Blueberry Delight

I finished with pro bono client The Tri-State Community School for the Arts, a start-up non profit arts school in the Cumberland, MD area. I’m really happy with the flash photo effects and the overall look. It’s kind of a blue explosion, but the director seemed to enjoy the color choice. Hoorah! Trying to figure out the best/cheapest way to require payment for online registration. It’s a lot of scripting I don’t have experience with, plus–according to Brian, apparently there’s startup AND monthly fees for running httpS:// security, which is a requirement if your site is receiving credit card info. I’d like to help them sidestep that hassle by utilizing a middleman, especially since no one involved understands it, and I barely do myself. We might be back to square 1 with a PayPal “Pay your goddamn fee” solution not unlike what the client had before. There are ways to spruce it up and make payment *look* required without its systematically *being* required to run the JS registration form. With this, the client would still have to keep separate lists in Excel or whatnot of who’s registered versus who has paid, and then reconcile the two lists. But if there is a “Pay your fee” on the same page as Registration, I feel like a larger majority of folks will go ahead and do it at the time of Registration because they won’t know it’s systematically *not* required for the “Submit” command.

On the laptop front, I’m still leery of downloading all my old programs because there are still spam and funky moments reminiscent of the grand virus era.

On the personal front, I have a couple exciting summer & autumn trips either planned or still in planning stages:

1) Camping in August with those Laurel goobers. 2) Ocean City weekend with the auntie and potential guest, 3) Potential road trip to Indianapolis to stay with Stepherz. Opening for a roadie. 4) Potential road trip to Nashville, since my last trip was disastrous and our plans were foiled. Also has opening for a roadie.

telling time with a roundhouse kick to the chest

I’ve been taking introductory Hapkido classes at Sullivan Traditional Arts and loving it! Learned how to flip someone over my back on Saturday, and the week before learned how to take a large man by the wrist and render him useless. It’s definitely one of the more interesting things I’m doing with my summer. It doesn’t beat Midgardener‘s flying trapeze school, but it’s interesting enough for my tastes

On the business side, I’m finishing up a trial run for a layout for a new arts school in Cumberland, MD. A fresh set of viruses on my laptop set me back a few days as well as delay on the logo designer’s results, but I’m glad I did enough leg work so that now I can just plug the logo in and basically be finished draft 1. It’s very blue, so I need to do another layout sample that is more, um, visually unobtrusive shall we say? More neutral. I’d like to start on that tomorrow. For now, I need to head out for lunch with some coworkers.

Rolling down the highway with the smell of honeysuckles

The past few nights on my way home from gatherings, birthday dinners, and work I’ve been driving with the window down. I noticed a distinct smell to the air bludgeoning me, and that smell was honeysuckle. ‘Tis the season, folks! My favorite part of spring–the honeysuckles blooming and spraying their particles everywhere. The highway smelled like I was sitting under a honey bush despite the 75mph wind smattering on my skin. It’s an odd juxtaposition in such an urban area, but there are enough mini areas of well-kept forestry left to still achieve this effect… Woodbine, Laurel, Olney, and Urbana to name a few through which I drive. I’m sure there are more.

Tags: driving, honeysuckles

Welcoming myself to WordPress

Nuovo Fatali Design is up and running, I’ve had 8 client since February, and I’m barely advertising. I’m rather impressed with the pace it’s going! considering all I’ve done is tell a few choice people, and then post about it on Facebook.

Working 10-12 hour days during the week makes it difficult to come home and do coding at night sometimes, but I make it happen somehow. I have a promotion coming in July that will secure my permanent status at my company, improve my pay, get me an office, and otherwise allow me to slow down a bit to share my nights with my side business. And I’ve been chronically undatable since my last man’s bag of tricks, so my evenings have been free for nearly 6 months, thus enabling this business to really come into fruition. Despite working so much, I truly have been fitting it all in. It’s a wonder what retreating to a house and only coming out for parties can do to one’s productivity!

My very first client from February–who is paying me in a free Korean Martial Arts class or two–seems very pleased with the site. I even used a webhoster template for one segment of the site, which is something I just never do. The quality was good, so that experience persuaded me to try one of these WordPress ready-to-go, widget-able, embeddable journals. I have to say, so far I’m impressed with the ratio of usability to customization. Usually one is sacrificed for the sake of the other.

Tags: hapkidokumdo, templates, welcome, wordpress