Close to home
Yesterday, a local Lane Bryant was involved in an armed robbery that resulted in five of the women in the store being shot. Four of them were pronounced dead, and one shortly died later from the injuries sustained. I was in shock namely because this is just a few miles from where I live. I shop in the strip mall every month. Hell, I worked at the Best Buy that was in this plaza.
I’ve been keeping up with all of the news articles, and the Chicago Tribune, Five victims named, sources say sixth survives, announced the victims names, as well as Lane Bryant putting up a $50,000 reward to help catch the piece of shit that did this. There’s a lot of differences between newspapers and news reports, but apparently he made the woman go into the backroom, and whatever happened in there, he subsequently shot them all.
His victims were: Connie R. Woolfolk, 37, of Flossmoor; Jennifer L. Bishop, 34, of South Bend, IN; Rhonda McFarland, 42, of Joliet; Sarah Szafranski, 22, of Oak Forest and Carrie Hudek Chiuso, 33, of Frankfort. May you all rest in peace.
Using Elance.com to widen my client base and wallet.
When I landed a job as a web designer for a local consulting firm, I’ve had nothing but code running through my veins. I can’t get enough of it, and honestly, I don’t think I could live without it. I’ve been looking at making extra cash for awhile now, but haven’t had any luck. For awhile there I was browsing Craigslist.com to pick up some of the extra gigs for website designs, but I rarely received any communication back. Or if someone was interested, they’d fall off the deep end (which is also why it’s a good thing to charge a 50% deposit up front–don’t want to get screwed out of work you do…)
Now before you think this is some god awful sponsored review, well, you’re wrong. I can’t remember how I found this exactly but I believe I was searching through Google for “freelance websites,” and other variations of it. I ended up stumbling across elance.com and immediately was interested in it. Before I joined up I browsed around some of the companies that are listed on there, and then some of the projects that are listed as well.
The system is divided in half. You have one section that’s dedicated to finding professionals and another part of the site that’s dedicated towards finding work. There are eight categories each of the two are divided into which range from Web Programming to SEO & SEM. Since I’m only interested in finding work in the web programming area, I ended up just browsing around some of the listings and was just a bit confused on the setup.
It’s not like a standard listing where you contact them, and if they’re interested, they’ll go with your services. Each listing is actually similar to an auction. They state how long the bidding will last for, what their budget is, how you’ll get paid, and then they have the option to list the details of the project that needs to be done, or what they can do for you.
Once you’re logged into your account (and you’ve completed the criteria necessary to actually bid [membership fee of $9.95/month, an Elance test to "certify" your account]), you’ll see a special section next to the bid where you can submit any questions to the user about their product/services, and then you’re able to type in your proposal to them. You can attach files to give them a better idea of what you can do for them. Once you’ve got that down you can then submit the price you’d want to be paid for the project, and how long it’ll take to deliver it.
Then it’s a waiting game to see if your bid will get accepted. I’ve noticed that majority of the users that are using the Find Work section of the website are from India, and other countries in Europe. I’ve also seen a few from the states but like I said, majority from India. I’m not sure what my point is in mentioning that, but it was just something I noticed. Most of the bids I’ve set for projects have ranged from $150 for a small 5 page hosting company design, to $500 for a Wordpress powered blog with a custom design and other plugins implemented within the design.
I’ve yet to receive a project yet as one of them I bid on has just ended today, and some of the others are set to end in a few hours or in a week or so. But I’m kind of hoping that this will help to bring in extra work my way so that I can just get some rainy day cash flow started, and hopefully appeal to my need to waste my money on electronics, plane tickets, and well, you know, pizza and beer.
Regardless of the fact that I’ve yet to make any money of it, judging by some of the stats I’ve seen from other users (in each bid it shows their feedback given by the bid starters, as well as how much money they’ve made on Elance), it’s definitely a great way to earn money. One person/company from India had over $100,000+ in profit from bids they’ve won on Elance. Now I’m not sure if it was all design based, or if it included various other gigs. Either way, I’m hoping that my profit will get to at least 1/10th of that!
Other resources about Elance:
Finally something different!
Since my Fall semester ended last week, I’ve been able to put some extra time into creating a new layout for atourworst.org. It’s about time too because I was becoming really sick of the previous design I had created (which also broke in IE6, and unfortunately I was too lazy to fix it up.) It’s still a work in progress, but for the most part it’s done. As far as I know most of the coding validates (namely XHTML portion) but I still have to run through the CSS that’s being used for other plugins here.
Speaking of school, I’m making the decision to change my major. I just can’t deal with the webdesign portion of it anymore. I’m not challenged, and I’m not learning anything I don’t already know. So I’m going to change it to computer programming. I’m sure I’ll end up bouncing back and forth between the two but the plus side of it is that most of the classes necessary are for either of the degrees–so it’s not like I’ll have random classes that won’t work for the other.
Other then that I haven’t been up to much lately! Just trying to keep myself busy with little projects here and there. Of course video games take up a decent portion of my “I’m bored” time too ;)
There’s always time to make a resume.
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?