Posts Tagged ‘Web Design’
Thursday, September 5th, 2013
I unfortunately needed to put the Little Boy back outside. While he is generally a really good cat, he’s also an animal that’s spent the last two years on the street and wouldn’t adjust very well to permanent indoor life. A certain time of night he would be itching to go outside, and then he wound up lashing out by attacking Bella and Meow-Meow. Typically I wouldn’t care about the playful aspect of his personality, but when it goes from playing to claws, and his eyes completely change. We all decided it would be best to keep him as an outdoor animal to ensure that he’s getting the frisky side of him taken care of in his usual environment, and then also making sure he has a proper place to relax.
So the bench outside has a nice warm blanket on it, and he’s got a little feeding station. He doesn’t stray far from the house, and it’s kind of funny to watch him follow Bella and I whenever I take her out for a walk. Usually he’ll get to a certain point where he stops following, but this morning he completely went around two blocks with me and her, and even used the bathroom when he needed to. Not many people can say that they can walk their cat and dog at the same time, so it’s nice to be unique once in a while lol.
Work has been hectic, I’m working on 6 different sites at once and of course they’re all due at the same freaking time. There are projects that I’ve had to leave pending because I just don’t have the time to transfer over to them and no matter how many times I post something on Twitter/Facebook/Freelancer I can’t freaking find anyone who knows what they’re doing in order to help me out.
I need someone who understands proper HTML5/CSS3 compliance, who also has some type of a jQuery backend. Even if they don’t write it themselves, they need to know how to work with existing scripts (which I can actually provide to them anyway). From there, that same person would need to know how to code for WordPress. Anyone can turn any theme into a WordPress theme, but I need someone who understands that you need to have EVERYTHING inside of WordPress as clients are not to touch the actual .php files themselves. So the use of Widgets and Advanced Custom Fields (primarily the repeater fields) are required as well.
Now, while that may not seem like very much – you’d be surprised at how hard it is for me to find someone capable of handling the load. It’s driving me absolutely crazy. I don’t understand how there seems to be NO ONE around who can do it.
Help? 🙁
Tags:AGn Designs, CSS 3, HTML 5, jQuery, Now Hiring, Web Design, Web Development, Wordpress
Posted in AGn Designs, Annoyed, Smokey, Work | Comments Closed
Tuesday, July 30th, 2013
It’s been a long time coming, but I’ve finally got a new theme up on k.nu. The previous one was nice and all but I needed a change. I was waiting on inspiration, and oddly enough I got it from a damn game on my Tablet. There’s a game called “Fashion Story” that I’m absolutely sick of playing but the color scheme for the game itself inspired me. When I showed it to Adam he said “OOH SUPER CUTE” and I told him to build something for me. He sent me a PSD with a base template, I added to it and went crazy with little tweaks and mods here and there and BOOM = New Template!
I mirrors templates that I’d done in the past. Everyone now, sticking with HTML5/CSS is going for the centered layouts with muted, but bold, colors. I wanted something completely different. There was a theme I created when I was on dork.com (over 10 years ago) that really reminded me of the theme that Adam started for me. Back then my coding skills were no where near what they are now, I think I tried to figure out what DIV tags were for that template because I’d previously used Tables and multiple frames to get everything to load. God, do you remember coding with FRAMES, that had to be the absolute WORST way to build a damn website – but no one knew any better, they just wanted to get as much information as possible onto a single page and that was the only way to do it.
I’m actually very happy that I was able to get this up and running. I know it’s not an extravagant WOW type of template, but I’m happy with it and that’s what matters. I’ve been so busy working on numerous other things that having the downtime to get it done is really what mattered to me. I started putzing around with it about a month ago, and was able to put the final touches on it for the last few days. I’d finished up a site that I was working on with Adam (for Kimberly J. Brown – remember her from Halloweentown?). The site itself is ready to go in a Development folder we’re just waiting on the GreenLight to go live with it. It’s a fantastic change from the design she was previously using. It’s more hip, modern, and not located on blogger. This chick has been fully upgraded to WordPress and I’m hoping she’s super happy with the site.
My issue now is I’m at a ‘low point’ with work. So this means I’ll be working on random odd-and-end jobs to help Sean out, but I don’t have anything to personally handle on my own. I know I’m helping him out with a site tomorrow, but then I’m jumping onto the total revamp of AGn Designs, it’s in desperate need of a facelift and I have quite a few sites to add to the portfolio. It really sucks that I have so many NDA’s with clients, there were numerous sites that I’ve worked on that I’ve been so proud of but don’t have the ability to list them in my portfolio. One day I’ll get those kinds of sites for my own doing so I can joyfully display them, but for now I’ll just keep chugging away.
I do know that my usual boss has about 6 sites to send to me, but he’s been so damn busy with everything going on that they’re delayed at the moment. I just hope that all of the sites he claims are coming to me aren’t going to show up mid-month in August. Our friend Colin is coming down to visit for 5 days and I really don’t want to be working the whole time he’s here. It wouldn’t be fair to him, and I already have a lot of stuff planned for us. Working would completely cut into that.
The upside to today, other than completing this, is I was able to get outside for a little while and do some much needed lawn maintenance. It’s been so long since I weed-wacked that I couldn’t even see where the bushes began and the grass ended. The grass grew straight up and over all of the trim/separators we have outside. I wacked that down straight to the dirt so I know I’ll have a few more weeks before I need to get out there again. Grass grows so damn quickly this time of year, I hate it. I wish I had a gravel yard … less maintenance.
