the basic premise of Do Less goes right inline with something erin and i have discovered on our own: when the product we want to make is supposed to be a creative and limited, one-of-a-kind thing — something we like to think of as a work of art — you can’t take on every project you get.  this is tough.  a lot of web designers out there, including the design firm that we did freelance stuff for over a year ago, just has a “take all comers” approach.  they will scale a plan to fit any need and do it quickly and — presumably — well.  but if you take everything you’re offered, you can’t produce anything that’s exceptional.  because a lot of people don’t want exceptional.  there are some people who want budget.  there are some people who want functional.  there are some people who want fast.  and you can do these things, but they do not produce an environment conducive to doing something extraordinary, and, for the most part, these people aren’t looking for extraordinary anyway — they want something that looks like the stuff they look at every day: clean, professional, businesslike.

and we started out this way — taking what we could get, and working for cheap, because we needed to start building up our business and portfolio.  but we knew that wasn’t the type of business we wanted to run.  as we grew, we were torn with the desire to stay true and fair to our past clients, and the need to raise our rates, focus on our niche and unique talents, and brush off projects that would not benefit us in the long run.

it feels counter-intuitive to decline projects, even when they are under your budget.  as a consumer, we’re always looking to make the most out of our buck, and as providers, we feel inclined to respect that wish for value.  but quality is worth something.  Seth opens Do Less with an anecdote about a real estate investor.  This investor does just one new investment a year.  The reason?

In any given year, we look at a thousand deals. One hundred of them are pretty good. One is great.

I don’t think we’ll be at the point where we can do just one gig a year and spend the rest of the year making art, and writing, and working on projects that are self-gratifying, and working on being great parents to our kids.  it sounds great, i just don’t think it will happen. but we probably did more than 100 projects our first year — for ourselves, and freelancing for another company — and we still brought in less money (with a part-time second job I carried at Whole Foods) than the $40k/year job I left to do design full-time from home.  a lot less.  and sure, we could have continued working as freelancers, getting paid $20 a page for a slew of subpar projects that really didn’t interest  us all that much for someone else who didn’t care about individual designers’ talents as long as they got the job done quickly — we could have learned to do more, faster, using as many shortcuts as possible and not spending too much time on the process, but that went against the whole reason for doing this.  it wouldn’t be something we loved, it would be just another job.  and i think that doing something you love shows in your product.

it’s interesting that i decided to read Do Less at precisely the same time that we started having conversations about the types of projects we take on and how we want to do business now and moving forward versus how we used to do business.  we were already on the do less path, because what Seth says is true — you can’t be everything.  you can’t have quality and speed, you can’t have cheap and have time left over to spend on side projects or with the fam.  we’re learning this, learning to go against what feels natural.  if you’re in the business to sell the most thneeds as quickly as possible, then bigger, faster, better, more is a good mantra.  but that’s never been something that’s meshed very well in my brain.  when you’re learning to Do Less, you need to think more like Turtle: slow and steady wins the race.

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image copyright 1973 mercer mayer

“What do you do with a Kangaroo
who jumps in your window, sits on your bed,
and says,
‘I never sleep on wrinkled sheets,
so change them now and make them smooth,
and fluff up the pillows if you please’

What do you do?”

there’s an old book by mercer mayer, before he did the little creatures books, called what do you do with a kangaroo?. in it, a cherub-like girl is confronted by an unlikely series of animals all demanding she serve them in absurd (and disproportionately upper-crust, given that they are animals) ways just as she sets out to do exactly what they are doing.  there’s a raccoon eating her cereal but complaining that it’s stale and could she bring him a gold-plated fingerbowl to wash his paws?  and an opossum using her toothbrush and complaining that the toothpaste is too sweet and the brush is worn.  honestly, i had never read any of mercer mayer’s stuff other than little creatures, and it’s the non-little creatures books he did that i think are far superior in retrospect.

my kids love them.

so i was reading what do you do with a kangaroo? this morning to lilah.  erin and i were just talking about some difficult clients we’ve had to deal with in the past, and the frustrating demands we receive as web designers.  and it strikes like inspiration: what do you do with a kangaroo?

