Archive for the ‘Work’ Category

Been a few days…

Sunday, July 29th, 2007

With the amount of time I’ve spent online for the last few days I wanted to at least get around to posting something here instead of dealing with things every where else. I’m catching up on email, I completed a few things for other domains and clients and now I’m waiting patiently for Sean to get out of the shower so we can head out for the evening.

August 2007 Someone asked me about the color scheme for August, I figured I’d paste it up to share. Note that once the template is replaced for September’s, it’ll be setup under my the free wordpress templates, naturally there’s going to be a few alterations but I’m sure it’ll work out just fine as a free template anyway. Who doesn’t love Gray and Pink?

PS: Still working on returning comments, I have three domains worth to get through!

Almost done for the evening.

Friday, July 27th, 2007

For some reason my domain wasn’t set to auto-renew so I luckily got in just in time so I could keep AGn Designs up and running without any downtime. The server has been on the fritz for most of the evening, if you’ve noticed a 500 error – trust me I’m fully aware of it.

I just finished up work for the day, took me a few hours longer than anticipated but I think that was based on the fact that I’m having some trouble concentrating. I have quite a bit of email to go through as well. I’ve been slacking, but honestly I’ve just had more important things to do. I’m working on a new project, I’m getting clients taken care of, if random questions here and there go unanswered for a day or two that’s just how it is. I’ll have all of them cleared up tonight though, I should be sitting here for a little while longer before I take a shower and get myself ready for bed.

Bella’s being obnoxious lately, she refuses to eat anything half the time and she’s been right at my feet for what seems like the last 24 hours. I usually can’t leave the room without having her right behind me but today it’s just growing to be annoying. I can’t even move my chair without the risk of rolling over her paw or her tail. She has a bed in the office, she won’t really sleep in it though. She was in it for a while today but then Sean came back in the office and for some reason once he showed up she wound up right back underneath my chair. If she was just under the desk itself it wouldn’t be that bad but right under the wheel of the chair is just unsafe considering how often I move around. My back has been killing me, so sitting still for too long just doesn’t seem possible anymore.

Time to get some write-ups taken care of.

Where are all the jobs?

Thursday, July 26th, 2007

Karen is in the process of looking for a new job. The company she currently works with is absolutely horrible because it’s being run by someone who saw a price tag and not the actual business behind it. They’re lucky if bills are paid on time and it’s been noted on more than one occasion that they’re just sneaking by on getting the payroll taken care of. So naturally she’s tapped into every possible site on the internet looking for work. Monster, CareerBuilder and even CraigsList haven’t really brought up anything for her. I pushed her in the direction of looking for corporate finance jobs because that’s probably going to be the best thing for her. She’s digging through their site at the moment, I just hope she’s able to come up with something.

It’s FinancialConsultantRecruiters.com, they’re a executive search firm that has finance jobs and their professional recruiters/consultants have executive and entry level jobs in the corporate finance field available now. I just hope she’s able to come up with something because she’s had no luck looking anywhere else.

:: crosses fingers ::

Keeping in touch.

Wednesday, July 25th, 2007

With running as many sites as I do, I make it a point to have Mailing Lists setup so it’s easier for me to get in touch with a large number of people with out having to keep a huge address book on Thunderbird. I have quite a few contacts that I’ve built up over the years, I don’t use them for regular mailings, but when something big is going on with say AGn Listings, for example, it’s good to know that I have that database to get in touch with the members.

There are many resources out there for running your own mailing-list. It’s important to know what kind of resources you’re going to need in relation to them as well. Don’t figure that the moment you launch your site that you’re going to have over 30,000 members on your mailing list and then purchase some $600 script to manage them all. When you first start out I’ve found that self-hosted scripts are pretty reasonable, and 99% of the time they’re free OR can just be found through your cPanel installation.

Naturally someone running a large business wouldn’t take this route and they’d look into outside companies like ResponseCom‚Ñ¢ to handle these things for them. Marin Worldwide is one of the largest and most successful mailing list providers in the nation which offer you customized mailing lists, Telemarketing lists and fax lists to both small businesses and fortune 1000 clients. If you’re looking for something on this scale then checking out martainworldwide.net would be a good thing for you.