The second upside – I found a site that makes all kinds of custom stuff for your business. It’s not vista-print – I effin’ hate them. It’s a newer site called BuildASign.com. I ordered a custom license plate, because Delaware is one of those states where you only need to have one plate on the car, so I’m utilizing the real estate that my car actually has (meaning lack of outside decoration) and I got myself a plate with AGn Designs logo printed on it. I did have to partially cancel my order with them because I chose the wrong size window decals – they were way too small for the amount of information that I actually put onto it. That was completely my fault, I know I was paying attention when I was setting everything up but I honestly didn’t even think about it being too small until my Mom had mentioned “Really, 3×5?”. So now I’m working on getting everything larger so it’s easier to read. The license plate should be here by the 15th. Hopefully today I’ll be ordering the larger sized decals and have them around the 15th/16th as well.
Anyone interested in a free AGn Designs window decal? I can offer free advertising to anyone interested in pasting it onto their car to aid me in a little free advertising as well. Shoot me an email through the Contact page if you’re interested.
In any event, it’s knocking on 6am and I have an inbox to clear out so I can get some shut-eye.
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Tags:AGn Designs, Daily Life, Friends, Graphics Design, Portfolio, Vanity, Web Design, Wordpress, Work
Posted in AGn Designs, Boyfriend, Delmarva, Randomage, Sitely, Stressed, Work | 3 Comments »
Saturday, December 1st, 2012
I’m not someone who’s easily overwhelmed by ANYTHING. The past hour, however, has set my head into such a spin that I feel like I’m dealing with some type of internal tornado.
I’ve been working for a design firm in Manhattan for quite some time now, Sean actually was the one to get me the job with one of the company owners to work on one of their websites and from there was bounced to the other owner who’s the #1 on the Web department. It’s been steady on-going work, primarily in WordPress and after the last year and a half I’m utilizing areas of WordPress that I didn’t even think existed in this world. The way things are morphed and hacked (without physically touching the core files) blows my fricken mind. I don’t think I’ve done one site that didn’t require heavily modified template files to cater to custom posts and custom fields. The repeater field on Advanced Custom Fields just about made my head explode when I was finally able to figure out the ins and outs of it.
All that aside, obviously I’ve been able to keep myself busy with a lot of things to do, the thing that’s kicking my ass right now is the fact that there’s 4 sites that basically need to be done by Wednesday (just for this company) and I have no idea how to wrap my head around the amount of work that needs to be accomplished. I’m not against working a 16-20 hour day in order to get everything done, don’t get me wrong, but the issue now is the fact that I’m needing to figure out how to do this while still sitting in the cancer center on Monday and Tuesday for Karen’s chemo. She did OK for the first cycle (3 weeks ago), she had the typical side effects of nausea, headaches, vomiting but it subsided after a few days and she’s been pretty comfortable since. The woman is eating her weight in food on a daily basis and her newest addiction is potatoes and corn because she’s carbo-loading like a best thanks to the Steroids. Her recent discussion with her doctor, and the fact that she had a very strange reaction with the first cycle (almost immediately) now has her on the path to receiving a different type of Chemo that needs to be administered over the course of two days instead of the one. So on Monday morning and Tuesday morning someone needs to accompany her to the cancer center so she’s got someone with her for the 5 or so hours it takes to get her treatment. Now, if things were a little slower it wouldn’t be an issue at all but having such tight deadlines for four massive sites… I don’t know how I’m going to be able to accomplish it all.
I just really hope that the cancer center doesn’t have restrictions on their WiFi. I don’t mind switching back over to my laptop to get in a few hours of work while I’m there, but the last time I tried to work in a hospital I was quickly shut down because they don’t allow uploading on their network, and it’s not exactly possible to connect to FTP when that’s the case. Sean and I had a shit-ton of bad luck when we were at Johns Hopkins (main hospital for 5 days back in July) because of the restrictions, and we didn’t actually have a hotel room to go back to until 2 1/2 days after we got up to Baltimore so we lost a lot of time on our punch cards in order to deal with everything going on there. We didn’t try it while Karen was in Hopkins (Bayview – for two weeks in September) because we bounced back and forth from the hospital to the hotel multiple times a day and were able to utilize the wifi at the hotel to get everything accomplished.
Now, the Tunnel Center (where she’s getting her Chemo) is local (literally four blocks away) but this doesn’t mean that I’ll have any kind of luck connecting to a network that allows some type of uploading based solely on the fact that there’s lord knows how many offices in this building and they’re all competing with the download time for BeeBee medicals internal file-sharing system that stretches amongst their entire network, including the imaging center right next door.
I guess I’ll just need to figure out everything when it happens, I can only hope that they’re super dumb (compared to Hopkins) and don’t have that kind of restriction because everyone in Delaware is a hell of a lot more trusting than they are in Baltimore.
My goal for tonight is to finish the edits on Site #1, so I can then get a few hours of sleep (hopefully at least 4) and then wake up to complete the remainder of Site #1 being as all of the PSD’s haven’t been moved into WordPress yet. My day tomorrow is completely booked worked wise, but at the same time I still have A LOT of cooking to do. I’m starting the crockpot around 11am, throwing in the meatballs/sausage around 1pm so they can cook for 6 or so hours to be done for dinner. I still have chicken to make before it goes bad, and quite a bit of baking to do because I was very unhappy with the bakery in the supermarket tonight. So with everything else going on I still have to make Fudge, White Chocolate Chip and Regular Chocolate Chip cookies, PLUS a Banana Nut Bread because, as I said, Karen is carbo-loading but I still need to figure out how to sneak some kind of fruits/veggies into her that aren’t just potatoes cause that’s way too much starch.
