Inspired Nonsense

I've been using a notepad from Behance called the Action Pad for the past year or so, and I love this pad!

I tend to take notes as thoughts occur to me, and as such, my notes can often get jumbled between topics (as my mind wanders sometimes ;)). In the past I would use a simple notepad and use stars to denote action items. Eventually I moved the action items to the right hand side of the page, creating a separate column. When I started more UI wireframing and such, I moved my notes to graph paper. At that point I was pretty pleased with my setup, until I stumbled across the Action Pad.

Now, I don't subscribe to the Action Method, or any other method for that matter. But the formatting of the pad itself perfectly fits how I take notes:

• First of all, the Action Item boxes on the right-hand column are fantastic


• The small area at the bottom right is ideal for parking-lot items


• The small area on the top is great for random thoughts and ideas


• And the graph dots are much more versatile and nicer to use for wireframing or other drawing

In the end, I love this pad and am more than willing to pay the $8 per pad to use it. I highly recommend this, along with a Moleskine or some other notebook for personal or off-topic notes, as an ideal set of pads for your computer bag.

At the end of 1999 I was working an overnight job that a monkey could do. My most recent romantic flame-out was fresh, and a deer had run in front of my car on the way to said monkey job on Christmas Eve. All of these events inspired me to spend New Years Eve with some friends and a large bottle of Patron Anejo tequila.

The next day (after the fog had worn off) I made a decision, I was going to take charge of my life again. I started learning HTML and Photoshop in the spare 6-7 hours of my 8 hour overnight job. I also decided to pursue the woman who I had fallen for years earlier, but the timing was never right.

Now I stand at the cusp of 2010, married to that same beautiful woman for over seven years (we're expecting our second child in June). I'm also now the User Interface manager if an excellent team and am ready to embark on the next decade of my career in web.

So my goals for the next decade?

• Focus on the things that matter to me. Gaining this focus won't be the hard part, keeping it will be.


• Patience to see the opportunities already in front of me. Maintain the long view of my goals and persevere.


• Appreciate the good luck, relationships, and life I already have. I've spent much of the last few years lamenting what I'm not doing professionally and personally. High time to turn that around.

Professional goals for the next decade?

• Share more (blog, meetups, etc.). Focusing on my particular POV being inside big biz with a small web team and the tools/methods we use to succeed


• Attend one social web meetup/gathering each month. I learn so much more when attending events like these and getting to know fellow web professionals in Denver.


• Keep my eye on the prize. Always remembering my career is my own path. Always be checking the road signs to make sure you're still on that path!

And on a personal note, my new years resolution is to restrict my TV time to the weekends so I spend more time reading and with my family. This one will be particularly difficult as TV is how I chill out on any given day!

Okay, so I thought moving over to WordPress would force me to learn the system better. Only thing is, I really don't have a pressing need to learn it!

Movable Type is a fine publishing system, and now that I'm using TypePad at the office, it only makes sense to move at least my main blog back to MT. Plus, I already know how it works!

Now maybe its time to finish working on my new blog design. Hoping to have it done before 2010.

Okay, so first off, I'm not a Facebook newbie.  I've been using Facebook to converse and track the happenings of my family and friends for years now.

But...

I was shocked today.  Simply shocked and amazed.

I sat in a room full of small business owners at my local chamber of commerce to discuss social media marketing.  Conspicuously, each table had the icon of a social media network hanging above them.  Halfway through the hour, the presenter suggested each attendee should all move to the table with the network most relevant to their business.  The networks listed were:

• Meetup


• Delicious


• LinkedIn


• Twitter


• Facebook

A good lesson.  Now I need to learn more about Pages and the other side of Facebook!

I've been spending spare cycle time this last week thinking about a good name for the freelance small-biz web consulting I want to start doing on the side from my day job.

And...I can't think of a single good name...at all.

I've thought about just building out a branch off of seanevanking.com, but I really want to keep that strictly a resume site.  So I'm left domain name hunting.  So far I've been to:

• The Dotomator


• crawled all over Urban Dictionary (I swear someone buys the domain name for every entry)


• Brand Bucket (too costly for freelance, but not bad for startups)


• I even went through a list of words ending with "us", to cleverly use the .us tld

I'm not giving up.  I think this just may take a while, and a large section of my oversized whiteboard.  If I'm lucky, I'll stumble across something before 2010...