The Moment You Have All Been Waiting For

I know the suspense has been killing everyone. OK, so, Katie and I had our meeting with Lloyd Purdy yesterday. It went exactly as I anticipated. When I first got there, Lloyd showed me around the new and improved Beard Building. It is remarkable! On the first floor, there is even a wall of art from contributors all around Cortland County.

If anyone is interested in this, the official open house for the Beard Building is today, from 12-6(ish). Lloyd seemed very excited. I suggest that if you have the time, you should stop in and check it out. And, on a side note, there will be free beer and wine to everyone “of age” at the later hours of this open house. I know I’ll be there…

Back on topic: So, after Katie arrived, and we started our meeting, things went pretty efficiently. We generally discussed the logistics of this venture. After we learned about some of the improvements and events that were happening in Downtown Cortland, Lloyd left us with quite a few “homework assignments” that are to be completed within the next week and a half. These are:

1. We need to contact Alex for a couple of questions. They are: There is wireless internet at the Beard Building that is accessible only to SUNY Cortland faculty, staff, and students. How can Katie and I connect to this with our laptops? Lloyd wants us to be able to, if we wanted to, connect to this wireless network and upload our recent posts to the blog from the Beard Building. Second, we are going to set the blog directly on www.downtowncortland.com. The host is www.fatcow.com. How will we be able to incorporate our blog onto the main page, or even off of it as a button, using the host site? Lloyd (along with Katie and I) felt that this project was about more than just writing a blog, so he left us in charge of resolving these technical issues.
2. The next issue that we need to tend to by the next time we meet with Lloyd is: We have to contact Craig Little. Dr. Little is a professor at SUNY Cortland who is in charge of incorporating the college with Downtown Cortland (the non-profit organization that Lloyd is in charge of). So, we all felt that he would be a good contact to have if any questions arose, etcetera.
3. Also, we have to actually start writing! Because of breaks and all of our busy schedules, Lloyd felt that it would be a good idea to always be a couple of articles ahead. So, in keeping this in mind, we will write two articles and send them to him by the time restraints mentioned above.

Everything was agreeable during the meeting. Although there is one issue that we still have to resolve. Mr. Purdy mentioned that we had the opportunity to have our blog be named The Blue Frog Blog. In doing this, we would have a quasi sponsorship. This would be cool, but there is one problem. Katie happens to work for Coffee Mania and we all realize how awkward it would be for her manager to find her on the internet with the competitions name above her blog. So, we haven’t decided if we are going to go through with that yet; we’re waiting a pending answer from Katie’s manager.

Another factor that came as a little bit of a surprise is that Lloyd would prefer to look at each of our posts before they are uploaded. I say this is a surprise only because he mentioned that we could write whatever we wanted—raw, uncut material. So, when he said this I was slightly confused. But, after he explained that he just wanted to be another pair of eyes for grammatical reasons, I was OK with it.

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. This is a good one for you, Dr. Stearns. Katie and I had to fill out official Main Street Promotion Committee forms. This way, at the end of this project, Lloyd will have something to show his sponsors (in order to see if we were successful or not), and we will have something to show you all the work that we have done. I must admit though, I’m not quite sure how to fill out this fairly confusing form yet…

So, I’m going to follow this post with an E-Mail to Dr. Stearns and Dr. Reid so we can get some of these issues resolved as I start to write the first Downtown Cortland Blog post! Lloyd had pointed out that “in an ideal world” we would have had this blog up by now. But, he knows that he is an extremely busy chap (as we are all also) and hopes to have it up within the next two weeks. So, because of this, I wish to have my responsibilities ready to go so that after I travel to the Blue Frog and write—all that is left is for me to send an E-Mail and wait.

I am still excited about this project and I hope that my posting skills are up to par (considering Lloyd has a journalism degree). I have a lot of great ideas that are just churning in my head; I can’t wait until I get some free time so I can get them written down.

That’s all for now, folks.

Cheers,

Ray