Curative Design

Ghetto lighting - Like this group’s admin suggests:
“If you use desklamps, your window, candles, whatever else I have not mentioned, then you my friend, use ghetto lighting.”

Digital Photography School had another ghetto lighting assignment this week, and though I’ve had a sort of dry spell with little free time and anti-camera sentiments (It happens ), I’ve dusted off the canon to take this photo, only because my cat - Volki - looked too wise and the force seemed very strong with him today

As the name suggests, Volki was lit up or “back lit up” by my monitor, something I’ve been regularly searing my eyeballs with and which has suddenly been given a whole new purpose (to light up my cat’s whiskers for a photo shoot!)

See what you can do with your lamps, disco balls (I know you have one!), or random contraptions that omit light.

Share/Save

It’s the little things that make a web or online service great. I don’t know what to classify Xbox 360 LIVE, but I’m assuming it’s an internet service. You’d think you could cancel by logging into Xbox and clicking on membership/modify subscription. They only give the option to renew subscriptions for longer terms…

Actually there’s a whole lot of assumptions when signing up for LIVE.
Maybe I’m just stupid but when looking at the packs of -Monthly, 3 months, 6 Months and I think they even had a Year, I assumed it was pay once every month manually.But Of course it means creating a subscription that takes about 40 minutes to cancel on the phone, 3 months later..having found my credit card charged twice (How antiquated).

The ordeal was alot more complicated than it should be.
- the LIVE account was connected to an old email address that has been canceled 2 years ago (on PC). Could have been avoided if a notification was sent while canceling the email address..kind of like “Hey btw - Xbox uses the same darn login so you might want to look into that….”

- As I stupidly assumed it was a once off monthly expense, Microsoft was charging me every month on a credit/debit card. Which I didn’t account for and hadn’t the money in my bank to cover it. I assume at this stage my subscription would auto cancel…Unfortunately it just creates a backlog of payments as if paying for rent/electricity and water (I don’t even think major utilities stay on for the rest of your life while charging you endlessly into bankruptcy, they simply get the hint and shut off!)

No Microsoft has to create a thing call “pending balance”. So while on the Monthly subscription I assumed, “awesome, I’m ending this here and now”
The operator kindly told me of my pending balance. This confused the heck out of me..
“How can a subscription payment be canceled and still have a pending balance?”
(answer: refer to the ironic charging practices above)

After 40 minutes, almost being referred to the website as my identifying details were incorrect, and after asking “which details were incorrect? It’s been 5 years since signing up to LIVE, addresses and phone numbers change”

” I’m sorry, we can not provide that information”
…being put on hold…

Later discussed when I was charged (what dates)..Operator says 27th, I say 28th..he adamantly says 27th and I say “whatever, probably difference of timezone as I assume you are in the US”.

He says “We are not permitted to disclose the location of the call center” (dude, relax..I don’t care!)

Now I have a pending balance and a subscription I assume will terminate at the end of the month.
Wouldn’t it just be easier to allow customers to login to their own accounts and cancel it on their end? They need to read “Getting Real” by 37 Signals And while they’re at it, look into less eternal charges that live happily ever after!

I’m used to being on the service/product end where we think about all the ways to make customer service top notch and to minimize emails and calls coming in. I think a “cancel membership button” is the most basic option a service should provide to their users.

Share/Save

On work:
To be idle is a short road to death and to be diligent is a way of life; foolish people are idle, wise people are diligent.

Don’t know a great deal about Buddhism (infact..close to nothing. While visiting the temple where the word dharma kept showing up, all my husband and I could think of was “lost”!! Silly shallow people) however, all that I do know is respect and admiration for a religion of peace and self respect, dedication and wholesomeness.

Not sure how it all relates to Business, but I think for life as a whole, to integrate even a few of Buddhas teaching could be a better start to life.
And of course there’s the beauty of zen gardens… ;)…

Share/Save

Not much happening on the Curative Design front as I find myself swamped with my other full time job. This poor site is being sadly neglected. I’ll still be adding random posts from time to time such as this image for Digital Photography School for the assignment “vivid”.

Share/Save

Something I’ve found difficult to locate online is information regarding Paypal, billing and subscriptions. They do have a pretty extensive help center and developer center…but it’s the little details such as information regarding ECHECKS!

Assuming you are a seller using paypal’s “Payments standard”.
Your product is a service such as hosting - clients pay via a monthly subscription/recurring payments.

Did you know…
When a buyer starts up a new subscription it needs to be paid via
1. A credit card or
2. An account with a credit card attached or
3. Via an echeck or instant bank transfer.

