New Clients

Just closed a new hosting deal. Now my priority is to get Martal Exterminators done, start on Home Simon, and work on Graveyard Chef. After desinging graveyard chef, I will train Amor on building sites in full CSS, tableless sites.

Now back to work…

Work… Work… Work…

Doing an SEO only site, but decided to give it just a little design treatment to make the SEO work more.

Martal Exterminators, Inc. Current Site

Martal Exterminators, Inc. for SEO in Development

Designing was not part of the contract, but just decided to arrange things on his page.

/*******************/

Design with no content. Still need content from Master Min…

Current incomplete San Diego Taekwondo Association Website

/*******************/

Proposed design

The Graveyard Chef Study Layout

/*******************/

No design yet, but logo was approved.

Final Approved Home Simon Logo

/*******************/

Done a long time ago, but still no content from the client.

Association of Marketing Educators Development Site

/*******************/

Did small text updates.

MarkProf Foundation Website

/*******************/

Not yet done with my company’s new website.

Current YDS Web Solution Website

YDS Web Solution Website in Development

/*******************/

It is already March 20, past due already for my monthly hosting clients. Got to see status of collection.

/*******************/

Sorry Topher, I can’t work on any of this at the moment. I guess you will have to rely on Xenia and whoever you can get to help with CDBN.

CDBN Site by Xenia

/*******************/

Hosting does not consume much time and so far all my new hosting clients since December are:

drukelly.com
gskelly.com
kabalikatnec.com
inreverentfear.com
martalexterminators.com
meredithvictor.com
plumstudio.net
reinhardt.ws
robustness.org
rsi-insure.com

/*******************/

I don’t feel like finishing this blog post. I feel sleepy.

Scientist?

I decided to check out Mt. St. Helen’s current activity and found up-to-date information on the US Geological Survey website. Well this is an active volcano, unlike Pinatubo which was dormant, when it erupted, it was a big one since being dormant, there was a lot of pressure build up inside before it blew up.

Intrigued by the people that maintain the site I went to the homepage and saw the satellite photography. And I then started to look at a lot more stuff that calls my interest.

Then I thought how cool it would be to work at USGS. And I checked out the job openings, and saw I can enter in a lot of them. There were a lot of openings for Chemist, Physical Scientist, and IT. And there were a lot of jobs for each category, if I don’t qualify in one, there are a lot more. Salary sounds good too.

I can if I wanted to, but I decided not to at the moment. You never know how much it will eat of my time in the future. For every movement the earth makes, that is something significant to USGS and I might be required to be there all the time when something happens. That may sacrifice time with my family in the future. Although I believe I’ll love the job, I still love my family a lot more. I know there are a lot more opportunities out there that I can maximize my time with my family.

Filing Taxes

The first time I needed to pay taxes when I was working for SGS Philippines. I was a quality analyst/chemist there and the HR was pretty cool in handling all the paper work for my taxes, all I needed to do is check it out and sign. I never really understood how to file taxes and the people at SGS was cool.

My second job was teaching college chemistry subjects at DLSU while taking up my master’s degree in Chemistry. When it was time for taxes, I just consulted my colleagues that have the same employee rank as me with the same salary, and copied their forms since our forms would be pretty much the same. And I ever really understood everything.

I then went into business. My first business was the now closed computer shop Click Me! Computer Sales and Rental Service. My clients needed official receipts and I to be official, you need to process this with the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR). After 3 months of running the business, I received a letter from the BIR stating that I have not been filing my taxes. And I need to appear at their office at a certain date and failure to do so, was some number of days imprisonment and a cash penalty.

I arrived at the BIR office with no one being accommodating, no one helping you, and everyone you ask, will point you to ask someone else. There was a general information table but there was seldom someone there. After doing nothing for about an hour, I finally saw someone on the information counter and started to ask about my taxes. The person was totally not accommodating, was not explaining things well. So basically I just ask what are the list of things I need to submit and I’ll just come back, and hoping I get to ask someone else I know who knows how to do all of this. My company ended up availing the services of an accounting firm. And even up to now, my company is still availing the services of an accounting firm.

In 2003, I taught various web related subjects, various computer graphic software usage and PC networking and troubleshooting. And Lheng who was of the accounting department, pretty much handled everything.

