just my thoughts

So I’ve been tweeting a lot lately. It took me a while to get into the jist of it, however it seems to really be a pretty productive networking tool. It’s not really about just letting people know that you had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch, that your dog is running in its sleep, or that your car was freezing this morning. It’s more about sharing important information with other people, and more importantly, digesting the important information that the people you follow kindly share with you.

Obviously it depends on who you follow, whether or not the information you digest will be important or useful, so I tend to not just follow any and all people I can find, I actually have three different twitter accounts set up with three different goals in mind.

savingstrangers - This is my most ‘nothing’ account… following anyone and everyone, friends, and random people.

justmythoughts - This is the tweet for inter-post posts. Basically just a way to spit out random thoughts that don’t really deserve an entire post or section of a post dedicated to them. Or… if I forget to write about it in a post but it’s still on my mind, it may pop up here in the twitterfeed.

stayvalid - Here is my more ‘professional’ tweet, based upon web standards and design trends, I follow top design studios and freelance workers, and hopefully they follow me in return. This will be where I also tweet the most up-to-date status of StayValid’s production and development.

So that’s my little rant about Twitter.

Do you use Twitter? If so, what’s your feed?

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So my parents left a couple weeks ago (2 weeks ago Sunday night) for Indonesia for 10 weeks. They are going to the middle of nowhere on the outskirts of Indonesia, to work in an orphanage taking care of infants and working with some Indonesians teaching English as well as teaching bible classes.

I’ve gone through task of creating a web site to keep everybody up-to-date on what they’re doing, how they’re doing, and any-and-all pictures they send my way. Please take a minute, check out the site, and let me know what you think:

Prayers for Indonesia

So please keep them in your prayers and thoughts, as they will be over there for a long time, and it’s definitely not a safe area to be… especially as a Christian couple, the Jihad (striving to fulfill the wishes of Allah, such as removing Christians from the face of the earth) are pretty thick in the region, and they need all the prayer you can spare.

Let me know your thoughts on the site, and please keep them in your prayers.

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I finished up some freelance this past month, that’s mainly the reason in the delay of posting the last couple weeks. You can take a look at my most recent release to production, for the Alaska Community Development Corporation.

It’s probably the least ‘visually stimulating’ of the sites I’ve done recently, but it’s rock solid, and looks great all around I think… and most importantly the client was very happy with the turnout, which is obviously the most important part. Always nice to get some state-known projects in the portfolio for a little bit more exposure than the average site as well!

Aside from the Alaska CDC site, I developed a site for a motion graphics artist down south, who is getting the site finally into production. She did the design, but I did all the implementation of styling/css/xhtml, and beautification… then made a sort of instructional template for her to continue on with adding her work to the site in consistent fashion… and she’s done a great job! So really it’s not a design piece of mine, rather a beautifully coded and rock solid functioning site.

She has amazing amazing motion graphics work, you’ve even seen some of it in movies and commercials, so please take a bit to check out her work at CamilleChu.com

Please let me know what you think!

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So I found out this week that Loveline has a podcast on iTunes, however the free subscription only gives you the first ten minutes of each show. That’s sad because each show is like an hour and a half… so that’s just a teaser. The ‘premium’ membership costs $5/month, and apparently I’m just too cheap to do it, I guess mostly because I think it should be free for the whole show. I listen to the show whenever I get the chance, and I’m a huge fan, but I can’t make myself pay just to listen to it, and I don’t see why it should be okay to charge for it, when it’s free to listen live when the show is on… so why should it cost money to listen to it as a podcast? If anything it would make people like the show more and try that much harder to listen live so they would be able to call in and ask questions! I’m disappointed Dr. Drew and Stryker, very disappointed.

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The Biggest Loser is such a cool show. Sure, they add in all kinds of unneccessary drama, but it sucks you in. I love shows out there that are basically solely devoted to bettering people’s lives and circumstances. Shows such as The Biggest Loser, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, Supernanny, etc. These are a different category than just your average ‘gameshow’, like Deal or No Deal, which is also obviously hugely impacting people’s lives, just it seems a slightly different sort of show. I think Extreme Makeover: Home Edition has the best spirit of any show on television, as it is entirely based upon drastically improving a family-in-need’s lives, and it’s just a great show with an awesome mission! What other shows would you say fit into this category?