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Friday
13Nov2009

aleggUp and New Projects

Just finished a project I've been working on for the past 3 months. A website for a start up in the states. They're called aleggUp. They're specializing in helping high school and college students gain some focus on what they want to do professionally and otherwise. Check it out if you have a chance.

With all my focus on aleggUp I've neglected some other projects. I don't regret taking the contract. It was a good experience. I have two personal projects I'm hoping to start working on full steam here shortly. A satirical music/scene review site. I don't want to say much more than that. I'm still working out the specifics. I'll post more when the plans are bit more firmly laid. I'm also working on a start up of my own. I've been considering starting a company of my own for a while. Still doing some research. Trying to find out what I need to know to even accomplish this. All the basics, what forms I need to sign and such, what I need to register, what type of company I want to establish. It's going to be a design company, which there certainly aren't enough of, am i right? But, I'm trying to decide on inc, llc, that sort of thing. Got advice? Send it my way, pdukes (at) pauldukes.com.

Like every father before me, my daughter is amazing and beautiful and cute and the 2nd most important person any my life. Sorry sweetie, mommy comes first. It's been kind of hard having all of this work and so little time to spend with her. We go on lots of walks. It's a good way to get all of us out of the house. My wife is on leave for another 9 months. Not to brag, but I'm in heaven. We went shopping and bought a new Ergo. It's awesome and should be great once the snow decides to start sticking. We don't like using a stroller. It's more cumbersome, and Elsa prefers hanging off my chest like a little monkey.

Friday
11Sep2009

Quick Update Between Feedings

I've been away for a bit. And by away I mean extremely busy. I picked up a few new contracts. I will be posting more about in my current projects section whenever I have a spare minute. I don't know when that will be though, because my daughter was born on Sunday, YAY, so I'm usually spending spare time with her.

No updates on my jQuery quest, but Lynda.com just posted an essentials tutorial that I plan on doing whenever I can get one of those now elusive spare minutes. Also, I was wrangled into signing up for Plurk.com so feel free to friend of fan me if you use their service.

Tuesday
28Jul2009

jQuery Master?

So I've been busy doing a lot of nothing lately.

Well, I take that back. I've been reading a lot and trying to do a review that is long over due for Nerdyblog. I've been building baby furniture and trying to get the house ready for our first child. It should be here in a little less than two months. And I say it because we don't know what we're having. Right now we're just hoping it's a human.

I guess work wise I'm in a bit of a holding pattern. I've got a new version of a site I've been working on for about a year now. I was hoping to launch it a few months ago but I've been having to teach myself some technologies so that I can implement certain functionality. While doing that I've also decided this is the year I master jQuery.

So far it has been an easier journey than I expected it to be. My main problem with learning new things is usually myself. Either letting myself get distracted with other things, whether it's a game or book or life in general. A common problem I have is starting something getting distracted, forgetting about the thing I started, then remember I started my project, feeling bad that ignored it, and then ignoring it some more because I'm disappointed in myself that I forgot about my project. I'm sure you can see, it's a vicious cycle. To be honest I started my adventures in jQuery earlier this month. I had planned to finish a book or two that I bought on the subject by the end of the month. That hasn't worked out so well. I'm on page 25 of book one. I figure that maybe if I put this out there for people to see then I'll feel smoe sort of motivation to see this through. If, you're curious check back in January to see how I managed with that.

On a different and final note. What is up with the Firefox 4 screen shots. It looks a lot like Chrome to me.

Friday
19Jun2009

All Moved In

So I finally got everything transferred over to my new home here at Squarespace. I'm loving how easy it is to edit pretty much everything.I'm not planning on giving up on Wordpress. I still manage Wordpress based sites, and I'm looking forward to all the upgrades in 2.8.

I've posted two short articles over at NerdyBlog.com concerning Google Wave and Opera Unite. Go check those out if you're not familiar with them. They both look like they're shaping up to be great advances for the web.

So that's all for now. I'm hoping to get back to my regular schedule of posting now that I've got this site up and we've gotten moved in.

Wednesday
10Jun2009

Squarespace Test Site

Since I've been having some problems recently with my normal hosting provider, I decided to give Squarespace a try. I've been hearing great stuff about it for a while now, and I figured now was the perfect opportunity to give it a try.

I have to say I love it. I've been playing around with it all day. I've not been this excited about web design since I first began developing sites with Wordpress. On one hand I'm excited about the possibilities. On the other I'm worried about losing my job. The WYSIWYG editor available with Squarespace makes things so easy to do when people find out about it everyone is going to want to build there own site.