having a great life in spite of everything

Cuddly and soft!

get yours today

At least it is when you put it on football players. I’m loving the pink accents the NFL is using for the A Crucial Catch campaign to promote Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Pink coordinates surprisingly well with the team colors, I’m really going to miss it after October ends. I wonder if there’s any chance some of the players or coaches will keep it up? Eh, I guess not, since everything is supposed to be auctioned after the campaign ends. But it’d be cool if they did. All the proceeds for items in the auction will go to breast cancer research funding – I would so love to buy something, but I bet it’ll all go for way more than I can afford. Which, actually, is a good thing, better that research funding makes more money than I have some more NFL crap around my house.

While I’m talking football – hey, the Texans defense is trying to make a liar out of me by playing well against the Raiders yesterday (that safety was awesome!). Which is actually fine with me, go right ahead, I’ll be happy to eat my words.

One last note – on October 11, it’s the Dallas Cowboys vs. the Dallas Texans. That’s right, the Chiefs will be wearing their throwback uniforms from the 60s when the team was part of the AFL and were located in Dallas, as the Dallas Texans. Lamar Hunt lobbied for a game between the two Dallas teams, but it never happened; now the Game That Never Was will play out in Arrowhead Stadium this upcoming Sunday. If the Chiefs don’t win another game all year (and the way they’re going, that’s a distinct possibility) I hope they win this one. It’d be a fitting tribute to Lamar Hunt.

I did a lot of research when deciding how to set up my online portfolio (I still follow the basic design principles I learned in school – step 1: research). I looked at a whole lot of designers’ portfolios, most of them had some really great work in them, but I wasn’t always wild about their general set up. This article – My Last Portfolio Sucked, Yours Might, Too – generally backs up a lot of what I was feeling.

I knew I didn’t like incomprehensible thumbnails that are so tiny or such a small part of the image that you can’t tell what you’re looking at. Some sites using them did look really cool overall, but no one will want to have to spend a lot of time clicking through the images. I only hit one or two sites that had music, but I don’t remember anything else about them, I left those sites immediately. Seriously, people, no one likes sites that play music! Stop it with the music already!

The sites I did like generally had a layout that allowed you to see the projects without having to click or scroll too much. So that’s what I went with in the end – there’s just a few general categories, each category has blog-style layout with a brief description and image, and each image can be clicked so you can see a larger image. It’s similar to how you’d mount pieces on a plain, black background in a physical portfolio, a purposeful reduction of surrounding distraction. 

It would have been easy to go with a template with a lot of flair that would have required a lot of clicking, and it would have looked great. I made a conscious choice to not do that. I don’t like having to navigate that way myself, and I didn’t want the distraction from my actual work samples. But, I do wonder if I made the right decision there. What if a hiring manager sees so many portfolios with lots of bells and whistles that mine seems boring by comparison? What if they assume that I’m incapable of that level of work?

It occurs to me that maybe those other designers have 15 pieces of flair for a reason. Maybe that’s what it takes to get the necessary attention.

They’re really very similar. No, really, they are. I know many people are extremely attached to one but not the other, to the point of animosity, even (I’m looking at you, knit snobs). Essentially, I like to describe the difference this way – in knitting, you carry all your stitches “live” on the needle, but in crochet, you bind off each stitch as you go, so there is only one live stitch*. That means that crochet is a little thicker (making it warmer) and less flexible (because there’s more yarn in each stitch); it also means that crochet has the ability to move in directions that are much harder or even impossible in knit. So there’s pros and cons both ways, depending on what you want your yarn to do. I learned both about the same time in my early teens, but crochet was my first love. I mostly knit now, but I do crochet some still (amigurumi rocks).

The pink ribbon scarf pattern on KnitMonster is a knit pattern, and I made it to imitate the texture of grosgrain ribbon. By knitting every row (garter stitch), ridges are formed, and slipping the first stitch of every row creates a chain edge around the perimeter, which further compliments the look of grosgrain. You can achieve the same effect in crochet by working single crochet in the back loops only. And then the chain edge would be created by single crocheting around the outside. I’ve done a sample, now I need to finish so that I can get the pattern up.

Don’t worry, crocheters, I got your back!

*Yes I know, afghan crochet – it’s really the same, though, you just bind off a row at a time instead of one at a time.

We’ve all heard about how difficult and demoralizing job hunting is. And it is, the Job Search a hideous bitch goddess. There is the possibility of advantages to it, though. As much as I thought I’d kept my skills up to date, I’ve been confronted with the reality of all I had not done. And so, I’ve been working for the past six weeks examining my shortcomings and developing those parts that I’ve neglected. I found a quote that sums it up quite well.

“Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul’s resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.”

- William James

Of course, James was talking about a much grander scale of things than I am here, but I’m going to twist it to my situation anyway. Losing my job did feel like ultimate disaster, I loved that job. But I have managed to gain much in the past month and a half – I gots a lot more skillz goin’ on than I did before I was laid off. I’ve done many hours worth of extra training, I’ve learned new applications, and much more about the ones I already used. I’ve done research about marketing, communications, and social media, and I’ve got long lists of more that I intend to do. Someone would be lucky to hire me now, I’m about as highly motivated to keep learning and growing my skills and experience as I can possibly be; and I’m determined to do better, be better, and live better than ever before.

When you’re unemployed and job hunting, you have no choice but to self-examine, which is why the job search becomes demoralizing, you are forced to see your weaknesses. But there’s no reason to wait for disaster. So – how are your job skills? Are they really as good as they could be? When was the last time you did any extra training in your field? Have you done any networking, are you on LinkedIn? How do you compare to others in your field, could you compete if you had to?

I don’t mean to depress anyone, what I’d like to do is inspire someone to feel positively about their ability to keep growing and expanding. You can do it, and you don’t even need to lose your job to make it happen.