“You throw him out, that’s what you do.
‘Get out of my bed, you Kangaroo!’”

it occurs to me that this is advice that is possibly more appropriate when applied to business than when it’s applied to stuff kids have experience with.  i mean, when are kids going to face irritating and exotic demands and have to fend off such requests?  it makes me wonder if it was intentional, like the jokes in old Warner Brothers cartoons that were clearly directed towards adults.

when we got started doing web design, we did pretty much what people asked us to do.  in fact, we took on freelance projects for another company to hone our craft and to start to get income doing design.  later, we started doing more and more work for ourselves and were eventually able to stop doing contract work for other people and have our name on everything we did.  it was frustrating doing our best work for people who didn’t really appreciate it, who payed much more than what we made off the project (we got paid $20 a page + bonuses with kickbacks for upgrades and enhancements), and see that site get crapped up by some other designer later who was responsible either for some upgrade or who added a flash component that completely destroyed the flow of the site.  it also made us fairly bitterly opposed to all things flash.

back then, if a customer wanted something a certain way, it didn’t matter if we disagreed with it, we pretty much had to do it.  it was simpler, we were pushed to get jobs done as quickly as possible, and though the company gave lip service that we should say “well, in my professional opinion…” the truth was that these people were not paying for our professional opinion.  they had clicked on an ad on google (they were plastered all over for a while, i used to get them in my gmail) for pretty much the cheapest custom web design around.  they wanted fast and cheap.  when we started doing our own stuff, we took some of the same mindset.  in the beginning, we needed money, so we needed projects, so we took on projects we weren’t altogether excited about, but could do easily.  on the whole, we fared better than we did working for other people — we had less arguments with clients who were already frustrated by the time they got a designer by how long it took to even get to that point, and an innumerable amount of miscommunication and billing issues;  we were often told we were the only ones they could get a hold of, and the only ones who listened.  in many cases, we saved the day.  we didn’t have that negative start with our own clients which made things roll a lot smoother, but we did occasionally have some difficulties working with clients requests.  and it became clear that the projects we had more problems with were the ones we liked the least.

our prices were a problem, too.  we started by asking for a fair price — even less than average for web design standards — but we didn’t get any bites.  we didn’t have a name, and relied heavily on freelance marketplace sites where often (although not always) the low bid wins.  it’s impossible to bid a competitive (by design standards) price on a freelance marketplace where you will be inevitably underbid by a design firm in india or another designer in the states who’s just starting out, so we had to go with the bare minimum.

and we met a lot of kangaroos.

now that we’re more established, we have a bit more clout, and we have a sizable portfolio with some neat stuff we’re really proud of.  we shouldn’t need to push the Bengal Tiger along on our tricycle to the Taj Mahal Circus while singing about waffles and airplanes and matters-of-fact, only to be thanked by being eaten for breakfast or lunch.  but occasionally, we need to be reminded, because we’re so used to that mentality of just doing what we’re asked because someone asked for it.  even when we know it’s not the right decision, either for ourselves or for our clients or the design of the site.  really, no one deserves to be treated like that in any situation.

what do you do with a kangaroo?

in business, you put your foot down.  you throw the kangaroo out.  you explain your case, and maybe you’ll sing about waffles, but you most certainly are not going to take on a thankless job that you will be underpaid and unappreciated for.  if you value your work, you should feel justified to defend it, not just give in to every whim someone may have.  this is something that designers have to deal with every day, and people see us as pricks at times.  and we can be pricks at times.  and it’s important to find a balance and to make compromises that benefit both sides.  but you can’t let the kangaroo stay and think their friend the llama won’t expect the same treatment.  what it really comes down to is how much you value your work.  but at the end of the day, it’s much more gratifying making decisions that matter and stick to them. not doing so means you don’t value what you do very highly, which means you can’t possibly expect people to pay very much for it.  if you’re in the business of cheap-o design (or cheap-o anything really), then that’s for you, maybe, but for us, it drives us crazy to have to lower our standards, and we’re much less happy with the result.  and i don’t know about you, but we got into this whole running your own business thing to do something we like and make money doing it.  it doesn’t work if we don’t like what we’re doing and our best work is the stuff we enjoyed the most.

also: it’s amazing that you can pay $30 for some management or business inspiration-type book when you can find all the answers you need to run your own business in children’s books.  we, as human effing beings, need to revisit the lessons we’re teaching our kids when we run into problems or frustrations of our own.  and i don’t think that mercer mayer would be entirely out-of-place on a bookshelf next to seth godin…unless maybe they’re sorted alphabetically.

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I tend not to get into religion or personal issues here.  The theory is sort of that that’s one of those subjects that’s bound to rile people up and not polite to discuss.  Then again, this site gets very little traffic, so riling people up can only help…

I consider myself to be pretty theologically open minded.  As long as you don’t force your views on me, I’m game to listen, consider, and adapt.  As such, I don’t hold to any single philosophy – like a lot of my peers, I feel my way around for what feels true.  I used to tell people I was born Jewish (my biomom is a Jew, which, because the heritage passes matrilineally,  makes me Jewish by default), baptized Roman Catholic, and have since tried on just about everything from Crowleyan occultism, to Wicca, Church of the SubGenius and Discordianism, and Hinduism, even being part of the creation of not one (The Gospel According to Cheese) but two (The Peter Ryan Cult) quasi-fake religions, but the most truth I ever found (at least that was in an established format, and not a do-it-yourself theology) was in a pack of Tarot cards.  The Osho Zen Tarot, to be specific.

