Year: 2007

There’s always time to make a resume.

Personal

I’ve made a resume once in my life, but never used it when looking around for jobs. This was because most of the jobs had their own applications which essentially served as a resume. But for the past week or so, I’ve been looking around for a new webdesign position to get more experience with other places, and to get my foot in the door with a larger corporation as opposed to a couple of guys running a small consulting firm.

All of these jobs require a resume to be sent in via email and/or fax. However, because my field is webdesign, the best way to approach this is by designing a resume template for my private website. Not only does it state my objective, experience, skill, and education but it also shows them right off the bat what kind of design skills I’m capable of. However, while designing it, I figured that although it showcases my skill, other people might benefit from the resume template.

The template was designed with smaller resolutions in mind. Therefore the width is static, and is set for 700px. Anything in this template can be changed in regards to font family, font size, colors, you name it. I don’t require that you give me credit for it, however it is welcomed and appreciated. I just ask that you do not take credit for this in your resume or portfolio. I’m sure you can figure out on your own why you wouldn’t want to do that.

If you want to see a working preview of it, you can visit atourworst.org/resume. If you want to go ahead and grab the template files, visit atourworst.org/resume/source.php. There are other files involved that you will have to download if you want to use the same format from the resume. I’ve listed them all in the source, so you’ll be able to download them from their original websites.

If you see a need for improvement or have any critiques, feel free to share them. I’m all ears.. err, eyes?

I promise I won’t let it die

Personal

It’s been awhile since I’ve actually put any effort into maintaining this website. Essentially I’ve abandoned it, but as of late I’ve been trying to spark my interest into wanting to have it active and full of life. I’ve been working on a new design on and off again for the past few days, so hopefully I can muster up the will to get it finished.

I’ve also finally decided to bid adieu to countless WordPress plugins that I don’t use at all. I also really need to update the content here. There are some pages that are just useless and don’t need to be available, and some just need to be cleaned up because they featured broken content/links.

I should get paid for having a personal site.

The joys of being a hermit crab.

Personal

I’m sure you were thinking that this would be some fantastic entry about a pet hermit crab. Unfortunately, the hermit crab in this case is me. I’ve made the decision to spend most of my time at home then go out and deal with the world. The past month and a half haven’t been all that pleasant for me. I don’t blog too much about my personal life because I like to keep it more closed circuit so I’m finding it hard to really blog about the intricate details. I just don’t want the entire world to judge me for it. Yeah, I’m a fragile. Whatever.

Despite the fact that I do enjoy being somewhat of a social butterfly, I honestly prefer to stay home and enjoy myself here. I’ve had the chance to play too many hours of Halo 3, read up on some new Dean Koontz books, and work on three different designs for my website all of which I ended up deleting shortly after.

I suppose it’s easy for me to be such a hermit because right now my car is in the shop again ($450 worth of repairs), and well, I’ve just had a few personal issues on my end that resulted in me not talking to any friends and just wanting to “find myself.” I’m not so sure that I’ve found myself, but in the process I tried to get the courage to stop talking to Mark, planned out a move back to Louisville in late March and/or April, and became more intimate with my money habits and sent myself a decent budget.

On a more uprising note: my butt hurts.

What have I been up to? Halo 3, that’s what.

Gaming

I’ve probably started at least 10 or so entries in the past week or so, but I just never want to finish writing them. That will explain my lack of posting in the past few months. I just haven’t truly had something worthwhile in my life to really blog about.

I work, I go to school, and I play Halo 3. If anything, I should be blogging about Halo 3, considering that’s the one thing I do the most in my life right now. I admit that I am ridiculously addicted to the game, more specifically the XLIVE part of it. For almost four weeks, I’ve watched cable television maybe 2 of the 24 days. The other 22 days I’ve been on Halo. And it definitely shows. And on that note, the rest of this blog is going to be about Halo 3.

Riane On Half

My character is a UNSC Spartan which basically means that in multi-player (Xbox Live), I’ve won 20 or more ranked games. Bungie has this ridiculously intricate ranking set up for XBox Live. Currently I’m a Lieutenant Grade 3. I haven’t received too many achievements from playing campaign as I’ve only done two missions thus far, but I play more online matchmaking than anything else. But online matchmaking has a lot of medals that you win throughout matches, regardless of it being social and ranked. Some of them are achievements but not all of them.

So far I’ve played about 805 matchmade games, most of those being Team Slayer. I’m just not big on playing Social matches simply because I hate dealing with parties larger then 4-per-team and the arrogant people that tend to stick to social. There are times when I’ll have really bad games (usually Shotty Snipers) and there are times when I’ll have really amazing games, like this gem right here. I had 50% of the games kills (25/50), and ended up getting some uber sweet medals I haven’t gotten before like Overkill (Kill 4 opponents within 4 seconds of the previous kill.), Extermination (Get an overkill on an opposing team that results in all of the team being dead.) Needless to say I was pretty stoked about that, but I think I intimidated the other guys on my time, because noone partied up with me.

