Domestic Geek

Gah, I hope Marcus gets home soon. I don't know if someone has infiltrated my email account or if someone else's computer with my email addy in it has become a spam zombie, but I've been getting undeliverable email notices for the last couple of hours...lots of them.

Edit: Well, it looks like I ended up getting some sort of trojan or something on the old PC today. It was the zombie. We're not sure if we got it stopped and the machine cleaned good enough, so Marcus just had me pull the network cable on it. Grrr. Stupid spammers. Stupid windows. Stupid me.

I had a really weird moment of Zen last Thursday, I think it was. My old place of employment called Marcus because the designers are being allowed to work from home 3 days a week instead of having to make the drive to Larkspur every day and needed their computers set up to access the network from home. At first I was so incredibly angry when I heard about that, because I asked for that exact work situation before I was let go. Since one of my main problems was the amount of gas I was wasting driving there, I wanted the ability to work from home and I was flat out told no.

Then I took a deep breathe and felt totally at peace — a real moment of zen. I realized if I had gotten what I had wanted, I wouldn't be where I am now. I wouldn't be working at an established company only 17 miles from home, working with Marcus, working with a really nice set of people for the most part, getting some recognition for the good work I do, getting paid hourly so I actually get overtime pay for those extra hours I work and getting company-paid benefits. Instead I'd still be working at a floundering start-up where the personalities clash, people are mean and rude to each other, driving 100 miles a day round trip, no benefits whatsoever, having to deal with stupid clients and franchisees and generally feeling too much stress.

It was a sucky road getting here, but I am truly grateful for the position I have now. I'm grateful for the experiences I've had at all the different places I've worked because they have given me such a broad knowledge base of the various types of design skills needed and so far all have come into play in one way or another where I currently work. Even my technology skills have been useful.

I'm so glad I was so quickly able to look for the good and let go of those angry, ugly feelings I was having. It's a real breakthrough for me.

While I was over at Apple's site this morning, I saw the front page had a big announcement that in June you will be able to view YouTube content through your AppleTV. That's pretty cool.

We listen to the station 99.5 The Mountain a lot at work. It's great because I keep hearing songs that I need to add to my iTunes library.

The other day I heard a song I love by Paul McCartney and Wings called "1985." I knew they had just released the Paul McCartney catalog on iTunes, so I checked as soon as I got home and all I could find was that tune by Bowling for Soup (which I already have, btw). I did several Google searches and that's the way every kept spelling the song title — in numbers. Yesterday I decided to search wikipedia and decided to start going through the discography. Since the song ended with "Band on the Run, " I decided to start there and lo and behold: it's spelled out "Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five!" I went to download the song and it was being offered as iTunes Plus, the DRM-free (without Digital Rights Management) version, so I paid the $1.29 of of my balance and it is all mine. I made Marcus stop watching his show on the AppleTV so I could hear it through the stereo.

I applaud EMI records for being the first to agree to get rid of this DRM crap. It's so easy to get around it, anyway. I will gladly pay a little extra for a song I can play anytime on any device.

I became aware of a site to get t-shirts printed online called CustomInk.com a few years back while working at a screen printing shop. I fell in love with their straight-forward ordering process and "Design Lab" product creator is one of the best in the business. I often wondered with sites like this, why would people deal with the hassle of working like a shop like ours?

CustomInk.com has just about every product imaginable to put your design on: garments such t-shirts, tanks, baseball jerseys, sweats, polos, hats and fun stuff like umbrellas, mousepads, teddy bears. You need to check out the site to see the wide selection available. They're not selling cheap, junky shirts, either. Choose from well known brand names such as Hanes, Gildan, Champion, Anvil, Jerzees and many more.

I'm really impressed that they decided to upgrade the Design Lab. It only used to work in IE on windows, but it seems to work just fine in Firefox and on both a mac and pc. You can choose from their many stock images and font to create the idea you have in mind, or follow their detailed instructions to create art of your own and upload it. They also provide a great demo on how to use the Design Lab. You can save the design and send it colleagues who need to look it over. It's all very cool!

Marcus is wanting some new shirts for his gaming group. I know we'll be using CustomInk.com to order those shirts.