I just hope that the eggs I bought two weeks ago didn’t go bad already, and I really hope that we have butter in the house because I was stupid and didn’t check that when Sean and I went grocery shopping tonight. Crap I just remembered I need oil. I guess while I’m waking up with my first cup of coffee I’ll be dodging through the supermarket to pick up everything just to get back here in time to start the rest of my day.
Lord help me, even Music won’t calm this nerve down.
Time to get back to work so I can go to sleep.
Tags:AGn Designs, Baltimore, Cancer, Chemo, Cooking, Delmarva, Graphics Design, Stress, Web Design, Work
Posted in AGn Designs, Daily, Delmarva, Family, Work | 2 Comments »
Thursday, November 8th, 2012
It’s the middle of November and I’m freezing my fricken ass off. It’s not even like I’m in a state where this type of weather is expected (ie: Maine / Minnesota), I’m in Delaware!! It’s supposed to be boardwalk friendly weather until December 21st!
The “Noreaster” rolled through yesterday, it was pretty much a windy day with a drizzle. New York got hit pretty hard, I know my mom had about 8-inches or so of Snow, which for November is completely uncommon. And while the power did stay on in numerous areas, there are people from the last storm who don’t even have power yet. To make matters worse, those who just got there power back within the last 48 hours or so, are already out. I wonder if LIPA has been holding all of their machinery together with duct tape and gum? How the hell do you fix a transformer to only have it stop working two days later? No wonder Gvnr. Cuomo is as pissed off as he is – you people suck.
There are crews in from all over the United States and Canada to aid in relief efforts, but then you see arial views of all of the LIPA trucks just sitting around doing nothing while all of the out-of-staters are pretty much handling everything. The North Shore of Long Island has been taken over by Kentucky and Tennessee power companies and there isn’t a single LIPA truck to be found. It blows my damn mind. These states are coming in to be kind enough to help you out and you’re just going to sit back and do jack shit in it’s place? I’m sure there’s some kind of a union bullshit thing involved here. From what I’ve heard LIPA is still pissed about a remaining bill of like $75,000 from Irene so they’re taking their sweet time. Meanwhile, just based on billing periods, they can make that in two hours since there a damn monopoly anyway. No one wants Con Edison to be involved with Long Island, the rates are absurd and the quality of service is just as bad, if not worse.
I think they should just take the innovative approach and put all of the damn power lines under ground to help keep things moving. It would not only put A LOT of people to work, but you wouldn’t be dealing with the bull shit of “Oh no, it’s a windy day – I think I’ll be dealing with ANOTHER blackout”. That’s the one thing we’ve never had to worry about down here. Even with all of the damage that’s been done by storms in the past there’s never been a major blackout due to a storm.
But, going back to my main point. I’M FUCKING COLD!! I have no idea where any of my jackets are, mainly cause I’m too lazy to look for them. I’m amused at how the dog is sitting next to me panting away like it’s the middle of the summer and I’ve got a chill going up and down my spine that just won’t go away. All I want to do is lay down in bed and go to sleep but I know I need to put in at least 8 hours tonight (starting now) to complete a site for a client. There’s still about 8 pages to convert from HTML to WordPress, and of course there’s the issue of needing custom fields all over every single template file so needless to say that puts a damper on things.
I also need to figure out a conditional tag, I don’t think is_blog() would actually work the way I need it to. The site has two backgrounds, the initial one for the home page, and a more compressed one for the content pages. Now using is_front_page() and is_home() are working to display the correct background on the index page, and the content pages, but when you think it’s going to carry over to the blog you’re sadly mistaken and all it does is display the background located on the index page. I’m going to have to spend quite a bit of time figuring that one out tonight. Not to mention I’m also going to be dealing with the issue of the fact that the site was so poorly coded it’s not even looking the way its supposed to in any browser lower than IE9. Whoever the client paid (originally) to code this thing was a total waste in money, and now it’s a rush job to get it done by tomorrow morning (Friday AM). We told them 24 hours initially because we thought it was just going to be loading the template into WordPress and creating a few custom fields here and there. I didn’t realize it was going to require a complete and total recode because the moron who coded it for WordPress took the Twenty-Ten (not even Twenty-Twelve) and copied and pasted the WRONG areas into the WRONG template files. STUNAD!!
Tags:AGn Designs, Stupidity, Weather, Web Design, Wordpress
Posted in AGn Designs, Annoyed, Daily | Comments Closed
Thursday, May 3rd, 2012
I’ve come to the conclusion that I need someone to build PSD’s for me on a some-what regular basis. Trying to balance 8 different accounts just isn’t working out too well for me right now, especially when you factor in there are a few waiting in the wings that have absolutely no idea what they want and I need to take all of my photoshop efforts and push them to constant emails back and forth about what is liked, unliked, and ‘the cool thing cause I don’t know what I want’. I’m about 10 minutes from ripping my hair out.
I hired Muir as an assistant to help out with the tedious bullcrap, but she doesn’t really know Photoshop other than for quick photo manipulation, building an entire PSD and labeling everything just isn’t an option right now. Thankfully for her, she’s picked up another job with someone local in town so she’s able to get more of a paycheck being as the tedious gruntwork on my part (right now) is Photoshop based.
I’m thinking of going through my friends list on FB and Twitter and putting out an S.O.S. to anyone who knows what they’re doing. I’m not looking for someone to code everything, but having an ounce of a code background (especially in WordPress, Joomla and Mangento) is a big help.
Any takers? Email me. krissy (at) agndesigns.net
Tags:AGn Designs, Graphics Design, Now Hiring, Web Design
Posted in AGn Designs | Comments Closed
Sunday, April 8th, 2012
After almost a year of “I need to buckle down” mentality, I finally sat down this week and began the next chapter of Krissy.nu. Not only is there finally a nifty new theme, but I’m also bringing on a guest blogger to keep things moving forward. There will be no more months-on-end of absolutely no posting on my part.
