Freelance Progress, Upcoming Travels, TV and Films

My freelance stuff is really taking off lately. I finished up the campaign website that I had written about previously, and the project as a whole moved along pretty smoothly. I’ve added a link and summary about this project to the Websites I’ve Made section (all the way at the bottom).

Next up is OSSWA, Ohio School Social Work Association. Their old site is a bit of an eye sore, and I’m excited to pretty it up for them. I’ll be creating their new site completely from scratch, and setting them up with easy administration tools, mostly through WordPress and Google. I think it will be really exciting to complete this, as they are pretty unhappy with the current state of their site. There is just so much room for improvement for me to bring to them.

Beyond that, there have been quite a few leads for me lately, and I’m considering juggling multiple freelance projects at once, but it will require a new level of time management on my part. Luckily it hasn’t been too difficult for me to manage these projects thus far, as I thoroughly enjoy making websites on the side. The extra cash provides a bit of relief for my bills, as well as some guilt-free shopping (I just got a new iPod Touch!) and traveling.

Speaking of traveling, I recently went to New York to visit Tim in his new apartment on the Upper West Side, and had a nice long weekend relaxing with him. I plan to return at the end of October. I’ve been a good girl all year and saved up vacation time, and should be able to spend a whole week in NYC before and during New Years Eve. I can’t wait to spend such an extended period of time with Tim! Before that, I also have planned a trip to Chicago to see Raechal with Brittany, as well as a trip to Pittsburgh to catch up with my two closest friends from high school and a mutual friend they met at Mount Union. October is going to be a busy, busy month! I’m excited for the fall season though and getting to see friends around the country.

Fall season also indicates a kick-off of most of my favorite tv shows (ahem, Lost likes to wait until winter). This year I’m excited to keep up with The Office and The Big Bang Theory. Additionally I like a little dose of ridiculous reality tv in America’s Next Top Model. Grey’s Anatomy makes me roll my eyes most of the time, but I’ve been keeping tabs on that as well. Lastly I think for a new show I will be checking out FlashForward, which I believe is being marketed towards Lost fans, and I’m more than happy to oblige.

Moving on, fall also indicates an exciting time for movies. Sure, in the summer there’s always a few blockbusters, but for the most part I feel like a lot of the movies released in the summer are just lacking. Recently I’ve seen Inglorious Basterds and District 9 which I loved, as well as Cold Souls and 9 which I thought were decent. A few that I’m looking forward to are Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Sherlock Holmes, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and especially – Where the Wild Things Are, which has incredible previews out right now.

Summer 2009 Updates

Oh… hello there non-existent blog readers. I haven’t written in a while because none of you jerks commented on my gravatars post, which I THOUGHT was a fun and useful post, but apparently was mistaken.

The blog is slowly dying out for me due to lack of inspiration, twitter (as previously mentioned in another post) and also because jilliannichols.com has been forever in-the-works, and would eventually become my new (way freaking cooler) blog.

If you visit jilliannichols.com, however, you’ll find a blank page. Simplicity is in though, right?

But mostly, there isn’t much new going on. I’m still bringing improvements and progress to my fulltime job at PMA where I can, and still freelancing on the side. PMA is not doing well in this poop economy but I do what I can for them in regard to their online presence. My newest freelance project is for a political campaign, which should be different and fun! I’m working within a tight time schedule, but hopefully I will have no problem meeting the deadline. I love being able to freelance because it gives me more room for control and creativity than what I typically experience at work. It allows me to grow and shape my abilities as a web developer. And make some extra cash!

Things with Tim are going well and I still see him every month or so. My last visit to NYC was for the 4th of July, and he will be returning to Ohio in a couple weeks, and we plan to go to Cedar Point with a couple friends. Fun!

I’ve resigned my contract at my current apartment. It’s not amazing, but its a good deal. I figured I could go up in price and get a fancier apartment, but why not save that money instead? It kills me to be throwing away as much money as I am on rent already. I don’t plan on staying here another year, but I’m not sure where I’ll be going. Hopefully to some place new and exciting.

And… that’s pretty much it! Hope you’re all enjoying your summers as well.

Gravatars

As promised, I’m going to write a quick tutorial on how to set yourself up with a Gravatar. I’ve noticed that a lot of you that have left comments here are not set up with one, so I figured it could be of some use to you guys.

1. What are Gravatars?
   Gravatars are “Globally Recognized Avatars”.

2. Okay, uh, so what are Avatars?
   Basically, a little profile picture for you. What makes gravatars “globally recognized” is that you can comment an pretty much any kind of blog or web forum that supports this feature and this image will always appear next to your comment. It’ll also appear next to any comments you’ve already made in the past.

