About a year and a half ago I saw my older sister’s website for her home based business and decided I couldn’t allow it’s outdated look to continue to poison the internet. Since I was building this site free of charge, it became sidelined many times as I was busy with work and my other activities. After I was laid off, I decided it was the perfect time to finally get it done.

My Little Impressions makes a replica of a child’s unique hand and footprints. These precious statues are then mounted in a choice of a shadow box or on granite. I redesigned and rebuilt this website using Wordpress so that the pages and pictures can be easily added and edited. Below you can see the before and after screenshots of the website design. I’m not that great of a designer (I think I just don’t have the patience for it), however I still think this turned out pretty good and it’s a huge step up from what it was before!

BEFORE

AFTER

Love Me:

When you have a job you don’t have much time or motivation to do work for yourself (or at least it seemed I didn’t after a while). My blogging frequency dropped off after a few months at my past job because I got busy and tired and didn’t have the motivation to keep it up, even though it’s something I enjoy. Same goes for anything else career related. So I guess being laid off has been nice in a way that it has given me an opportunity to rediscover these things.

One is definitely blogging, I’m going to do my best to keep it up as often as possible again. The other is mostly just skills in everything I know how to do. I’m keeping up with things by finally finishing a site I did for my sister, which should hopefully be launching this week sometime if I can get all the new hosting figured out (her old host’s website was copyright 2002 and has a max of 40MB storage space… EEK).

Of course, my other side project would be updating this website, perhaps doing a design of my own and getting rid of this old creeky thing. I love how illustrations look and I think it would be cool to be do an illustration of myself to put somewhere in the new design. Unfortunately for me, my patience needs a little more work to take on a project that large – illustration is so time consuming! Perhaps I should just try an hour a day to start out and see where that gets me…

Love Me:

Canadians are robbed blind by the high cost of the things they pay for. We pay more for food, alcohol, gasoline, clothing, and telecommunications than many other countries, especially the United States. This is one of my biggest peeves about Canada – maybe we’re just too nice, that we just take what they give us without a fight.

I for one, though, will not take internet metering lying down.

The CRTC just decided to let your Internet Service Provider put a meter on your Internet.

Bell Canada and other big telecom companies can now freely impose usage-based billing on independent Internet Service Providers (indie ISPs) and regular consumers. Big Telecom companies are obviously trying to gouge consumers, control the Internet market, and ensure that consumers continue to subscribe to their television services.

This means we’re looking at a future where ISPs will charge per byte, the way they do with smart phones. If we allow this to happen Canadians will have no choice but to pay more for less Internet.

PLEASE SIGN THE PETITION TO STOP INTERNET METERING

Love Me:

Another freelance site has launched! Experience the breathtaking photography of Brendan Robinson, based in Chilliwack, BC.

Love Me:

I guess to start off today’s entry, I’ve got to say happy day of thanks (you know, cause its Thanksgiving, here in Canada). Although my 3-day weekend started out pretty good, it didn’t end the way I would have liked. It seems I ended up working 2 half days out of my 3 day weekend and I feel like I’ve been running around like a turkey with its head cut off. Lots of work to do and so little time to do it in!

I went to the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s Music of the Night performance on Friday night and was that ever amazing! If you’re in Vancouver, or are from Vancouver, and you’ve never been to a VSO performance, you are missing out! It’s unbelievable that you can get tickets for $25 a seat (and the sound quality is just as amazing as it would be from the $150 seats) and witness that kind of talent. It was definitely a time that I was thankful for my sense of hearing.

On Tuesday I finally got the rest of the pictures for one of the freelance projects I’ve been doing. Once I make some more last minute tweaks and add the new photos, then prepare to be amazed by the photography of Brendan Robinson! My other freelance project which consists of my first attempt at theming Wordpress, should be up soon too – so stay tuned!

This weekend I was house-sitting/dog-sitting for some people I know that live in the Dunbar area of Vancouver. Last time I stayed at their house in June I discovered something seriously cool and I forgot about it until today when I happened to drive by it again. I give you the darn coolest looking elementary school I’ve ever seen. Who WOULDN’T want to go to school when it looks like this?!

Okay so, the orange pylons kinda take away from the whole ambiance, but still pretty darn cool right? I’d go to that school! I didn’t get a good photo of the playground, however it looked pretty awesome too. That was until I discovered what made this whole thing not so cool. Deal-breaker = no swing set and no merry-go-round. WTF?! Why are playgrounds so boring and “safe” these days? Lame.

As a side note, I was gonna do this whole awesome post about the new Google Street View here in Canada, but then I got too busy and the rest of the blogosphere beat me to it. So instead, enjoy this cool post on things spotted in Toronto with Google Street View.

Love Me:

Wow! It has felt crazy busy the last few weeks not only with freelance projects and Toastmasters, but with the social side of life too. It’s time to get blogging again though, especially now that sweet, sweet, Autumn has returned.

This upcoming week at Toastmasters we have our Club Table Topics and Humorous Speech Contest. Originally it was so hard to get people to sign up as contestants and I even threw myself in as a contestant hoping to get the ball rolling. So now I am participating in the Table Topics contest and we have over 14 contestants between the two contests. Oh, of course some may drop out as they realize there’s no time to prepare a speech and such, but overall that’s still a good number!

I also need to get going on my regular speech projects again as I’ve only completed three and I’ve told myself I will have my CC and CL status by the end of the executive year. That means I have to do at least seven more speeches to get the CC and a few other projects for the CL as well. Writing a speech isn’t really a big deal for me, not really. It’s more about the topic to choose – what can I write a speech about that will keep others interested?

On the web side of things, I’m doing another set of demos for our hockey pool website, PickupHockey.com. The downside is I’m terribly equipped in the audio department, so my next mission is to excellently equip myself and do those demos again, with better audio. I’d also like to find a way to make them more interesting, cause they’re pretty boring to watch. There’s got to be a way of doing them in a more captivating and fun way.

With the return of Autumn, comes the return of more time indoors – meaning that hopefully more work will get done. Despite the increased time indoors, I really do love Fall. Today I went for a bike ride around Stanley Park and what a lovely Autumn day it was. With that, I leave you with a photo of Siwash Rock along the Stanley Park Seawall.

Love Me: