i’ve been hard at work working on a new look for this site.

okay, actually not, i’ve been slacking, but i did finally come up with a design that i am going to start building.  here’s a peek at the new design.

 

after a month of being frustrated and writing bids on projects we wouldn’t get, erin and i re-evaluated what we were doing, how we were approaching the business, and what we should be doing.  since then, in a little over a week, we’ve scored 7 new projects on Elance and completed 4 of them.

saying we’re excited would be an understatement.  sure, we’ve had to cut our prices to be more competitive because many buyers are wary of new providers, but now, while we still have the new provider tag next to our name on our bids, we have positive reviews and a history of completed projects — we end up looking better than the other new providers.  and we’ve only had to stop bidding on things we didn’t really want anyway, and take projects we’re more interested in.  the ultimate decision was to play to our strengths — we don’t like making professional, corporate websites nearly as much as we like making fun, artistic websites.  and anyone who wouldn’t want to hire us because we’re not professional enough is someone we wouldn’t want to work for anyway.  so we’ve changed some of the language on the thinktank site and changed how we word our bids to be much more honest, and conversational, and less canned.  and it seems to be working — we think we’re really the only ones who talk like human beings in our bids and it seems to be attracting a positive response (oddly people seem to feel more comfortable with that…).

and this is working for ourselves, not through a third party.  which means that when we do work for someone they can say we did a great job, not the company we’re working through, which all just reflects better on us.  we’re really just excited we’re doing so well.  and it means we can cut down the number of projects we need to take from that other freelancing job.  it may be a while, yet, before we feel comfortable cutting them off entirely, but since doing these Elance jobs, we’ve had to chase down our customers much, much less, and they’ve been much easier to work with, and we don’t need to worry about calling them during business hours or really talking on the phone at all.  And oddly enough — although hws says that their customers are the type that want their site up cheaply and asap — the projects we’ve been working on outside of hws have gotten done faster than those for hws.

it’s all just so much more satisfying and rewarding and we’re really starting to feel like we know what we’re doing.  and, you know, i’m excited, too, because we’re expecting our business cards to arrive tomorrow.

verily it was decided that it was time for a makeover of the thinktank site.  this came down from on high because we went to some other web designers’ sites and realized most, if not all, our contemporaries tended to be a lot more conservative in their presentation on their own website.  now, this seems counter-intuitive to me — i mean, it’s your site — you should show off how insanely badass you are.  but no, most of them are fairly boring, professional-looking sites.

well we didn’t want to do that.  but we did want to make it a bit more like what other people were doing.

so i had a brilliant idea to try to find a script or something that would allow for a dropdown menu that would choose the theme for the thinktank site.  so you could pick which one you were looking at.  not only would it be cool just for the cool gadget factor, but it would showcase our skillz and make us look more badass and give a lot of variety to the site.  it would (in theory) be as good a representation of what we can and do…do…as the portfolio itself!

BEHOLD!  thinktank-studio.com and the glorious dropdown of awesomeness!

(as a sidenote, we’ve been watching way too much how i met your mother recently…..)

i’ve got a couple more themes for the thinktank site in the works and erin’s gonna make some so it should be pretty sweet.

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in other news, it’s not quite done yet, but i’ve created a kickapps community for jazzsequence.  you might remember me talking about kickapps a couple weeks ago in this post.  mostly this was an experiment to set it up, get it working, and know what it’s about so i can start building it for other people.  but it’s also cool in its own right and i think could take the place of the now-dead forums and such if, you know, i still *have* a community….if you have a login on the jazzsequence.com blog, you should already be able to log into the members area with the same info.  if not, make one, and be awesome.  there’s blogs and message boards and stuff (at least when i set it all up).  you can see what i’m talking about at members.jazzsequence.com.

