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so i was really aggravated last night.  we just had a major reset done in the cheese department, and i was focusing on the case, figuring out what i should cut.  there was some chocolate that i needed to deal with and my big, pretty display i built a couple months ago got pulled down and replaced by rolling racks.

 that was annoying, but because our regional analyst person talked to me about it, i was expecting that.  i was annoyed because i thought it looked good and i had it somewhat organized the way i wanted it, and the new set had stuff mixed together and the tags were all mixed up.  plus there was stuff everywhere.

more annoying, however was when our marketing guy — who was doing a demo in front of really big windows letting in the afternoon sun, came over and said “hey, chris, i thought you should know…your chocolate is melting.”

wtf?  i go over to see the halloween display had been moved in front of the big windows since i last worked, with all my specialty halloween chocolate and, in fact, the chocolate had been melting.  hi, chris, you need to do a chocolate reset.  so i did.  the result looks pretty good, but it was annoying to have to come in and deal with some scruffy-faced nerfherder’s brilliant idea to stick the halloween chocolate in front of the frickin’ window.  i mean, seriously.  whose brilliant idea was that?  so far i’ve had no answers (not that i think anyone would take credit for it to me, considering how pissed i was).  so here’s the new chocolate set, halloween candy included:

beyond the annoyance of having to do the reset, that’s $65 of lost chocolate now, that’s unsellable, and while that could have been a lot worse and we generally make a pretty big margin on most of the chocolate, it’s still lost sales and our department hasn’t been doing fabulous with the change in seasons, the economy, etc.  not to mention the fact that my whole day was spent on that instead of other things.

so i came home and made myself feel better with an herb-crusted fleur de france brie and yummy cambozola (a german cross between the italian blue, gorgonzola and the french camembert brie) on la panzanella croccatini which, in my opinion, is the best cracker for cheese.  they’re big flatbreads and kind of unruly, but they’re awesome and crunchy and not too thick like some other croccatinis.  the cambozola was a bit more -zola than cam- having sat in our fridge for a few days, but still tasty.  the evening was capped with some hornsby’s crisp apple hard cider which, i’ve decided, doesn’t suck.

so last week, erin and i decided to cut off iFreelance for good.  we’ve gotten a good run on Elance and we’ve only really gotten 1 fix-it job on iFreelance, the interface isn’t as good, the support and payment isn’t as easy (for either party) or well developed, and the jobs are fewer and tend to be less money.  so we closed down shop on iFreelance.

similarly, we’ve been talking about dropping heritage as a source for freelance work, as well.  we don’t make as much money, the projects are more work, the customers are often frustrated and upset by the time they get to us, they didn’t pick us as designers, but the company, and therefore the projects are typically less the types of things we really want to be doing. additionally, it’s been months since we had a project that wasn’t a pain and actually was something we enjoyed doing.  on the contrary, pretty much every single project we’ve had lately has been completely horrible, including the one i’m working on right now in which the customer doesn’t pick up the phone when i call, and responds to my emails in one sentence that does not answer what i’m trying to find out.  it’s a joke and it’s been a week and i haven’t gotten any information yet.

which has made us step up our exit strategy a bit.

the original plan was to wait and see how the off-season/winter treated us as freelancers and evaluate heritage after january and maybe drop them then.  at this point, the amount of stress and hassle and time wasted dealing with their stupid and non-functional bueracracy makes me think that we’d be making more money if we were not taking anything from them and just doing stuff on our own through our site and Elance.  more money, because we get more out of working for ourselves (since we set the prices and it all goes to us, so we make more from doing less), and because we’re not wasting time dealing with people who don’t respond to us and stressing out about it.  and time, in this business, really is money.

so.  the new plan is to drop heritage after this project.

