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:

This week Jess let me chair the meeting again at Toastmasters. It’s good practice for sure and I’ve made up my mind that I’m definitely running for president in the club executive elections on May 27th. On my way to Toastmasters I even thought of a good argument for why they should vote for me. I’d tell you, but then I’d have to kill you (or bring down your website). I’m saving it for the actual election speech. I’m actually really excited about it and I feel myself opening up more and becoming a lot more comfortable with Toastmasters, speaking, and being myself around strangers in general.

I finished the flash book Leigh had ordered for me, and the satisfying part of it is that I knew about 98% of what it taught. My first project is going to be a Netgenetix social photo gallery which Leigh wants me to treat as a real project with a project brief, a timeline, and deliverables. That should be interesting in terms of the timeline/deliverables, only because I’ll be working on it in my free time, not on a daily basis like a client project. Who knows what client work may fill up my time in the coming weeks?

I’ve come across some awesome design/development articles and pages in the past week that I’d like to share. Take a gander, I’m sure you’ll find at least one of them useful or inspiring!

• • Create an Image Rotator with CSS/jQuery
• • 40 Tutorials for Creating Highly Detailed Icons
• • 26 Horizontal Websites for Inspiration
• • 20+ Brilliant List Styling Techniques
• • Meagan Fisher – An Inspiring Designer
• • The World’s Largest Free Textures Site
• • Run Several Versions of IE on your PC

… and you can see more of my cool website discoveries by following me on Delicious.

Love Me:

I guess I’m a little behind on my Toastmasters updates eh? Well, last week I did the Invocation, which is what starts off the mood for the meeting. Usually people talk about things that are really meaningful or generally serious and inspiring. So I decided to do something a bit different and, again, steer in the direction of happiness, which I’ve posted in the comments for this entry.

This week I did the word of the day and the language evaluation. I have to admit when I was trying to think of an uncommonly used word the first one that came to mind was  “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”. Yes, its in the dictionary! However, that word is a bit silly, and as Justin mentioned, I didn’t want to make people hate me. So instead I chose the word “flabbergasted” cause its a fun word and its not often used. I have to say though, compared to previous meetings, everyone was good at attempting to use the word. Woot. 1 point Bekah.

Also, Jess did a last minute speech which she threw together in something like 20 minutes (or less!) for tonight’s meeting. She talked about interviews and what you can do to have a better shot at getting a job offer after leaving an interview and feeling good about any interviews you have – without feeling like you could have done better after you leave. And, of course, it was nothing short of amazing. I don’t think there will ever be a day when she doesn’t amaze me with her abilities and skills…

———

As for Netgenetix these days…

The boss is having me learn flash… that’s gonna be awesome. I know the basics and a decent amount of AS3 from school but I never got into it much at that time. So I got a book and have been doing some self-teaching but its a bit slow right now with how busy I’ve been… however I’ll hopefully be starting a class for it in the fall probably. I’m actually pretty excited… I’ve always had super good ideas for things that could happen in flash but obviously don’t have the patience for the design part of it (as usual)… but once I get good at it and I’ve got Justin to design stuff before hand, then that will be pretty sweet.

Also, I’ve been wanting to write a few more new blog entries for Citrus however haven’t had much of a chance lately. If anyone has any good ideas or things for me to write on regarding SEO please share! (Anything you’d like to know?)

Oh! And the NHL Playoffs started today! How exciting! Yay for the Canucks first win against the Blues! This means an overload of support emails on our free hockey pool website, PickupHockey.com. I’ve been helping out with these support emails a lot over the last couple days and I’m not sure what it is about them… but I’m ADDICTED! I dunno what it is, but I’m addicted to replying support emails and doing so as soon as humanly possible! It’s actually pretty exciting, Pickup Hockey is growing so much and it’s freaking awesome… I’m not sure what it is but I love watching the number of registrations and daily visits continue to climb. I’m proud to say I contribute to keeping one of the biggest hockey pool websites on the internet alive and well!!!

Anywho, that’s enough rambling for one night. Later!

Love Me:

Here is my first speech as a Burrard Toastmaster (the Ice Breaker). Titled “Recipe for Happiness”, props to Jess for help on the title (and editing of course)!

———-

Good evening fellow toastmasters and most welcome guests,

If you were to ask anyone who knows me to describe me in one word, I have no doubts that word would be “happy”. I find that being overly cheerful comes quite naturally to me, and I’ve never really known anything different. Some people might say it’s because I haven’t been jaded yet or I haven’t been through enough hardships to be bitter about life and its many challenges. However I honestly don’t think it has much to do with that. What I’d like to share with you are the things that keep me so upbeat and cheerful every single day.

Firstly, I have a great many interests and dreams; as most people do. The joy in each of my interests in some form ultimately finds me in some way or another each day. Whether it be listening to the tunes from my favourite musical, Hairspray, or uncovering a great piece of design which often comes from a certain colleague or old classmates. It doesn’t stop there either, I find simple happiness just from dreaming about the travels I hope to have one day, to experience the world I haven’t had a chance to see yet. It all begins when I wake up in the morning to my favourite radio DJ’s, with their upbeat tunes, and their silly banter, I can wake up happy, and then be ready to start my day.

