and where we are now you will see how much things have changed. Second, thanks to Brian Gardner. If you remember two themes ago I was using Brian’s Vertigo theme and I borrowed the styling from that theme for the footer here—four columns of glory. Third, Kirk Tardy for getting me started on this and for future help with this theme. That top header wouldn’t be possible without Brusheezy, because it supplied some great brushes. Also, I need to credit Derek Powazek for the FlickrRSS plugin styling. Finally, I just want to thank all the fans who support me… I wish I had a smiley for right here.

There was one, sad casualty in this process. I lost the smilies plugin. Sorry. I will see if there is a good replacement. (Edit – Bolded for Brenda)

Why so much green?

Fair question. I am using the same colour template that we did on Epiblogger, but in a different order obviously. I wanted the colour to reflect my thoughts on blogging. There is a lot of corporate blogging going on in this world and I want to soften that with something more organic. This theme and this blog represents an open community where I can share my stories (which are hopefully entertaining and provoking) and connect with you in new ways.

Organic blogging, to me, is blogging with the understanding of growth, adapting and lots of change. It is having a conversation and telling a good story instead of just lecturing or ranting and raving.

Open living is about living openly. There are places that I will not go on this blog, but there are so many areas that I have yet to explore. For instance, and this was only a fairly minor thing on previous themes, I want to share about the tshirts I wear from Uneetee (that’s one in the picture up there) and the other products and services I use. I also want to explore different mediums—including film, pictures, writing, audio, etc.

This shift also comes with an experiment. It is my belief that organic blogging—in every sense of the term (discovered and undiscovered)—can make a profit. Think of organic farmers. They make money, yet their product is still organic. It is my hope that I can move towards making some money on this blog while maintaining my authenticity and drive to provide great content. It’s worth trying, I hope. Part of that is going to mean that I am going to work just a bit harder at marketing this blog and trying to get a bit more traffic. I will do my best not to lose sight of my goals here.

And now, I leave the floor to you. What do you think?

P.S. All the major work is done, but there is still some tinkering to be done. If you have suggestions or something you would like to see let me know. The work is never done.

Edit – I forgot to mention that Lee was also a tremendous help moving databases from one server to the other. Now you wouldn’t have noticed, but I actually moved servers. I would have been lost without Lee.