The upside? The few games that I play on my Tablet have given me a small amount of inspiration – completely referencing color schemes.  I do know that the next template on k.nu will be a little darker, but bright at the same time (if that makes any sense). I handed the color pallet over to Adam to see if there was anything that he could come up with because I was fresh out of ideas but wanted to do something with pink/black/white (in a different manor than I’d ever done before) and he’ll be playing in Photoshop to come up with something for me.

Hopefully there will be some time this summer where I can actually sit down and get something done that isn’t work related.  Thankfully the Internet is being slow-as-sin which is causing me to have to let the FTP programs run in the background while I find something else to do (ie: the reason I’m blogging).  I should be working on my old laptop to wipe Windows 7 out of it so I can hand it off to my sister, but that’s the reason the Network is so slow right now because I’m transferring 20 Gigs of files from the old laptop to my Macbook this way I at least have a back-up of all of the important stuff. (Files and Photoshop crap primarily). I could personally care less about making a list of “Important Programs” considering if it was important enough to be part of my every day life than it’s already on this thing anyway.

The only annoying thing is the internet is going to remain slow for about 5 hours.  I really do wish that I had some kind of a flash drive up here with me, or even a USB-to-USB chord so I could just drag and drop instead of heavily depending on the Wireless in the house to get the job done.

I think it’s about time I start digging through my old laptop bag to see if I even have a drive like that.  I’d rather wait 20 minutes than 5 hours.

At least I’m on a mission now.

Even now I’m holding off on things and I have like six sites to work on and haven’t started a single one.  All I can do is think about how I need to put tonights dinner away and get myself set to watch the Monday night shows on CBS. Since those are on in 8 minutes I have the feeling they’re going to take the priority yet again.  I’m not really sure what’s wrong with me, but I can tell you that it’s completely unlike me and really not going to work in my favor.  There are numerous bills to pay, emails to answer and sites to start and my brain is just all “Nope, bedtime right?”.  Coffee doesn’t even work anymore and I’m up to over a pot a day just to hold me over and it’s still not working.

To top off everything else, I’m still looking to build a new template for here because this one is officially driving me crazy. I’m tempted to just change it over to a basic default one just so I can get by. I also know that won’t work for long because I can’t stand anything ‘Default’ that comes with a script, no matter how much customization is available its still not enough to keep me happy. I wind up spending more time on changing the temporary template than I do designing a new one.

I’m sure I’ll figure something out at some point, for now I’m going to sidetrack myself with TV until I can finally hunker down and get something done.

Colin and I met in middle school and maintained a friendship for 15 years, there were times when we didn’t speak to each other for years at a time but that bond has always been there.  That bond grew much stronger after Lucy passed away a few years ago, and since that point we’ve been a regular part of each others lives.  To make things even better, he and Sean are pretty much BFFs.  It’s to the point with them that I consider it more of a bromance than good friends, but either way the three of us are always happy spending time together and you can imagine my surprise when Colin says “I’m coming to DE for a few days”.  He did that this past weekend and I have to say, it’s gotten me out of my funk.

See, Colin is one of those guys that can be counted on no matter what the situation.  He’s always just a phone call away and will do just about any and everything for you.  Him coming down here for us proves that no only is he missing the crap out of us the way we miss him, but that he’s ideally one of the best friends you could ask for.

He got here on Friday night, we had a nice meal/trivia night over at Buffalo Wild Wings. He and Sean were on their XBOXs the rest of the night because it was pushing after Midnight by the time we got back to the house so of course it was a little too late to really venture out into the town being as we knew there was a pending tattoo appointment the following day for him.  Saturday was spent at Applebee’s, two tattoo shops, the arcade (with a super hyper cashier that was all over Colin) and Dover Downs because it was time to teach the guy how to use a slot machine lol.  He was enjoying himself until the Casino had taken the money he walked in there with but it’s the luck of the draw.  Sean did well, he managed to leave with the same amount of money he walked in with and that’s good enough for him.  I lost $100, but I can’t argue because I enjoyed my time there and that’s what counts.  We also hadn’t been up to a Casino in almost a year so the itch was there and all it took was telling Sean he could walk around Best Buy as the stipulation to even stepping foot in the Casino.

