michaelmistretta.com

School’s out, and henceforth, my three-month summer begins. School—even with marks in the high nineties—ceases to give me any satisfaction. And so I’ve decided to live a summer full of purpose and productivity. I couldn’t be more excited.

I have a couple of projects that I am looking forward to working on throughout the course of the summer break. While I want to relax during my one major break from school, I also want to be creative and accomplish something (or a couple of somethings) this summer.

• As many of you know by now, one of the things very close to my heart is missions. I will be going to Lusaka, Zambia for a month this June to help first-hand with the troubles facing AIDS victims and orphans. It’s different than just dropping some money in a bucket and letting someone else worry about their problems.

  I get to actually first-hand and walk with them, talk to them, and love on them. Sure we will be helping out with the essentials—food, water, medicine, AIDS education in schools, etc. But there is something even more powerful: I am able to go and bring them the love and hope and happiness that they have never had the chance to know. I count it a privilege to go and live in tents in the middle of the jungle in order to bring love to their remote tribe. That, in my opinion, is the greatest project for any summer.

  But being the geek that I am, I don’t want it to end there. Part two of this Zambia Missions project is to bring what I saw, heard, and felt home. I want to share exactly how the people of Zambia have changed my life as much as I have changed theirs. I will be coming home with thousands of photos, video clips, and stories that I will be just aching to share. And share them I will—as soon as I catch up on my sleep.

• The next major project that I will be working on is a major redesign of MichaelMistretta.com. While the current design has served me well, it’s grown a little long in the tooth. And truthfully, I’m a bit tired of it myself. I don’t have any mockup designs in place as of yet, although I do have a pretty good idea of what the next step is in the MichaelMistretta.com design evolution.

  I want MM.com to be a central hub into all of the things I’m involved in on the Net. That said, I’m going against the decision to make it look like a “hub” and lose it’s journal-like experience. I’ve got a couple designs floating around in my head that I’m not ready to reveal yet. But if you are a designer that is looking for a project of you’re own for this summer, and feel up to the task, please give me a shout. I’d be more than happy to discuss plans in more detail one-on-one.

• On another site related note, I will finally be switching all of my many sites over to (mt). I’ve been using free Site5 hosting from my friend Ben Feldman ever since the launch in January, and I’m not going to lie—it’s been pretty bad. MM.com itself has only had about 85% uptime in the last couple of months, and I’ve had my IP banned from my sites for multiple days. After reading Shawn Blanc’s extensive post on his experiences with Media Temple over the past year, I knew that they were the host for me.

  I’m opting for Media Temple’s (gs) hosting plan which seems to strike the perfect balance between storage, reliability, price, and seems to handle a medium traffic site with occasional traffic bursts seamlessly. Sounds ideal for my needs.

• Finally, my biggest project this summer is the one that I can reveal the least amount of information about. The inspiration for the idea struck while in the middle of a game of Mario Kart Wii—which has absolutely nothing to do with the idea whatsoever. It is a joint project between Chris Thomson and myself, and is slated for a public release on August 30th. That is, of course, depending on how fast we can code PHP/speak with some people. While I can’t reveal the idea yet—although I will hint at it, as I love secrets—I will hint at the code-name for the project. It’s known as The Plank.

There are, of course, other side projects that I hope to participate in this summer, as well as some secret plans that I have yet to reveal. So far though, it seems that this summer is going to be action-packed. I’m looking forward to working on some things that I’m passionate about after a long year of school.