Perpetual Smile

I recently received a gift certificate for one of ten local restaurants from someone who really liked some work I did for them.

I like food, but I’m not a foodie. I don’t really visit any of our local restaurants because I already have my favorite franchises. I mean, yeah, I love Frankie’s (which is the best hot dog franchise in Connecticut and now Florida), but it’s not like I go out of my way to go to any of our other restaurants. Waterbury doesn’t really have any of its own local “flavor” that other towns have — at least, I don’t think so.

But I’m not one to turn down a free meal, especially not when it meant a night out alone with Mike.

Initially, I asked him what he was in the mood for, because I didn’t really care. He wanted Tuscan-style food, and most of our restaurant choices were Italian. The more I thought about it, though, the less I wanted Italian. I mean, I eat Italian food at home all the time, and I also eat it when I go to my aunt’s, which is pretty often. Our only other choices were a Tex-Mex restaurant, or an American/European restaurant. The latter’s website didn’t have a menu. I was suddenly really homesick for Deerfield Beach and the Tex-Mex food down there, so I decided to give the Waterbury version a shot.

Crossroads Cantina is a restaurant tucked in the industrial section of downtown. It’s a little offset from the main road, hidden behind what looks like a warehouse and a maze of highway on-ramps and exits. It was pretty quiet outside, but as soon as we entered the automatic doors we were blasted with chatter and loud music. It became very clear very quickly that I wasn’t going to get the private atmosphere that I had daydreamed about all day.

Still, free dinner is free dinner, and I was pretty hungry. Our waitress seated us and let us know that she was new. “I’m probably going to suck,” she told us. She reminded me a little of Lauren, my younger sister. She was about Lauren’s age — maybe younger — and she was really friendly.

She took our order — which took a while because we had a few questions and she had to run back and forth to ask someone else when she didn’t know some of the answers, and Mike always takes a long time to order anyway — and then brought us tortilla chips and salsa. The chips were pretty good, if not a little greasy. The salsa was deliciously spicy but sort of reminded me of the stuff you could buy in the store. According to the menu, both were housemade every morning.

They were pretty busy, which is probably why it took so long for both our appetizer and our entrees to come out. But when Mike tried to cut his chicken breast with a fork and, unable to do it, asked a passing waitress for a knife, he got a butter knife. We had a good laugh over it, but he still had a hard time getting his meat cut.

The rice that came with my quesadilla was dry, and the quesadilla itself didn’t have much chicken or cheese in it. I like the quesadillas at 99 — a franchise restaurant in our city — a lot better.

I came to the conclusion that Crossroads probably gets its reputation because it’s the only Tex-Mex in town and because most of the people that go there come to drink and are probably too drunk to notice that the food isn’t totally stellar.

Still, our waitress was friendly and she did pretty good, considering it was only her third night and her first night with the place packed. I tipped her pretty well, though I’m probably biased since she reminded me of my little sister.

Mike and I compared notes on the ride home, and passed one of the restaurants we could have gone to.

“We would have probably got our food faster if we’d gone there,” he said. “We probably would have been outta there an hour ago.”

“True,” I said, feeling a little guilty for talking him out of Italian.

He took a right when our light turned green. “Ya can’t knock free food, though.”

My life is going at the speed of a frog in a blender. It’s almost too much!

I started working two jobs a couple of weeks ago. I am not used to working all day, every day. It’s exhausting! It’s totally worth it at the end of the week, though. I’m actually catching up on things I’ve been trying to save for. Maybe I’ll even be driving the Sunfire soon, rather than my death trap Mazda. I even got the BlackBerry I’ve been dying to have (thank you to Sarcastica for being so patient and helping me get on BB Messenger)!

A couple of days ago, I also partnered my web design freelancing business with my aunt’s web design and print media business, OSC. We will be collaborating on social media websites. So basically, if one of us has a client that needs a website and social media, we will work on it together. I will be working on the social media end of it, be it setting up accounts on social networking sites (MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc) or building a site in WordPress. We will be offering training and hopefully will be doing seminars. We have an expo in about a month that we need to prepare for, and we’ve been doing a lot of networking. Needless to say, I’ve been working pretty much non-stop and I could use a nice, long nap.

Somehow, through all of this craziness, I’ve managed to stay smoke-free. I don’t know how the hell I’m doing it.

