Time to Put on the Big Boy Pants

By Alex | Published: March 18, 2010

So I’ve been design­ing web sites for a while now, for profit, but I’ve been doing web design and related non­sense for nearly ten years. That is crazy to me; my first site was com­pletely hand coded, pow­ered by notepad. Oh how I hated the process! Now, it’s a funny foot­note in my life as I con­tinue to develop my skills and myself.

About three or four years ago I decided to get more seri­ous with things, became a sole pro­pri­etor and took to doing web design for real, that is, make some money doing the thing that’s given me so much joy. Today, I look at the line in the sand and see where I am now. I have come a long way in my devel­op­ment as a designer and busi­ness per­son… Though, the lat­ter could use a lot of work to be honest.

I put in a lot of work doing what I do and I’m proud of that and I wish I was doing it as my only job, instead of split­ting time doing stor­age and dp related work, which, don’t get me wrong, I love, just not as much you, you see. Always and for­ever… =) (Kudos to you if you caught that ref’)

This month I pushed for­ward and cre­ated a cor­po­rate iden­tity for my busi­ness. I don’t need one just yet, but it’s a good idea because I can go corp to corp with other com­pa­nies on other free­lance oppor­tu­ni­ties, some­thing that I’ve lost gigs to in the past. Need­less to say I’m super excited about it. The com­pany is named “DigiSavvy.” The com­pany will con­tinue to focus on web design and devel­op­ment, but will also add SEO mar­ket­ing and Social Media Strat­egy devel­op­ment to the port­fo­lio as well.

My goal is to work at this full time within three years. The clock starts on 3/31. I'm already ner­vous but very excited about the prospect of doing only my pas­sion for a job.

For now, I’m get­ting the logos and biz iden­tity stuff squared away, doing research and get­ting the busi­ness not-so-fun-stuff taken care of. I lit­er­ally can­not wait to get going with this!

As always, pay atten­tion to who you might know that needs help with mak­ing a site, exist­ing site or just needs help or ques­tions answered regard­ing social media or online mar­ket­ing just send them my way. Pretty, pretty please! You get a free cookie* if you do.

Tak­ing a deep breath – Wish me luck!

Posted in Life, Uncategorized, Web Design, Work | 2 Comments

Oh Me Oh MEye…

By admin | Published: March 10, 2010

See what I did there with the title? Yeah, pretty lame… I know.

Any­way, I met up with my Oph­thal­mol­o­gist for yet another appoint­ment about my eye. My eye looks bet­ter and less gross.

That's a good thing!

Of course it the doc­tor gave me the good news that what I have, Inter­me­di­ate Uveitis, causes cataracts, but it's a slow form­ing process… Yay. The Doc­tor gave me a rec­om­men­da­tion to go see another eye guy, who has some exper­tise in Uveitis. So that's a good thing. We'll see what comes of that.

In the process of diag­nos­ing this con­di­tion I have con­sumed a good bit of pre­scrip­tion drugs and I've also had a CT scan done. I have PPO insur­ance… None of this stuff is cheap, as I've come to find. It's okay, I've been able to absorb the costs, but they've been hefty enough that I'm con­sid­er­ing a change back to the HMO sys­tem… Ugh. I haven't even talked about my wis­dom teeth get­ting pulled…

Let's see how much more med­ical good­ness I can stack up this year. =)

Posted in Life | 4 Comments

Second Eye Blind?

By Alex | Published: February 19, 2010

First off, no, I'm not blind. Both of my eyes can still see… Mostly. =) Sec­ondly, I don't like Third Eye Blind nor their trib­ute band, Sec­ond Eye Blind. They both suck, yet, Sec­ond Eye Blind is bet­ter musi­cally speaking…

After nearly two months of dra­mat­ics with my eye and peo­ple ask­ing "Uh, dude, how'd you get pink eye?" Or "Man, you should go home, you don't want to infect peo­ple with your pink eye." I finally have res­o­lu­tion on this issue.

It turns out, my opthamol­o­gist tells me, that I have Inter­me­di­ate Uveitis. It sounds made up, unfor­tu­nately it's not.

What Inter­me­dia Uveitis is, accord­ing to Wikipedia, is

Inter­me­di­ate uveitis refers to inflam­ma­tion local­ized to the vit­re­ous and periph­eral retina. Pri­mary sites of inflam­ma­tion include the vit­re­ous of which other such enti­ties as pars plani­tis, pos­te­rior cycli­tis, and hyali­tis are encom­passed. Inter­me­di­ate uveitis may either be idio­pathic or asso­ci­ated with the devel­op­ment of a sys­temic dis­ease such as mul­ti­ple scle­ro­sis (MS) or sar­coido­sis. As such, inter­me­di­ate uveitis may be the first expres­sion of a sys­temic con­di­tion. The most com­mon causes of inter­me­di­ate uveitis are idio­pathic (69.1%), sar­coido­sis (22.2%), mul­ti­ple scle­ro­sis (MS), and Lyme Dis­ease (0.6%). [1]

The only thing I noticed in that descrip­tion was sar­coido­sis and that's because it's some­thing that Fore­man is always sug­gest­ing as a poten­tial issue to Dr. House but gets shot down. It's never sar­coido­sis, Foreman! 

Any­way, it's a genetic con­di­tion appar­ently, though, I'm not sure who in my fam­ily has had this… It's not known what causes this, but it's not altered my life in such a way that I can't func­tion and do what I need to do. In fact, my eye is still located in the same place where it's always been. Which is good to know, I don't want it falling out and get­ting eaten by my neighbor's cat, Pillsbury.

