B B B B Benny and the Jets....

Yeah, I ordered Elton John's "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" from Amazon and it arrived today. My neighbors have the privelege to hear me belting out the hits in my horrible falsetto voice. I watched a serious of shows on VH1 showing the background behind some of rock's best albums and I was impressed at how this album was put together. DESPITE the fact the album is one or two years older then I am. Oh to balance out the gayness factor I also got a Ben Harper DVD and Beck album ok? NOT that there is anything wrong with that of course!

Today has been nuts. One meeting after another. I have another one in a few minutes that will take me out of the house again. I guess I should be happy about that, but you have to realize meetings are all hard costs...I don't charge people to go see them. I'm certainly not "Hoydee Toydee" about it, I don't have the muscle to charge people just to talk to me hehe.

Anyway, it's ok going to meetings. There's a pattern to my road trips. First I normally get lost going there (I'm directionally challeged, I rely on landmarks better then I do street names). Second by the time I'm talking to someone I usually end up talking too fast or too much. I've been getting better about both these issues but it has to come with practice. Luckily my BNI gatherings have helped a bit.

I'm pretty happy that I've been getting more work for printed materials and logos lately. Perhaps tonight when I have more time I'll put up the latest logo I completed. I quite like it.

Now it's all the Holiday Season rush where people are needing promotional material. Which reminds me I have to do my own Christmas cards OH NO! I got probably one week to try to get those done so I can shoot them off to people. What do I do this year?! ACK!

Happy Belated Thanksgiving

I've been too busy to notice. Thanksgiving weekend? What's that? Holidays don't mean so much to you when you're freelancing.

How was my Thankgiving? Very non-traditional. I just spent the night with my parents praying the night will go by without some kind of argument about their apartment. For the first time in 20+ years my parents are renovating the apartment...and let me tell ya, NOTHING has been smooth.

Nothing worse then having 2 stubborn parents trying to decide what they like best in their home. Folks, this is WHY you sometimes need an outside designer. You CAN do things yourselves, but the trouble of having to decide everything on your own and compromising with everyone else in your house, is not worth it.

There have been nights I was so ready to yank all my hair out and check into Kahi Mohala after dealing with them. Anyway, it's coming along...there's still a way to go but the place is looking somewhat fresher.

Dad made chicken on our turkey day. /shrug. Yeah, the other white meat. I mean, it was great chicken from another one of my dad's secret recipes, but I've always felt there is always a little fun in holidays when you try to observe the right traditions. Nah, my family is definitely in our own world. So I made myself contented carving up my little chicken wing and pretending it was a juicy turkey.

My only real disappointment this year was that we didn't have pumpkin pie. I like pumpkin pie...at least enough to crave it once-a-year. Nada. I'm going to have to make up for that somehow...are there any places that make pumpkin pie all year round? Am I just going to have to crave this for an entire year?

The rest of the weekend has been a mix of work with an occasional trip outdoors whenever a friend would offer company for a meal. Trust me, when you spend all day holed up in your home office, you go STIR CRAZY. I'm talking to myself already.

I'm going nuts.

Break time

Projects are going smoothly but I'm a little behind because of some unforeseen delays after helping my parents over the weekend. So here I am working till the wee hours of the night catching up. I'll get it done...it's just easy to burn out. Luckily a good dose of Cute Overload does the trick. But here's something funny that helped me get a timely chuckle... careful if you have little kids around though, the language gets rough at the end.



WHAT the F?! hahaha.

OK, my obligatory design find today. I saw this demonstrated last year on some TV show like "Boyond Tomorrow" or something like that. Pretty neat:



I signed up for membership for NAPP lately. Yeah pretty geeky I know. But considering I make most of my living based off of Photoshop, Illustrator and the like...I suppose taking some career development courses every now and again is good. They have a seminar coming up here in Honolulu on the 4th of December which I signed up for. Hopefully I'll learn how to better prep my images. I'm actually looking forward to it....I'll spend a day outside of the house and going to a seminar to get all the free goodies. (Well, technically I paid for it all didn't I?)

I've been using Photoshop since about version 2 or 3, but there's always STILL stuff to learn on it.

Back to work. WHAT THE F!?

Death by Snail

Here's something you don't hear about me every day...I'm allergic to snails.