I find that work keeps me happy too. To some, this might seem crazy. Yes, work makes me happy. What a notion, I know! Even back in the day when I used to be the opening manager of McDonald’s, getting up at 4:30am to go and make eggs and get yelled at in the drive-thru. The truth is, being cranky and working at McDonalds at 5am doesn’t really get you anywhere. So I found ways to keep me happy – singing and dancing while you’re making Egg McMuffins helps A LOT, although it does get you some weird looks.

Now, I work as a Production Assistant, for a web development company, and it doesn’t require singing and dancing to keep me happy. I just simply love what I do and I love the people that I work with; I see something amazing in each of them, just the chemistry that we have together is what makes me happy. In all honesty, even though work is tiring, I don’t know what I would do with myself in all that free time or if I would be nearly as happy without being able to go to work everyday and see all the people I enjoy spending time with.

Another thing that makes me happy is just singing and dancing in general, neither of which I do well, I might add. A lot of people don’t know this about me, but when I’m walking to and from work, I mouth the words to my favourite tunes and even bust a move once in a while, especially if I’m walking up Lonsdale Ave from the Seabus. Yeah, strangers probably think I’m weird (and you probably do too), but it makes me happy and that’s all that matters. Singing isn’t something I do out loud in public very often, however I love to sing, I just wouldn’t subject other people to the painful sound of my voice. Although I’m probably sure that people in my apartment building have heard me belting it at least once or twice to the melody of “You Can’t Stop the Beat”.

There’s a phrase I often use with my friends as we get older. Have you ever heard of being “maturely immature”? As we get older, we get more and more mature, or as some people put it, more serious. Serious? I just don’t do serious… unless it’s absolutely necessary. Sometimes to remember that not all things have to be taken so seriously we need to have our childlike immature moments. This is how I describe “maturely immature”, and it’s what I tend to be a lot. If something makes you feel like you wanna laugh, why hold it back? As some others say, “Growing old is mandatory, but growing up is optional.”

There are so many factors in my day to day life that keep me cheerful, so many, in fact that I can’t begin to think of all of them. Maybe, most of all, its just that I enjoy being happy and being a positive happy influence on the people around me. I hope that today, not only have you learned a few crazy things about me, but that you have also been able to take a piece of my happiness and add it into the recipe that is your life, to make the flavor just that much better.

And remember, it will always take more muscles to frown, than it does to smile.

Love Me:

With a little bit of graphic design assistance from Justin, and the authentication and upload from a couple of developers, I completed a small project yesterday. Netgenetix updated an online customer management system used by travel agencies for a company called Pro File Client. My project was making software demos to make learning the system easier for its users. There are three demos, one for an agent level login, one for an admin level login, and one for sales and marketing purposes. Over the span of about two weeks I managed to re-write the scripts, learn to use Adobe Captivate, code the new html pages (from an old template though, so not difficult), create pretty buttons for the videos, record all the audio and put it all together for upload. I was so hoping for a lauch on the deadline before noon. Unfortunately due to other projects being launched and other daily distractions I was unable to have it uploaded until nearly 5:30pm at the end of the day. This means all the QA things I noticed which couldn’t have been tested until it was live will have to wait until Monday to be fixed.

Despite the annoyance and frustration this project brought me, I actually probably had the most fun working on it than I have in the past few months on other projects. I learned so many things working on this one project alone as well. From simple coding tricks and some design tips to dealing with difficult audio. I can’t even begin to list all the techniques I tried to make the audio for these demos usable. Everything from making home-made sponges for overtop of the mic to making full on tents around myself to keep the sound confined and adding blankets and material to absorb the sound in an extremely boomy and echo-ey conference room. I spent hours trying to make the audio usable for these demos.

Considering the majority of this project was done myself it was also an experience in project managing myself. I’ve never really done any freelance projects and building your own website doesn’t really have much of a deadline unless you want it to. In order to make this deadline I pulled my first all nighter since college – and it actually wasn’t too bad – I managed to stay awake and still be productive at work the next day. People say to me, “why? why are you doing extra work you don’t get paid for?”. And the answer is, because I want to. I guess I’m exceptionally dedicated and caring when it comes to work than most people – but I’m not about to let a project go out past deadline or looking like crap if I can help it – especially if its a project I did all myself. It’s about the pride in the work and the reputation you get from it. I want people to look back on it thinking “Rebekah did an amazing job on that project” not look back on it thinking “We can do this project well as long as Rebekah isn’t involved”. It’s about pride and dignity, dedication, and the feeling it brings you when it’s done.

As for those demos, well, two of them are password protected but you can see the sales demo if you want. However I’ll warn you its probably pretty boring – its a software demo. Those of you who want to provide tips or criticism feel free to do so.

Thanks!
Rebekah

Love Me:

Citrus has made an impression! It’s being featured on more and more CSS Gallery sites for its inspiring design and amazing CSS work. Here are a few sites it’s featured on:

CSS Mania

Most Inspired

Screenalicio.us

CSS Count

CSS Based

CSS Impress

CSS Leak

CSS Star

CSS Creme

CSS Brigit

Love Me: