Domestic Geek

Something in me snapped at work today. I'm done.

I'm so sick of being a square peg trying to fit in a round hole. I'm so sick of giving it my all to try to make a fucked up situation work just to get a paycheck. I'm sick of being lied to my face. I know I'm pretty good at whatever I try, but these people don't deserve my best. I won't go into details publicly, because I know this blog comes up if you search for my name, but I deserve better than this.

I was searching for something motivational to put in my line of sight at work and I came across the Steve Jobs commencement address at Stanford University. The parts that stick out for me are excerpted below:

"You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.
...
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
...
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish."

--Steve Jobs, June 12, 2005

I'll be honest that this colon thing has me a little freaked out. I'm also getting closer to the age that Mom was when she passed. If I don't figure out what will make me happy and do it, I'm going to die with regrets and bitterness.

I'm in a creative funk. I purchased this today at Barnes & Noble to see if I can get my creative juices flowing again - Kim Werker's "Make It Might Ugly.

One of the best things about Keystone, SD is Big Time Pizza. We always order the Big Tatanka (Buffalo meat, green peppers, onions & bacon). The place caught my eye because the owners have that Subaru Baja pictured there.

I'm really wishing I hadn't done any paid blogging back in the bleak unemployment fiasco back in 2007.

Every few weeks, I get an email from somebody asking to have their link removed from my pathetic little blog. I did a little purging a while back. Some of the ones that remain are services that I would have actually used at some point. Like right now, there's a font site asking to have their link removed. They were on my list of resources for when I get back into design, but no longer. If these darned companies would worry more about their service or product and less what Google's most recent demands are, they wouldn't really need to care about where they rank on Google.

I'm so sick of this SEO game. Stop trying to game the system (that's why you and/or your company paid for all these lame links anyway) and stop giving Google all this power over you.

I'm especially irked when it isn't even a paid link in question, just some site I found and linked because I liked what they had to sell or wanted it for future reference. Some guy with a site selling old Hallmark ornaments asked to have his link removed. I told him why I had linked it and since he apparently cares more about Google than a customer, he's history. His stupid website still looked like something from a beginning HTML class. Good riddance.

I was going through some papers and found a list of all the paid posts I made back then and now I'm going to remove each and every one regardless. Some acquaintances that did paid blogging with me back then say they ask the companies to pay them to get the links removed, but I so don't want to deal with that. I'm just tired of seeing this crap in my inbox and reminding me of a period in my life that I would like to keep in the past.

STOP PLAYING GOOGLE'S GAME - NOBODY CARES!

I need to get on my soap box for a moment.

I really feel bad for people trying to make a living doing any type of designing these days, but I feel especially bad for cross-stitch designers. Just like in my graphic design field, anybody that can buy software all of a sudden thinks they are a designer. I don't know how many sites I have turned into Disney because I see someone selling charts for images they scanned and ran through their software.

An even worse problem is that the computer age has made it so easy to share or sell copyrighted patterns freely. People are so self-absorbed that they never think how this affects the people that originally made those patterns. This problem is made worse by foreign counties (China, Russia) that won't crack down on offenders if the work originated in another country. Pinterest has been horrible for these folks, as once again, a good idea and a useful tool is being abused by many. Instead of using it to post links to projects to do something or the like (as I do on my Stitchery board), they're putting the whole freaking chart there for anybody to use.

What most of these losers don't realize or care to admit is that they are STEALING! Many designers are tired of the fight of trying to protect their property. Instead of the freedom to create, they're having to deal with insolent people that hate being called out and hiring lawyers. Many of them have decided it's not worth it and quit. I also hate the ones that say it is OK to use Disney stuff, they're a big company and someone else making a little money off their characters isn't a big deal. Stealing is stealing.

A couple of recent posts on a Facebook group to which I belong really got my blood boiling. The group description has this: "We do not share or sell patterns in this group." Well, a woman was showing pictures of the piece she was working and anytime anyone asked her to name/designer, she simply offered to send them a copy. When I counted up how many people had publicly asked for it (never mind that many probably sent private messages), I got pissed. As I recognized the style of the designer and the chart is on my to-do list, I tracked down a legitimate place to purchased it and posted the link on both offending posts. I took a screen shot of one of the posts and then made inquiries as to how I could pass that on to the designer to give her a head's up. What slays me is people continued to ask for it after I called her out on it, so they suck just as much as she does. I PMd the group's Admin and then had to go to work. All day long, I kept seeing my notification counter increase, but as work makes me angry enough, I dared not look to see how many others were asking for it.



(Man, it took forever to blur out/cover the offending names. See how nice I was? I even covered up their avatars since many of those are pics of family members. I can show some respect.)

Right before I got off work, the admin had messaged me back to inform me that she had taken care of it and to thank me for alerting her to the offending posts. I then noticed that my notification number was very low. Whew, one down. I got a PM from a woman letting me know that the offender was now acting like the victim in all this:



All sorts of people commented on her post. Too bad she didn't let them know why her posts were deleted. It had nothing to do with what she was stitching, it was the problem of giving everyone that asked the danged pattern for free. I clicked through to her page to see what kind of woman she is on her page. She's a "Christian" and sells Avon. I wanted to send her a PM asking her how she'd like it if people intercepted her Avon deliveries and just gave them to others, since that was basically what she was doing to the designer whose pattern she was forwarding. I didn't though. Then I saw this - The IRONY! (ETA: Well, now I know why she had no problem passing it on, the pattern is pinned on her board - yes I'm stalking her. She got it from one of those crappy Russian sites I was mentioning earlier. Grrrr!)



I felt so bad for this designer that I decided to buy 2 of her charts that I've been wanting since I got paid yesterday. I bought the one in question here, Lets Love Winter, plus Let's Sew.