Sunday afternoon was spent with a quick lunch at home (He’s a sucker for my Mac & Cheese) and some video game play for the two guys.  I, for some reason, completely passed out after he left around 3:30 and then saw that it was after Midnight on the clock – my system has pretty much been messed up since.  I did get another couple of hours between 4am and 8am (tossing and turning, but I’m sure there was a substantial sleep in there somewhere), so at least I’m back on the normal schedule.  I’ve managed to completely flip mine, I’m no longer waking up at 5pm and completely wasting the day by only working at night. It also helps to be up early considering Bella’s going in for a grooming tomorrow morning and she needs to be dropped off by 9am.

So yea, while we didn’t really do a lot while he was down here we still all got to spend some quality time together that’s given me a boost of energy to get me out of my funk.

You really can’t ask for a better friend, and I honestly think this is the first time I’ve ever referred to him as a “Friend”, to us he’s more “Family” than anything.

He got everything all nicely cleaned up so everything is now back up and running and I’m surfing the internet to figure out why exactly this dry ice stuff makes a difference, I always assumed it had something to do with dust buildup, in which case it made sense to have a few areas with air condensers, but this is supposedly the more beneficial solution. Google brought me over to icetechworld.com who has a fairly decent sized site informing everyone of the pros of utilizing ice blasting. I honestly thought it would wind up being too harsh on the system due to excess build up of water but it’s more of a ‘vapor’ effect so I don’t have to worry about something carrying over, and cleans just as effectively as someone going in there with some horrible chemical that will corrode the systems over time. You can view a little more information on them if you click here.

For now, I’m happy that things are back on track and clients don’t have to worry about any downtime. I’m just annoyed that it even got to that point. I’m going to have to think long and hard about allowing newbies anywhere near my systems. I’d lose way too much money every month if I didn’t have the right ducks in a row to keep everything up and running as smoothly as it is.

I think I need to hire a personal assistant who just wants to sit in Photoshop all day while I code things.  Anyone interested?

Needless to say, things are getting fricken crazy.

So fast-forward to six months later and it being moved from NY to DE – it’s worse than it was! Maybe the excessive bumps along the NJ Turnpike completely did it in, who knows. I just know that I’ve got myself set up in the kitchen just so I can sit up properly for excessive amounts of time without having to worry about my back killing me from sitting in front of Photoshop & Dreamweaver all day long.

So I decided to take a break and see if I could pick up a new chair somewhere. I don’t want to pay a high price for something that’s just going to break, so of course I’m leaning more towards a discount chair just to save a little money. Low and behold I came across chairhero.com, and of course I found Sean’s old $300 chair for $180 on this site so that got me to look through things a little more and it’s safe to say I’m going to have to continue looking through their site until I can find a new one for myself. Something tells me with the way things have been going I’ll probably be purchasing one by the end of the month anyway. I’m sure there’s quite a few of you having the same problem, we know that when you pick one up from some office retail store there’s always going to be some major design flaw with it, you can see products here to find the one that’s right for you.

They could be 100% on the ball here, after picking up a new chair I might refer to them as Hero’s by default.

So, since I have some pretty big dreams I’ve obviously been with the “Go Big or Go Home” mentality and was thinking forget the business cards and the pull tabs – how about some type of a poster, heck even a billboard? So I googled custom poster printing and came across shortrunposters.com, not only do they do custom poster printing but they have the ability to size and do whatever you please with your own images. So if I were to take the logo off my business cards and then put in all of the proper information I could then take my custom poster and turn it into the posters you see on the windows at bus stops (lord knows people sit there long enough – they’re bound to read something, right?) . I also thought if I come up with something big enough in the future I can have it as a custom decor for the inside of the future AGN office. You can see products here, they range from smaller printing to larger printing.