Of course I have another sinus infection. I have to call my physician in the morning and get some drugs! I thought that by quitting smoking, I wouldn’t get as many sinus infections each year. I guess I thought wrong. I don’t want to go back to smoking, though. I don’t even care that I quit, and I’m glad for all of the extra cash (especially now that Connecticut is hiking up the taxes on tobacco).

The only real problem with all of this working is that I’m starting to feel like I don’t ever do anything fun. I realized the other day that I’ve been much been working non-stop for the last year or so, and that sucks. It’s starting to drain me. I spent most of the day yesterday trying to stop the

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and

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from leaking out of my ears.

My only consolation is that today is Wednesday, Friday is pay day, sometime this weekend I am going to get my hair cut, and Julien-K finally released their debut album. Oh, and did I mention that Mike found me the ultra-rare translucent Dr. Manhattan figure? Cool beans.

Not too long ago, I noticed that MySpace was using a new ad banner size. Their entire background was devoted to the costumer’s product, for an entire day. There was also usually some kind of accompanying 960×250 banner underneath the header. I loved this form of advertising from the start. I thought it was really creative and interesting. So naturally, I forgot about it.

Then, I was at Mike’s one day and he was showing me something or other at IGN.com. IGN started off as a little website that people uploaded video game walkthroughs to in .txt files, and now they write review and walkthroughs of all the hottest new games. I was surprised and excited to see that IGN too was using a similar advertising format.

Both sites are now sought-after ad spots. Let’s face it: whether you love or hate them, each site has a very large user base.

While MySpace uses only their home login page for these background ads, IGN uses the ads on every page. If there is no advertiser for that size on a given day, MySpace will use the 960×250 banner spot beneath the header on their login page, while IGN just reverts to their red logo background and regular ad spots.

A recent ad featured on MySpace was for the new Nicholas Cage movie, Numbers. At the bottom of the home login page, on the left hand side, was a smaller 620×50 banner.

MySpace and IGN aren’t the only websites using this new ad size. I have seen a handful of other sites using their backgrounds as ad space, and I think that more sites should snag this new idea while they can.

Why? Let’s face it, ads are tough. Users hate them and customers want the best ad spot possible. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t about Customer X or Y complaining that they aren’t the only one, or that their ad isn’t in the current hot spot. Companies have a hard time pleasing everyone and making money at the same time. I’ve seen all sorts of different methods that work, but get old very quickly: the page curl, the 1025×230 dropdown, the 300×250, and many others. Customers want ad space that gets in users’ faces, and users want ads that are helpful but also easily averted.

The full background, 1280×600, ad size solves all of these problems. It gets your attention, but it’s also part of the normal site; there’s nothing popping up, down, left, or right at you. If you’re interested in the product, you can click on one of the nearby banners (which are usually part of the entire ad in general). If you’re not interested, you can just move on.

Customers can purchase a whole day of being the best ad on the site, and online companies can make a nice profit because these ads are so great.

Of course, just like anything else on the web, this solution isn’t going to last forever. So get your background ad on and make some money!

Every time I go to write a new post, I end up writing about something I don’t want to write about, because I don’t want to write about what I actually want to write about. With me? Great.

I spent the last two weeks sort of reevaluating my life. I thought about my relationships with other people, my career, my goals, and blahblahblah (all one word, ’cause that’s how I actually say it). The only thing that I actually figured out was my current job situation. I didn’t make any decisions on the other things that are bothering me. I obviously can’t do anything about the things I can’t control, but it still sucks because waiting is not on my list of skills.

I did decide to stop letting everyone use me, and even though I do mean to stick to that, it’s hard. It was especially hard yesterday when someone who basically ditched me for the last couple of weeks suddenly called and wanted my sympathy (and possibly my help; I didn’t answer the phone).

I just can’t keep giving everything and getting nothing in return. I can’t live in a cesspool of drama and constant emergencies that I always feel obligated to help out with. The truth is, I don’t owe any of these people anything, because they never gave me anything to begin with. Sure, we had some good times (Rock Band marathons, trips to the mall for no reason, spontaneous trips to the bar, movie nights, and all that good stuff), but when it actually counted, none of these people — and by none I mean neither, ha ha ha — could give me any of their time.

So, although a part of me wants to return that phone call, I refuse to get suckered in again. I hope that both of these people end up getting their shit together, but I’m not going to stick around to find out.