3. Cool! So how do I get one?
   Go to Gravatar.com and sign up. To get an account, all you have to do is provide some basic information. It’ll be important for you to (eventually) add all emails that you use when leaving comments on blogs – that’s how it links your picture to your comments. Lastly, be sure to upload a shining picture of your beautiful face!

And, that’s pretty much it! A simple tool to use online, but one that seems to be overlooked by many of those who are not completely immersed in the web world. Feel free to use the comment section on this post to test it out!

General Updates

I have recently become a dedicated Twitter…er. You can find me here. I think Twitter might be to blame for my recent blog laziness, mostly because it allows me to express whatever I’m thinking in a much more periodic and less committing kind of way. It’s kind of pointless and fun at the same time. A way to keep in touch with people and see what they’re up to during the day in a less complicated way than Facebook. Also unlike Facebook is the surprising amount of celebrities on there. Some, such as Rainn Wilson, have proven to be pretty amusing to “follow”.

I also added my latest website project over here on my “Websites I’ve Made” page. Be sure to check that out. Upcoming projects are moving slowly, mostly because I’ve been taking a break from the ol’ computer and reading books more lately. I should be working on a new website soon though. If not, I’ll compromise and write some blog reviews on the books I’m reading.

Coming soon, if my motivation streak lasts long enough, will be a post on how to use “globally recognized avatars” so that your shining beautiful faces will show up when you comment on my blog (or anyone else’s, for that matter).

Thanks for reading!

Lexmark Can Suck It

Recently I was very disappointed with the products/services provided by Lexmark. I figured aside from bitching to my close friends about it, I could attempt to write a semi humorous blog post about it, and if anything, convince you to buy another brand, should you ever consider them.

For Christmas, my nice parents who still buy me gifts labeled from “Santa”, bought me a printer, because now that I am no longer living on a college campus, I can’t easily go to the computer lab and print things out. It was a – you guessed it – Lexmark printer.

Recently, I had a need for printing, and decided to set that baby up. It didn’t take me long to notice that the USB cord was no where to be found. And, I suppose by “didn’t take me long” I mean, the 25 minutes that I spent tearing apart the entire room and looking into the box it came in about 20,000 times to make sure it really wasn’t hiding in there.

While looking for the USB cord, I came across some poorly designed flyer about calling Lexmark directly if you have any problems, with some racially ambiguous woman who appears to be absolutely ecstatic about wearing a headset and taking angry calls from pissed off customers such as myself. In addition to the politically correct lady, I also see featured an anatomically incorrect telephone… holding a… telephone?

When I say “anatomically incorrect” I am referring to the fact that his eyebrows are not attached to his body, among other reasons, one being that phones do not even have eyebrows, nor talk on other phones. If you click on the image, you’ll see that Lexmark paid at least $25 for that.

I suppose to make up for being ripped off by a bad stock image, they thought they may try to cut corners by leaving out crucial parts of their products, such as the thing that connects the printer to the thing from which it is printing from. I called Lexmark, at this point STILL wondering if it was somehow just hiding in the box, I soon had my doubts in Lexmark confirmed. Their presumably 10 option automated phone menu went in this order – 1) Technical Support 2) MISSING ITEMS FROM A PRODUCT RECENTLY PURCHASED. Apparently this is frequent enough that they had to make it their #2 option. Ridiculous.

Even more ridiculous? I had to speak to someone who was… not good with the English language, to put it lightly. I explained that the USB cord was missing from my printer, and he did not question this, simply told me that they’d send me one. Giving the guy my address was complete torture. I spelled out every single word for him. I had actually felt bad, like perhaps I was coming off as an asshole by assuming he couldn’t spell “H-E-I-G-H-T-S”, so I decided to let him tackle Ohio on his own… that is, until he asked me how to spell “Ohio”.

To top everything off, it’s two weeks later, and I have yet to receive anything in the mail. Absolutely ridiculous. I will be giving yet another angry call tomorrow, and I will certainly never buy anything from them again.

How to: Subscribe to RSS Feeds

I feel like the concept of RSS Feeds is one that a lot of people have heard about, have a general idea what it relates to (websites with dynamic content), but mostly don’t really understand the point, or how to use them. I myself am a internet junkie in general, and kind of discovered how useful they are only a little over a year ago. Since then, I use them almost on a daily basis. I thought I would share the love and explain to you their benefits, and how to set it up for your own use!

There are a lot of different options when it comes to subscribing to and reading RSS feeds. I’m mostly going to stick to the options that I have chosen, and I’m going to branch out a bit for those of you who use Internet Explorer, even thought it pains me a little to do so. Internet Explorer is the most common browser used to date, but it’s also one of the worst – both versions 6 and 7, especially 6. Please look into downloading Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, or Safari (for you Apple lovers out there). At the very least, if you’re using Internet Explorer 6, please do yourself a favor and upgrade to 7 or 8. If you’re not sure which you’re using, a tell-tale sign is that 7 and 8 have a yellow swoosh around the “e” logo, where 6 is just all blue.