So what’s been going on since NOVEMBER?! Not much really, life has been it’s usual constant up and down, things have been pretty busy – work wise – and my personal life in general isn’t really bad at all. I’ve purged a lot of excess baggage and drama out of my life and am now moving forward with a more positive attitude, and much left aggravation in my life as well.
It’s my goal for the next couple of weeks to go full force into regular blog entries and updates, plus I’m bringing Muir on for some interesting news for all you ladies out there interested in properly taking care of your skin. She’s not only a dear friend of mine, but a consultant for Rodan & Fields – the creators of Proactive. I also recently hired her as a lead consultant and manager for AGn Designs.
Needless to say…things are gonna pick up 🙂
Tags:AGn Designs, Life, Web Design, Work
Posted in Career, Friends, Work | Comments Closed
Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011
Today is one of those days where the only thing I can really think of saying is “WTF Mate?”.
I’m working on converting a site from tables to divs. Now, while this may seem like an easy task (and typically is), I’ve found myself wanting to rip out my hair because I have absolutely no idea on where to start other than completely from scratch and implementing the remainder of the code. Even ‘from scratch’ is proving to be difficult considering its a custom script where the creator obviously has NO idea on how to do anything.
The other “WTF” moment was a comment that I deleted from my pending queue, someone named “Mark” left a bit.ly URL for his website and what appears to be a valid email address noting that they’ve been here before, but lost the link (bull shit, bull shit, bull shit…yada yada) and informed me that my SEO is not up to par. Dude, it’s a fucking personal site, are you serious? #1, I could care less about SEO, and #2, if you type “Krissy” into Google I’m already on the first page, my PR rank is a 3 (no idea how I got that back), and I hardly ever, if at all, update…. so what’s the freaking point?
On a side note, I’m slowly coming along with My Portfolio and AcidGloss.net. I’ve decided to keep ‘krissys-portfolio’ but the redirected domain is AGnDesignsNET. The reason for this is it makes no sense to push everything to acidgloss.net when I do still wish to keep that as a blog. So, agndesigns.net was available, I paid my $10, and now its just a matter of working in the content.
I’ve been working on some high profile clients, which would always look good in a portfolio, I’m also dumping all of the little BS templates that were in there for the longest time and really do not show off any kind of design skill other than my ability to whip something up in Photoshop in ten minutes and not think twice about it. That’s bad for business, and a portfolio should utilize your best…and that’s what I fully intend to do.
The major rush behind getting everything back up and running is the pending write-ups that I need to do. I have at least 15-20 articles to write and have absolutely no ability to concentrate on my own stuff to get it done. I’m hoping that within the next few days I can buckle down and accomplish that but it seems that every time I get some down time, someone kicks some work my way so thats an instant “nope, not gonna happen today” kind of downside.
Either way I’ll figure it out. I also just needed to post here because it’s been well over a month, and while I do update twitter regularly, it’s not the same as sitting down for ten minutes and actually posting something here.
So now I’m off to continue working on the monstrocity that is client #3 for the day.
I need a cig 🙁
Tags:AGn Designs, Clients, Graphics Design, Twitter, Web Design, Work
Posted in Sitely, Stressed, Work | 1 Comment »
Thursday, June 23rd, 2011
I’m doing everything I can to work myself back into a proper routine. In the past few days I’ve finished up a couple of sites, and based on my inbox there’s at least 4 projects that need to be completed no later than Monday morning. With that I’m setting myself into “Get it done and get it done NOW” mode. It’s a little difficult being that I’ll admit I’m a little rusty, but it’s also helping my ego to know that a man whom Sean’s been working for, for about a year now, loves my work and wants to take me under his wing as well. This instantly has me stepping up my game, there’s absolutely nothing that I don’t want to learn to secure my spot on that team. Right now everything has been heavy graphics work, AND a lot of WordPress jobs. I’ve already knocked out about 4 of them, two more to go at this moment in time.
On top of all of this I’ve been drawing up a few template ideas to merge acidgloss.net and krissys-portfolio.net, there really is no need to have to separate domains, however – I do still wish to utilize acidgloss.net as a business/technology blog. I’ve been going back and forth with a few people in reference to product reviews, so this will help to bring more content to the site itself. I’m sure you’ve also noticed a few sponsored entries popping up here and there on this site as well, it will be a regular occurrence, however I will be back to properly blogging on a regular basis so you shouldn’t see any major flow of articles that are 100% sponsored… I actually take the time to work them into a real life experience.
My only NEED right now is a proper chair. I’m sitting on a wooden chair with an absolutely horrible cushion, no matter how many cushions there are – there’s a major lack of support which means that half way through the day my back is absolutely killing me. For the time being I’m going to deal with it, it’s my goal within the next couple of weeks to pick up a proper desk chair, I’m not looking to spend any more than $100, I don’t need bells and whistles, I just need something with some padding. I’ve already added cushions, even tried pillows – nothing works. I need a decent amount of foam for comfort, there’s no way of getting around it.
I’m going to have to head over to Staples to pick something up, there are also a few ‘office’ supplies that I could use but thanks to my wiping out my desk at my previous job, I do have enough to get by for the time being. OH! That reminds me of other crap that I need to take care of. I’ll be utilizing my post-its more than I thought. LOL
Tags:AGn Designs, Daily, Office, Shopping, Web Design, Wordpress
Posted in AGn Designs, Daily, Work | 3 Comments »
Thursday, June 16th, 2011
I don’t think I’ve stopped in the last week. I’m doing really well with bringing in some new clients, and in return I’ve created a few sites that I’m very, very pleased with. Of course it also helps that the people I’ve been working for are sweet as pie and detail oriented. I couldn’t ask for anything better!