I have to be a hardass about this because otherwise I’m only going to keep getting hurt.

Anyway. Now that that’s over with, we can get to the good stuff:

I don’t pretend to know everything about user interface design. Really, I don’t. I may have read a paragraph of the assigned reading from the ginormous UID textbook when I took that Final Project course for my AS. Still, I am a user, so I have a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn’t.

Changing things over and over again, people, does not work.

It took me longer than normal to get used to Facebook. Things were organized in a strange way and I didn’t understand why I had to create a Page instead of just starting another account for different things. Once I got used to it, though, I liked it. I pushed for us to use it at my morning job. I became accustomed to the differences between my profile, my Pages, and my Groups.

And then they changed Pages.

I had to learn how to use them all over again, and quick, because not only do I use Pages for my Letters of Love, but I also use them for my morning job’s company. Still, they were easier to use and I liked being able to update their statuses.

And then they changed the home page’s UI. Completely. I didn’t know how to access my Pages or my Groups. I could only see my friend’s updates. I had to use the toolbar — which I rarely use and think they could just do away with — to go to my Pages.

My Pages whose UI’s were changed, again.

Not majorly, mind you, but just enough that it threw me off a little. The status update seems to have copulated with the Wall. They’re now the same thing. I don’t see what the point is, because now when you write on your Page’s Wall, your status changes. I don’t want my status to say hi back to so-and-so.

Now don’t get me wrong, I know that UI’s are going to change. Usually, though, a design/development team makes those changes because the old UI wasn’t working. It needed to be better. It needed to be more comprehensive. I think the old UI could have been a little better, but they didn’t have to change it completely. They could have organized things a bit better instead.

Anyway, they had better be careful. If they keep changing things around like this, they are going to alienate their users. People are creatures of familiarity; if things keep changing too much, Facebook may lose a big chunk of their users because they got fed up with having to relearn how to use the site over and over again.

I’ve already had to learn twice. I’d hate to know how many times older users have had to relearn it.

Drum roll, please…

First let me say that I’m sorry my updates have been so blah and uninformative lately. There’s been a lot going on that I didn’t want to write about for several reasons until I knew for sure what was going on. (There are still some things I can’t write about, but I promise I will when I can.)

The meeting with the local freelancing agency last week went very well. I filled out tax forms, so now it’s just a matter of waiting for them to find me some work. Someone I listed as a reference spoke to them and told me that they said they were very impressed with me and that they said they will definitely be using me.

Still, things were looking pretty dismal. I couldn’t get anymore hours at my current job because they’re under some financial stress, so going to school or saving up for things I needed was getting to be really tough. My aunt found an ad in the paper for a full-time gig as a web designer, at a local web design and print company. I figured it was worth a shot, so I emailed them my resume and tried not to get my hopes up.

The owner of the company emailed me back the very next day, asking me to call him at a certain time. He asked me to come in the next day (yesterday) for an interview. The interview went pretty well. I was fairly confident that I would get it, but he mentioned that he was interviewing two other people this week so I tried not to get my hopes up. So when he called me this afternoon and asked me to come right away, I was ecstatic. I changed out of my sweats into something presentable and professional in five minutes flat, then headed for their offices.

Fortunately, I was right! I got the job. It’s part-time for the moment, but it will be full-time in May when they move their office to the new location. This means I can continue to work at both jobs, but don’t have to fear layoffs at my current job (there’s been rumor of more layoffs lately). I can save a lot more money, and can go back to school part-time in the fall!

It got even better when I got home; my diploma came in the mail! It’s really nice. It felt good to hold in my hands. I don’t care what anyone says, I’m proud of it. I’m proud of myself and all of the hard work I did to get that piece of paper. It’s proof of how hard I worked, and it means a lot to me.

I’m feeling pretty good right now, despite my gloomy mood earlier.

PS: I made some changes to the content in the sidebar. I deleted all archives before 2008, since those can be found on my LiveJournal anyway. I cleaned up and organized all of the categories and tags, and I also got rid of the blogroll. I used to use the blogroll just so I could read everyone’s blogs really quickly, but now that I’ve got Google Reader I don’t need it anymore. I also cleaned up a few tags. In general things should be nice and tidy around here! Who knows, maybe someday I’ll even get to redesigning it!

I’ve been thinking a lot lately, and a couple of other posts this week really got me going.