i won’t say anything bad about heritage (well, not more so than i have already, i guess).  the experience wasn’t all bad.  on the contrary, we learned a lot, and have done really well.  but the system is flawed, the outsource department is often left hanging and seemingly ignored, with very little support from in-house staff or training material to go off of.  increasingly, and especially since we’ve been able to make money doing this outside of heritage, the inefficiencies and pain points of working with them are made more obvious and it makes the experience more abrasive.  it’s hard to be an advocate for the company as a designer dealing with customers when i’m so frustrated with the situation.  the projects have slowed to a crawl as the number of outsourcers has expanded and the amount of projects being moved to the design phase are hung up in the gathering content stage, and even those that do get moved to design are woefully incomplete.  at least when we’re dealing with our own customers, they know what they want, they have their content, or not, and know that they’re responsible to.  if they want a specific feature, we can give it to them, if they don’t, we don’t.  we don’t spend time and patience haggling about enhancements the customer doesn’t really need or charging them a gross amount for things that should have been included.  it makes dealing with customers, and the project, even more painful than it should be and takes time away from doing what we should be doing which is, designing their site.  in my mind, i’m much more able to ensure good customer service if i’ve been with them directly from the beginning.  coming into the story at the end, after they’ve already been pissed off for 3 months about nothing happening on their site does not a good customer service experience make.

but it has been a learning experience and a good jumping off point.  but it’s a lot like tech support — no one with any actual talent stays with it forever; if they knew their stuff, they’d be doing something else.  it’s a good intro job, but it’s time to move on.

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.

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…

so it seems totally contradictory that now that i am home all day i actually have less time to blog than when i was working at albertsons.  that probably says something about my job.  but that also says something about having kids around and being a parent.  and, you know, that part is cool.

so, let’s see.  i’m possibly getting some thinktank webdesign gigs.   (that’s a bit of search engine optimization there…search engines like google use hyperlinks to sites that have text links like that in how they arrange search results for various queries, which is why it’s better to say this site is really purple, rather than there’s a red site here….i decided to wiki it a while back in research for the thinktank stuff since, you know, people get paid big bucks for SEO) one is for the salt lake theological seminary, erin’s dad’s work, and one is for a nonprofit a friend i work with at whole foods works with.  so that’s exciting.  the other webdesign gig is a real time suck.  it’s cool and it’s still fun, but it can be stressful trying to get things in under the deadline (even just the deadline to get invoices in) knowing that my paycheck is riding on someone else and this last week i had 4 accounts all of which were almost impossible to get a hold of anyone.  i guess to make up for it, though, this week i got a 10 page site whose owner is readily available.  i’ve been doing a lot more ecom sites because they’re easier to plow through, we got thrown way off our schedule a couple weeks ago when we all had the flu and had to take a couple days off to recover.

erin is an equal partner in the web design now and, while she may be a bit slower with the technical stuff, is coming up with design concepts that are hawt and stuff that i wouldn’t have thought of.   so it’s good that there’s two of us, and it’s good that we’re both working, and it’s good that we can help each other out, and it’s good that we’re both in the thinktank thing together because if we are ever able to get enough work doing that on our own it means that our sites will be twice as good, and i’m banking on the quality and creativity of our designs being the main selling point.

design tips of the evening:  gradients are good.  bevelling can be good.  drop shadows are nice when very subtle.

so the problem is that we’re literally working all the f’ing time.  especially now that we’re behind.  and when the kids are fussy, it just makes it worse.  meara calls up erin and says “what are you doing?”  “working on websites.”  “so, what are you doing later?”  “…working on websites.”   and that’s seriously what we do.  i try to set a cut-off time and save weekends (or at least days) for weekends, at least one day off, anyway, but it’s tough when there’s deadlines and the utility bills and food ride on how productive we are.   and customer revisions are a bitch.  imagine building something that you’re happy with, and you think is ready to meet the world as it is and having someone say “i really would like it to be a different shade of red” or “can you make it more like this over here?”  and thus begins the long and painful process of revising ad nauseum until the site looks like crap.  it’s rough.