Things are finally starting to move!

Wednesday, July 25th, 2007

I’m not sure if anyone else heard about this yesterday but some drunken loony out in Cali decided to destroy a couple servers at a major data center that houses big-name sites/companies like Technorati, Six Apart, Netflix and CraigsList. This was before the huge power outage that they suffered as well so the last I heard there were a mob of people standing outside the building being very pissed off about the ‘breach of contract’ going on with the down time, guess they didn’t notice there wasn’t any power either – hm? I found the actual story itself on slashdot, a direct link to the article can be found here. I’m sure you’ll find some aspects of it both amusing and quite annoying – I know I did.

There were notifications up on a few of the sites that were experiencing downtime. I believe that Alexa (while it may not have been in this particular building) is also based out of SF and I know for a fact that they experienced some down time as well. This is why my site has been lagging for the last few days. And to think, I thought it was blogrolling being mean to me again (hrm…maybe they’re hosted on a server there too?).

My August theme is about 80% completed, I absolutely hate this blue monstrosity that I’ve got sitting up here and I made it a point to sit down and work on it this evening. It’s about 9am and I’m still awake. The template didn’t keep me up though, my eyes are crossing too much to even continue to move forward with it, it’s the fact that dinner was started at 5am (sauce needs to brew all day) and now I just have to give some things a quick stir before my head can hit the pillow.

I have a lot of work to do today, quite a few emails to get back to, and I need to make a phonecall to a dealership up in Jersey because we misplaced the ID number for our Sirius Satellite radio and now since I’m going to reactivate it for both car AND home use – obviously I’m going to need that number.

Long day, not enough hours – I’ll tell ya!

I’m stuck.

Thursday, July 19th, 2007

I’m not sure why but for some reason I’m having trouble coding up one of the free templates. There’s a lot of functions options to play with for the widgets. I came across an article where you can use multiple widgets on the site and naturally I’m looking into them considering one of the themes has a hemmingway footer and instead of having the user install excess plugins, I’d rather do it through the new WordPress 2.0 setup with the widgets. I know the sidebar one works fine, it’s just creating the other ones for the footer that are growing to be a pain in the ass. I’ve been working on it for most of the day so I could have at least four solid templates to launch with in upcoming weeks.

Shauna, to answer your question, the downloads will be based on acidgloss.net, but I’ll have them located on blog-ideas.net and even curvy-chick.net just to cross link everything.¬† Either way they’ll be easy to find, trust me.

Other than that, it’s been kind of a lazy day. There isn’t really anything interesting going on. A little bit of rain passed through here today but nothing major. There’s nothing on television and I got no cleaning done, other than a few things in the kitchen before I made dinner. I did a roasted chicken with potatoes and broccoli, turned out pretty good but the white meat was a little dry and that makes no sense to me considering I basted the thing about three times during it’s three hour cook time. There’s a lot of left overs, I had to take all of the meat off the bones to put in a bowl. It’s not worth keeping the bones when the important stuff can easily fit into a bowl for convenience. So Bella is covered on food for the next few days, no one really eats left overs. It’ll save me some money too considering her new love of canned chicken is costing me about $30 a week in dog food where regular dog food is only about $0.60 cents per can – she’d prefer human food.

She got sick this morning, she refuses to eat and then throws up and looks for sympathy. So Sean and I were both sitting on the floor kind of forcing a piece of cheese down her throat, It didn’t work and we just wound up going to bed. We woke up a few hours later and she went right for a piece of cheese. Too much of a brat for me, I swear.

Speaking of brats, Princess loves to go through purses and managed to get into mine. All my gum is gone and all of my receipts are ripped to shreds. She did her damage then parked herself on the couch like she could do absolutely no wrong. She also almost took my finger off tonight going after a piece of food, teeth marks and blood to prove it. Vicious little brat, I swear to god.