I’m taking ten minutes to throw an update on here just to show that I’m still alive and as active as possible. I haven’t yet been able to balance blogging and clients but I think that has a lot to do with my environment. Unfortunately I don’t have a proper work space at this moment in time. I’m working on a “Table Mate” in the corner of the living room until I can get a desk. Sean has kind of taken mine over with the Mac and the other PC we have (my old Windows desktop). As usual I’ve already designed an office in my head, everything from the desk to the color scheme (which closely resembles the current pink/grey/black/white template here heh. For now I’ve found that throwing on headphones to cut down on the background noise is helpful.
My sleep schedule is all kinds of fucked up. Now that I’m completely working from home I’m going to bed around 4am and waking up around noon. For me its like I’ve wasted the day considering I got so used to waking up early and finishing my workday at 6pm at the office. I’m working to get myself back on track but with everything required of me during the day its hard to get myself on track.
Right now I’m balancing three clients, I feel really bad because I haven’t been able to give everyone the full attention they deserve. I really don’t like not being able to start one job and finish it, now I’m doing two different accounts a day so its screwing with me big time. Either way I’ll work on getting things on track and should be able to then schedule the day accordingly. I know what needs to get done, and how it needs to get done. Its the matter of implementing it, and the sleep schedule plays a HUGE role in that.
In any event, time to get cracking in Photoshop.
Tags:AGn Designs, Web Design, Wordpress, Work
Posted in Career, Daily | 1 Comment »
Friday, June 10th, 2011
It’s been one hell of a week.
When I was finally home on Thursday after a very long weekend at my aunts house, Bella was picked up by her groomer and things have been – interesting – ever since. I’m not sure if something happened while she was with the groomer but to be blunt, the dogs been crapping liquid for the past 7 days. We’ve finally gotten it to solidify but its taken a lot of different food ideas and quite a few days of bringing her out every 3 hours, and let me tell you that waking up at 5am when I no longer have to was kicking my ass. Last night after giving her some pepto (who knew?) her and I were both able to sleep the entire night for the first time in almost a full week. I think my body was confused because I wound up crashing until about 1pm this afternoon. While she’s been very clingy today being as she’s still not 100% (and the storm to roll through scared her a bit), there’s still a dramatic change in her. She’s eating more, drinking more, playing with her toys, and not scratching on peoples legs every 20 minutes to go outside. It’s been peaceful.
On Monday I officially started back up with AGn Designs, spending a lot of time on numerous freelancing sites. By Tuesday morning things were beginning to worry me being as I hadn’t heard from anyone. Tuesday night was a whole different story, I wound up picking up three projects which is bringing in a decent chunk of change for what’s going to be three days of work in total. I’m almost finished with one site, it’s the matter of loading it onto her server and tweaking the wordpress widgets so that everything flows right, and the others I’m waiting on a few responses from. Either way things have been picking up, and so far everything is going beautifully.
I had to spend some time tweaking my template on krissys-portfolio.net because the Lightbox script I was previously using was very obviously out dated so I needed to upgrade to Lightbox 2. That solved the issues I was having with the images, the bigger issue right now is how horrible the template looks. However, that’s going to be a long drawn out process to change. I want to some-how merge krissys-portfolio and acidgloss.net. I was thinking of coming up with an over-the-top template that would work on both sites to just flow everything together. I have the idea in my head, and some doodles in photoshop but nothing has really stuck yet. I don’t just want AGn to be a blog, I want to bump it up but I don’t want to lose k-p.net… either way I’m sure I’ll have something figured out within the next couple of days being as the creative juices are flowing.
I have to say, and don’t want to admit it, but Sean really kicked my ass this week with a revision to one of the sites he’s been working on. Whatever script the idiots from India came up with was NOT working when trying to recode the site for the WordPress template. There were like 7 DOCTYPE tags, numerous HTML and BODY tags being called for absolutely no reason. When running it through the validation check it was coming up with over 600 errors. I just about shit my pants when I saw that! I’ve never seen so many errors on such little output in my life, and that’s including a time years ago when I actually started to care about validation and recoded everything I had!
In any event, I have a few more emails to respond to and a bed that’s calling my name. I missed staying up until 1am, but it’s kicking my ass – that’s for damn sure!
Tags:AGn Designs, Bella, Daily, Web Design, Work
Posted in AGn Designs, Bella, Daily | 1 Comment »
Thursday, February 25th, 2010
I finally got rid of the tooth that was bothering me for the past couple of weeks. I have to say it’s been an absolute blessing to know that the amount of pain I was experiencing has now gone away. My issue is the fact that my mouth is really sore but I know in the long run it’ll work out for the best. If you’ve been following me for a while you’d know that no matter how much time I spend in the chair, my issues just will not go away. I’m to a point that I’m hoping to win the lotto so I can have every single one of them pulled and I can just replace them all with dental implants that can be easily fixed with a cap as soon as something breaks. Either way I’m uncomfortable right now but I know it’ll subside over time and that’s just something to look forward to.
As far as the past week is concerned, a few interesting things have sprung up. A girl was abducted a few blocks away from me on Monday. While I was in a drug-induced coma I woke up to see the helicopters flying over head with the spot lights blasting the wooded areas around my house. At first, I honestly thought that I was hallucinating because of the combination of sedation and vicodin in my system but that really wasn’t the case, it actually happened. The girl was returned home a few hours after all of the activity sprung up which is good to know but I think she’ll make a better choice of boyfriends in the future considering her boyfriend and one of his friends were the two to actually play this out. It really makes me question the relationships that some people have when you get to a point where you’re abducted by your OWN boyfriend. I’m sorry it happened to her but I’m sure it’ll smarten him up a bit considering he seemed like a total low-life anyway. They setup central command in the lot right next to my house so we all had a pretty good look at what was going on.j
In GOOD news, my boss had her baby. She’s been uncomfortable for a while so a major congrats to her on the birth of her son.