we both are painfully aware of not being able to do things.  like talk to people, go outside, watch movies, blog about the kids, etc, and we both think about it but there isn’t much we can do at the moment.  gavin is doing some cool stuff lately.  he seems to have learned how to read numbers which is pretty f’ing awesome, and he says his numbers and abc’s.  he surprised me one day by opening this counting book we have to the last page and pointing to parts of the page and saying “eight.” point.  “nine.” point.  “ten.”  but he’s done it since and erin says he has done that with the whole book.  i guess the sesame street we’ve been playing is doing something after all.  erin also tells me that there are other older kids that don’t know colors, which gavin’s known for a long time.  among other things.  which pretty much proves the theory we’ve had that he’s really smart even if he isn’t talking a lot yet, it’s just because he’s busy thinking about other things.

like how to read harry potter.

next week i’m going to teach him html and he can help with the web sites and maybe then we can start blogging and posting pictures more.

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Now playing: Soul Coughing - Screenwriter’s Blues
via FoxyTunes

there comes a time in every blog where the blogger just randomly, for no particular reason and with no malicious intent, disappears. try as you might to bitch, moan, and nag the blogger in question, it is, alas, to no avail. it’s happened before on this blog and it undoubtedly will happen again.

this particular lull in my ranting has been largely due to the new job(s) and the fact that my computer is now a tool for work, and my hours are either a) whenever i feel like it, or (as is often the case) b) whenever i’m at my computer. this means that the “fun” quotient of my computer has gone down dramatically in the last couple months despite the fact that i just upgraded the video cards in both mine and erin’s computer so they don’t suck (well, suck for gaming anyway. new — okay, pre-owned — nvidia 6600 cards for teh win, now i can game like it’s 2005). so i’m finding less opportunity and inspiration to blog, even though one of my (alas, probably foolish) ideas before going into this was that with all this being at home time, maybe i can finally get to do some music stuff.

no, most of my day is spent juggling html, css, diapers, laundry, meals, and two children. blocks of “fun” need to be prescheduled and preapproved, and are oft disrupted by any of the aforementioned juggle, erm, whatever you call things that you juggle. so, yeah, blogging, much as it’s been on my mind, isn’t something i’ve really had an opportunity to do until now, having been kept up for 2 hours by the stupid kitten who decided — after i had finally given up on going back to sleep — that since i was at the computer, now must be the time to chill and take a nap.

aside from all this, things have been going well at jazzsequence central. the web design gig is pretty fun. despite the fact that the greater majority of sites i/we (because erin has been doing her fair share of designing sites now) get are boring business-y sites, it’s still fun and something i can take pride in, knowing that, in the end, the customer is both happy with what i produced, and the site looks good. that, previous sentence, needs someone, to edit it, largely, and completely, for horrible punctuation; i apologize. and the new irl gig for whole foods is good too. however, my plan on using it as a gateway to insurance may be futile because, at this rate, by the time i qualify for insurance (after working 400 hours) we may be fast enough and good enough with the design that we can just get it on our own and don’t need that as a second income anymore. at the same time, the employee discount is enough that, even if we didn’t need the job for the money, it might still be worth the trek up the canyon a couple times a week. transferring is an option, but i haven’t seen any positions at the other stores open up yet, or at least, not that have been posted in the break room.

also, i’ve started wrangling up some interest (maybe) in my solo freelance work as ThinkTank Studio. at least, i had a client ask me if i did my own thing on the side and was a contractor — to which i said yes — and then ask for info for that and said that he’d recommend me, and later he gave the glowing review to the company that appears on the thinktank contact page. he then asked me on the side if i’d design a business card for him. also, i’ve put my name and portfolio in a pool for redesigning this site which is erin’s dad’s work. (and it helps that, at this point, i’ve done enough church sites and one education site that i don’t feel like i’d be going into it blind or unprepared.) also, i’ve just finished tweaking out my paypal account and checking out the invoice templates and i feel pretty good about that stuff.