so we got a new client for thinktank.  it’s a wordpress blog, and it’s mostly maintenance and updates, but it’s still pretty cool.  our client wants to build/integrate a social networking component, so i did some researching and found KickApps Social Networking Software.  the more i read into it and compared the alternatives, the cooler (and more KickAss) KickApps became.  they run a SaaS — Software as a Service, an intriguing concept Wired wrote an article about a while back.  what it means in this case is that the social networking software is provided by and hosted on KickApps’ servers.  you setup the gateway, and everything else lives on their side.  which means less twiddling, infinitely easier setup, no maintenance (other than cosmetic stuff) and also means, for them, that they get to control the flow of traffic and how things work monitarily.  you see, as a free service, they control 2/3 of the ads that show up on the site.  1 of the 3 ad banners you control and can set up as you please.  there’s an option to buy out the ads, but according to the video on their site, it starts at $100/month for 5000 clicks — not a small-scale deal.  they have an impressive client list though; professional sports teams, vibe, npr, universal music, etc.  and it plugs right into the standard cms apps.  not just joomla! and drupal but also wordpress.  it’s exciting enough of a concept to tempt me to create an account and set one up here.  even though, you know, no one visits me, really.

i also just finished optimizing this blog for search engines.  from which i learned a few things about seo-friendly coding, and hopefully does something to counter the last part of the paragraph above.  all this seo’izing and working on a new blog made me think of making affiliate buttons for thinktank.  well, the other thing that made me think of that was the email i got that said that firefox set the world record for most downloads in a 24 hour period for the firefox 3 download day campaign.  it all made me think that creating more ways for people to link back to thinktank couldn’t hurt, and the buttons are prettier than my cleverly unobtrusive “website designed by thinktank” tag at the bottom of our sites.  oh, the other thing the seo stuff taught me (or reminded me, really, i already knew it, but i wasn’t implementing it) was that it’s better to link the whole phrase “website designed by thinktank” than just the “thinktank” which is what i was doing before.

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in other news, i got my computer working again, although i haven’t had a chance to look at the old hard drive, see if it’s usable, and figure out wtf happened.  for, you know, fun, and because i wanted to figure out what hardware i should get, or more accurately, if the hardware i was planning on getting would be comparable, i downloaded 3Dmark06 — the standard benchmarking tool that gaming magazines use to rate.  it seemed kind of silly to be using this benchmarking tool that i’ve read about in computer gaming world, but i wanted to see how erin’s system (roughly the equivalent of my broken system) compared with the media center which i was using (roughly the estimated equivalent of what i would be using).  i made a fatal error in doing this — while the mainboard and processors would be comparable (the mainboard i got was a mini version of the one i’m using in the media center) the fantastic graphics i was experiencing in guild wars on the media center was not due to a highly advanced onboard graphics processor which was my assumption at the time.  in fact, it was from the graphics card i got for the media center specifically because i needed s-video out to go to the tv.  as such, erin’s computer with an nvidia geforce 6600 ranked about a 600 and some change on the 3Dmark06 test.  the media center (not designed as a gaming computer by any means and only holding 1gb ram) ranked a 300.  these were, of course, piddly compared to the high scores of people who actually cared to build a gaming system and uploaded their scores to futuremark’s database.  so my plan was to get 4gb ram to overcompensate.  but, as i wrote in one more to file under “it’s always something”, i only had 2 ram slots and my power supply wasn’t spiff enough anyway.  so, having to order a new power supply, i also ordered a new graphics card as well, an off-brand nvidia geforce 8400gs.  it was the cheapest and most powerful solution.   when the power supply came, i started installing vista ultimate, and when the graphics card arrived a couple days later i started transitioning over to my new/old system.  in all, it’s performing well.  my new 3Dmark06 score is around 1600, and guild wars nightfall looks gorgeous — pretty much like the screenshots on their site.  so i’m a fairly happy camper and using a mostly functional operating system again.  while vista isn’t as simple and intuitive as osx and the start menu is all fuXX0red — seriously more messed up than previous versions imo — it works, the glass effects are pretty and it is better than XP and it’s no 95/98 by any means.   it’s definately an advance, albeit not a ground-breaking one.  there are a couple issues:

when i started using vista on the media center i discovered a problem — while i could create new folders (and new files through the right-click option) i could not NAME them.  i.e. New Folder.  New Folder (1).  New Folder (2).  etc. etc.  no matter what i did, i couldn’t get it to work.  apparently, after googling a bit, i discovered this was fairly common and required a registry hack to fix.  annoying, and a waste of a couple hours of banging my head on the computer screen.