So the doc­tor doesn't know how or why I got this and that's okay, at least I know I have it and have begun early treatment. 

For now it's just some­thing I get to live with and tell peo­ple about from time to time. Peo­ple say "I'm sorry" a lot… Per­son­ally, I don't care to hear other people's apolo­gies. That's life these things hap­pen and you move on and deal with it. I don't need apolo­gies, just my friends and fam­ily and I'll be fine.

In the interim I'm just treat­ing this with top­i­cal steroid drops for the time being, if those don't work then my chances at mak­ing the Olympic Mud Wrestling team will be severely derailed because the doc­tor will force a gen­er­ous amount of steroid pills to com­bat the inflam­ma­tion. I know. It's kinda lame.

Until next time.

Posted in Life | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Relay for Life of La Sierra — Your Support Counts.

By admin | Published: February 7, 2010

American Cancer Society DonationsGuilt trips. They can be to me what kryp­tonite is to Mr. Super­man. I have lit­tle to no defense against I well-deployed guilt trip. The worst guilt trip of all is the one you level against your­self… That brings us to Relay for Life of La Sierra. It's a char­ity being pimped out by many giv­ing and kind-hearted folk­like peo­ple, such as my dear friend Mrs. Sul­li­van, she also goes by "Sully," though she bears a resem­blance to Agent Scully, from the X-files… Just sayin'.

You see, some months ago she came to me and asked me to donate to another char­ity and I said I would. Of course I for­got all about it and she ended up hav­ing to cover my com­mit­ment for a dona­tion. This relay comes up and, well, I can't really stiff a foun­da­tion doing good things by rais­ing can­cer aware­ness and it's also a topic near and dear to me for per­sonal reasons…

So I've donated money to the cause. Now, Sully had bet­ter kick down with some free food and awe­some home cooking.

I ask that you, too, make a dona­tion for this cause as well. I can't promise that Sully will be cook­ing you any food, but you're still donat­ing to a wor­thy cause. Even if you can't make a dona­tion, please spread the word and share this with your friends.

To make a dona­tion:
Please visit Sully's Amer­i­can Can­cer Soci­ety Dona­tion page

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Acts of Random… err… Kindness?

By admin | Published: February 6, 2010

So there I was, shar­ing a won­der­ful din­ner with the recently "minted" Mrs. Back­ouris, her mum-in-law and Loni at the Fifty Forks restau­rant, at the Art Insti­tute of Orange County. I was shar­ing a story about some­thing ran­dom I began doing about a month ago. When I shared my story it had been brought to my atten­tion I hadn't said any­thing prior to my telling of this story. You see, I men­tioned to Long, a lit­tle over a month ago, that I wanted to take ran­dom, out of work-down on their luck, peo­ple out to lunch. I just didn't want to brag about it. There's noth­ing to brag about. I just hate eat­ing alone. =) I wasn't try­ing to accom­plish any­thing and I wasn't expect­ing any­thing out of this. I've been doing this a month and I've man­aged to take only one stranger out to lunch… I know, I know. It's a rous­ing rate of success.

Any­way, what I've been doing is just post­ing on Twit­ter and on Face­book, ask­ing, ran­domly, if some­one wanted to go out to lunch with me. The only require­ment I asked was that the per­son be unem­ployed. I'd meet them for lunch and pick up the tab. Easy. Well, peo­ple are weird. After some dis­turb­ing mes­sages from a user so-called "Ernest Morn­ing­wipe" I was wor­ried and slightly dis­turbed, yet I persisted.

Jeff in the FleshThat's when Jeff, an unem­ployed Civil Engi­neer, reached out to me and stated his desire to do lunch. He was a pretty nor­mal guy, save for this crazy han­dle bar mus­tache that he'd been grow­ing because, well, he had the time to grow it.

I imag­ine Jeff's story isn't too dif­fer­ent from a lot of peo­ple strug­gling in today's econ­omy, try­ing to make ends meet and sur­vive. Jeff's been unem­ployed for six months, but he had done a few inter­views on some recent leads he's got­ten from friends and for­mer colleagues.

Jeff remained cheer­ful and he was a really social guy. He thought it was odd that I'd invite some­one out to lunch and pay for it. We dis­cussed the "why" of it all. I didn't really have a good answer, as it was on a "just-because" whim, if you will.

He said, "Hey, that's cool with me, man. As long as you're not push­ing Sci­en­tol­ogy on me I will eat of some free fish tacos." We had a laugh about that one, before I asked him if he'd like a free "stress test." More laugh­ter followed.

He and I didn't have a lot in com­mon, really, but we both had a lot to talk about. He's engaged, but has had to put mar­riage plans on hold for the time being. It was inter­est­ing to here his story and how he's cop­ing. I think what really stuck with me was his atti­tude; he wasn't des­per­ate or down on life or him­self. He was sim­ply mak­ing sac­ri­fices where he could and just man­ages to keep plug­ging away and try to make things work.

You see, there's some­thing that I've been told, that I say to oth­ers because I believe it myself: "Things will work out because there's no other choice; they MUST work." That is, when we're pinned against a wall we still have to DO some­thing. I don't think I'm mak­ing sense, but all I'm try­ing to say is that things will work out in some way or other, per­haps not the way we'd like, but, in the end, things work out… Like it or not. Hav­ing that in mind has kept me sane when I'm stressed out. For Jeff, it just seems like he knows and I appre­ci­ate that attitude.

Posted in Asides | Tagged , , | 1 Comment