My Plan to Save Money On Gas

Well, I’ve finally gone and done it. Anyone who knows me well, knows that I don’t care much for work. More accurately, I don’t care for having a job. Thus it is with great delight that I announce I am making a transition to being jobless. No longer will I be making rich, old, white guys richer… or older… or whiter. My official escape from cubicle nation will be the eighteenth of August in this two-thousand-sixth year of our Lord.

I’m going to do nothing but watch daytime soaps and let my wife support me. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. I’m actually going to be working my butt off to continue the growth of The Web Shop. Still, walking up the stairs is a vast improvement over driving 25-45 minutes as far as morning commutes go.

A Tale of Two Blogs

Clay, you’re writing for two different blogs?  That’s crazy.  It’ll never work.  One man just doesn’t have that kind of time, I don’t care what kind of sleep schedule you’re on.

Yes, I am writing for two blogs now, but the subject matter is drastically different.  This is a personal blog without any unifying them theme more complicated than “thoughts that happened to enter my head”.  My other blog adheres strictly to the subject of running a web design business.  That material won’t interest most of the (four) readers of this blog.  But (the four of) you don’t have to worry about “Can I Change This Later?” being forgotten.  I don’t intend to stop seeing movies anytime soon, and I always have time for a Single Sentence Movie Review.

The New Web Shop

I recently got a new logo for my web design business courtesy of Mike and Betsy.  Such a momentous occasion could only be appropriately celebrated with a site redesign.

I still expect to be adding quite a few things in the coming months, but the general look and feel should be steady for a while.  To be honest the previous didn’t do much for me.  I also don’t think it gave people a very good idea of what kind of work they should expect from me.  What you see now is a more accurate reflection of my style.

If You Treat People Like Children…

For most businesses, a set of policies grows over time.  Whenever something bad happens, you create a rule to make sure it doesn’t happen again.  By the time a business gets really big, it’s usually developed a byzantine list of policies to address things that probably weren’t going to happen again anyway.  The guys at 37signals suggest a different approach.

Some of the leases I signed in college were victims of this same phenomenon.  Because of a problem they had experienced with one tenant years ago, a lease I signed included a clause saying that I would never have any candles lit on the property for the entire year I lived there.  (Birthday cake, anyone?)  Everyone knew this was absurd.  The employee who handed me the lease even pointed out that they didn’t really expect us to never light a candle.  The fact that they included such a trivial (and largely unenforceable) clause in the contract made me question what else in the lease didn’t need to be taken seriously.  Sure they included legal gobbledygook stating that if one part of the lease turned out to be worthless, then everything else would still stand.  I’m not a judge, though.  So what I walked away from that lease signing thinking is that these people expect me to ignore some of the rules.  I know they had an expectation that I would instinctively know which rules belonged on the list to take seriously and which belonged on the list to only break behind closed doors.  I wonder if our lists were the same?

My Weekend At The Labor Camp

The primary reason I got into a career in computers was to sit at a desk all day and rely on email as my default means of communication.  Imagine my surprise this past weekend when I spent 12 hours on Saturday and an additional 12 hours on Sunday carting computer equipment punctuated with running and patching cables and telephone lines.  I work for a company that moved to a new building this weekend.

When I arrived home on Sunday at 11pm, I was hobbled through the doorway to the sympathetic (but still highly amused) laughter of my wife.  She subdued her chuckling just long enough to give my legs a much needed rub down and make me a late dinner.  (Poof!  You’re a late dinner.) 

I closed me eyes that night with the comfort that tomorrow morning would be relatively painless as our entire organization hit the ground running with little to no interruption from the move…

Only now, on Thursday, four days later have we settled into any kind of equilibrium.  I truly believe some of my coworkers really were able to come in Monday and start doing productive work.  None of those people were in IT.

I’d be lying if I said the compensation for all this hard work isn’t a little cool.  I would have been satisfied getting paid time-and-a-half.  I’m even happier, though, with what actually came to pass.  For each hour I worked over the weekend, I earned 1.5 hours of vacation time.  That means I added just shy of a week to my bank of time off.  I’m certainly not anxious to do it again anytime soon, but a week of vacation is really a nine day weekend.

Maybe everyone else would rather have the extra pay.  Feel free to hit the comments and speak your peace.

The Web Shop

There are still a few finishing touches that need to occur (ed: like the remarkably bad purple and green logo), but the site for my freelance web design business is now available for public viewing.

The Web Shop

In Case You Doubted That Businesses Were Targeting China As an Emerging Market

I saw this a few months ago, but just came across it again.  This is a commercial for Coke and World of Warcraft.  I’m not sure if they split the cost 50/50 or what, but the commercial seems to paint them both in an equally positive light.  There’s also a group in the commercial which may or may not be a popular act in China.  It could also just be three random actresses.

Movie posts are in chronological order. Look for July 19, 2005 to see China’s Coke/WoW Commercial.