It does not take payments from an existing balance in paypal. Even if the buyer has $1000 dollars in his/her paypal balance, it’s untouchable. This was interesting to me. Theoretically it only applies with the FIRST payment. Once the subscription starts off, as a buyer you can then choose to pay from your paypal balance directly.

Another interesting thing about echecks while on a subscription/recurring payments:
Say as a buyer, you’re paying for hosting/or other webservice, and you’ve paid with paypal on March 1st and started up a subscription. April 1st rolls around and you don’t have enough funds in your account, paypal initiates an echeck (after trying out your credit card) which is drawing cash directly from your attached bank. Echecks regularly take 4-12 business days to clear.

Apparently, and I say this with vague memory of what I’ve discovered a couple months ago, apparently as you pay with an echeck, even though your funds haven’t cleared, your subscription stays on the same billing course, which is roughly every 30 days or 1st of each month. If your funds take 2 weeks to clear (which is maximum) and your service has shut down within the pending stages, you’ll notice your webservice will kick in once the echeck clears (March 12th) and you get a lovely 18 days of use until your bank gets charged once again, and your web service shuts off until your echeck clears again…and the cycle continues till you’ve wondered why the web service you’re paying top dollar to seems insanely intermittent.

Moral of the story:
As an online buyer on a recurring plan: Keep your paypal balance padded, or an active credit card attached. Keep an eye on your subscriptions and prepare to change the source of payment (instant bank balance, paypal balance, creditcard, or echeck)
Realize that echecks can be nasty things that take up to 2 weeks to clear which means your online service can be stopped while it’s pending.

As a seller: Keep an eye on users who buy with echecks on recurring payments. If you’ve setup your product to activate upon payment, it may activate the service/product before the echeck clears or possibly bounces. Although one thing to note: The bank with the bounced echeck may charge the buyer with an overage fee on their end which can protect this from happening often.

Happy online buying and selling with paypal!

Share/Save

I’ve stumbled on an effect which makes one raw file look HDR without all the HDR messing around.

In Adobe Camera Raw, slide exposure down towards the black, “Fill light” towards the white, and further play with contrasts and black levels. The 3d pops out and creates an interesting visual effect. Note this is done on a RAW file, I haven’t tried it with Jpeg.
The image above is taken at Watson’s Bay, Sydney.

Share/Save

We wake up too darn early to be considered human, I feel like a crow..
6:30 but recently sometimes even 5:30, after a particularly exciting work week we would get up around 5:00, now I’m settled back to 6:30/7 but it still feels wrong.

The only redeeming factor is I get to watch the sun rise. It rises extraordinarily fast, and the church spires as silhouettes look amazing.

Tip for canon users - (and other dslr peeps) When shooting a bright ball called the sun, obviously don’t do it if it’s mid day, and even sunrise/sunset make it fast, make sure the shutter speed is lightning, iso is low and dial down the exposure. I’ve learnt how to do this and ever since been able to capture bright things like lights and such without having big blur in the screen..

Turn the dial to AV mode. Which I think is aperture priorty..Find the Av plus/minus button. press that while at the same time turning the little dial next to the shutter button. You’ll see the little black square in the screen rise and fall up and down the scale. Try shooting out a window on the different scales and see how it effects the brightness and exposure. This is a really handy thing when for most of your shot you want dark but you want that one little bit of brightness in focus or visa versa. That way the camera doesn’t self adjust by brightening the whole thing.

If you’re shooting in raw (which is a good idea) you can also later bump down exposure so the ball of sun really does stand out.

And that’s it for this morning…I need my tea!

Share/Save

Lesson hours: 2

With the CMS we’re creating the mock company website.

1. Create 3 pages.
2. The menu/page labels can be something like: Home/News/Contact Us.
3. On each page fill it up with dummy content and real images of your topic.

My brother is creating a “toilet” company. So his image subjects are naturally toilets - and content regarding the different style toilets that are available (yes, very professional) For a quick free CMS to practice using, I’d recommend:

Wordpress

Technically a blogging software but you can create new pages and edit different areas of the site in html/css to customize it. The installation alone (if you install it on your own servers) is a nice learning curve. If you’re paying for hosting and it comes with a “cpanel”, they usually provide “fantastico” which is a 1 click installer. This makes it VERY easy to install other CMSs including wordpress.

Another free CMS you can look into for quick website creation is Drupal.

The purpose of this CMS exercise is to take your mind off the backend and coding humbug (which I’m completely unfamiliar with), and focus on the simple editing you can do in html in a live environment and perhaps change a few things in CSS. Don’t be scared off by the random PHP code you may see as most CMS’s are built with it. Stick to reading and trying to decipher what you see in html, particularly the text editor where you place content. This is where you can add images using tags, change font sizes, borders, padding, and linking to any page you like!

