Posts Tagged ‘Sitely’

Yea… so I renewed….

Sunday, April 14th, 2013

Every year I get a notification that krissy.nu will be no-more sometime in May and every year I pay my $30 to make sure I keep it mine. Why? I honestly don’t know. Even though I really have nothing to do with the ‘blogging’ world anymore, I still feel that this is a big part of my own history and can’t personally stop myself from renewing it.  There have been numerous times where I’ve just wanted to let it go and walk away, but that’s primarily because I don’t get to ENJOY the Internet the way I used to. Everything is work related, or Facebook (not gonna lie) and by the time I get down to wanting to work on something personal, my brain is completely blocked and I have no inspiration to come up with ANYTHING.

The upside? The few games that I play on my Tablet have given me a small amount of inspiration – completely referencing color schemes.  I do know that the next template on k.nu will be a little darker, but bright at the same time (if that makes any sense). I handed the color pallet over to Adam to see if there was anything that he could come up with because I was fresh out of ideas but wanted to do something with pink/black/white (in a different manor than I’d ever done before) and he’ll be playing in Photoshop to come up with something for me.

Hopefully there will be some time this summer where I can actually sit down and get something done that isn’t work related.  Thankfully the Internet is being slow-as-sin which is causing me to have to let the FTP programs run in the background while I find something else to do (ie: the reason I’m blogging).  I should be working on my old laptop to wipe Windows 7 out of it so I can hand it off to my sister, but that’s the reason the Network is so slow right now because I’m transferring 20 Gigs of files from the old laptop to my Macbook this way I at least have a back-up of all of the important stuff. (Files and Photoshop crap primarily). I could personally care less about making a list of “Important Programs” considering if it was important enough to be part of my every day life than it’s already on this thing anyway.

The only annoying thing is the internet is going to remain slow for about 5 hours.  I really do wish that I had some kind of a flash drive up here with me, or even a USB-to-USB chord so I could just drag and drop instead of heavily depending on the Wireless in the house to get the job done.

I think it’s about time I start digging through my old laptop bag to see if I even have a drive like that.  I’d rather wait 20 minutes than 5 hours.

At least I’m on a mission now.

Malware and Masses BE GONE!!

Saturday, July 14th, 2012

I received a couple of emails informing me of Malware on the site, unfortunately with everything going on I wasn’t able to actually login to work on things more than just upgrading WordPress via my phone. Turns out the Malware was no where near as bad as some of the sites that I’ve been working on. One of the Malware hits was so severe I had to completely recode the website because every template file was infected and beyond repair. “Why not just upload your copy of the theme?” simple – I’m in Delaware – not New York and don’t have access to the original files. Redoing the entire site from scratch was the only way to go.

In reference to the attack here, however, the only effected file was index.php which is two lines of code pulling the blog header file from the WordPress directory. Once I went through all of the template files to confirm there was nothing else to worry about and did a fresh reinstall of the current WP version I now no longer need to worry about anything. I submitted my site through the Webmaster tools with Google so it stopped kicking the error back to me and hopefully there won’t be any problems moving forward. I don’t understand how it happens, but at this point all I can say is “Whatever, it’s gone now” and move along.

So, as I noted, we’re in Delaware. Typically it would be our usual work during the day and head down to the beach at night, being as that’s what we always did when we actually lived down here during the summer months. However, it’s been much different this time around and now instead of “Go to Beach” it’s “Catch the hell up!”.

Unfortunately Sean’s mom has been having medical issues and instead of going to any of the doctors down here (since they suck balls) we made the trip up to Baltimore to spend some time floating around the numerous departments in Johns Hopkins main hospital so she could actually get proper care. After having some chest pain, shortness of breath and elevated heart rate the choice to walk right into the E.R. was pretty much manditory. From there, she was admitted and wound up in the hospital for about 5 days (in total). We went up on a Friday, wound up waiting until very early Saturday morning before she actually made it into a room. I attempted to get some sleep in the car but it was during the middle of the heat wave and we were in a parking garage so that just didn’t happen. Sean wound up crashing in his mothers room a little after 7am and got a few hours of sleep while everyone was trying to make heads or tails of things.

After he woke up we decided to head back to Rehoboth because on top of needing to take a shower and get some proper sleep – we also needed to do some light laundry and get everything together for Sean’s mom due to the fact that none of us had any idea that she would be admitted to the hospital and had absolutely no clothes or any kind of ‘overnight’ supplies with us. We wound up driving two cars back up, which was not fun AT ALL being as we got stuck in the middle of a monsoon on Sunday night. It wound up turning the 2 1/2 hour trip into a 3 hour trip just because we had no choice but to pull over. If I can’t even see the tail lights of the car in front of me there’s absolutely no way in hell I’m going to keep moving. My choice for stopping was warrented, and confirmed when we got back on the road after things had let up and saw a pretty major accident on the south bound lane that was more than likely due to the lack of visability.