Now in the US, I was needed to file my Income Tax Return statements. There is a Federal and a State income tax. Federal is basically what everyone pays, and for the State is basically, the taxes you pay only in the state where you are. With my experience with taxes in the Philippines, it was always a pain filing anything tax related. So many fields to fill up on various forms. I was never able to do it alone. So at the back of my head, I had this feeling of dismay since I had to study how to file my taxes returns. And if I have some accounting firm do it, I was worried about the cost again.

Then here comes along the software H&R Block’s TaxCut. After opening the software for the first time, it just asked a bunch of questions. The questions had easy to find answers. Just answered everything, it was not a quick process, but it was easy.

From the answers you give, if fills up the required forms you need to submit. And once done, it prints out the official forms you will submit, fill up with the correct information and all you need to do is sign and mail. Now that is one major big difference on how I did things here and how I did it in the Philippines.

Thunderbird

I was a long time MS Outlook user, not only for email, but for synchronizing with my Palm, where I started with a Palm m100, then cIII and now a Zire 71. I tried StarOffice, and this other one I forgot the name. I was not happy.

My Outlook crashed twice within a week. All emails were still saved, in a separate file, but all my message filter rules were erased. And from the looks of it, My data might be erased completely soon if another crash may occur.

So I decided maybe it is time to switch to Thunderbird for my email. And even if Mozilla made the Calendar Project and Sunbird, they are not yet synchronizable with a PDA. So for other PDA Sync functions, I’ll use the standard Palm Desktop and for emails, Thunderbird. Fast running, stable, happy.

New Team on Monday, Logo Approved, Laptop, Work

At work, we are grouped in teams. A designer, a builder, a writer and we do nothing but websites. Starting monday all designers will be on one team, all builders or Production Assistants will be another team and all writers another team too.

I’m not going to comment on this, but I guess the people happy about it are those that are not happy with their team. And the people not happy about it, are those that like their team.

Logo approved. 3rd logo was chosen. Check all three!

I didn’t post what laptop I got. That’s because I didn’t get any yet, but I believe I am getting John’s Dad’s laptop.

Work, work, work… SEO for Martal Exterminators will be done once I get the content. Logo approved for HomeSimon.com, I might make it 3D. San Diego Taekwondo needs some building for the inside pages. Graveyard Chefs initial sample design needs to be done too. And follow up on all these hosting deals. Reminds me of the demo account I need to setup for Ivan.

What laptop to buy…

After thinking on my trip to the Philippines…

I thought of buying a laptop. So I can bring my work with me, and even work on the long plane trip. Be more productive on lost time.

But I really do not have much money, the plane ticket is so expensive. I even searched for the best deal I can get for plane tickets, regardless of airlines and stopovers and not landing at the Centennial airport in the Philippines which is way better than the other terminal in MNL.

So I searched online for a good laptop deal with some low monthly payment. My first decision was if I will get an iBook/Powerbook or a Windows Notebook. I’m totally sold out with the power of the Mac, but after thinking of it, I will settle for Windows and will just start of with a MacMini for my use at home. But I’ll buy the MacMini when I come back from the Philippines. The my other desktop will run Linux.

Now that I have decided to get a Windows laptop, where do I buy it? What brand? I first searched on the websites of HP, Dell and Sony.

Initially, just by looking at the displayed packages, Dell has nice deals, good prices, low monthly payments. But all three websites had a “Customize” option. You choose the parts you want and the site computes the price along with the monthly payments. It tells you anyway if you are putting things that are not compatible so you can fix your options.

After customizing, making the options as similar as I can on all three brands, guess what’s the result? Dell, the one with the cheapest advertised prices, suddenly became the most expensive among the three. And the best deal was on HP.

I chatted with John on his views of the matter… Although he is a Mac advocate, he said since I am a PC guy, buy a Windows laptop and not a Mac. Which I agree, and I’d just buy a MacMini when I get back to the US.

He shared his views on using credit. And low monthly payments on a long term makes you pay for something for so long, until your laptop is old already and there are new ones out and you are still paying for the old one you have. But he also knows my concern of building up my credit history, since here in the US, no credit history, it is like you are unknown when you will buy a house or car. So he suggested to ask them if using credit will really help my credit history.

I am still studying all my options. I’ll let you all know what I got in my next posting.