I’m really a huge sucker for Halo 3 though. I honestly can’t get enough of it, so much that I’ve put off buying Call of Duty 4 and The Orange Box because I don’t feel like stopping with H3 just yet. Though when you couple that with not wanting to spend money, it’s a perfect reason to stick with Halo! Though since I don’t want to really buy a game I won’t like, I ended up caving in and subscribing to Gamefly.

The first three games on my queue are:

  • CSI: Hard Evidence – Shut up! I just love CSI and wanted to see if the game was any fun.
  • Half-Life 2: The Orange Box – This will be the deciding factor in whether I’ll buy it or not.
  • Gears of War – I’ve been told that the campaign is ridiculously sweet, but that the online multi-player sucks donkey doo.

So there. Now you know what I’ve been up to and currently obsessing with. Oh, and for those of you that have Xbox Live, feel free to share your gamertag. I’d be willing to hit you guys up for some matches on Halo 3 (cos you know, that’s the only game I ever play!)

Riane on XBOX Live

It should be easy for a webdesigner taking rudementary webdesign classes, right?

Personal

When I decided to go back to school to get my Associates for Web Design and Administration, I though that it would be a lovely piece of cake. I’m not being cocky in regards to knowing the material, but I figured that it would be easy to do the assignments, tests, and projects in class with no need to ask questions, or really have to rely on someone to get me through it.

The problem I am dealing with for my webdesign class is that the material is outdated, partially deprecated, and is compromising to the values and accessibility rules I stick with. I’ve tried to stay focused on the [online] class but I keep drifting away from the assignments. One of my first assignments was creating bookmark links (<a href="#about">About</a>, <a name="about" id="about">About</a>), fixing up some unordered lists, and deleting text (I shit you not, this “teacher” had created a comment in the HTML saying “Delete this section.”)

My biggest wafoo came when I had to make an image map. Uhm, I had to question why I was even in class. I don’t want an easy ‘A.’ I want to earn it, and work hard for it. I want to learn something, because I don’t want to pay $300 for a class where I’m regressing my talent and knowledge just to get some piddly Associates.

I’ve dealt with the bullshit from the class, and I’ve done the tests. My problem right now is this god awful midterm project he created for us. Not only does he hinder my creative side by setting the topic to health, but his list of requirements make me want to punch him in the face. Then again I wanted to punch him in the face when I saw his JJC staff website page. You’ll want to punch him in the face when you see it too. Then you’ll ask yourself how the FUCK did this asshole get the role of being a webdesign teacher with that atrocious garbage.

Moving on, here are the requirements for my webdesign midterm:

Required Elements

  • A minimum of 1 picture on each web page
  • Proper navigation to all 4 pages, available at the TOP or LEFT side of each page. This should be consistent.
  • All of the navigation links should be placed within a table, whether it is horizontal or vertical.
  • Use the following tags: cite or q, dfn, em, strong
  • Alt tags must be used on EVERY image tag
  • Go into the paint program (or any drawing program that you are familiar with) and draw a body, face, ventricles of the heart, bones in a hand & arm, etc… whatever is most appropriate for your site. Create an image map out of it and have a minimum of 2 links, each linking to a web page within your site. [This is where you may need to create 6 pages in your web site, rather than 4, in order for these links to link to content appropriate web pages.]
  • Every page must have a title in the browser window title bar.
  • The ONLY file you are submitting to blackboard is a ZIP file, with all HTM and image files needed for your web site.
  • Vary the use of your content tags, H1-H6, p, br, hr…
  • You must properly indent all lines of code
  • Make sure that you test each web page for XHTML validation

Optional Elements

  • Frames
  • I recommend that you put all content in a table first. Even if it is a 1×1 table.
  • Design your web pages for a screen size of 800×60.

Criteria

  • XHTML pages can be transitional
  • All writing on the web pages must be ORIGINAL writing by YOU, unless otherwise cited.
  • All cited material must be appropriately cited and quoted.
  • All pictures on the web site should be created by YOU. Don’t worry, I am not looking for Picasso level images…

The asshole in me really wants to create an iframe based site that breaks in all browsers, but is still fully XHTML validated coding. I want to use neon non-safe webcolors, and glittery animated images. But I’m not. I’m going to actually just code up the new design I was making for atourworst.org and also apply it to my midterm. Why go out of my way to design something I won’t use again, when I can just kill two birds with one stone?

It’s shit like this class that is really making me rethink registering for next semester. I really want to get my Associates, and then my Bachelors, but the mere thought of paying some fucking asshole like my professor, for bullshit that I already know (and don’t use) is what really gets under my skin.