Now, I learned later that Osho got some heat from critics for establishing what was widely seen as a cultish commune for expatriate white folks of fairly well off backgrounds to give away all their possessions (to Osho, of course), and live in blissful harmony while having promiscuous sex with each other.  I have no idea if the accusations of it being a sex commune (or any of the criticisms) are even remotely true – my source is the novelized travel journal The Techno-Pagan Octopus Messiah – but the rumors had to have already been there for him to have heard them and included them in his book.  And I defer to people who appear to have a clue when I lack one.

Rumors aside, my personal experience with Osho Zen (via the deck of Tarot cards) was that it was a powerful, life changing philosophy that could essentially be summed up as “this, too, shall pass.”  As a Tarot deck, I did readings for people that were sometimes frighteningly accurate – in one case I was able to discover, through a fairly standard reading of the cards, that the person I was reading for had recently been sexually assaulted. (Something that, yes, it’s possible she was communicating through body language and other signs that people tend to believe lead an experienced “psychic” are reading in addition to, or possibly instead of, the cards – but that’s just it, I had virtually no experience at the time, and much of the explanations and feedback I was giving came verbatim from the Osho Zen Tarot book.  Granted, however, that I knew the assault had happened, I just didn’t know who the survivor of the assault was.  Until then.)  Even that, however, was more of a “this is a traumatic time of grief and strife, but you must let it pass and not hold onto any of these powerful emotions you are feeling right now.”  Later I learned that this is a fairly standard Zen Buddhist approach – if you imagine life as a stream of water (yes, yes, I know, bear with me), the stream bends and winds and eventually becomes part of something bigger – a lake, a river, an ocean.  When there are obstacles in the path, the stream goes around, nothing stops the flow.  The ideal is to be like water, to not let anything obstruct your path, and the most dangerous obstructions are yourself, particularly your psychoses like fear, doubt, denial, self-hatred, vanity, etc.

While I don’t personally live all the time by the “go with the flow” philosophy, a lot of concepts from the Osho Zen Tarot resonated with me, have held with me and become part of my personal philosophy.  So that’s why it strikes me as so odd when I am presented with a situation with someone who, by her own account is Buddhist, doing the exact opposite of water: making herself into an obstruction.  Holding fast.  Being stubborn, uncooperative, and closed.  If there are any sins in Buddhism, would I be wrong to say that these are it; that the biggest sin for a Buddhist is to become like a rock or a dam in the flow, forcing others to go around you?  WTF?

The gist is that I had an arrangement with a client in which he would send us blog posts and newsletter updates and we would edit them for any grammatical or continuity errors, clean them up, and post them to the site or send out a blast.  In addition, I did some minor tweaks here and there to the site every once in a while, occasionally volunteered services when I thought they would be beneficial to the site (it is for a non-profit).  If the site needed updates, one or the other of us would suggest it, and I would come up with a quote (scaled down to fit their limited budget) for the work.  It was work for a friend, and he let me pretty much determine my own level of involvement not only in terms of the website, but also the NPO as a whole.  He even encouraged me to make up a title for myself and put myself on the Our People page.  When he went on a retreat, he put someone else, who we had previously had no dealings with (neither did he, until before meeting her abroad) in charge of the updates and newsletter stuff, and had agreed to go on the retreat at all after she had committed to raise a specific (fairly sizable) amount of cash, per month, while he was gone.  How could he refuse, right?  Everything would be left in good hands.

What came of this was that categorically, when we said something, anything, she would not listen or selectively listen, resulting in the final round of head butting that caused me to have one of the worst days I’ve had since going fulltime at this design thing.  Here are the facts:

• My client/friend came out of his retreat.
• There was one fundraising event scheduled for later this month.
• The funds for the NPO have dwindled, causing him to cancel our ongoing payments.
• Another fundraiser and organizer in the NPO sent out a few blasts via Facebook, raising enough money to pay the bills for the next month.

By all accounts, it would appear that this person, who had committed to my friend to raise a specific amount of money, failed to do so.  Instead, she sent us webpage updates, text and images, and commissioned us, on the side, to update the nav bar on the site.  It wasn’t until after I mentioned that it had been our understanding that her primary level of involvement would be keeping up the blog while our friend was gone and fundraising, that the event this month was announced.  We went out of town last month.  There were a few things that I had yet to do for the site, that I had promised to do when we got back.  In the interim, the payments were stopped due to lack of funding.  Because we have our plate full of paying projects, I sent an announcement to all involved (my client, and the new intermediary), that I would complete the final changes after I had a chance to meet with him and figure some new arrangement out.  We could not take on any unpaid work right now. There were still a few minor things I was planning on doing on the site (and subsequently completed), and then I was going to take a step back until he came back and we could talk.  She then proceeded to press the issue about the updates, and what came next was a massive butting of heads culminating in my being accused of a lack of integrity.  WTF?  I twittered my frustration: Being forced into doing volunteer work is sort of the antithesis of the word “volunteer”.  We stood our ground, and eventually she backed off.