Okay, that’s enough geek-speak for now.

RSS feeds are typically available on any website that has dynamic content (that is, content that changes often or is being continually added). An obvious example of such a website is a blog, because, unless its author is a slacker, blogs are constantly having new content added to them (like this one!). Let’s say you have 8 friends with their own blogs, and all of your friends inconsistently add their content as often as every day or every other month. You probably get annoyed or forgetful when it comes to checking all of these blogs to see if anything new has been added lately, and that’s were RSS Feeds come in handy. You can subscribe to all of your friends’ blogs, and then their content will be organized in one place for you, and you easily check that one place to see if there have been any updates. Convenient, right? And its not just blogs that you can do this with, you can also do it with news websites like CNN.com, and virtually any website you can think of that is regularly adding to its content.

So for our example we need to pick a website, and an RSS feed reader. We’ll go with http://jilliannichols.wordpress.com (hey, you’re already here, so why not?) and Google Reader, because I’m convinced that no one creates better free online services than Google. You’re going to need a Google Account, and really you should have one already, but if you don’t – get one here.

Firstly, you want to log in to Google Reader. From Google Reader’s interface, you can add feeds by clicking “Add a subscription” and doing a search, say on CNN.com.

Or, you can also subscribe straight from the website. Look in the upper-right corner of my blog, and you’ll see “Feed on Posts” (or comments). That little orange square is kind of the official image to represent feeds, and you’ll find this little guy tucked away in the corners of all sorts of websites, if you look for it. If you click that link and you’re using Mozilla Firefox, it’ll take you to a page that lets you select Google Reader or iGoogle as your choice for feed-reading. As I’ve already stated, I’d suggest Google Reader. Internet Explorer, not surprisingly, isn’t as helpful. It instead seems to try to turn the browser into a feed-reader, which is lame and pointless. I would suggest that you just copy and paste the URL at the top (for my site, its http://jilliannichols.wordpress.com/feed/) and paste it into your “Add Subscription” box in Google Reader (as described in the previous paragraph).

Once you’ve completed that, in the future when I add a new post, when you log into Google Reader you’ll see my blog name in bold with a (1) next to it – kind of like the way email works. The more subscriptions you add, the more new content you’ll have to read every day, and the more beneficial Google Reader will become. If you play around here a little bit, you’ll see that Google Reader has some easy-to-figure-out tools available for you to use, such as doing a search among your feeds.

Hope that made sense… I’m always available for additional help if you want to shoot me an email or leave a comment. Enjoy!

How Minty Are You?

Seeing how worthless and random my last post was, I thought I would counteract it with a post that might help you keep a few extra dollars in your pocket. Or at least, clarify why they’re not in your pocket.

What?

I was recently being nerdy and reading an article about the increasing amount of services offered for free on the internet in general, and came across Mint listed as one such service. Many a year ago, when I was in high school, my dad installed Quicken on my computer and told me that I had to keep track of all of my checks and credit card expenses. I kept up with this really well while under his watchful eye, but once I went to college, the program was never opened again, nor transferred to my new computer that I bought after college, and I was thus without any kind of money managing documentation beyond that of my own brain and innumerable misplaced post-it notes.

Now that I’m making more than $40 a week (that was my income my sophomore year) and spending quite a bit of money beyond BW’s Jacket Express card, I’ve found myself recently kind of flustered with keeping track of a couple credit cards, a checking account, and the recently developed student loans. Oh, and now that I’m a big girl with a big girl job, I now have to pretend I have any idea what the heck is going on with my 401K and Health Savings Account. It’s a little overwhelming.

Anyway, back to the point, Mint is awesome. I’m not a money managing nerd by any means, but this website makes money matters… actually kind of fun. Basically you log into your multiple accounts through Mint, and then you can oversee everything from one location – it imports all of your transactions together in one place. It’s a breeze to figure out and customize to your specifications. And it shows you all sorts of neat things like how much you’ve spent on food over the past few months, how much you spend on gas vs. the average American, etc. Even nicer, it analyzes the benefits you’re getting from your credit card(s) and checking accounts, (points, rewards, interest, etc.) and gives you a layout with suggestions of other credit cards or banks that might be better off for you. You can also have it send you a text message before your credit card bill is due – fantastic! And as a web person, I can’t resist saying that their website design is easy to use and pleasing to the eye.