I think even someone who aren’t in the business world could benefit from their services, based on the fact that a lot of my readers do have children and I know how soccer moms love to one-up each other, so of course having custom poster printing for your kids science project or activity would make everyone else know that you pulled out the big guns for your kids benefit. I think even teachers could benefit if there were a series of rules/regulations they have in their classrooms so that they can design it however they want and just send it off to the printer.

I don’t know, I’ve got quite a few ideas going through my head right now – I just know that it’s a site that is now permanently bookmarked on my end and will be utilized for my design business (and hey, maybe even kids projects – who knows what the future holds for me there). I already sent the link over to my mom ’cause she’s always doing some big flyer work for the many things she’s running throughout the course of the year.

I was very surprised to even receive the gift, honestly.  Our goal for the year was to pay down and pay off as much of our credit card debt as possible so that we can start banking something into savings to be used towards a home purchase later on down the road (yea, we’re back at that step in our lives together). So you can imagine my surprise when I dozed off one night and he woke me up by hopping into bed and pulling the super cuteness of “Guess what I just bought you?” Then the “Maybe I shouldn’t tell you since it’s not V-day yet” conversation.  So I got it out of him, which is never hard cause he loves to blab a good secret and knows I’m not big on being surprised.  (I’ve got OCD and I’m anal retentive about doing things a certain way – bad combo if you want to surprise me LOL)  So he told me that he signed up for another credit card and was approved for financing on the Macbook, and there was still more than enough left over for him to be able to order an iPad for himself.  The company has six months deferred payment and I’m not sure on the deferred interest but we anticipate having everything banked to be able to pay it off in July anyway.  So of course I was surprised, and super happy and I’m still super happy because it’s everything I’d ever wanted and more.  They aren’t making them this large anymore and I don’t care what anyone says – no matter what resolution you put things on the overall size of the screen does make a huge difference.  I’m not just putzing around on Facebook on my Macbook to be trendy – I’m utilizing it for everything Adobe – and it will really come in handy for school in the future too considering all the work I’m anticipating for the next semester anyway.  Next on the docket there is all Flash related.  I’m so into jQuery right now that Flash is probably going to completely throw me off my game but at least I’ll be able to recreate some of the funky flash-based headers I’ve been seeing around the net to be used for future clients – the only upside but whatevs.

So the mac got here last Friday and it hasn’t really left my side.  I’ve spent quite a bit of time in bed with it because I’ve got my fancy tray table to keep it sturdy and give me an actual spot for the mouse pad that doesn’t require it sitting on top of the blanket (not sure if you’ve ever tried to draw a straight line in Photoshop while your mouse is on the blanket but it’s NOT easy).  Sean, a few years ago, bought me a tray table for like $20 from Walmart, and it’s been my buddy every single time I’ve been working from bed because of my various back problems.  In this case, however, working in bed is actually causing the back problems because I’m not properly supported and sitting up the way I would be in a regular office chair.  The issue with that is the fact that my office chair is leaning like a bitch and I might have to actually cash in the warranty and pick up a new one anyway.  So for now, I’m setup in the kitchen until I can knock out a substantial amount of work tonight.  Too much needs to get done for me to worry about how often I need to stand up and stretch before I can jump back into something. That’ll throw me off my game and I can’t afford that right now.

The other upside to the month is a long-overdue client finally paid up and I was woken up yesterday to Sean sneaking around the room and opened my eyes to him saying “Are you super comfy sleeping in our bed?” Of course I was until he started talking to me (can’t function without coffee or a cig in the morning – don’t talk to me unless I’ve been outside for at least 10 minutes).  He went on to say that the client paid up and he just paid off the bed.  GE Credit must be super pissed at me because I’ve never paid an ounce of interest on my purchases before. LOL.  So yea, even though we bought it in November for about $1600, it’s completely paid off as of February and there was 6 months deferred interest on it so that wouldn’t have kicked in for a few months anyway. MWAHAHA!!