random lockups and freezes in explorer, especially when accessing files on a shared network drive.  both vista computers do this so i can only assume this is fairly normal as well.  also, having to log in to the network drive after every reboot is obnoxious and i’m still trying to figure out how to save my password.  :/

so that’s the scoop.  a few quick, final closing remarks:

to answer the comment in my last post: avatars are user icon things for social apps like blogs and forums and messaging programs, but also are used by microsoft to visually represent different users.  it’s sort of the digitized representation of yourself to the world.

i’m planning on sending off my 8mm reels to get transferred to dvd in the next couple weeks.  once i get the dvd back i will rip the video, add new soundtracks and post them here (possibly to youtube as well).  i’m also going to do something about the gavin video and the guy in a hat video (guy in a hat might need to move to youtube also, just for kicks).

i want a google phone.

yes, i’m playing guild wars again.

look for joss whedon’s Dr. Horrible in a couple weeks.  it’s gonna be aweX0me.

it’s been a long time coming, i finally updated the blog design. i’ve done a couple custom wordpress themes for thinktank clients now, and it was about time i did one for myself. it’s not really anything new, although the banner is totally new. but the css was recoded by hand. the overall design is keeping in line with the thinktank site — i really like that look.

so, if you haven’t heard, firefox 3 is coming soon. the mozilla organization is trying to set a guiness world record for most downloads in a 24 hour period. so head on over to Spread Firefox headquarters and pledge to download on Download Day (date to be announced).

personally i like the idea of a wordwide “download day” — but i think it shouldn’t necessarily be focussed on one software. so my pledge and what i propose to you — all 5 of you, dear, dear readers — is to download AS MUCH AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE on whatever day mozilla decides to be “download day.” let’s put so much pressure on the servers that we clog the internets tubes, knock down a couple servers, piss off the riaa, whatever. let’s celebrate download day with some good old fashioned destruction.

oh, and if you were curious, trent reznor compiled a mix that features the artists he’s touring with this summer. you can download it for free — it’s got full art and stuff. pretty neat.

and in completely other news that’s pretty much interesting only to me — i noticed from my google analytics report that i got some bumps in hits and search referrals when i talked about gaeta and bsg. and it made me think, huh, so if i actually talk about stuff that people like — they’ll go to the site? weird. so i think i’m going to start dropping BATTLESTAR names to STAR TREK get some extra FREE PORN hits ENLARGE YOUR MEMBER. we’ll see how it VIAGRA goes.

i totally redesigned the portfolio page on the thinktank site.  it now looks super-hot and uses lightbox 2.0.

check it out.

i added some cool stuff to the thinktank studio site.  it’s like wallpaper and avatars and graphics and stuff.  you should check it out.

also, if you feel like lol’ing, this is f’ing hi-larious. and check out the archives, too.  good stuff.

i’ve decided to learn RubyOnRails.  Rails is a programming language/framework that comes with some prepackaged “programming shortcuts” which allow developers to write programs much faster.  it’s more of a “do this” and the app actually does that sort of thing as opposed to writing lines and lines of code for weeks to make it “do this.”  i learned about RoR months ago when the lead developer for ampache was talking about possibly using it instead of php for the new version.  so i wiki’d ruby on rails and thought it sounded interesting.  still, i hate programming and it still sounded like a programming language.

 then i read this article in the new Wired.  it still sounds like a programming language but the fanaticism surrounding it sounds like it comes from taking much of the coding out of programming.  and so it sounds like the language for me.  maybe.  i mean, we’ll see, but the possibility of being able to create “a simple blogging application in 15 minutes” makes it sound pretty damn promising.

 so i asked erin to think of a web 2.0 type app that i could try to write to learn rails and she said an image slideshow since people always want that.  and so that is my new project.  i will try to keep the collective you posted.

so just about all i blog about these days is how the web design gig is going. that probably has something to do with the fact that i’ve been dreaming CSS lately. well this post won’t be any different. and i’m still f’ing dreaming CSS…

we recently hit a landmark accomplishment. when we were first figuring out how much money we’d need to make off the graphic design gig to be able to maintain our current standard of living, I threw out a figure of $600 base. that wasn’t including insurance or taxes. We figured, when we could, we’d put away about $200/week for taxes, which would bump that number up to $800, and after looking at insurance plans you can get on your own the grand total was about $1000/wk. Well thanks to my benefactors at Whole Foods, I have insurance for myself and the kids (and erin after i hit 400 more hours worked) for somewhat less than $200 a paycheck (which is every two weeks). the 20 hours a week at WFM has been netting me about $200/wk. now, the medical benefits are brand new, and i haven’t seen my cards yet, but presumably that’s more or less settled. the last piece was being able to make a minimum of $600/wk from the freelance graphic design gig.