Finally accomplished something!

Wednesday, July 18th, 2007

I’ve been pretty busy for the last few days working on many different projects, and clients no less, but one thing that I’ve been able to finally accomplish is getting some templates together for the freebie sections on my other domains. As of right now they’re all coded for WordPress, I just need to set them up on the other sites. There will be other platforms available, I just need to work on them.

Some are primarily CSS based while others have some funky graphics that I thought would be rather cool for the web2.0 world that I’m slowly tapping into with my designs. I’m to a point now where I’m itching to play around with CSS3 on some of my templates but there are still browsers who can’t handle it so I guess I’m going to have to wait a while for that one.

I picked up a magazine today that features the top 50 web2.0 based websites on the internet, I think sometime tomorrow I’ll do a write-up of that list so I can get them out there. The bulk of them are pretty heavy with Ajax, something I’m itching to learn over time. I guess this just means I’ll be working harder than I currently am.

Either way it’s a little after 3:30 in the morning and I think it’s time to get some rest. I have some clothes to fold up before I can even get to my pillow but that shouldn’t take me very long at all, thankfully. It’s going to be a big cleaning day for me. I have my to-do list right in front of me in bold black text so I don’t forget about it. Gotta love dry-erase boards, they’re the best thing since pen and paper (for me at least).

Cleaning + Stormy Weather + Work = GREAT DAY!

Tuesday, July 17th, 2007

I woke up with a mission and the concentration that I needed for the past few days. The kitchen was cleaned up, the coffee table is now cleared off and even the dining room received the touch-up it needed. Tomorrow, or maybe even before I go to sleep, I’ll wind up getting all of my laundry taken care of and I think I’ll float around the house with the vacuum as well considering it’s been a while since that was done.

A rather nasty storm rolled through here this afternoon and I’m happy I’d woken up just in time to be outside for the start of it. Nasty thunder and lightening for a few hours and two very scared puppies because of all the ‘boom booms’ as we call them. I had princess curled up on one leg and Bella basically trying to crawl behind me just for safety. For dogs with such big personalities when someone rings the door bell (bark central!) they’re kitty cats when it comes to thunder – go figure.

Minus the cleaning I had a fairly good day as far as business is concerned. I’m waiting on a few payments from clients but I count that as income for the 16th considering that’s when projects were completed. Now I just have to decide if I’m going to get Sean a Wii or a monitor for our anniversary. He told me he doesn’t want anything but you can’t NOT get someone something – you know?

Talk about BORING

Monday, July 16th, 2007

Today was kind of sluggish for me, not sure if it was based on the fact that it’s a Sunday or what, but either way I really didn’t accomplish very much. I did get some work done for a few clients. I also managed to get some posting done for advertisers on other domains. I’m working on rebuilding a few things that I’ve kind of left behind in the past. I setup a few banners for advertisers and that’s basically the bulk of my day.

The one thing I was unable to accomplish – at all – was anything home based. I set out to clean up the kitchen, dining room, bedroom, bathroom and a much needed cleaning of the coffee table in the living room. I didn’t get around to doing any of it which is kind of annoying considering in a few moments Sean and I are going to retire to the living room for a little while and watch a movie. It’s hard to relax when theirs chaos going on around me. I may wind up starting on that clean up after I’m done posting here just so I can go in there and lay down to watch a movie without feeling over whelmed.

Mozilla Thunderbird I keep getting strange spam email to my girl@k.nu account, I may wind up moving things around there or just getting rid of the address in general considering everything is basically redirected to gmail anyway. I don’t even bother to log into websites for email anymore, I’ve got thunderbird housing about 8 email addresses at the moment – god I love this thing. Anything Mozilla touches upon is gold – I swear. I know it seems stupid to put up a screen shot but for those of you not using thunderbird, just the side panel alone can basically show you the perks of the program. Running multiple email addresses under one main login makes life very easy, especially when I’m working with clients on 3 different email addresses depending on where they came from. The cool thing about thunderbird is it’s networking capabilities. I’m running everything off of my external hard drive which can be accessed through my laptop as well, I don’t have to worry about just using one computer for email anymore, the way I used to with Outlook because it never updated the paths properly – fucking useless program!

