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09
Nov

In Other News…

Ginger

I’m at almost 60,000 words for my NaNoWriMo project, having just finished my first book of the set of five I’m aiming to pound out by the end of the month. I think this is a series I could easily edit and self-publish, and I’m really happy with it. I never thought I’d be the sort of person who would enjoy writing a fantasy novel (I like to read sci-fi almost exclusively), but here I am, and I’m quite enjoying it. I’m actually drawing upon a novel I originally wrote, also for NaNoWriMo almost two years ago, based on a dream I had in which I saw a bunch of characters doing something, and I was curious enough to see how the characters had gotten to that point, and what happened after, that I decided to write it out.

I could see doing this for a living. Hey, if Stephenie Meyer can do it, so can I, right? :)

I think I’ll do some nonprofit webwork to round out the week. I have my eye on a couple of easy projects that involve Facebook apps or fleshing out a new website. We’ll see if I’m motivated enough for more.

The household had a great time last night watching the Portland Irish band Darby O’Gill perform. A few other friends attended what ended up being this intimate acoustic set with Scott and Ken. We should make this a much more frequent occurrence, hehe.

We’re looking at having the car looked at by a professional at the close of the month. As I have a job lined up for December that will require me to be mobile, this is a bit worrisome. We’ll see. I’m also looking to acquire a new smartphone during the same time frame as the car. That will be a happy thing.

I should probably start visiting the local thrift stores for work pants and shirts…

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18
Sep

This Week’s Goings-On

Ginger

This week, I decided to do a bunch of tasks through Fiverr at the cost of $5 per task, just like the website advertises. I tackled a bunch of new WordPress installs, including themes, for people who were interested in such (their domain and webspace were already there, or purchased separately), and did a few whimsical banners for those who were searching for such. There was one person who wanted a theme customized beyond what I considered to be mild tweaking, and so we negotiated an additional $5 for that. lol I have a list of plugins for WordPress that I group into different packages, depending on the client’s website needs; for example, a band would need to show booked events and showcase their music, while a realtor would require a consultation request form and a gallery for photos and layout diagrams. I love WordPress.

I’m about halfway through my current volunteering assignment, a social media campaign for an international nonprofit; Twitter is gaining a lot of momentum in the form of @replies, personal messages, and new subscribers, and the Facebook app has proven very popular. I’m not associated with the Adsense advertising also going on, but that’s also garnering a lot of web traffic for the organization. I get an email whenever a new ad goes up, and I watch the statistics spike as more and more people either click a link, or use Google to search for more information on the organization. Very fun. This would be the same firm for which I initially created the social media accounts, mentioned a few weeks back. The vice-chairperson I have the most contact with has expressed his approval of my work so far, and has asked me to train an English-speaking volunteer in France to continue the work I started. The vice said specifically that he’ll keep my contact information in mind for future projects regarding the various social networks out there. I am always pleased to gain another repeat customer.

My calendar of events is now virtually unlimited–for a couple of years I have had set hours due to the various real-life demands on my time each weekday. For example, I transport a friend to and from work. I gave her notice that with the recent changes to my household, it would be difficult to coordinate her schedule on top of everything else that is going on. My last day of transport was this Friday last. I don’t feel as frazzled about juggling online and offline responsibilities now.

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12
Sep

Something Something Complete

Ginger

Good gravy, I’ve been busy.

I wanted to make sure I had a volunteer gig set up for today, September 11. I remember what happened in 2001, and I also remember how people came out of the woodwork to help each other. I try to schedule something wherein I can give to my community. Today, that something was the suicide hotline; I (wo)manned a chatroom and talked to people who needed an empathetic ear, for a total of five hours. It’s something I do roughly once a month, and it’s not something I talk about often. Today, I heard from a few individuals who were very triggered by the date, and one in particular who had a sibling on one of the planes. Everyone was really cool.

After that, I left the house for a few hours with a task in mind; I was to meet up with a friend to acquire a car. The car has been acquired, it’s sitting in our parking spot, insured and all that good stuff. I haven’t driven a station wagon before but apparently I will now, hee.

Hubby spent the last couple of days dogsitting for a serviceman friend who had to go do army stuff for the weekend. Having sat in the friend’s house for a couple of days without A/C in sub-100°F heat, hubby was quite ready to get out of there for a bit. We went on a minor joyride to get him some edibles and me some noms. We then housesat together until our friend got home. We awayed with ourselves to home, soon after leaving once more to go to the store, because we could, and were way too gleeful about it. “Hey honey, I’ll go wait for you, out by THE CAR!” “THE CAR” was our exclamation for much of the day, giggling fiendishly at all the stuff we can now do with it.