So Sean and I stayed at the Tremonth Plaza in Baltimore for a few nights. The hotel in its own right was really nice, the people were friendly and having the car locked away in a parking garage made me feel very safe knowing that nothing was going to randomly disappear. They offer a shuttle service to the Hopkins hospitals so that you don’t have to worry about navigating your way around Baltimore AND paying additional money for parking.  They offered parking for free at their facility, so that cut down on expenses quite a bit.  It also helped that they offer their rooms at a discounted rate if you’re family of someone who’s currently admitted.

After two nights in the hotel, and countless hours floating around the hospital she was released and we’ve been back down here ever since. Unfortunately it’s taken me forever to catch up on everything when considering I was on some pretty serious deadlines that I had to post-pone for clients. It also didn’t help that my backs been bothering me from all of the excessive walking with horrible unsupportive sneakers.

We’ve been down here for a few weeks, it’s not like we just showed up and instantly went up to the hospital. I just know that his Mom wasn’t feeling too hot the night we came down and things have just kind of spiraled from there. Thankfully everything appears under control now, there are still more appointments to get through but I think after this coming Monday things should be OK. We’re heading back up to Baltimore so she can have the mass on her lung looked into. There are also issues with her heart that need to be looked after, but I highly doubt we’ll be able to get into any offices for that while we’re up there.

Needless to say, this one-two week trip has turned into a longer than anticipated stay. It’s just my hope that everything begins to work itself out, and I’m able to get through the weeks worth of work that I’m backed up with. I’m seriously considering hiring other hands but haven’t seen anyone floating around that can really be trusted with “hush-hush” type of clients. Everyone wants to put something into their portfolio and don’t seem to understand what NDA actually means. It drives me crazy, but that’s the caliber of people floating around these days I guess. I think I’m better off just pushing through exhaustion and trying to get as much done as humanly possible over the course of the next few days.

I just know that I some how need to force myself to sleep by 10pm on Sunday so I can be ready to leave the house by 6:30 on Monday morning. Not looking forward to dealing with Baltimore traffic on a Monday so we’ll see how well this goes. :crosses fingers:

Finally finished…

Saturday, June 4th, 2011

It took a little longer than I would have liked it to, but I’ve got everything up and running.  There are a few sub-pages that still need a little bit of work but if you’re reading this it means that k.nu has completely transferred back to its old server.  I moved it to dream-host for about a year and hosted it under Sean’s account there but their server sucks major, major ass. When going through my WHM I realized that I still had the complete site still located on my own server so after a few modifications, things are back.

It’s been a pretty crappy week, even though I’m no longer dealing with my hell hole former employer, I’ve still been sick as a dog which is giving me very little to work with when moving forward in the design world.  I’ve got a few projects that I’ve started on, and I’m going to spend the bulk of my weekend working on them but for now the larger of the projects (getting this back up) is completed.

Tomorrow is going to be a relatively busy day.  I’m going out to purchase a new washing machine AND dish washer.  The dish washer has been broken for a while, we’ve just converted to hand washing, but being as I plan to do a lot more cooking now that I’ll be home at a more reasonable hour, the lack of dishwasher will 100% get in the way.  PC Richards has a few for under $200 that look pretty decent so we’re going to go with them.  And as far as the washing machine is concerned, that completely died today, PC Richards will save our asses on that too.  We wish that the washer crapped out last week while everyone was having memorial day sales but there’s nothing we could have done about that.  So since Dad has a 20% discount since he’s a hospital employee, that’ll drop a lot of money off the final cost.

Once all of that is squared away it’ll be time to start cooking the Sunday 3-course meal.  This week will be a glazed meatloaf, garlic mashed potatoes and some variety of veggies that I’ll figure out tomorrow. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but I never had the time to properly cook anything in the past due to the work schedule.  Now that I’ll have more time at home, I’ll be able to move forward with regular home-cooked meals as opposed to whatever is convenient to pick up before I come home from work.

In any event, I still have a lot of other things to work on so I’m going to hop to it.

I’m free!!

Saturday, May 28th, 2011

As of 6pm on 5/27 I am a free woman. The last almost three years with that company completely sucked the life out of me and now I’m doing everything I can to scrub their evil scent off of me. Unfortunately my energy bursts are limited thanks to the uber nasty cold that I picked up over the course of the past week. I’m patiently waiting for my nose to unclog itself, and the meds to kick in so that this fever can go away. It’s the worst feeling in the world to even have a fever when it’s freaking 90° outside. Hopefully something will kick in soon. I’m hoping it’s after I eat some dinner though, I don’t want to spend another night going to sleep without something to eat simply because I can’t TASTE anything right now. I HATE IT.