In any event, I’m going to start on some cleaning and then hopefully get myself to bed.

I’m doing the best I can!

Wednesday, July 11th, 2007

I’m still not feeling very well but I’ve managed to catch up on all of the sleep that I’ve lost over the last couple of weeks. I’ve slept over 24 hours in the last two days and while that’s nothing I’m really proud of, I still at least am sleeping off the bacteria that’s infesting my once healthy body at the moment. Based on my inbox I really do have a lot of work to get around to. I’m working on making up a list for tomorrows things-to-do and I’ll hopefully be able to accomplish something on it. At this point it really depends on whether or not I have the ability to get out of bed tomorrow. I really hope I’m able to though, the house needs some cleaning up and I really need to disinfect the sheets in the bedroom so I can slowly start moving this bacteria out of the house before it hurts us all.

In order to avoid getting everyone else in the house sick, I’ve spent more time in the bedroom than any person should, sleeping or not. Sean, unfortunately, is starting to cough a little but I’ve made it a point to stay clear away from Karen because she has to work and I know she has an interview tomorrow as well. The last thing I need is for her to get sick when she’s in the market for a new job, you know?

I took Bella for a walk tonight. The poor thing didn’t get to go last night because of that stupid animal and tonight, I couldn’t take it anymore. Even being a dizzy girl I’m a stubborn one. I stayed on the main strip and made it a point to walk rather quickly. She did her business a few times and then we high-tailed it back to the house with the ‘quickness’, as my sister would say. At least she was able to take care of business and you can tell by her current temperament that she’s pretty darn happy at the moment. She went like six times, but two days of backed up food will do that to you. At least she’s done, that’s all that matters.

I am still behind on email, and more than likely will be for a few days. I know that there are about 3 of the $30 Deals waiting for me, two potential clients from AGn Designs and some advertiser looking into me for another one of my domains. I’ll get back to everyone as soon as I can, I promise.

Business Credit Cards

Tuesday, July 10th, 2007

What I’m typically not too open about is the fact that I do own a credit card for business based purchases. I was lucky enough to come across one on creditcardsearchengine.com that gave me basically everything I’d ever need without any major interest rates that I couldn’t afford. I’m also lucky enough to have a high enough credit score that it helped the high interest rate as well. I use it to make a few purchases here in there, mainly bulk ordering when it comes to domains and other hosting related supplies. Three of five servers are being paid for through the card as well. It’s a rather nifty little thing to have, honestly. I don’t want to have a personal credit card but I can understand where having one, from a business stand point, is rather important.

New toys, very sick, rabid animals and more!

Tuesday, July 10th, 2007

I’m fully aware of all of the email building up in my inbox but as of right now I just can’t get to it. I’m running a high fever, I can barely breath from being so congested, I’m cramping quite a bit due to an extremely heavy period – I’m just NOT having a good couple of days. If you’re a current client or even a potential one, please just be patient with me. There’s only so much I can do when it takes me a half hour to stand up without collapsing from the fact that I’m extremely dizzy at the moment. I’ll be in touch with everyone as soon as possible, I promise. Tony is handling hosting orders at the moment, I’ll get to the design aspect of things when I can.

Sean bought me a graphics card for our anniversary, we’re also going out to dinner next weekend as well. The card showed up today, he installed it after he got some of his own work done and I personally hadn’t been at the computer in the last 12 hours to see how things look. The clarity on the card is amazing and I’m back up to having my gig of installed ram being used on everything else, not being shared with a graphics card. He got me a 512 card, and it has the option for dual monitors as well – something I’ll more than likely have in the near future anyway. Everything does look great though, I really like it so far.