So yea, in a nutshell it’s been a pretty good year financially so far.  I’m not one of those people who chooses a ‘health kick’ as a new years resolution – I know my lack of a ‘drive’ and stick with the stuff that I know I can control. Since money makes the world go round, of course that would be the one to focus on anyway. So, our goal for this year was to pay off as much as humanly possible and so far we’ve paid off about $2,000 worth of credit cards since Jan 1st.  My only issue is there is still people who owe us a substantial amount of money and if they would get off their butts to pay us back we could continue to pay down our debt, but they’re pussy footing around and that’s just enough to be annoying for us.

It’s our ultimate goal to only have the car, insurance and the cellphone bill going out every month.  Hopefully by August that will be a possibility so we can start pushing all of the usual money that we shell out every month to bills straight into savings. The goal is to have about $25,000 in savings to put down on a house, and of course I’m super picky about how I want the house to look and the features it has because an in-law suite is mandatory for me.  It doesn’t necessarily need to be a separate dwelling, even the option to setup the basement as kind of an apartment for my dad is all that matters to me. I was looking in the general Rehoboth area, but I’ve found a few down in Selbyville and up in Dover that I fell head over heals for and now at least have a starting point.  The requirements are in-law type of a suite/dwelling – a pool (or room for one) – no HOA cause I think they’re assholes and a gourmet kitchen with plenty of room for huge family dinners because that’s what us guineas do.

Now it’s just the matter of coming up with the money for it, so I guess it’s time to get off of blogging and get back into Dreamweaver.

PS: For the last 6 months I’ve wanted to come up with a new them for krissy.nu, I may wind up just converting to the 2012 WP theme and slapping a header image in there – who knows. But one will be coming soon, I promise!

The book is fan-fiction for “Twilight” another fucked up phenomenon where someone in Hollywood decided to take it upon themselves to rip a book out of someones hand and make them watch the movie version instead. (They’re doing this with 50 Shades, by the way).  The characters are pretty much the same between both series of books, the only differences is more or less that the names were changed.  The best review that I’ve read on this series, and the movie, was handled by The Atlantic, you can read the article here: The ’50 Shades of Grey’ Film Will Be Better Than the Book (but Still Bad) – Noah Berlatsky – The Atlantic.

Very well said Noah, very well said.

Now, when you strip everything down it converts into a super kinky romance novel – or at least we’re to believe that’s the intent of the author.  In my humble opinion, anyone who finds nipple clamps and flogging to be even remotely “romantic” needs to suck on the exhaust pipe of a big-rig and not their husband.  Numerous “50 Shade Babies” are popping up all over the world. This is porn for soccer moms, period – point blank.

The rating of the movie is going to be NC-17, obviously the Adult industry has already begun cranking out movie after movie and while everyone is wondering if Mila Kunis is actually going to be standing around with nipple clamps on the set of “50 Shades” you can bet your ass that the actual book itself can only really be seen in the Adult movie store because that is the only industry that’s capable of getting away with horrible acting and writing and the excessive amounts of “kinky fuckery” (as coined by Anna Steele).

For those of you whom are only on the first book.  Let me help you out:

Her boss at the publishing agency hits on her, Christian fires him because he bought the company to protect her anyway. The same character (Hyde) attempts to kill Christian (and his assistant) by messing with the engine of his plane. An old sub shows up and holds Anna at gunpoint, and when Hyde (and Anna’s boss) appear in the 3rd book it’s to kidnap his Sister for the sum of 5 million dollars based solely on the fact that Hyde and Christian were actually together in the same orphanage and the Grey’s chose Christian before they looked at Jack.  Anna and Christian get married, and have a baby – the series finalizes with her being pregnant with baby #2.

So yea – when you strip it down like this – the remaining 700 pages in the series are Anna’s internal dialoge about how much she loves his bare feet, whips and cuffs and has no problem walking around government and business officials while hiding balls in her twat sheerly for his arousal.

UCK!

So why am I even online?  Welp, I’m trying to complete a site by the Wednesday AM deadline but still have about 8 hours work to complete, knowing that we’re going to be out of the house for at least another six hours, I had no choice in the matter.  Thankfully my cellphone gives me the ability to “hotspot” myself so it’s been pretty easy to keep the pace of coding and uploading without worrying about anything. Thank god for 4G.