I spent a few hours on Thursday getting my laptop in order. I’ve got Microsoft Office Suite setup… one benefit for working where I did for the past few years is Microsoft Outlook. I know that not many people use it, but when it comes to scheduling, organizing and keeping tabs on EVERYTHING, it really is just a necessity. The customization is much nicer than Thunderbird, and I’m sorry but the options that Outlook 2007 comes with are just mind blowing. Different colors for everything, inserts up the wazoo and for some reason the line spacing on the emails is always perfect no matter what fonts you use. My default font of course is a black century gothic 10pt, it blends nicely with the logo I setup for my signature. There’s no way that I’m going back into everything without having all of my shit in order, outlook is part of that shit.

Photoshop is where my problem is, I’ve spent so damn long looking at estimating software that I’m having trouble getting myself back into the swing of things. Of course since this is a new laptop I don’t have the luxury of all of my old brushes/fonts. It’s hard to start completely fresh but it’s a “Challenge Accepted” situation at this moment in time. After a few days I’m sure I’ll be back up to speed, it’s just the ability to unlearn everything I’ve learned in the past few years to open the file deep in my brain where my ultimate creativity is.

There’s a few ways of triggering it, unfortunately it’s not going to happen overnight. I always had much, much more going on in my head when I was living down in Delaware, and with the addition of the new truck, Sean and I will be taking frequent trips down to Delaware, especially the boardwalk where all of my inspiration came from. Jersey is turning into an inspiration point for me too. I honestly don’t know why, could be all of the interesting people, cool looking diners, and the fact that every job offer I’ve been getting lately is IN Jersey. I will not be moving there, however. It would be the halfway point between my family and Sean’s, but if I go anywhere it’s out to Suffolk County. I love the Centereach/Ronkonkoma area – no idea as to why – but I will be looking into it more seriously when money gets to where it’s supposed to be.

Sean and I have been discussing financials a lot lately. We know exactly how much needs to come in, in order to handle all of the bills, and how much additional would need to come in, in order to be comfortable. It’s our ultimate goal to bring in about $6,000 a month, which is doable considering the industries we’re in, it’s just the matter of scheduling and contacts. I’m starting off small this time, I’ll start local and then work my way to the corporate accounts that I used to have. Those were the ones that paid the bills and god damn were they great to have. I thankfully have all of my old mailing lists so I can send out a blast to get the ball rolling, it should be smooth sailing from there. :crosses fingers:

In any event… I was able to locate the template I’ve been looking for and need to do some major tweaking to get it to where I want it. I’m also loading in some new aps/plugins that will make things easier for me. You can’t be a member of the DROID community and NOT utilize all of its benefits. I’m giving myself a week off from “work” and getting myself back up to speed. I’m taking it easy this weekend only due to the fact that I am nursing myself back to health at this immediate moment in time. I just popped a few more NyQuil Gelcaps, hopefully I’ll be sound asleep in the next half hour… if it actually works the way it’s supposed to.

In the meantime I’ll be watching the rest of “Scott Pilgram vs. The world” Let me tell you this movie is dumb as shit.

Rollin’ along…

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

It’s only Wednesday and I’m itching for it to be Friday.  I can’t wait until my paycheck comes in so I can get some bills paid and enjoy a little bit of self-pampering.  I’m going to pick out a new uber-cool nail polish and head down to the salon to get my eyebrows done, I’ve let them go for three weeks and even though I’ve been maintaining them myself I’d really like to get them touched up.  I’m also going to dye my hair because the gray roots are getting way too freaking long and it’s about time I do something about that.

I’ve already noted on acidgloss.net that I’d like to start doing a little more with my sites and I know I’ve been saying it here for a while but with the way things are going lately I think I’d be able to properly budget my time for a little while so I can actually get something done.  Lately I’ve been putting in a lot of overtime at work and being as it’s approved for my department it’s not such a major deal anymore.  I’m now doing the Saturday afternoon shift completely by myself. Originally I was alternating with another co-worker but she doesn’t really like coming in on the weekends and noted that she’s not hurting for money as badly as I am right now.  Sean is bringing in really good money with a few clients he’s working with but I’m pretty much stuck within the same price-range every two weeks.  It’s paying the bills, and that’s all that matters right now.