Now before you may ask me how I might have found out about this unusual allergy, it took me a few years to put the combination of clues together -- everytime I would go to a nice restaurant with my family I used to love ordering esgargot. MMMMM! Wonderful buttery, garlicy goodness!

Later that night I think my throat would constrict and I'd suffer an asthmatic type attack where I would wake up in the middle of the night and have a super hard time breathing. Since making that connection, I stopped ordering esgargot and I haven't had one of these episodes since.

UNTIL...... today my business networking group, BNI Hawaii, met today at the Bistro near Waikiki for a lunch meeting. They served esgargots to use as a complementary appetizer. OH I knew I should have resisted but it's been YEARS since I've last had one. What are the chances I'm still affected by something so small. "One little delicious snail won't hurt...."

10 minutes later, "Hmm..nobody is eating that last tiny one over there.... how bad can 2 snails be?"

Now I don't know if it's just my imagination but I'm certainly feeling a bit strange. I'm breathing just fine but I feel like my body temperature is elevated. OH it would suck to die like this. Imagine the coroner's report, "Subject died because of snails"

I guess it's not the end of the world to be allergic to something as obscure as snails. It could be worse I could be allergic to ......air, or something like that. There are enough substitutes out that are similar. Eating a snail is just about the same as eating a piece of portabello mushroom. MMMMM. Hey, maybe I should create a snail burger. Any takers?

Besides this episode, the BNI group I'm in is finally kicking off. We reached our required membership amount to kick off our very own chapter and now we're going through training. They teach you how to run a BNI meeting, but more importantly, they've been been teaching all of us how we must present our businesses to each other so that we make effective use of time and words.

Imagine walking next to a stranger on the street and they asked you, "Oh so what do you do?" The idea is to be able to quickly and effectively tell this person about your business within 60 seconds. This is a basic fundamental skill that every business person should have. I'm thankful that there's a group like this to help me develop these things.

Our group seems fun too. There's a few folks in there with a good sense of humor so we're getting along just fine.

Well, back to work..... hope I survive the night.

Too Fast for Love

Despite life going so fast I sometimes feel like going into an isolated room and yelling "STOP!", I still manage to do a little self-education. In the process of learning to be more competitive and effective in my client's projects by aiming to be more efficient in CSS and PHP, I've stumbled across some amazing projects from other designers out there. I certainly tip my hat to some of these folks.

Check out this one. I don't know what it is but it's just the most creative thing I've seen online in years:

Flowers Feed the Soul: It's some kind of bizarro Alice-in-Wonderland page that doesn't quite immediately says what it's for. But it's just SO bizarre I found myself sitting there trying to click on things trying to discover what it was. (You navigate by those little fuzzy bubbles above the logo by the way)

It's an interesting device actually....here I have been trying to tell my clients that the best designs are ones that are blatantly obvious and clear. But here is a site that tosses that aside and says, "here, I'm so wacky you'll WANT to find out what I'm about" At least that's what it's saying to me. (yeah, voices in my head again).

From a development standpoint I'm impressed too. There's a danger for those of us trying to design to create designs "for other designers". We sometimes fall into the trap of making things to impress one another when we're really supposed to be serving our client. In this site, I was wondering if this was the case, but I think it's just so wonderfully creative I think it's just simply art meant to be enjoyed.

ENJOY!

What am I doing?

I feel beat up.

I've been spending a lot of time doing stuff that sometimes comes with web work but I'm not as familiar with it, nor does a part of me really want to. But it's there.

Yesterday for instance I spent about 10 hours straight messing around with database and programming work for a project that involves some open-source work with things like Mambo, Forums, and Galleries.

If you're unfamiliar with Open-source work, the basic concept is that there are programs online that are collectively developed online by the internet community as a whole and freely distributed to anyone who wants to use them.

So a lot of forums & galleries you see out there are built using this open source material and modified to suit the users purposes or tastes.

The problem comes when you want to be "fancy pants" and try to merge all these separate open source stuff together so it's a seamless website that delivers all these things in one. It's a pain in the neck.

Like if you had 5 groups of people and you send each group to develop a part of an airplane, the best they can do without seeing any plans or seeing what the other groups are doing. Later when you have the 5 parts it's up to you to try to put the thing together and make it fly.

