First, I heard back from the vet yesterday: Mouse’s last bloodwork all came back normal, so we have ourselves a healthy cat. The elevated white blood cell count was presumably entirely from her infected tooth and gums, which the tooth removal and antibiotics took care of, and the liver enzyme count from her anorexia which is taking care of itself nicely now that it doesn’t hurt to eat anymore. She’s one happy cat now. 

And yesterday I got my registration package from school! Here’s what my first two weeks back look like (PDF) before classes start in September. From what I can tell from the documents, beginning in September I will be taking:

• MBA 5300, Data Analysis
• MBA 5330, Organizational Behavior and Human Resources Management
• MBA 5340, Financial Accounting Information and Decisions
• MBA 5210, Business/Government Relations
• MBA 5270, Information and Communication Technologies for Managers

and maybe an elective. I bet you all consider those riveting.

Some other interesting upcoming school bits: I’ll have to decide whether or not I want to get involved with the MBA Students’ Association, which holds its elections for executive in late August — since everyone is only there for one year, the executive is all “first-year” students. I also need to decide whether or not to get involved in case competitions, whose tryouts are in the beginning of September. Either of those would be a great experience and a great resume-booster, but I don’t want to spread myself too thin.

And finally a followup to my post about business cards: I asked Ask Metafilter for some advice on printing the other day, and someone there took it upon themselves to set up Illustrator files for me and tell me exactly what to get quotes on at print shops. Ask Metafilter is usually pretty great, but that was far more than I expected. Thanks, Matt!

(Matt is also responsible for Be Safe And Smart On Metafilter, which might be a little in-jokey but is still hilarious. The man has far too much free time.)

I considered getting 4-color cards from a template at VistaPrint or some other web-based inexpensive-cards factory, but I think this is one of those places where it couldn’t hurt to do things right and set myself apart a bit from the crowd. So I’m going to get “real” cards printed at a local printer, using spot color and my own design.

Part of the problem of designing business cards is that there is the boring corporate style and there is the graphic designer style, and it’s hard to find something that balances the two appropriately. I thought about doing stamped cards but I’m not sure they’ll convey “nifty” rather than “cheap”.

Anyhow, I played around with a few designs (and Josh Zhixel contributed this) before ending up with this, my latest draft:

The hook, so to speak, is that my name is contained within my email address. It’s not much but the line between hook and gimmick is subtle. I also tried it with blocks of color around the name bits but the descender screws things up a bit, and I think the name jumps even less with the color.

Maybe the back will be orange too, but I’m not sure it’s worth the extra cost. Regardless it’ll be on your standard matte business card stock.

Anyhow, what do you think?

(In case you’re curious or geeky in that way, it’s all Linotype Helvetica Neue: Bold Condensed for the orange bits, Thin Condensed for the rest of the email address, and Light for the bottom bit. Here’s what it looks like if I use normal width instead of condensed.)