New House ... Ughhhhhh

Well I bought a new house last September, well that is when the process had started, and I finally will be moving in next week (first week of December) and I think the whole process is going to put me in a early grave...lol.

The whole mindnumbing process of moving my operations (my office/computer network of hosting servers) to another location overnight is putting a heavy feeling on mychest. I mean all those wires and power to be setup is kinda scary, especially when it ahs to be done overnight cause of the downtime, and knowing that I cannot get access to the house an earlier to pre-prepare...

Now the mortgage part of things is ... ugghhh wait here comes another migraine... ok thats a sign I wont even get into that mess (mortgages).

Now the actual moving of furniture and stuff, Im not looking forward to it, I just hope this is the alst time I have to do it...

Short blog today cause I got no time.

Sodexo Foods

So I finally put two and two together and realized that this company (Sodexo Foods) is the same company that feeds our children at our schools for breakfast and lunches, that feeds me for breakfast and lunches at work.

Now what bugs me is that at my work, I have great lunches. For lunches I can have freshly made pasta's, salads, sandwitches, and other great food, but at our childrens schools they are getting pizza slices, french fries, hamburgers and other not-so-good foods.

What is the difference, the kids lunches are costing us almost the same amount of money and Im sure they would eat what we eat if you didnt have the other stuff also. If you didnt have the other crap, then the kids WOULD eat the better stuff.

I was told by a Sedexo employee that its because the kids dont want the foods we (adults) eat at work. I replied, well they dont want what I serve for dinner but they eat it, what choice do they have.

Well thats my gripe, it doesnt make sense that we spent the same amount of money and they get crappier meals.

Well last month I mentioned a ottawa photographer site that I did and couldnt get the page rank up, and still have failed to get it up. We decided to use the Google Adwords approach, but now that we did that we went from a 3 to a 2.... Im confused.

UPS Confuses Me

Well here I am waiting for an important package from UPS, and the tracking service they provide really confuses me.

The package was sent on October 21, and had an "Estimated Delivery Date" of October 25th and showed in a town near by me on October 23rd.

Well today is now the 29th of October, and the information in the tracking is completly different. The tracking information shows it going from town-to-town until the 27th of October, and is NOW at the same town it said it was at on the 23rd of October. Hmmmm, add into the factor now that they have added a "Train Derailment" to one date.... weird.

There information is completly incorrect and cannot be reliable, or am I the only one getting this kind of "reliable" garbage. How is one suppose to set aside time to actually get the parcel if they cannot provide a reliable date of delivery.

Now calling them is even a bigger waste of time... Uhhhhh UPS, clean up your practices.

Well my site of the day is a ottawa medieval site that gets together weekly and practices the art of medieval warfare in Ottawa Canada.

Are We in a Recession?

Somebody please just make an official statement on this. The markets are up and down faster then a yoyo, and gas prices are confusing me.

So in the last month markets have dropped almost below 8000 points on the DOW and gas is half the price it was in July/August (yet the price at the pump doesnt reflect that).

My question is, should we be spending money, or saving money, should I wait for a better mortgage rate in a month or grab it now. SOMEBODY please let us know before its too late.

Anyways I guess being an average citizen I am left in the dark like the majority of us are and just want answers.

Well back to work, I have to finish up my latest site, a precast concrete site based out of Canada.

Gas Prices 2008

I dont get it, I really dont get it.

Like most (I think) I will never understand the price of gas at the pump. The price of a barrel of gas is lower then it was over 2 years ago and yet we are still paying the same price as we were when it was 95-100$ a barrel. (Currently its 68$)

We were told it was a six month difference between the "Commodity" price and the pump price, but that seems to only be a factor when the price is coming down. Heck the price of gas went up yesterday cause the barrel went up 0.50 cents. Its down almost to 65$ a barrel and I expect the price to probably jump 3 or 4 cents tonight.

Maybe someone can explain it to me.

And with a sinking economy on the verge of a recession OPEC is going to cut production cause they are not making enough money, isnt this what put the country into a recession, the factor of greed? If its a recession and gas is priced to high, who is going to buy it?

On that note, I decided to buy a new car, and decided to go to the local car auction place and found some good deals, but didnt buy anything. I think I will go for a few more weeks and see what kind of great deals they have.

Just Not Working!

So I spent the evening (starting at 4pm) over at a friends house trying to help him install his satellite dish. Now before I get into this, I have setup MANY satellites before and if I have a problem with the setup, it usually is a simple fix... I wish it was this time.