Anyway, I’m beginning to sound like an advertisement, so I’ll stop there. I was pleasantly surprised by this free online internet service, though, and I just couldn’t help but share it with everyone. Let me know what you think if you decide to try it out!

Funniest Super Bowl Commerical – Warning Message

There were several super bowl commercials that I enjoyed last night, such as the ones created by Pepsi, Budweiser, and the NBC LMAO clinic, to name a few.

But I think the funniest one was one that was not even intended to be funny.

Did you see the Maytag commercial? The maytag guys talks about how their new washers are heavy duty (or something like that), and then displays this by riding a monster truck over them, leaving them completely undamaged.

This really isn’t that funny, it’s somewhat clever at best. But the funny part is, at the bottom of the screen, in teeny tiny type, appears the warning message -

Please do not try this at home.

ORLY? Are you sure? Because after witnessing such a commercial, I can’t tell you how tempted I am to go out and buy 22 washing machines and a monster truck to see if this experiment would actually work…

Website Project Inspirations

You may recall me mentioning a friend that I work with, Amy, in previous posts. She and I (well, mostly she) have come up with a website idea that we’re both really excited about.

In the few months that I’ve known Amy, she’s really opened my eyes a bit to all that there is available to do in and around Cleveland. She often says, and I would agree, that a lot of people don’t give this city enough credit. Anyone would probably agree that Cleveland comes with its flaws, but many people fail to see all the good things and good times that the city offers. I have to admit, the entire time that I lived at Baldwin-Wallace, I think the most adventurous evenings out that I had were usually a trip to the movies or a local chain restaurant. I’m amazed by how much there is to do around here that I’ve been so unaware of for so long. Example? The entire time that I lived at BW I had never even HEARD of Tremont. Yet this is a charming, historic city just south of Cleveland (and just 20 minutes away from BW) that has all sorts of wonderful things to offer – such as incredible restaurants and art walks, to name a couple.

Realizing that there are a lot of “hidden treasures” to Cleveland, Amy and I thought it would be fun and helpful to others to create a website focusing on things to do, places to see and events to check out around our beloved city. No doubt there are already some sites in existence like this, but typically they are 1) outdated 2) not enjoyable to read or browse through 3) utilizing a painful design and/or 4) crammed up and focused mostly on obnoxious advertisements.

Amy is excited because she is an active blogger and always has a lot of interesting information and stories to share with the world, and this will be a great outlet for her. I am excited because I’ve never really made a website where the design was totally in my control. Most websites I’ve done are for businesses and those just aren’t as fun. Right now I’m thinking this website will be trendy and grungy, with use of dark colors and cool graphics. I’m really pumped.

Hopefully this is a project that will actually happen and not remain indefinitely in brainstorm-mode. As it may not be (immediately) profitable, and as we will have to work on it outside of our full-time jobs, it may get put on the back burner from time to time. But both of us are excited, and I’m thinking that once I get a serious start on developing the site, it should take off relatively quickly. I will, of course, promote the hell out of it here and on facebook and anywhere else I can think of, so keep a lookout for future updates!

One Way to Gaurantee Yourself Death by Age 50.

My co-worker/friend Amy and I are big fans of Mexican food.  That would include authentic Mexican food, such as Cozumel, sort-of-authentic Mexican food, such as Chipotle, and not-at-all-authentic-in-the-least Mexican food: the beloved Taco Bell.

Every once in a while Amy and I like to spoil ourselves, while also saving money, and we’ll go to Taco Bell for lunch.  The first two times that we did this, I noticed that there was an older couple that was also there both times, in the exact same booth.  My first thought was – “Does that mean that they go to Taco Bell a lot, or does that mean that we go to Taco Bell a lot?”

A few weeks later, we went again, and yet again the couple was there, in the exact same booth.

This is just too coincidental at this point.  I have reached the conclusion that this couple goes to Taco Bell EVERYDAY for lunch. Monday through Friday, if not all 7 days of the week.  Honestly, go to the Seven Hills/Parma Taco Bell during lunch and you will see them there, sitting next to the pop machine.  Amy and I are thinking that the booth seats have to have perfect ass grooves at this point.

We usually go to lunch early, sometimes before even 11:30.  But they are always there, always in “their” booth.  I wonder what would happen if I went to Taco Bell at 8am and waited until they opened and snagged that booth first.  What would they do when they walked in?

Anyway – I do not claim to eat healthy.  I know that I could use quite a bit of improvement in my diet.  But when I eat at Taco Bell I usually feel a little guilty for a day or two about it, because I know that it is 100% nutritional crap.  I just do not get how you could eat there everyday and a) still be alive, or at least b) not get sick of the food immediately.

Honestly, they’ll probably end up being those kind of people that defy all expectations, and end up living beyond 100 years…