I’m chomping at the bit to get more fabric and go nuts with sewy things, but I’m thinking it’ll be mildly prudent to sit on that and have gas money set aside for the week. Upon writing that, I realized that my roommate will likely have need for me and said car, so that will push the gas need up a bit.

Gosh, I cannot tell you how happy I am to be mobile again–Portland is a nice city but never being able to get out of its limits really gets to one. One longs very much to see the stars without city light pollution, for example.

The moonrises and sunrises have been dramatic lately–there aren’t any forest fires in the immediate area, but there are a few in the Cascade Range, creating a vague haze along treetops and hills. The satellite and the star are much redder. In fact, the other day, I was startled to see that the sunlight streaming through the blinds was shining on the walls a very vivid red.

So, I was using zingiber.us as my “business” website, but after considering it, (and I kept wanting to share my sewing tinkerings which are not at all business-like,) I decided to copy the few entries I had over to this domain, and make a blog out of it. Why? Because it was bugging me and now it’s not. Also, most of my usernames are identical to this URL, and why double-up on stuff like Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, and the like, if I could use the same thing for everything?–

I am sorry, I have had a very long day and my writing-themed brain cells went to sleep hours ago. I think I’m going to follow them to bed.

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01
Sep

Charitable Goings-On

Ginger

I’ve been busy again!

Recently, I finished up a Facebook app for an organization for underprivileged kids in India. I was given two weeks to incorporate custom social media links to Twitter, Blogger, and a few other major websites, create badges for subscribers, and create a portal script through which the public, the fundraising organizations and major corporation representatives, and the Indian organization could communicate, share ideas, develop and participate in contests and fundraising campaigns. It was a really ambitious project and I wasn’t sure two weeks would be enough. Constant contact through Skype and Yahoo, and a little subcontracting on my part for the easiest, most time-consuming portions, and the project was completed just this morning.

I love my informal team, my cohorts are always willing to step up and help whenever I ask, especially on these unpaid ventures. We’re all professionals, some of whom work from home and some of whom are just connected to the internet seemingly 24/7 for professional purposes. Thanks, guys and gal!

Also on the volunteer front, I had a small influx of fresh photos and descriptions for animals to be listed on Petfinder. I’m usually told when an animal whose profile I developed has been adopted, if only to update the adoption status and depreciate the profile. Seven of the eleven animals, four cats, a puppy, and two birds, have new homes. Another two cats have promising leads; their fosters will let me know what comes of them.

I was looking at some of my other domain names, and wondered if I might make a personal blog out of one of them. I keep wanting to write about my offline crafting ventures and ideas, but I don’t really think zingiber.us is the right place to put those thoughts. There are a few entries that could be cross-posted to both blogs, but I’m thinking it will be a largely separate entity. I’m still brainfarting about that one.

Oh! I have a standing engagement to write weekly posts regarding another charitable company’s goings-on, copying the info on a few different social networks, for eleven weeks. They forward me their emailed conversations, so that I can glean some sort of overview of what’s going on, and try to encapsulate the weekly news tersely and accurately. It’s what I call “spinning“, wherein I flex my writerly muscles and summarize what the client wishes for me to convey to the public. As a subset of that, I’m in charge of @replying those who take the time to comment on the company. I’m wearing my social media manager hat for that.

I’ve been spending a few hours of each day off the computer, sewing of all things. My SO’s been listening to an audio book in the only room with good lighting; I’ve been considering listening to podcasts while I do my thing, so that I’m amused. It’s not that the audio book is boring, but I don’t want to listen to that every day. But enough about that non sequitor. I think about more projects I could be doing online, and I write them down if they seem especially important or attention-getting.

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26
Aug

Quiet = Busy

Ginger

I try to think of something most every day to post on this blog, be it an idea, an assignment, or a project I’m gnawing on. If I haven’t started or finished something, I’m always at least working on something.

I don’t update as often as I’d like, because sometimes I bury myself in something and don’t come up for air long enough to remember that there’s a blog here. There are days that are entirely devoted to somethingoranother that I’d like to work on, or a puzzle to work out.

For the past few days, for example, I’ve been busying myself with a newly found development kit. I made a pit stop here long enough to share a new link, and then I was back at work, or performing a daily errand, or I’d gone to sleep for the night.