There is an animal running loose in the complex that’s more than likely rabid. Sean spoke to someone last night who said that some large grey cat attacked their pit bull. I saw this animal last night – foam dripping off his mouth. We called the police who wound up transferring us to a different county, explained the situation and an HOUR later animal control zipped through here quick and left. I saw it again tonight, we wrote a letter to the main office and hopefully home owners in the complex will be notified as soon as possible considering almost every other house has a dog in this place, it would be horrible if another one were attacked.

Go figure, I thought skunks were a big deal around here!

Chinese Medicine: Reishi

Wednesday, July 4th, 2007

I came across an article today about Reishi at LongevityHerbs.com. I think this would work along side my previous post about some Gotu Kola product that Sean is currently using. This one is a mushroom that is supposed to be one of the most widely-used herbal remedies in Traditional Chinese Medicine, leave it to the Chinese to use fungus to cure something, they come up with some of the funkiest remedies that actually work and no one else (well…outside of China) would think of using them. This is why they’re ahead of us, take a lesson Bush.

Reishi has anti-inflammatory properties which help it to positively effect ones respiratory system. It’s supposed to be great for allergies, bronchitis and reducing blood pressure issues in relation to hypertension. Now, I’m not a doctor, I’m not someone that follows medicine and I could care less about what’s in an aspirin, I just know it stops my head from hurting. Karen, however, if it’s written in some medical diary or could be found through Google – she can more than likely diagnose anything you throw her way.

A quick note that I found interesting on the products description:

Much attention is paid to reishi’s high concentration of polysaccharides, which are linked to aiding cancer remission; acting as hypoglycemic agents; and strengthening the immune system. Reishi also scavenges free radicals, which retard aging and promote general healthfulness on a systemic, cellular level. Finally, it is known to protect the liver and help instill calmness.

I would assume that anyone who is dealing with the above conditions (personally or family oriented) may find this “herb of good fortune” to be of some help to them.

Getting some much needed work accomplished

Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007

I’ve decided to get my ass in gear on getting a new template setup on AGn Designs. I’ve been playing around with a few things for it over the course of the last few months, I’ve even got a blog thrown around in there somewhere amongst all of the craziness that is my coding. I’m just not too sure what color scheme I’m thinking of going with. I’ve had the green template up for quite some time now and I HAVE been considering going with bright blues and grey but this doesn’t mean that’s actually going to happen. I’m sure I’ll find some kind of a creative streak in the near future to keep my drive towards this template, but it doesn’t mean that I’m going to get it done anytime soon. The last time I updated the site it took me about 3 months of putting it off just to get things done, after that it was a mad-dash to the finish line to accomplish everything I could have done over the course of a week in only 10 hours time. It wasn’t easy, that’s for sure. I may be able to get it done though considering I’m more productive when I’m on my desktop than I am on my laptop. That seems a bit strange considering I can take my laptop with me but this doesn’t mean that it actually works out for me, either.

I processed a few touches here and there on AGn Solutions as well. I kept overlooking a flaw in the template that shouldn’t have been there. I also redid the template for the suspended accounts so it’s just targeted back to the main page instead of going through a seperate folder that’s kind of useless. At least everything is now in the ‘all-in-one’ stages.

I give up…

Sunday, July 1st, 2007

Nothing happened between my last post and now to give me any kind of inspiration for a July theme, as far as I’m concerned (at this point in time) there won’t be a change. Maybe something will trigger me in upcoming days, I know there’s a holiday around the corner, but I’m heavily doubting it at this point.

I have emails up the wazoo with bitchy people asking stupid questions. I’m not sure how but WordPress was bombed with spam that took me about a half hour of going through PHPmyADMIN just to delete and I’m craving coffee right now to keep me awake even though it’s after 3am and I should just go curl up with Sean and crash for the night, he’s been knocked out since 11:30 this evening!