So in this time and age if you have a satellite dish and want both regular and highdefinition channels, then you need to have a dish that has 2 LNB's on them (the things at the front of the dish, not the dish itself) and I have lined up these things sooo many times I can do it without the satellite finder that I used to use when I first started. Now this time it became the WORST ever expierence to try install one of these things.

So I go and line up the dish as usual, and run my wires to the receiver and go to the receiver and start setting it up to receive the signals. Well here is where it all began. I was able to get one satellite in, but not the other. If I pulled the wires from the one satellite, the other one would come in, and vice-versa. Now after about an hour of pulling my hair out and trying things, I decide that its probably a bad switch (thing that lets the receiver determine what channel is on what satellite) and decide to replace it. After I replace the switch it seems to be the same thing. I tried new wires, new LNB's and another receiver, and still nothing.

After seven hours I was still unable to make both work. I tried SEVEN different switches, 3 different receivers, 4 sets of LNB's, and numerous setting changes.

After all that... NOTHING... thing still doesnt work, and forces me to try again. I guess my next option is to try another box of wire and see if that fixes it. The other thought is that maybe its a metal roof and its not grounded? I have never had this problem and its driving me nuts!

American Pie is on this evening, I saw this movie YEARS ago, and its just not the same movie with all the cable edits... LOL.

My selfless website of the day would have to be a birthday and special events clown based out of Toronto named Petunia the Clown. Did her website awhile ago and always liked the layout.

Business Sucks

I always thought of myself as a down to earth, easy going, always wanna help someone out kinda person. Yesterday showed me another side.

Now I have been a webdesigner/code monkey for over 10 years now, and have designed and implemented over 100 websites both corporate and small business. Now I have NEVER had a complaint about my work, service, and pricing in any of those years, and never have had ANYONE not pay me, or give me grief about payments. I would have to say that I have a 100% success rate with websites and they all seem to be successful... I guess lucky me.

Yesterday was my first time that I actually had to get upset at someone regarding one of my designs/implementations. The client told me he didnt like the pictures in the site "they were to COMMERCIAL" for his/her business and I said "ok, I can change them", but I never understood why he/she would want to change the pictures, but so-be-it, its not my website, its theirs.

So after I get the feedback from the client about the picture's he starts yelling at me after I ask if there is something else, he just keeps telling me "it's sh*t, its sh*t". Now Im kinda insulted and surprised because usually I get rave reviews on my sites that I do (even if they are not my idea of "professional looking"), and keep asking what is wrong, and he keeps yelling the same thing, and throws the phone at the ground, and tells me he doesnt want it.

I am thinking that I did bad work, then I get a call from him saying he wants to use parts of it like the logo design and other graphics which completly confuses me cause if its sh*t, then how come he wants to use parts of it. So I tell him "no" he cant use it, he has not paid for it, and again he gets mad starts slamming the phone and hangs up.

So the person that referred him to me (since I only work on referrals) calls me up (just by coincidence, i think) and tells me how much the client was praising his new website the night before and he agreed with him. Ughhhhhhhh

So I guess I just ran into my first "refusal to pay" client and figured out what he was doing... he is going to steal the design, logo etc and get someone else to replicate it, Damnnnnn!

The other side of me came out cause I was mad, mad at the fact I got ripped off and mad at myself for doubting my work because if I dont make you successful then my work looks bad in the long run, and I wont get referrals. Now I know that helping people out by charging them less and doing extra stuff will probably bite you in the butt!

Well after all that I had to look at something funny and found a funny website called WholeLook.

I Have No Time!

I dont even know what made me think of writing a blog, its 2am in the morning and Im adding sites that I create to other sites I have created to help them get better search engine ranking.

The first site I have been working on is a Ottawa Photographer named Martin Photography. Their ranking has been bugging me lately cause the site has been up for awhile now and the site just is not coming up for any keywords in Google except their company name.

Now what I dont understand is that Google says that it has no link in's, but I see alot on sites such as DMOZ, Google Directory, etc etc with their link, its really confusing me.

Now there is another photographer in the region that is known to load his page full of keywords that are the names of other photographers in the area, and he actually shows up for their name. This just eeeks me and really gives legit programmers a bad name.

So if anyone knows another way to help me get this Ottawa Photographer a better ranking, then please feel free to leave me a message.

Thanks!