Also getting familiar with installing CMS’s, uploading, linking and FTPs is great if you want to get into web design and general web development. So practice setting up your site in any CMS you feel most comfortable with, and we’ll go from there!

——————-

Homework

Hours 2

1. Read: HTML Meta to Scripts
2. Add all character entities on this page in your news posts in the CMS’s html text editor.
3. Design a “banner” for your website. Use a bitmap image with text ontop. Create your banner in the dimensions of your current default banner on your site now ( if in wordpress, usually all the themes available have an image for a banner that you can replace.
4. To find the dimensions and what file it is, right click on the image in your browser and “view background image”. The closes my current site has for a banner is http://curativedesign.com/wp-content/themes/thewindcriesmary/images/15_bannerbg.gif. You can download it and view the px dimensions or throw it directly in PS and work ontop of it, and save over the file with the same name.
5. http://blog.qbrushes.com/blog-header-with-brushes-photoshop-tutorial/ try looking for banner tutorials such as this one for inspiration. And remember to integrate your logo!
6. Upload the header image in your favorite ftp program and overwrite whatever is currently there and view your site with the new look!
7. Happy designing!

Share/Save

Here’s Volki under the table chillin’. Took this photo aligning his nose on the line on the right, and eyes on the top-line for the weekly assignment on DPS

Here’s a great explanation on DPS about the “rule of thirds”.

Of course as in every rule, they can certainly be broken -  As long as you know what you’re breaking and how you’re breaking them, it’s all good! I tend to naturally and subconciensly place my subject on the top right point near the corner. Breaking away from it is actually moving out of my comfort zone which I will try to do more often. I love asymmetry, half hidden subjects, incomplete images and abstract notions, so hopefully I will start conveying what I like, in the pictures that I take

What composition do you like?

Share/Save

Here’s a list of 4 beautiful tools I work with everyday within a virtual team.
My team’s work involves: building new web apps, and offering services like hosting, and web templates. All staff work on different timezones.

If this sounds like something you do, these tools (if you aren’t using them already) are extremely helpful, if not critical, to creating that necessary office environment on the internet!

We were definetely struggling before we found these tools so I know sharing this will make someone’s day!

Documents and Spreadsheets

Google Docs

At the core of every business requires documenting, writing and collaborating! This is your one stop shop for word- document-like capabilities including spreadsheets.Yes, spreadsheets - excel-like! You can import xls and csv files..the whole works. Googledocs offers live sharing with revision control and version awareness! You can give access to anyone with a google account and limit access to different settings such as read-only. The best part about these docs is, you can edit them with someone across the world DYNAMICALLY -as in Live baby! That means as your co-worker is typing you can see the words appear as if by magic. Coupled with having them on mic/speakers and you have yourself the equivalent of you and coworkers huddled around a desktop, working on an article or glossing over your financials.

Which brings me to the next must have for a virtual office –

Communication

Skype

We all love skype, if not for personal reasons, such as keeping in touch with family and friends over seas, it’s the best thing that has happened to our team. Not only is it free, it also gives us the capabilities of conferencing! And that’s with any phone or lan line or other skype user! This comes especially handy when making a call you want all your people in on - such as a phone conference with your business adviser, or your server admin. Conferencing is usually not an option in a regular office with a little phone on “speaker mode” - But with skype, the sound quality is top top notch! And of course, if you really need the visual element of working face to face, Skype has cam abilities. Skype is also good for it’s file transfer and chat functions. Sometimes it beats msn messenger over the bean in that department.

So those two free services cover the basics of virtual office and collaboration-

Project Management

Basecamp

We used to use activecollab when it was free, but we moved to basecamp awhile back and haven’t looked back since.
This pretty much takes care of all your project management needs, delegating tasks, to-dos, announcements, your bulletin that sits in the office wall, plus memos, and all those little bits of papers that circulate the room…and a great tool for general chit chat or direct feedback with the commenting abilities. This service isn’t free but it’s hella worthit!

Tracking the Time
Live Timer

This is the all important part of running a business - tracking the time and hours your people spend working - including yourself!
This tool is like a secret weapon, before this, it was makeshift spreadsheet timelogs that had to be manually inputted. NOW it’s click the start button, then click the stop button..and never having to look at the clock or calculator. It works for multiple timezones, reports in multiple timezones and is constantly being updated by its developers. If you’re part of HR, you’ll LOVE this one, it makes pay day so much more enjoyable.

And with that..I wish you and your team the very best.
If you have a web application you use and recommend let me know in the comments below!

Share/Save