I was going to barbecue tonight because I had a craving for smoked sausage and rice with basil but since I’m the only one in the house who eats rice, I was going to make baked potatoes for everyone else. The potatoes we have are not only too small to make a REAL baked potato,¬† but they’d also been on the counter for almost two weeks and were starting to root themselves to the bag. Needless to say, I needed to go to the store to pick up some more potatoes. After I’d told Sean about this he offered to just go pick up something for dinner and we wound up at Bona Pizza, he loves them – I hate them. So instead of eating nasty pizza, I had a calzone. Now, in NY calzones don’t come in two freaking sizes so I should have known right then and there that this was going to be interesting. I figured okay, the large so I’ll have something to eat tomorrow night. Little did I know they make their calzones almost the same way one would make a stromboli. Fold a pizza in half and throw some extra cheese in. So now I’m sitting there with my LARGE pie folded in half that’s overstuffed with cheese and sausage. This is not a calzone. Calzones have mozzarella cheese, ricotta cheese, ham, salami, pepperoni and sausage – unless you ask for straight cheese naturally. So I was a bit disappointed with dinner considering it had little chunks of sausage and about 10lbs of HORRIBLE cheese thrown in. It didn’t SUCK but even eating about a 1/4 of the thing – I can tell my stomach is going to be screaming at me for the rest of the week while I finish the fucker off. Any true Italian will know, food does NOT go to waste.

I have a taste for things, I grew up in New York so someone telling me that Grotto’s is the absolute best place in the world – I’ll naturally like to beat them senseless with a large trout. A good place in town is Louis, their pizza tastes the most like New York pizza minus the fact that yes, the crust is kind of thin. Sean likes more of a sweet sauce – he grew up in Jersey I wouldn’t expect any less – but he considers himself to be the master of Pizza…when you’re going to marry a New Yorker, your state of mind WILL change. He likes Bona because he basis the good stuff on the crust and theirs, yes, is thicker. It also tastes like straight flower – and not even semolina – what you’re SUPPOSED to cook with. The only place that I can say I enjoy the most, in this entire freaking state, is up in Georgetown they have a place called Bella Capri and when they say Calzone – you get a freaking calzone. Filled with the right stuff, the right AMOUNT of stuff and while their sauce is very bland (straight out of the can kind of bland) they include seasoning on the table so I can adjust it.

Either way, back to my original point; my mind sucks for not having any inspirational thoughts, my computer sucks for not finding me anything good, Google should die, no one in Delaware knows anything about good Italian food, tourists need to be shot considering Karen’s boy-toy was almost run over tonight, Bella and I almost got skunked on her walk tonight, spammers need to get off my back, and I’m freaking exhausted.

END RANT

Client Control

Saturday, June 30th, 2007

PPPFor quite some time now I’ve been interested in making my business a bit more interactive. I’ve worked with a company before that offers a web based survey solution for their clients. The clients can answer questions and the answers would then be polled through the survey for me to get some more input on where I’m going wrong, and what I’m doing right. A company named ISalient allows you to collect data from custom forms for information gathering, research and quantitative analysis.

I’ve worked with a free program named PHPSurveyor which can be found through cPanel’s Fantastico auto-install system and it really didn’t give me what I needed as far as connecting boss to employee with surveys. After poking around through the FAQ for ISalient, I’m confident that in the future, they’ll more than likely be the service to go through. It also doesn’t require me to install anything that I wouldn’t need on my server just for something that seems to be so small.

I currently have over 4,000 clients under my belt. This is a merge of domain and design based clients and I would personally like to create two separate databases for each of them. This way I can change the wording around on both to work for their respective categories. I thought of doing this for many years but never actually got around to it. Sure, I have the ability to submit a testimonial on both my design and hosting sites but since they aren’t a continuing database, it’d be nice to have something that kind of connects everything.

What I really think would be cool is if I had the ability to take both surveys and kind of merge them together with some kind of an overall rating of services. I know that I still have a lot to learn and I feel the best way to learn is through trial and error. I try to get myself on a schedule where I’m doing things in a timely manor but at the same time I’d like the ability to learn more about what I’m doing wrong, and especially on what I’m doing right so that profit margins can exceed the levels they’ve exceeded over the last few months. I’m sure over time I’ll be able to get everything accomplished, for now it’d just be a great idea to work with what I’ve got.