I’m tired of being everyone’s shoulder to cry on. I’m tired of being taken for granted. I’m tired of giving my all and getting nothing in return.

I have tried, several times during the last few weeks, to reach out to more than one friend because I needed someone to talk to or an escape. None of these people could give me the time of day, when I’ve been there for them on more than several occasions. They couldn’t be bothered when I’ve dropped everything time and again to give them a hand.

I kept holding on to the hope that these people would wake up and start treating me like a person again. I’ve been that teddy bear that a preteen drags out only when they need it and no one is looking.

No more.

I’m taking my soft, fuzzy self to the nearest Build-A-Bear shop and I’m getting my bleeding heart replaced with some balls of steel. And while I’m at it, I’m going to pick up some Watchmen action figures.

I’m singing the Spice Girls right now and my cat has probably OD’d on Lithium, she’s so happy.

Tonight is going to rock, despite all of the shoot-me-now my life has been lately. I’m going to see Watchmen with Mike, and it’s going to be awesome. I’ve never read the graphic novel, but the trailer just looks so cool I think I’m going to be obsessed. In fact, there is a discount book store in my city that just opened, so I think Mike and I are going to check that out today. Maybe they’ll have the book and I won’t have to feel guilty about spending any money because everything in there is (supposedly) 40% off regular seller prices.

Last night was the season finale of Burn Notice. The new season starts in June. I’m going to die between now and then. Speaking of TV, I’m behind on Dollhouse and probably going to miss tonight’s episode. Whoever decided to put it on a Friday night is a moron. No one is home Friday night. I hope they count the number of views the episodes on the Fox website get, because I doubt the TV ratings are very high.

We also watched Religulous last night. I agreed with a lot of what Bill Maher said. My mom is Protestant and my dad is Catholic, though neither of them are hardcore about it. I was baptized Protestant and raised with a little bit of both. Mom always made us go to church on Sundays with her mother, while Dad stayed at home and watched Nascar. (I never got why it was okay for him to stay home but I had to endure two hours of either Sunday school or the pastor droning on and on. My favorite part about church was the Italian bread and grape juice. Oh, that and going home and playing with my toys afterward.)

I can’t remember exactly when I stopped going, but eventually my mom gave up on dragging me out of bed to go somewhere I didn’t want to be. Religion just never made sense for me. I listened to the stories and teachings, but I had a hard time believing in something I couldn’t see or feel. I tried exploring other religions for a while. I practiced Wicca and read about Druidism. I studied the Muslim religion in eighth grade. As interesting as it all was, I didn’t take any of it seriously.

I don’t believe in any kind of higher power. I am a firm believer of living my own life the way I want to, and treating others the way I want to be treated. I practice being happy and being a good person. I’ve been called a Satanist, and I’ve had people stop talking to me just because I don’t believe in any kind of god. (For the record, I don’t believe in any kind of devil, either. I think people have the freedom to be good or evil.) I once got fired from a job for no real reason, and I still believe to this day that it was because I don’t have a religion. (My boss and coworkers were all religious in some way.)

Religion is a touchy subject for most people. Don’t get me wrong. I am fascinated by other people’s beliefs. It’s interesting to me, but I take as much stock in it as I take in the spaghetti monster in the sky. (I did that just for you, Mike. I know you’re reading this, even though you never comment. Lazy ass.) I won’t not talk to someone just because of their religion. As weird as some practices may seem to me — like Scientology — I won’t dispute that it’s something people believe in. You believe what you wanna believe. I’ll leave you alone, as long as you leave me alone. Don’t interrogate me or tell me what I need to believe. Don’t try to force me into praying, or I’ll sick the vicious kitty on you:

I called the Bursar’s Office (translation: business office) at Southern earlier this afternoon. The lady I talked to was really helpful. She said they were going to drop me today unless I either paid in full or set up a payment plan. I told her there was no way I could afford the first payment at the moment, so she told me to drop the class and call her back right away so she could credit the $75 I already put down back onto my credit card.

So I have to wait until the fall (as long as I get financial aid) to start, but at least I get my money back.

I’m just amazed at how little time they give students to pay. I mean, it’s only March and the class doesn’t start until June 1st!

I’m a little disappointed that I can’t start as soon as I wanted to, but this is the least of my problems right now. I’m just relieved I’m not beat out of $75.