well, we just got a check for last week that was $602 and the next check is $600+ also. I prefer to see this as a trend rather than a fluke. for one, erin’s been kicking a whole lot of arse. her designs are awesome, and she’s getting to be almost as fast as me, sometimes faster because i work in the PC 3 days a week. We’ve also been taking a lot of E-Comm sites which pay more. This next check does have a 10 page E-Comm site which is a rare occasion, but erin took the design and is highly amused that the guy offered me a job for the work i/we did. how many times is that now? (i think 3, maybe 4…) the challenge at this point will be to nail that goal every week and then we’ll be in really good shape.

in other news, i’m still using safari. i switch back and forth between safari and firefox — mostly because i have some pages that have the passwords saved in firefox and i don’t know them…well, and i just figured out a couple days ago how to get safari to save passwords…but also, i like being able to open firefox and restore my last session by default. also, there’s some specific pages that i load regularly that are designed specifically for firefox (for work), and i need the web developer extension in firefox for the e-comm stuff. but for everything else i use safari and safari is my default browser. really, the only thing, other than the plugins, keeping me from using it more is the restore last session feature.

also, i think wordpress doesn’t like safari…

and the xbox debacle…

so many moons ago, i started talking about building a media center to consolidate the tower of stereo equipment that gavin liked to play with into one computer that did all that. at the time i was at albertsons’ and my friend, mike, talked me into building an xbox media center. after getting all the equipment needed and doing research on hacking the xbox OS to allow non-microsoft software to be installed by both using a modchip or a “softmod” (requiring a specific game and memory card and game save), i decided to order a modchip. i googled, found a vendor, picked out a reasonably-priced chip that does not require soldering and waited for it to arrive. and waited. and waited. while waiting, i attempted to use the xbox as we had been using the ps2, as a dvd player. often, it would freeze and start skipping and having errors at night. i decided that this was most likely due to the xbox overheating, and some microsoft support docs and stuff i found on the internets seemed to confirm this. so i started to “ice my xbox” — wrap an icepack in a towel and place it on the hottest part of the xbox — with mixed success. in the end, i submitted a complaint to the better business bureau after many attempts at trying to get ANY KIND OF RESPONSE AT ALL from the vendor who i paid for the modchip i had not received and what did the BBB say? that they had been unable to contact the vendor either. so i called the CC company to reverse the charges. meanwhile, there’s no point in looking for another chip because the xbox is a flaming pile of crap! we aren’t going to be able to use it as a media center if we can’t leave it running (albeit unused) for a couple hours while gavin naps or does other things. so i listed it on ebay in an attempt to recoup my losses and get some funding for a real media center computer.  well that busted.  2 listings and no bites.  so i listed it on amazon, where it sits now.  i’ve gotten two inquiries thus far.  when you get a message via amazon marketplace it has a form-generated message saying to never ship to a different address than what is listed for the customer.  so my first message was “will you ship this to someone else in germany.”  riiiight.  the next one seemed innocuous and seemed like i might actually get a sale.  in fact, i did get an email saying it sold and then a followup email from the “customer” saying ship it asap, please.  the problem was the address was in nigeria.  that was the first signal.  the next was that the email said they were giving me a $115 shipping credit — to my knowledge something amazon does not do — as i understood it, they either give you 3.99 or 6.99 for expedited shipping, so that was the second red flag.  the third was the email said something about payment not going through until a tracking number was supplied for shipping.  that sounded odd.  then, when i went to my amazon seller account, oddly enough it said i hadn’t sold anything recently.  THOSE DAMN NIGERIANS WERE TRYING TO SCAM ME!  so i politely sent an email back saying if you would like to purchase the xbox please do so at this address and copied the link to where it still sat for sale.  i then did all the spoof/phishing/scam reporting stuff that amazon has available.  so i’m in the market for a media center.  again.  my estimated cost before shipping is a little over $600.  which is more than the xbox was (which was the reason we got the xbox instead — cost).  still it’s not so bad, but we need to wait until this thing sells.  but thanks to the nigerians, it’s all boxed up at least…