Sean is in Manhattan today working for some guy, getting computers setup and whatnot. I’m amused by the fact that he’s dealing with all of the snow that Long Island was supposed to get and it looks like the rain is holding on really well so hopefully we don’t wind up getting any snow. I’m so sick of it, and I really miss sunshine, can’t wait for that to show up.
I’ve been spending all of my free time submitting my resume to numerous different companies. It’s to a point where I don’t even know where half of them are located or what the job entails but anything is better than where I am and of course that’s all that matters to me right now.
I’m trying to figure out how to get some kind of photo and html program onto my Netbook without crashing it. Considering it’s build specifically for internet and file storage, I’m afraid of adding too much shit to it. I do still have my other laptop but I have a lot of work to do on it before I can get it up to the speed that it was in the past. I can’t wait until I figure something out considering I’m sick of working with free premade templates when it comes to my own shit. My portfolio is really out of date, a few projects have completely been overlooked and there’s just a lot of general maintenance that needs to take place before I can be happy with my internet footprint again.
In any event, I still have another half hour on my lunch break and I fully intend to enjoy it by doing absolutely nothing. I’d love to be outside having a cigarette right now but it’s freaking POURING and just a crappy situation all together.
I think I’m going to call up the high school and see if they were able to locate my records. It’s been a few weeks and I honestly am getting sick of waiting.
Tags:Daily Life, Dental, Laptops, School, Web Design, Work
Posted in Boyfriend, Daily, School | 6 Comments »
Saturday, January 16th, 2010
I meant to do it much, much sooner but it’s been one hell of a year so-far. I’ve finally gotten my FAFSA submitted so I can work on getting myself enrolled into the University of Phoenix. It took about 15 minutes to do, and the bulk of it was spent trying to figure out what my damn PIN was considering I’d already attempted to apply in April 2008 but by then I’d LONG passed the deadline. Hopefully my doing it towards the beginning of the year will have a decent turn around.
I’m taking a break from floating around the internet in search of grant and scholarship information to kind of clear my head a bit. It really does turn into quite a job just trying to figure out a less expensive way to walk away with your Bachelors. It’s my ultimate goal to work towards a Masters degree but for now I’ll get the Bachelors taken care of and maybe I’ll be lucky enough to get myself into a position where I can utilize what I already know, and be accepted without the degree with the understanding that I’m currently working towards one. It’s really annoying when you go in for an interview and you’re rejected on the spot due to a lack of degree when the person giving the interview doesn’t even have one themselves! The standards of people these days really has gotten to the point of being totally obnoxious. Considering the economy is as screwed up as it is, you would think that people would be more understanding to the fact that not everyone can afford to go after the minimum of a Bachelors as noted on numerous applications as a requirement. I personally think if you have 12 years of experience, that well exceeds a Masters and that should just be good enough.
But anyway, it’s been one hell of a week. I stayed home for two days due to a few medical issues and for some reason I just couldn’t really get into the flow of production for Thursday and Friday so I honestly just feel like I’m lagging. I’ve noticed that I’ve been sleeping a lot lately too. While I do know that sleep is really good for you, when you’re trying to not be a lazy ass and be more productive with your time – the fact that I’ve popped in a DVD and just lay down in bed has really proven that I’m that lazy ass of the day. Hell, Sean did more today than I did and he just sat at the computer for the past 10 hours or so. Granted, he was working, but he got up long enough to cash a check at the bank and do the dishes to get the sink cleared out. I think all I’ve really done is had a couple of cigs and got through the first two disks of the “Are you being served?” box set that Sean bought me for Christmas. hah.
In any event, it’s knocking on 11:30, I didn’t feel like plugging in my laptop so of course that pesky “Low Battery” message keeps flashing across the screen. I think it’s time to shut down and go back to doing nothing. I’m gonna have to organize the crap out of all of my new bookmarks first though. I found some really cool information, most of which was in the middle of applying for things so I’ll come up with a bunch of links at some point in case anyone else is interested.
Also – At some point when I’ve got some spare time I do intend to get back into the wonderful world of sponsored blogging again. It’s not going to be to the extreme that it was in the past, but every little bit helps when you need it.
Tags:FAFSA, Grants, Scholarships, School, University of Phoenix, Web Design
Posted in Career, School | 5 Comments »
Sunday, May 31st, 2009
So I know I said that I had every intent to update more, but as you know – reality tends to take over internet. I’ve been floating around some blogs – some new, some old – and it’s shown me that the internet really just hasn’t changed. I’m to a point now where I’m just questioning as to whether or not I really want to be involved anymore. Working on a Bachelors in Multimedia is starting to seem like a waste of time considering I don’t have the drive to do it. I don’t even have to drive to finish a template I started on over a month ago for this domain – why even try? It’s not like I’ll ever get back to where I once was, and that was my own stupidity with all of the paid content and not enough real-life content. On top of that…when it was non-sponsored content it was basically drama because there are people in this world who were just never meant to get along.
Since then…I’ve grown and stepped away from that. It’s not my fault that some people are still holding onto bull shit but when they’re stuck in their little houses all day long with nothing better to do – it seems – it’s hard for them to let go of it to. So basically – leave the house, enjoy the fresh air, summer’s right around the corner and a few of you could seriously use a tan, don’t burn though – that would suck.