so that’s the update for those of you whom an update was dire. nothing new with my eyeballs. payroll with ABS got jacked — they sent me a check for the week after i quit — so it pushed back all the normal termination stuff like my COBRA info (which i was waiting for to look at before i pursued getting contacts fitted for my KC) and my vacation payout. i’m trying to build an xbox media center but the stupid modchip i stupidly ordered from stupid morons never showed and they don’t reply to my nasty emails. and that’s pretty much it. if you want to check out what’s been occupying all my time, you can see the sites i made on my del.icio.us page here.

oh, and i found a new flash video player thingie, so i will come back to those movies i posted that may or may not be working for some of you. and it’s been tested with super-high-res movies for this guy, so i know it works. and i think part of my problem may have been my own computer’s lag when i did the FLV stuff before…

topography was yesterday and it’s official, i have Keratoconus, or KC as it’s commonly abbreviated.  so the funness comes in here in that i went in for an eye exam, expecting a prescription, on the day my medical benefits from albertsons’ went buh-bye, and now i’ve got a eye condition that needs treatment with no insurance, and it won’t kick in with whole foods until i’ve worked 400 hours.  and seeing as how it sounds like the type of shifts they want me to work will be night shifts, getting contacts is important asap.  plus, i’d like to see.

the more i look at the pictures of the pointy KC eyeballs, like on the wiki article,  the less freaked out by them i am, and i’m forcing myself to come to terms with the contact lens thing.  i’m gonna have to get used to stuff whether i like it or not.  of course, we just watched an episode of deadwood the other night in which one guy popped the other guy’s eyeball out of its’ socket in a brawl, and he’s screaming, and the eyeball is dangling, and it was still pretty disturbing.  erin was laughing at my squeamishness — which, usually, goes the other way around — because she’s seen that exact thing on animals before working at the humane society.  even though it was late, i made us watch the whole episode because i didn’t want to go to bed thinking about eyeball popping out of its socket.

the guy who did the topography didn’t say how “bad” my KC was, just that i had it.  but i’ve found a couple of good sites that i del.icio.us‘d, one that has user-submitted photographs artificially (read: photoshopped) to look like various degrees of severity of KC, and i’m certainly not the worst.  i’m actually more on the lower end of the spectrum in terms of how i see.  more than anything else, i feel relieved that i’m not just totally insane and making this shit up because that’s how i’ve felt sometimes since it’s not like i don’t see clearly.  i do see clearly, but there’s other stuff, interference, in the way, shadows and ghosts and flares and things that make it hard to make out certain types of things even though my vision is more or less okay.

so i didn’t really go into what KC was in my last post, i just pointed to the wiki.  what it is is a conical formation of the cornea caused by thinning of the tissue there.  various factors and theories exist as to why the tissue thins, but chronic eye rubbing doesn’t help.  and according to some further research i’ve done, there is no real direct link to heredity — there are numerous cases of multiple members of families having it, but researchers haven’t been able to specifically attribute it to genetics.  so conical formation of the cornea — in english it means your eye gets pointy, and if you see pictures on the web of KC, you’ll know just how pointy.  i’m gonna make erin take a picture of my pointy eyeballs so i know wtf they look like so i can sort of compare with the horrible extreme-o-pictures i’ve found on the web.

normally, when your eye is more or less spherical, the light comes in, angles to a common point of reference, and projects on the back of your eyeball which gets translated by your brain and that’s how you see.  if your eye is an irregular shape, say more oval than round, then you see double images, and that’s astigmatism.  when your eyeball is pointy, the light comes in at crazy angles, and bounces all over the place inside your eyeball.  naturally, the image they produce is gonna be wacky, and have stuff all over the place.  most of the pictures i found on KCVision are way worse than how i see.  my eyeball is slightly more pointy down and slightly left of my pupil.  so some of the light comes in and bounces high and right on the back of my eyeball.  images appear upside down when they’re projected on your eyeball and your brain flips them right-side up, so how i see is the normal image anyone with good eyesight would see, and then a duzzy and light 2nd image below and to the left of that.  as i said before my left eye is shot — i have KC worse in that eye than my right — and also, the location of the pointy-ness is different.  so that means i have at least two shadows although i think i really see out of my right eye most of the time, because when i try to look out of my left i, everything’s fuzzy, and it’s not just the KC i don’t think.  maybe it is.  i dunno.  but i see crappy when i just try to look out of my right eye too.  and when my eyes are split, like through binoculars or the new eye exam at the DMV where you have to look through a thing instead of just read the letters off the back wall, or other optometrist exams where you’re looking through a thing at a light or a picture, it exaggerates and intensifies the effects of the KC so that i can’t really see whatever it is that i’m supposed to be looking at.

