isaymeow.net

I know I’ve been MIA for a while. For those who didn’t know, I began a Masters of arts in Organization Leadership in September. My first instructor was not kidding when she said that “graduate school is an endurance test.” I almost have one semester down in my three year journey and it’s a been exciting and exhausting. I will admit it was hard going back to school, but I needed to do this for personal and professional reasons. I have learned a lot of theory so far, but it’s still been a worthwhile experience. In fact for the first time in my education I didn’t sell a book back; The Leadership Challenge by Kouzes & Posner is an excellent read!

So that has been what has eating away at my creative time lately. I haven’t had much time to play with Photoshop, but over winter break I plan on finally putting together my next social media set as well as some technology reviews I have saved as drafts. Thanks for still checking out my site, hopefully I’ll have more goodies for you all soon! Thanks for your patience!

Instead of having my personal and website tweets in one jumbled mess I decided to separate the two off. I don’t think my website followers need to know what I had for dinner! If you would like to follow isaymeow.net, please do by clicking on this link!

I was feeling slightly creative and wanted to share a set of web icons. There are two sets containing Twitter and RSS feed icons. They look great on dark or light backgrounds, so hopefully someone will find them useful. Please check out the Goodies section for download links!

Well, My logicboard did indeed end up failing again and I wasn’t too happy. I had finally made the decision to make my way through the labyrinth of phone support to get to Apple Customer Relations. Now they don’t have a direct line, so you have to go through first and second level tech spport first. getting through the first level was easy as pie, the second not so much. He kept trying to troubleshoot my issue and would not listen to a thing I had to say. After fifteen minutes and me insisting he finally he gave in and patched me through to Customer relations. The man that took my call was James, and he was a very nice fellow — but of coarse that’s his job! He looked at my case history and asked if he could put me on hold while he worked out some options. I accepted and ten minutes later I was given the option to have the parts replaced and if anything else happens call his personal line back — or I was offered a brand new machine. Needles to say I took the new machine option.  They built me a custom machine (which it’s basically stock plus the antiglare coating) and it was shipped to me from chine within a week and a half. So now I am sitting here typing from a brand new 17″ Macbook pro giddy as a schoolgirl (especially when my CS3 Design suite installed within 15 minutes, Dear lordy!)

So a word to the wise; If you ever have issues with an apple product with multiple hardware failures be stong and insist you be patched into Apple Customer Relations, because they are the people who have the power to “make things better” — and after my experience with them Needless to say my faith has been restored!

If I haven’t mentioned before, I’m a Desktop Support Technician at a Private University. I work primarily in an IBM Lenovo environment, but being that the Arts Schools make up over half the students we also have a lot of Macintosh computers on campus. In fact in it was my old digital editing and document design classes that made me fall in love with Apple Computers in the first place. I used to preach about Apple’s machines and it’s customer service. But recently my love for them has waned after a rash of problem with my personal 17″ 1.67GHz PowerBook G4 over the past year.

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Well I have a slight update to make to my portfolio! About three months ago I was approached by a friend to make an iPhone icon for an app he was involved with. The old design was “quite lame” to quote him, so I worked with the man in charge to come up with something more streamlined. After a week and a half of e-mails back and forth finally we could agree on something as the final product. Well the App is up on the iTunes Application store now. It’s pretty amazing seeing something you made be used in such a public way!  So if your curious to see the app, or are a nerd and want to test your network speed then look up “Network Speed Test” in the App store!

Every OS has its own set of great apps that people recommend. I always see my fellow PC users compiling their lists, but I rarely see a list from Macintosh Users. There are so many free applications out there that it’s hard to sort through them all to find the good ones. So for my own amusement, and for the ease of others I have compiled a list of the most useful free Applications that I personally recommend.

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Well I have finally done it, I moved into the 21st century and bought a smart phone. Now I know I said time and time again I did not want to dive into the world of smart phones, but my views have changed after visiting my local T-Mobile store. I decided I did not want another Motorola phone after all my issues with my RAZR, which had just kicked the bucket this week. After playing with Nokia and Samsung phones I discovered how cheap they felt, and disliked the undefined keyboard along with the interfaces. So I caved and played with the Blackberry’s for a bit. I soon discovered that the Blackberry Pearl had everything I wanted; a defined keyboard and excellent interface along with Durability.  Plus it has software to sync my iCal and Mac Mail with the blackberry.  So it didn’t take long for me to be sold on it. I can see why they are very popular…I just hope it continues to live up to it’s expectations!

Well I have finally moved on into the web 2.0 era and taken the “lazy route.” From now on I’m going to use Wordpress for various aspects of this website because, well it’s just so darn simple. Now those of you who remember I was a hardcore HTML/CSS “I code everything by hand” girl when I first started out. But as I’ve grown older and wiser I’ve come to love the simplicity of using programs such as wordpress for content management. It so much more fun now working on one theme and being able to easily update content without having to strain my eyes using taco html editor. You can tell me I sold out, but I’ll enjoy the ability to focus more on design than on making page updates!

So here’s to a simple, easy to manage personal website and blog. Three cheers for wordpress!