So anyway, long story short (I think it's already longer then even I can stand), I spend countless hours putting together this damn plane that can barely roll off the tarmac right now. And all I got was a case of carpal tunnel.

Meanwhile I'm trying to develop my own site. ALSO using open source stuff, in this case using Wordpress. Very fun and interesting program in fact...more full featured & flexible then Blogger albeit a little longer to set up. I'm excited about it, but it's also a case of a lot of trial-and-error to customize that the way I want it.

By now I'm practically eating, drinking and shitting PHP, MySQL and CSS work. I wish I wasn't.

Where's my candy?

OK, so I'm crazy busy again. That's pretty awesome.

Which leads me to the conclusion if I'm ever short of work all I have to do is whine hard enough to the God of Stress & Eternal Work and he'll say, "OH, so you have too much free time and you're not enjoying it huh? OK, here's more work sucka"

Maybe I need to prequalify my prayers next time. "Please just give me money without having to work."

So I managed to vote yesterday even though I wasn't planning on it. I had a meeting with an associate who had a "No vote no grumble" shirt on and that broke me. I figure I'll just go to vote just to preserve my ability to grumble as much as I want. Hey, I never voted for Bush in either elections so I had grumble priveledges for close to 8 years now.

I voted rather independantly. I think I voted for one Republican...although for positions where I didn't know either condidates too well I sort of leaned towards Democrat. Hey, you gotta balance out Washington more these days it's insane. As usual it's a rather uneventful voting process...although I had a small anxiety attack having to fill in bubble forms again. I think I took too many bubble exam tests in my life.

I walked out of the voting spot feeling rather unfullfilled. I didn't get a lollipop or even a tootsie roll for voting. Hey they want to get more people out to vote? Offer some freaking candy damnit. Maybe I should run for elected office to enact the "voting for candy" platform.

Random Thoughts

And now for another installment of...........

RANDOM THOUGHTS.

Parents -- unconditional help and support. Always there if you need them. But will sometimes drive you crazy. At some point in your life they ceased to be infallible, leaving you only to think that somewhere along the line, life tricked you into some kind of lifetime parent warranty and then suddenly went out of business without telling you.

International Airfare -- how is it that international airfare now has taxes and security fees that are about 60% above the cost of the ticket itself? Want to fly to Hong Kong? Oh you can get there for about $500 in the off season... but then they'll tack on another $300 in taxes and fees later. Why don't those fartheads just say it's $800!? Bastards.

Politics -- voted for 10+ years only to feel a sense that it's completely useless to inact true change in office. I mean, even if your candidate is elected, I doubt there's really much difference between party lines any more. The best I hope for is to have a person in office that doesn't embarrass us by choking on pretzels.

Pain -- when comparing pain receptors on my body, there seems to be 2 areas of my body that supercedes all other pain. A pain in my mouth is bad. A toothache or a sharp dental object jabbing into my gums sucks. Yet even worth then that is one of those stomach aches from hell where you have to sit on the toilet bowl in a cold sweat wishing you were dead. I don't think I've ever wished to die with any other pains in my body... I think if someone were to torture me for information, just give me a glass of milk and I'll tell you everything.

Holy Moses

It suddenly got super busy in the span of almost 24 hours.

Yesterday it was almost night and day compared to the week before. My phone was ringing like mad. Even as I would be talking to someone one one phone, my other line would be ringing too. I literally couldn't catch my breath on one of my calls, I had to tell myself not to hyperventilate! heheh.

And I loved it! Am I a sick puppy or what? I love this kind of chaos...it makes me feel secure. Like a nice warm fuzzy blanket of stress!

I better keep jamming...

In the meantime...I have my ways of calming myself down during small breaks in the day. Here's some for you:

SomaFM -- free streaming radio. I like the Groove Salad station...prefect ambient background music for creative work. The other stations are just a little too trance for me, although the Secret Agent station isn't bad once in a while.

Boing Boing -- "A directory of wonderful things". Every once in a while there are some truly wonderful things that are found here. Endgagdet is another one that has cool things too although their angle is a little more geek-centric.

OK, that should keep you guys busy and distracted while I cuddle up in my blanket.