The entire time, every email from her was (on the surface) very polite, but also very demanding.  “I’m sure you are very busy but…if you could do…it would be ever so appreciated.  Thank you very much for all your hard work.” Etc.  It wasn’t until she made remarks about my character that the language was at all colored.  And yet, it was obvious she was trying to push me into doing something I said I would not do – she was, in a Buddhist sense, being an obstruction.

This leaves me wondering how people get this way?  How can you justify calling yourself a Buddhist and behave like this?  Similarly, how can you call yourself Christian – when Christ said things like “love your enemies” and when someone attacks you to “turn the other” cheek – and endorse violence and hatred?  If homosexuals are your enemies, by Christ’s example, shouldn’t you embrace your fears and try to overcome them?  Shouldn’t you perpetuate peace rather than go to war?  Where did these theologies all go so wrong?  They all say the same thing: play nice, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, don’t kill anyone, and in the end, you might be rewarded with something (rewards vary depending on your belief system).  I mean, at least The Fellowship of the Sun in True Blood has a fairly reasonable explanation behind their single-minded hatred of vampires – in their eyes, vampires are an abomination and not creatures of God.  It may be extreme (in the context of the show, in which vampires are a marginalized but accepted part of society), but at least it makes sense.

I really don’t get people who do things that are completely at odds with the things they claim to hold as truth.  Invariably, it’s not the bad Christians or bad Jews who behave like this, but the ones who claim to be the most devout to their faith.  My only response is that people all suck, and human nature is awful, and we should all live hermetically in caves (be they virtual or otherwise).  Thank god I’m not running things.

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segway for the lost: affiliate links are any link you get that goes to another site (generally something that sells stuff) that gives you a kickback or commission or discount or some kind of reward if they buy stuff. so, threadless has “street team” points which are redeemable for discounts on tshirts. jinx has a similar thing. with our webhost, 1and1 (and probably a lot of other webhosts and  businesses), we get cash back incentives. with me so far?

the theory is, if you can get enough traffic to your site, a thousand clicks a day, and you have something that gives a significant kickback reward — say $50 for a new account setup — and maybe 1% of your visitors decide “hey, that’s a good deal“, that’s 100 clicks on your affiliate link for 1000 hits to your site, which for $50 is $500. a day. the key is to get the traffic, and there’s a variety of schools and methods of how to do this and some are more sketchy than others and that’s a whole ‘nother deal.

this gets me thinking — this is a real, viable thing. something that could work. something that, for a lot of people, does work. every day. so i’m left with a quandry: do i want to sell my soul for a high traffic blog that needs constant attention, regular blog posts, and (ideally, and mostly because i am fairly strongly opposed to syndicating everything) legitimate content on a specific subject for a potentially lucrative income? i don’t know. i keep thinking that i don’t want to be writing all the time — i like writing, but i could give a million reasons why i’m not that guy, the pro-blogger guy. and i do like making art and making websites and making artful websites and if i was blogging for income that would take away from that.

on the other hand, we’re not at the point yet where we’re making buckets of cash doing web design, and probably we’ll never be making buckets. so it really comes down to whether i sell my soul or keep my soul. and yes, before i get the blogerati peanut gallery yelling at me, i know, making a living as a pro blogger does not necessarily mean selling your soul, however, it would feel like selling my soul to be doing something that’s okay for money rather than and as opposed to doing something that i love for money (no more so than any other job, but still…).

/sigh

so that takes me right back to the beginning.

the thing is no matter what you do in this industry (or any for that matter), you need to sell yourself.  we sell ourselves every day when we bid on design jobs.  we sell ourselves on our website.  by going on at lenght about arcane palette, i’m selling us again right now, and as i type this, i’m selling myself again.  and every day i’m thinking of ways to get traffic to arcanepalette.com that doesn’t go against my principles of getting hits that mean something from people who are interested in our work as artists — i’m trying to selectively bump our page ranking while not resorting to black hat methods to cheat our way to the top.  everything you do in the digital world that’s public is selling your online identity.  i have a lifestream page, so that sells quite a lot of my identity for anyone to see.  so i guess it really comes down to what do you want to be doing.  thing is, if i could make a living just ranting off on this blog about whatever i felt like, i’d be pretty happy — i just don’t see that ever happening.

but then, maybe that’s what’s holding me back.

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i’m left speechless.  read the post and scathing replies on /.

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corporate zombie

several hours later, at park city whole foods…

meanwhile, lost in the sullen darkness of the valley…

...i hate you guys...

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 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.

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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.

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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.

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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…

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