How to find your future

I've been doing some introspecting lately. I'm at that point in my life where I'm starting to wonder if I'm on the right track. I'm a creative writing major at the moment, but it's not something I want to make a living out of.

So what to do when you don't know where to take your life?

There are a couple of things I've found that can help you find some direction.

Seek Counsel
The first thing I did was make an appointment with my university's Career Services office. Career Services departments usually have counselors on hand for just such an occupational identity crisis, and having someone to discuss things with can really help clarify the situation as well.

Another thing Career Services is good for is the Strong Interest Inventory, which measures not only your interests, but your personality and learning styles as well. It's helpful to go over the results with a counselor because A) they know what resources are available; and B) they can advise you on how to best utilize them according to your results.

If you're not enrolled in a university, most state Department of Labor offices will offer similar services.

Look Within
Steve Pavlina has a pretty good article about finding your purpose on his blog. In my experience, his method works very well. Just expect to be surprised at what you find out about yourself.

Once armed with this knowledge, you'll be better prepared when meeting with that Career Services counselor, and you'll likely find that you have more energy when you're working towards your purpose.

How to Never Feel Tired Again

Lifehack.org links to an interesting article from WebMD about keeping your energy levels from taking a swan dive off the Empire State Building. (Or even just stumbling over the dog.) Worth a look.

• http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifestyle/how-to-never-feel-tired-again.html
  

Fun with Inkscape

Aqeel Zafar wrote a very helpful conversion of BittBox's Reflection tutorial. I used it to help with the new logo here. I know I probably could've done it a lot faster in GIMP, but vector graphics are so much more scalable. Besides, it's high time I figured out how to use them right; it's the best way to make character sheets, for one.

Anyway, I just figured out how to do that blur-based glow that graces the logo text. I've known how to make glows in GIMP and PS for years, and thankfully it's pretty similar in Inkscape.

How to make glows in Inkscape:
First, you want to make a copy of the target object. There are several ways to do this, but I prefer to use Duplicate because it doesn't lock the glow to the same color as the original like Clone does.

• Press Ctrl+D to make a duplicate of the selection, or click Edit->Duplicate.

Once you have your copy, you want to give it a blur so you can see the original through it. You may want to adjust opacity as well, though it's usually not necessary.

• Press Ctrl+Shift+F to open the "Fill and Stroke" dialog.
• At the bottom of the window, move the "Blur, %" slider as desired. 3% is what I used.

At this stage, you can move the blurred object a bit for a drop-shadow effect. Keep in mind that if the copy is above the original and you want it below, you can just hit PageDown to lower the selected object in the stack. Similarly, PageUp raises the selected object. Also, if you want a glow from behind the object, instead of over it, hit PageDown here. This gives a similar effect to a solar eclipse, with the corona glowing around the moon.

• Hit PageUp or PageDown to raise or lower the selected object.
  

Object layering and Blurs are incredibly useful. Play around with combinations; you can get some nice-looking effects that are simple to create, and are scalable as well.