On real notes – Work is taking it’s toll on me, I’m to a point of extreme exhaustion and I could seriously use a day off. Unfortunately I don’t have enough PTO (paid time off) to even consider a vacation without screwing up my finances right now. So while I’m at work all day, Sean’s at home trying to pick up as many clients as possible and right now they’re coming out the wazoo ever since he applied (and was accepted) to NYIT. It’s going to cost A LOT of money for him to get his Bachelors in Computer Programming so he’s doing everything he can to bring in as much money as he can. If he gets lucky and can load up on scholarships and loans, plus work study, he should be able to swing it. It’s just going to be rough for a little while because I believe his everyday work will suffer and I feel like I’m going to be the one picking up the slack. My monthly income is limited and being as I have no drive for design the only option is sponsored posting so I can bring in the extra $1,000 a month we need to live.
We’re trying very hard to save up money so we can finally get into our own place. Unfortunately bills just keep showing up around us that we have no control over. I was just hit with some BS penalty from HSBC for my loan because they claim that I’ve made late payments and it’s a $150 fee. I’ve paid my loan between the 11th and 15th since the day I got it (about 2 years ago) so I really don’t understand why there’s an issue now and of course everytime I call I wind up having to talk to someone in India. I went into the bank and was told that being as it’s a different department I should just call the customer service line. Either way I’m sitting here about to rip my hair out because they’re shooting this shit to me and I honestly don’t even feel as though it’s legit. So money is tight, tensions are high, it’s just been a crappy freaking year.
Tags:Finances, Life, School, Web Design
Posted in Daily, Randomage | Comments Closed
Sunday, September 7th, 2008
This past week was a bit better than last weekend but not really by much. September is just turning into one of those months that could probably be wiped off of the planet as far as I care.
WORK
Things have been going OK. I’m learning a lot of new things and it’s a lot to take in but thankfully I pick up on things pretty quickly so I’ve been OK so far. For the past week or so I’ve been in the training process by an uber-cool chick who’s had a lot of patience with me, even though I took over her desk. Supposedly when I go in tomorrow I’ll have my own desk and computer but who knows if that’s going to happen because the one making it happen keeps changing his mind on things. Either way I hope to be less of an inconvenience to her soon.
I know for sure that I’m going to keep this job, while I would prefer to be doing something in the design field, I guess I can handle just having a decent desk job for the time being. The people are all nice, it’s relatively easy work (once you get the hang of it) and the downside for me is the amount of time I’m probably going to have to spend on the phone but eventually I’ll suck it up and get over it.
DOWN WITH THE SICKNESS
Everyone is sick. A kid at work had walking Pneumonia, I had my abscess kicking my ass for a few days, colds and germs are flying around all of the schools right now thanks to whoever was incapable of covering their mouth when they coughed. Lu got pretty sick this past week as well, but her’s was more chest pain than anything. Sean’s allergies have been kicking his ass pretty bad this week as well. I really hope that there’s enough medicine in the world to cover everyone else that’s sick. Thankfully I was able to steer clear of the Pneumonia because of the antibiotics that I’ve been on. The downside is the abscess is coming back on the other side AGAIN. I don’t want to live on antibiotics the rest of my life so I really need to get my teeth straightened out.
I want to hold off until I have Insurance this way I’m not shelling out $2k per tooth considering the three root canals that I need as of right now. I kind of wish everything would just fall out and then I can worry about implants or something. At least they wouldn’t hurt as bad as the real ones. I’ll take a screw over an infected nerve any day!
STORMS n SUCH
Alicia was in New Orleans when the hurricane hit this past week, and upon evacuation she made her way up to Mobile, AL which was currently under tornado warnings. Thankfully after a lot of shit she was able to make it home so she’s at least safe and sound right now.
The storm that was supposed to be “oh so bad” for the Island was a total dud last night. It moved itself further north than originally anticipated so we were hit with some minor wind but I’ll admit it was a fairly decent amount of rain. I was soaked to the bone TWICE before I picked up an umbrella and all of the wind managed to knock that out of play within a half hour of it’s purchase. Why can’t they make them stronger the way they used to? Dad had a huge umbrella for the last 20 years or so that finally gave out on him, it was solid wood and never once had an issue. I know you can get them for $3-$4 but Jesus…make them last a little longer!?
AGN STUFFS
I’m a week behind on email, I know it’s pissing a lot of people off but the lack of time does play a major role in things right now. I’m trying to figure out how to schedule everything so I have a few extra hours during the day so I can maintain my own business but I’m not sure how that’s going to happen if I can’t change my hours at work. I’m doing 10-7, I’d like to do 8-5 or even 9-6 this way I’m home at a semi-reasonable hour where I can sit down and have dinner and then work until I have to go to sleep to do it all over again for tomorrow. I don’t personally see that happening right now though. Maybe in the future I’ll be able to do it, but not too sure as of right now and trust me when I say that’s getting on my nerve.
I have three accounts to complete – to my knowledge – and the only REAL time I have for them is on the Weekends. I look at a computer all day long but I’m not permitted to check personal email at work. I can understand their reasons for it, most of the sites are actually blocked anyway, as far as I know.
CELL PHONES n SUCH
Within the next couple of weeks Sean and I are going to get the cell phone stuff situated. We’re going with Verizon because they have better coverage on the Island (mainly due to the slew of cell towers, on the north shore at least. I know for sure that I’m picking up the Voyager and slapping a data plan onto it for unlimited browsing and what not. My second choice is the pink BlackBerry Curve (8330). Either one would give me all of the options I need. Sean is looking to pick up a flip phone but he does want the ability to get online so I have no idea of what choice he’s going to make. Either way we should have all of that taken care of soon.