Over the course of the next few months we’re really going to be skimping and saving just about everywhere we can.  We both have agreed that it’s time to move on with our lives and we need to get ourselves into a larger apartment and I really need to have my own car. I set my car budget around $12,000 and that’ll be more than enough to get me a 2007 or 2008 Chevy Cobalt that includes everything that I need in a car at this point in my life… power windows and decent gas mileage to get to and from work.  I’m going with a sedan as it will give me a little less to worry about on my car insurance and I’ll have an alarm system to give me even more of a break.  There’s also a defensive driving course that I could take to drop things down as well.  I’ll take as many deductions as I can at this point of my life.  I’m hoping to put about $5,000 to $6,000 aside for a down payment so I’m not stuck with a loan for an extended period of time.  It would help me out in the long run considering I’m still paying back my personal loan and all of the credit cards that I’ve managed to max out over the last year.

I’ve been at my current job for over a year and if you didn’t notice it’s put a major damper on just about everything INTERNET related for me.  I hardly check my email, and really had no interest in blogging for a very long time.  I was dealing with getting used to a 10-7 and that took up just about all of my energy.  Now that I’m in a fixed routine with all of that I’m learning to deal with everything else going on in my life.

My best friend passed away in February and that’s really been kicking my ass for the past few months because it was the last thing I’d ever expect.  Sean and I were rocky for a little while but now we’re back on course.  Bella went through surgery to have the tumor removed from her stomach and a few other things have sprung up over the rest of the year that have had my attention – mainly health related issues with both family members and myself.  It’ll all work itself out in the end so I’m not going to get that far into detail about it.

In any event… it’s after 10pm which means it’s past my bed time.  I don’t ever actually fall asleep until after 11:30 anyway… but I do try to be in bed so I can get some decent amount of sleep.  I’m working on about 5-6 hours a night and I’d really like to sleep for a full 8 hours once in a while.  There’s always the weekends I guess… that’s typically when I make up the time.  I make up for it more on Sunday than I do on Saturday considering I have to work but either way things are getting done and that’s all that matters.

So yea… I’m still working at the same job… I’m still dealing with my own gripes and issues with life.  I’m also hoping to get some time to myself so I can actually start doing something with the sites that I own… it’d be great.

WTF?

Thursday, May 14th, 2009

I have to say …. I’m pretty annoyed with WordPress right now. For some reason my database is corrupt and this only came up after the move to the new host. I did manage to fix it for this domain but that required overwriting a lot of files and generating a back-up of my database so I could make the attempt to start fresh. The screen I’m getting is telling me that I’m at my initial “Welcome to WordPress” installation screen. Considering there’s 4 years of archives I’m a little annoyed by that. I want to have the archives active so that when I get around to reactivating the domain there aren’t so many damn problems with it and I can go back to doing what I was going to do without any interruptions.

So if anyone else has come up with this error OUT OF NO WHERE please let me know what I can do to fix it (if you figured it out) and hopefully it doesn’t require completely reinstalling the entire program.

I’ve never once had an issue with WordPress before, and now it’s nothing but issues that are just pissing me the hell off!

What the hell?

Thursday, May 14th, 2009

I went to blog earlier this morning and was then interrupted by a “Welcome to WordPress” message.  I’m sitting here thinking “Crap, either I was hacked or there’s some kind of database malfunction”.  Sure enough it was the database but seriously now, why did that come out of absolutely no where?  Maybe it was a sign from someone that I needed to reconsider the template that I had in my head, I really don’t know.  All I know is I’m dead set on doing something light and airy and when I did finally have the idea in my head? Someone else already did it!  I wanted to just do a simple sidebar/blog combination that didn’t take up much room but was primarily a CSS only layout with no images at all.  Why? Cause simple is always better and I can code a CSS template on my laptop while I’m on my lunch break and not totally kill my battery being as I’d only be using Notepad anyway.

It’s a gloomy day today.  We had four days of sunshine and then magically the clouds came back and now it’s just…blah…. I’ve noticed on days like this that weather really does play a factor in not only MY mood, but the over-all moods of those around me.  Everyone is coming across as really grumpy today, and it sucks!  The lack of oxygen in this place doesn’t really help either.  There really is no point in having so many windows and none of them can open.  If I ever had my own office area, the biggest requirement would be the ability to crack a window!

Downtime

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009

OK so I forgot to renew my domain. Thankfully a .nu is only $30 a year now as opposed to the $60 for 2 years price tag that it once was. So I thanked myself for not touching my paypal card and managed to clear the $30 registration fee. There are a lot of plans that I have with this domain, as well as the others that I own, but I honestly just don’t have the time or the care anymore. I just don’t want to let this domain, or acidgloss.net die because they were my ‘babies’ for the longest time.

I’ll say this though…with the way the economy is going and the never ending cycle of crap that I’m getting thrown at me financially…when this site does become active again – you’ll have to excuse all of the sponsored articles. Just treat it as a word of warning!

Time to head off to work.