Right now I’m playing with a text-to-speech app for the iOS, emulating the vocal properties of a couple specific famous people, and figuring out how best to render a static image that will automatically lip sync to whatever has been typed. It sounds silly but I have a specific audience in mind for this.

I’ve also added a few more freelance websites to the link list. I have an active profile on each site listed. Business is steady, the projects are small, but I’m having a lot of fun, and I pretty much get to afford foofy coffee, a recent and disturbing habit.

Woo, an update!

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14
Aug

Educational Video Editing

Ginger

I just finished up a twelve-episode series for a nonprofit organization through onlinevolunteering.org, featuring animated characters who explain and teach science to children. After receiving the assignment and the topics to cover, I networked with a fellow volunteer with a background in science, to help me come up with a hypothesis to prove or disprove a statement pertaining to the topic, and developing a 15 minute episode depicting the scientific method in exploring the topic.

I advertised for nonprofit voice actors through Craigslist, requesting voicework to be sent through email, or through Skype. I networked with four people for the voice work, two who recorded their own material and uploaded it to our workspace, and two who allowed me to record them on my computer. I edited the vocals myself, found free creative commons sound effects, music, and other foley. I then created hand-drawn animations in a derivative of Photoshop, matched mouth movements to the audio, and compiled everything together into cohesive episodes.

There were three people involved with the quality assurance portion of the project, one directly linked through the assignment, one of the voice actors who expressed an interest in seeing how her voice was being used, and a friend of mine who enjoys seeing my work and critiques it unabashedly and impartially. I reworked three particularly clunky sections in which it was decided that a little more explanatory dialog was needed. It was also through the collaboration of the QA team that we decided that there needed to be a narrator to make the series, and the stories therein, more cohesive.

It turned out to be a really fun gig, and the recipient company, a client in South America, gave me many positive accolades for the work spanning two months.

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13
Aug

Random

Ginger

I have all sorts of random tidbits that can be collected together in one entry.

I’m helping a friend develop his photography business website, featuring a custom-coded HTML5 photo gallery, custom PHP automated link generator and emailer for paid downloads, organizing his thousands of photos into an intuitive heirarchy so that they are able to be browsed by the casual shopper, and easily added to by the site owner. This is another pro bono assignment, to which he asked, “Why are you doing this for me?” I answered, “Because I enjoy making websites, I know this is a dream for you, and I want to do what I can to help.”

I’m considering some classes at the college nearby; I kind of want to get into home realty, I sort of want to step into the human resource gig, I like the idea of being a transcriptionist of some sort, I am amused at the thought of holding a bartender license, and I think it’d be a really good idea to take classes on business management and organization. I’ve been self-employed for the better part of twenty years, but I’m very sure there are ways I could be better organized. I think it’d be very responsible to have the means to fall back on something part-time that has nothing to do with coding, programming, or design, when the paid gigs are slow in coming and the pro bono stuff doesn’t pay the bills. There’s also the draw of interfacing with people without the required aid of a computer somewhere in that interaction.

I keep wanting to natter on about the other projects I do in my spare time, such as teaching myself how to sew, using patterns and the whole bit. But that isn’t necessarily anything I’d do in a professional capacity, and so I’m hesitant to make yet more tags and categories for those entries on my so called “business” site. I’m a huge fan of crafting of all sorts, but that seems a different topic altogether. But I still wanted to mention it. I like to ooze creativity, apparently. :P

There are so many businesses, franchises and original retail outlets, that I wish I could start in my immediate vicinity, or the greater Portland area, specific businesses that this area lacks. But with the uncertainty of both the economy and where my residence will be in the next couple of years makes me hesitant to start anything.

Something that continually comes to the forefront of my thoughts is the need for transportation. So much of what I want to do in my spare time (and even professional worktime) involves being mobile, often during hours and in locations difficult to arrange with public transportation. The aforementioned English pub website gig requires me to sit on three different busses for 2.5 total hours before getting to my destination, which takes 20 minutes by private vehicle. Yes, I could request a taxi or the like, but that becomes cost prohibitive over a longer period of time. I’m considering how to raise money for that, setting up a donation link, or being more strict about how and where I spend my income.

I suppose that’s enough for now. Oh yeah, I received my Genbook in the mail, finally. And it’s just as crappy in construction and presentation as I had anticipated. Ah well, I’ll see what can be done with the monster.

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