TeamSD: Adventures of Lawyer Girl and Demian Man

Typically, I don’t make New Year’s resolutions.  I haven’t thought about it much, but it’s probably because I think that if you want to change something about your lifestyle, there’s no reason to wait until New Year’s to do it.  This year is a little different.  With a daunting year at work on the horizon, I figure I need a little more structure (and a little more accountability) to keep it together.  With that, here are my (inartfully stated) resolutions:

1.  Keep better track of my finances.

2.  Don’t be such a fatty.

Since we bought the house in 2007 and I started wedding planning, our budget and finances have been in shambles.  I didn’t keep up with how much we spent, paid some bills late, and just generally had no idea what the hell was going on with our money.  As a result, I think we’ve spent a lot more (and saved a lot less) than we intended over the last two years.  Well, no more!  With the wedding over a year behind us, I have zero excuse to not get my act together.

As for my second resolution, maybe I’m being a little harsh on myself, but I think I’m going to have to be – it’s just way too easy to tell myself I’m too busy or too tired to work out and eat right.  Thanks to a colleague at work, I’ve now committed myself to working out at least 3 times a week.  We started back in December, and now that I’ve gotten used to making exercising part of my weekly routine, I’ve gotten up to 5 times a week.  It’s really only 20 minutes each session (thank you, Jillian Michaels!), but it’s perfect for my busy schedule and otherwise lazy self.  I’ve started to notice a difference in my body in the last week or so, and that’s been really satisfying.

There are probably definitely other things I could change about my lifestyle, but I think two resolutions are all I can handle this year.

Wish me luck!

Yoyo. I haven’t posted in awhile, but I’ve been doing more twitter updates lately (see above for work hilarity). I just wanted to take a quick moment to write a post to gloat about something.

A few weeks ago EVGA (makers of the BEST video cards in the world) — no bias here at all — held a bunch of really cool contests. One of which, was FREE to sign up for, where all you had to do was play this video game (Team Fortress 2) on one of EVGA’s servers on “TF2 Weekend” and then you’re entered to win a drawing for a bunch of different prizes.

Anyhow, I sent the link to a bunch of my friends and I got mixed responses from “Ohh maan, I’m not very good, I don’t think I’d be able to win anything” (it’s a free raffle, just enter, play, and win), to “bah, I’m just too lazy” (apparently too lazy to win free stuff).

Either way, what happened was, the TF2 weekend came about, I queued up to join the EVGA server and play a round… loh and behold, all my other friends we’re playing TF2 at the exact same time (just on a different server) when they could have been playing on the EVGA server. Anyways, I played a few rounds on the EVGA server, quit that server to play on the same server with my friends and a few weeks later I am now a winnar:

My winnings! (New 23" Samsung 120mhz widescreen monitor, and 3d evga glasses -- floss not included)

EAT IT!

Well in an effort to beef up my web devleopment category as well hopefully provide some page rank to this new site I’ve developed, I’ll start posting some of the new websites that I’ve been developing and working on (well, at least the fun ones).

How it got started:
I met Terry at a comic book convention a couple of years ago (Super Con in San Jose) and we somehow got talking about some previous issues he had with his website and I offered to help out if he ever needed it. Recently we got in touch and developed this beauty below!

Terry Dodson's homepage

Terry Dodson's Portfolio

Design: All of the design was done by Terry Dodson

Development: Built this mostly with plain html/css, just using php for includes and other simple functions. Used a little bit of jquery to get some fade effects and for the portfolio slideshows.

Visit Terry Dodson’s Official Website

So I’m pretty sure everyone knows, but I <3 Zazzle. Perhaps the greatest place to work at, but it’s also a great place to get gifts and shop around.

So at work I don’t have a mousepad and so I’ve been waiting around and decided to just buy one from Zazzle to have at my desk. Then it suddenly dawned on me, “DUH, I collect all this art at home, I might as well turn one of them into this awesome mousepad”. So I printed the mousepad below!

Philip Tan Supergirl Mousepad

Pretty cool huh? Anyways, I’m really pleased with the way the mousepad turned out, I’m thinking of getting some mugs or something else with the art on it.

On a semi related note, there is a sort of new restaurant with the chef from the Grateful Dead/Google in town and country village in Palo Alto called Calafia and they have the moooossttt delciious smoothies. My favorite smoothie has organic orange juice, carrot juice, peaches, honey, agave and vanilla yogurt. So everyone should go visit and try that smoothie. Oh yeah… and it’s called the Zazzle Zinger (coincidence? I think not… Awesome T-Shirts = Awesome Smoothie). In all seriousness, the smoothies ARE really good and the Zazzle Zinger is the best one…

Zazzle Zinger

If you haven’t noticed, I’ve updated the wishlists for me and jaci in the navigation above.

I’ve had the functionality updates done for a little over a year but just got too lazy to implement the back-end to update it. Some new functionality that the wishlist provides includes: new jquery sorting, print page option which removes all styling and prints all the notes, additional sidebar navigation, and new icons that you can hover over which will say when the item was added or if it was updated recently. The big new edits were in the admin section which most of you won’t see, but I enabled one click completion, one click delete, and a tabbed interface to allow for quicker loading.

Some things I plan to work on still / troubleshoot: The entire teamsiudemian.com domain seems to be running a bit slow. I’m not sure what might be causing that but I’ll keep looking into. The lag seems to also pass on to the wishlist. I’d also like to take a look into adding auto completion, shared wishlists, and hidden wishlists for the admin side.

Anyhoo, if you guys run into any problems with the new wishlist let me know so I can take a look into it.

New Wishlist Interface

Wishlist Admin

Oh… and btw, my bday is next week. Coincidence? I THINK NOT!