so this leads into the fact that today is my first real day working at WF.  my manager, or team lead as WF referrs to them, said that his mornings and mids are pretty much covered.  which leaves nights and closing, and i really don’t want to be making that drive down the mountains at night with this.  well-lit roads are one thing, horrible and distracting but better than non-lit highways with lots of headlights coming in the opposite direction.  to make my timing even more perfect, today when i woke up it had snowed last night and was the first time it really stuck to the roads. it’s the 2nd snow, but the first wasn’t really all that heavy.  so now there’s that too.  which all leads me to want to get the KC taken care of, or at least under control, whether i have insurance or not, because it’s going to be really bad without.

so, today is my last day with albertsons.  thus concludes Operation GTF Out of ABS.  there’s a major safety net that is being removed by this transition.  stability, decent insurance, a steady paycheck, a moderate, but highly middle class salary.  what’s coming in its’ place is a low-paying (comparatively) P/T job and an unsteady, self-motivated paycheck.  so yeah, it scares the sh!t out of me.

i also know that if i’m ever going to do something like this — graphic design, web design, something interesting and more creative than what i’ve been doing and much more in line with what i actually studied at school — now’s the f’ing time.  if it’s not now, it may not be ever.  and moreover, i hate not being able to be around my kids.  my dad worked a lot when i was growing up, doing graves and other horrible things and i didn’t get to see him a lot.  and i’ve always felt like i missed out on having a really good father/son relationship with him, at least during that time.  and probably wanting to be around as much as humanly possible is a tad bit of overcompensation, but f— it.  i don’t feel like it’s spoiling my kids to be around more, and to not miss important milestones like lilah’s first steps, gavin’s first complete sentence, etc.  even if i’m home and working, and my kids grow up with this memory of me glued to the computer 8 hours of the day, at least they will have a memory of me.

and what have i been doing since johnston?  nothing worth noting, really.  i always wanted to go back to a johnston reunion and be one of those alums that has something to show off.  they always used to say that the majority of johnston grads really make good on things — end up a lot more entrepreneurial and successful than other UofR grads.  i always had this feeling like that would be me, but last reunion i wasn’t feeling it — it really wasn’t me.  what was i doing?  working in some crappy retail job, i think.  that’s not very bragworthy.  now, going back and saying, yeah, i’m a graphic designer, even if we’re sh!t poor for a while, that sounds cool, it’s something to be proud of.  and i am proud of the sites i’ve made, even when i have to kowtow to  the crazy expectations of the customer, the sites i design still look good.  and i’ve always been a snob with regards to websites.  i go to a site with unimpressive design or lots of weird flaws and it just pains me to think they paid someone to do that.  i’ve always felt like emailing those people and saying “your site sucks.  i can fix it.”  so, for once, i can be my own boss, i can do something i like doing, i can add to my own website snobbishness (always a plus), and maybe, just maybe, something else bigger and better will come along down the road as a result of this.  i don’t think the heritage thing is the end for me, but it’s a foothold in the industry, and it allows me to pursue a career in creative arts in the digital revolution.

so good luck, me.  i hope it’s worth it.  i hope it works out.  i think it will, but i’m scared of falling flat on my face.  it’s a big jump without that net, but i think there might be wings, or at least a jetpack, on my back.

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Now playing: “Portishead - Undenied.mp3″
via FoxyTunes

quick camPAIN post:
here’s the banners i made for kucinich.

feel free to download and use them if you feel so inclined.

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Now playing: “Deadboy & The Elephantmen - Break It Off.mp3″
via FoxyTunes