In any event, time to check my email. – oy!
Tags:Cell Phones, Family, Friends, Weather, Web Design, Work
Posted in AGn Designs, Boyfriend, Career, Gadgets, Randomage, Work | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008
After a long talk with Sean, I’m moving back up to New York permanently. There’s a lot going on up here as far as family is concerned and I’m at a point in my life where I’m supposed to be out on my own, but I’m also the kind of person where family always comes first. So I’ve actively been putting in resumes to places all over Long Island in just about any industry I can find. I’ve applied to numerous web design jobs, secretarial jobs, even to a company that just lists products on eBay.
My recent application was to the hospital here in town, it’s my mother’s old job (technically) and I know for sure that they want her back. She’s unable to do that at this point in time so I applied and now I’ve just got my fingers crossed. It’s per-diem work but once you have your foot in the door you’re basically set. So I can start at per-diem (basically call you when they need you) and within a few weeks I can be full time – it really just depends on what they need and when they need it.
We’ve been in NY for much longer than we’d originally planned. Sean doesn’t want to go back down to DE by himself, and I don’t blame him. I know I’ll miss him too, considering we just celebrated our two-year anniversary. So it’s been a very difficult choice to make but as soon as there’s enough money coming in, and an apartment in a reasonable price range opens up we’ll be able to get him moved up here and we can continue our life together on our own. I know the first couple of weeks are going to be hard on us, only because we haven’t not been together for the last year and a half (considering we’re living together) but I’m completely confident that we’ll be able to handle it so I’m not too concerned in that department.
We’re staying up here for another week or so and then heading back down to either pack my stuff or go back to the drawing board. If I know for sure that there’s no job up here than I don’t know if I’ll stay here. I want to, I really miss everyone, I just don’t want to leave Sean and still not have any money coming in up in NY, it wouldn’t change my situation at all – in many regards it would make it worse.
So I’m crossing my fingers in hopes to hear something from someone up here. I did apply to a place out in Brooklyn that I’m crossing just about everything for. It’s a great salary and it’s in the web design field and that to me would be a dream-job situation. They’re looking for a front end developer with strong HTML/CSS and Blog skills. I guess being a one-trick-pony for the past couple of months is something to laugh about now considering I’ll be able to use that portfolio to get my foot in the door. It’s a dream job that I’m going to have to travel for though. Luckily it’s only a block or two from the train station so I’m not too concerned about the commute. I can very easily get to the train here in the morning without any real issues – it’s right up the block so if I have a car or not I should be able to handle it.
In any event, I have to push some more applications and get started on some design work. I also need to finish some work for Adam. He has a very complicated template that needs to be coded for CSS. I’ve had to really stretch my know-how just to get the basics done. A lot of layers on top of layers and being able to accomplish that without absolute positioning is working out pretty well.
Tags:Family, Love, Web Design, Work
Posted in Boyfriend, Career, Family, Work | 10 Comments »
Friday, March 28th, 2008
Since I spent so much time trying to get acidgloss.net back up and running, I decided that a little theme alteration was needed here. As far as I’m concerned, March is over. There are only a few days left and I already show my Irish pride with a tattoo so having the theme up for as long as I did, just proved I’m not into it anymore. I was also getting sick of the green. It reminds me of something I don’t have, money.
Today I was accepted for a contract/freelance position and once I can get all of the paperwork sent back, I hope to be able to get the ball rolling. I’m also still patiently waiting to hear something from the Interview last week. I assume it’s going to take a few weeks and that’s fine, it’s more the waiting that’s getting to me than the actual choice they make. I just want to know – you know?
I’ve been up since about 7am, so I’m basically vegging out on the couch at the moment. I’m too tired to move and hope to be able to crawl into bed soon. There are a few more things that I’m going to need to accomplish before that happens but it shouldn’t take me a lot of time.
The weather today was absolutely gorgeous! Sean and I spent some time down on the beach enjoying the 77°F (25°C) temperature. While it was a pretty windy day, there was still an over-abundance of sunshine keeping us nice and toasty. It took a while to get down there though, with such a hot day the beach was absolutely swamped. I had to go over a few blocks to park because my usual side-street was packed to the max. I was close to pulling into someone’s drive-way but I wasn’t going to take that route, I finally did get myself into a spot so that was good enough for me.
For a while I convinced myself that I’d be spending a lot of time at the beach this summer. However, considering the way it was loaded today, and it’s not even summer yet, I think I’m going to setup a nice set of chairs in the backyard and tan that way. It’s my hope to be working through the summer, so my weekends will be filled with downtime in the yard, that’s not such a bad plan as long as I maintain my regular weekend schedule, right?
Another goal for the summer is to pack enough cash away so I can get myself into school this Fall. I know I’ve said this a lot but it’s a big goal of mine and at this point, nothing is going to stand in my way. Maybe I’ll get lucky and I’ll get back to my $5k a month income and be able to accomplish it a lot sooner than I’d originally planned. I can handle two full-time jobs, I have a laptop for the at-home stuff so that can come out to the yard with me!
Moving along…. After the beach we made a quick run to the grocery store, we were close to completely being out of food so we picked up the essentials and they’re going to have to last for a while. I’m breaking my diet and going to live on pasta for the next couple of days, only because that’s all we can afford right now. I don’t like being in a hole, but if $1200 a month wasn’t going out to bills it would be easier to maintain things.
In any event, it’s knocking on 11pm and my eyes are close to almost completely closed, time for bed!
Tags:acidgloss.net, Devry, krissy.nu, Summer, Tourists, Web Design, Work
Posted in AGn Designs, Boyfriend, School, Sitely | 2 Comments »
Krissy.