So I figured I’d mention that my resume has been updated, looking a bit spiffier, thanks to the assistance of the Reverend Doctor Barbara Ewton of The First Congregational Church of Verona, who my dearest Emma lives with, helps and who is giving us a lot of help in the wedding preparations! It’s down to one page, the fonts are updated (Segoe UI), and it’s really looking much better. I probably need to update the infographic that I’ve had going with my resume, as well, to make it a bit more punchy.

I hadn’t really thought about it in quite a while, but it really needed a revamp. Next step is to put it up on the job sites, get a push on my visibility.

So the people I live with have been having a tough kind of few days. I decided to make dinner, and looked around the house for what we had. Thankfully, we had stuff from a Costco run recently, so I just asked for someone to please get me some mozzarella cheese, and boom it appeared.

So I thawed three of the very large chicken breasts we got from Costco (the house brand), then got out one of the larger pans. Put some sauce in the bottom, put the chicken in. Put some sauce on top, then sliced up some of the mozzarella cheese (not a lot, and not very thick), and put it on top. Then some more sauce on top of the mozzarella, and sprinkled it with basil and oregano, and baked for about 25 minutes. The cheese got soft, the chicken got done (you’d probably want to cook longer if you used the chicken frozen, but I think that might mess things up a bit), and it went over well. Served it over noodles, a little bread on the side.

There were leftovers (my housemates couldn’t finish the chicken breasts, which are very very large, to be honest), so they have food for tomorrow.

This is how I spent my evening, cooking. It’s terribly calming, in a way, when you have to consider what you’re doing and how to do it, and focus on it.

Tuesday is the Lightroom panel at the Seattle Area Photoshop User Group meetup, which has the promise to be very interesting. (I’ve played with LR4 a little, and should get to know it better soon.)

This past weekend I watched the movie “Helvetica”, which some people might think would be terribly boring, but if you have an interest in these sorts of things is actually very interesting – looking into how the font developed and spread, along with interviews with fontmakers, graphic designers, and going into why there’s a number of designers who dislike Helvetica’s ubiquity, and why. Really, very interesting (at least for me). I need to watch the other films in the sort of trilogy, “Objectified” (about industrial design and designers) and “Urbanized” (about urban design, including architecture). The third isn’t quite my thing right now, but knowing about it might be pretty useful. (And all three are on Netflix, so that’s helpful!)

Thinking I should ramp up my drawing, too. Just because I still am pretty terrible at it, but there’s only one way to get better. I may just not have the eye for life drawing, but some other kind may suit me.

Goodbye 2012. You’ve been fired, please clean out your desk and get out now.

Updated to WP3.5.

I think I need to get going a bit more. Perhaps change is coming.

(note: this is a revised version of an earlier post.)

So I picked up an [amazon_link id=”B001FA1NK0″ target=”_blank” ]Apple TV version 2[/amazon_link].

The first thing to note is that it’s small. Really, really small. Go get a half-gallon of milk, and that’s the footprint on the entertainment center. A good hardback book laid down is taller than this device.

The second thing is the setup. Very easy. Plug in power cord (no wall-wart), plug in HDMI cable (no other output for video, although there is an optical output for audio), plug HDMI into TV. Get the remote, turn it on. The hardest part of the setup for us here was the insanely long password we had on our wifi connection.

Once we got that going, I associated it with my machine’s Home Sharing, and then set up the Netflix Streaming, and boom, done.

My roommates, one of whom is a self-describe Luddite, was able to easily pick a cheesy horror movie with Netflix and start watching it. She doesn’t really like intense technology, and she was able to get things running right away. (I don’t know the movie; I’m not big into horror.)

Then, just to see how it worked, I took it over remotely. I was watching a movie (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World) on my iPad, and I just tapped the screen and AirPlay tossed it right over.

And as a final test, I pulled up something from my YouTube playlist and did the exact same thing. And with only a small delay to load (no more than would be normal), what I was watching on my iPad appeared on the TV. As you might expect, the better the quality of the video on YouTube, the better it appears on the screen; don’t expect a nine-year-old 320×240 video to look suddenly like a 1080i Blu-Ray image just because you’re using the AppleTV to view it on a 1080i TV.

The one downside I’ve encountered so far is the input mode. You cannot synch a Bluetooth keyboard to it, so searches and entering passwords require you to maneuver around an onscreen keyboard. For long entries, this can become rather tiresome.

The other very small downside is that the remote is very small, and rounded, and seems to love to fall between couch cushions.

So: unobtrusive, easy to set up, easy to use, and AirPlay on both the iPad and the iPhone works just fine with it. I highly recommend the device.

I installed some new plugins on my local WordPress install so I could get practice with membership, ecommerce and DRM setup.

Also, I think I will not be updating my Twitter Tools plugin install guide. The plugin appears to be abandoned. On the other hand, perhaps I’ll try to figure it out and update it myself.

I am considering getting a portable lighting tent kit, since at the very least my first (hopeful) job may include setting things up for e-commerce, and taking photos in a controlled condition will help considerably.

I’m trying to decide if I need to make an S-Corp or LLC filing. The business license is currently a sole proprietorship, and I don’t know enough to decide about making the changes. There’s some small business starting things going on in Seattle, so I may attend those to figure out what’s best.

I think, though, that I’m starting to get my brain around some of the ideas for this. However, the one I’m least-aware of is how to get more clients. I just lack the knowledge, I guess, but again, the small business startup seminars should help with that.

It’s just strange to think that… this is actually happening.

I admit to being somewhat less than informed about Ignite-style presentations. Basically, a presenter gets 5 minutes to present, slideshows automatically update so they need to keep up, things like that.

There were three, and I’ll link them as I can.

First was Sheila Hoffman, who talked about WordPress plugins. She posted all of the information at a page on the Hoffman Graphics website (her business).

There were also presentations by Larry Swanson on Workplace Fitness, and Grant Landram, called “How to be a better WordPresser: Tips & Tricks for users & dev/signers”. (As I’m a user, moving to dev/signer, this was one I was mightily interested in. Sheila’s was also very helpful, and interesting, for me.)

The chat after the break, where I sat in on the plugins discussion that Sheila and Bob Dunn moderated.

I’ll try to keep up with what went on at these, even as I know other people do, because the more word gets out, the more people show at the meetups and the more interesting discussion goes on.

I’ve been trying to put together in my head what my new business idea is going to do. I know I can do WordPress setup and design; I can use Photoshop; I can write (as a technical writer and as a fiction writer); I’m working on programming again (JavaScript/Ajax, PHP and Python). Ten years of work for my previous employer gave me a number of skills, some useful and some not so (due to in-house-developed, non-portable programs to do what some companies do manually). I can take photographs fairly well, but not professionally so.

But what does all that do for me? What do I do with all that?

And I have an idea. I just don’t know quite how to phrase it. Online concierge? Digital Doorman? Technical Assistant? It’s not quite coming together.

The idea, as my business presentation showed, was offering myself to small business who have no online presence and helping them build one. Social networking, building a web page, getting themselves set up. Make some money from that, and maybe some followup work to keep them up to date (for, uh, a fee, of course).

I need a job title. That’s the thing that’s getting me right now.