Archive for October, 2008

Seeing Stars

Friday, October 24th, 2008

If you know me, you know trendiness isn’t exactly my thing. In fact I avoid trends if I can, because I so hate having to change everything up when what was in goes out. Especially when it comes to my logo.

When I went to make myself an invoice template in open office years ago, my logo wasn’t importing well. So I worked up new one that would work in plain text, with turquoise text and an orange asterisk in lieu of the supernova symbol I’d created. And to my surprise, I liked it better.

For one thing, the old symbol I’d made (which you can see in my favicon) looked a little like a circular saw blade. Plus my blog was becoming and more random, and asterisks are wild characters. (Just like me. Kidding. Kinda.) And of course I also liked that an asterisk/star could still vaguely reference a supernova, but that’s another story saga.

But now I’m seeing stars! Everywhere! Is the Asterisk the new Swoosh?
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Figuring out Billable Hours & Rates

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

Need help calculating billable hours? Or figuring out the rate you should be billing at? Here two of my favorite cool tools — they work well for freelancers of all sorts: designers, programmers, artists, and more. I almost lost track of these links. I couldn’t find them in google so I had to grab them from a bookmarks backup. So I’m saving them here, along with my two cents…
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Beta Delta

Tuesday, October 14th, 2008

I just got off the phone with Delta’s customer service and am feeling extraordinarily irked.

In some ways I can’t believe my own silliness. Here for nearly two months now, I’ve been thinking I had a return flight at on the day I agreed to on purchase, when in fact its been another all along. They did sent me a confirmation with that wrong date on it, and I was supposed to call them back and have it corrected within 24 hours. But the confirmation didn’t display in thunderbird, and I wondered why they’d sent me a blank email, till I tried forwarding it to our accountant and the text magically appeared. My bad is that I -did- click forward and even copied and pasted that forwarded info to one other person. I didn’t take time to re-read the dates and times in that forwarded email because I assumed they were correct. Silly me!
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Responsibility

Thursday, October 2nd, 2008

My kids have asked what the word means, and my best definition is this: Doing the right thing even when it’s hard, or owning the consequences.

Our economy is a wreck, says Mrs. Obvious, and I’m scared. I don’t think a bailout will solve anything. I don’t think punishments will solve anything. And for all I can see, the natural consequences would be painfully suffered by all.

So what do we do? I wish for a way to pull through this without government intervention, considering government intervention may well have contributed to the problem in the first place. Dave Ramsey came up with a three step common sense solution to recommend to our elected officials. What do you think?
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Yahoos!

Thursday, October 2nd, 2008

I had several photos from Wordcamp and thought I might upload them to Flickr. But its been so long since I used anything yahoo related, that I’d forgotten my password. No big deal, right?

Wrong. Their password reset feature doesn’t work for me. So now they practically want power of attorney to get it back. OK, not really – but over a series of emails, they have asked for ALL my personal identification information, including multiple phone numbers, alternate email addresses, and a copy of my drivers license. Which has my social on it. After all the runaround and all the information I’ve already given them… just to reset a password? I don’t think so, Yahoo! :-/

So, no flickr for me. Given that I haven’t switched my site over to wordpress with its nifty gallery plugin yet (as I’ve got more pressing projects at the moment) I’m just going to upload a few photos right here. (more…)