1/24/10
1/14/10
1/13/10
Another step toward the real world.
Apparently, in order to have a design career these days, you need to have one of those new-fangled website things. Given that I'm nowhere near becoming a web designer, the website-making has been pretty touch-and-go so far (my process lies somewhere in between free downloads of Adobe Dreamweaver and mooching off the skills of anyone I know who can use Flash) - so I decided to set something up on Carbonmade in the meantime.
I'm not a huge fan of free upload-and-hit-go portfolio sites, but it'll do for now. So check me out.
I'm not a huge fan of free upload-and-hit-go portfolio sites, but it'll do for now. So check me out.
1/12/10
Oh.
So I didn't give Mint.com a fair shot. Apparently you can take a more detailed look at all your transactions and assign different purchases to the appropriate categories (thank you Sarah Telson for allowing me to hover over your shoulder while you did this on your account). This should solve that pesky "uncategorized" problem - provided, of course, that I actually take the time to look over all my transactions and categorize them appropriately. This would be a lot easier if I didn't pay for $1 tubes of toothpaste using a debit card while simultaneoulsly paying for my share of the groceries by covering my roommate's bar tab for a weekend - but I'm sure I can figure it out.
1/10/10
Because I'm still unclear about where my money goes.
I spent my last semester wondering how I could possibly be so broke if all I spent money on (aside from my monthly rent, utilities, and MetroCard) was, to my knowledge, $3 PBR and the occasional $1 coffee. So, I decided to make a better effort to keep track of my spending and set some sort of budget. Following the wise advice of Ms. Sarah Telson, I set up an account on Mint.com.
Mint.com pulls information from your online checking account in order to determine where you spend your money. It allows you to set specific budgets for different categories of spending (rent, restaurants, travel, shopping) and keeps track of how well you stick to your budget. I figured the fancy tracking-my-checking-account's-every-move feature would finally answer my eternal "where did my money go" question, so I pulled up a pie chart of my account activity for the past few months. This is what it looked like:
So about 50% of my spending falls into the "Uncategorized" category. What the fuck does that mean? How is it that even this magical new-fangled interwebz thingamabob can't figure out where my money goes? All I want is for some fancy technological bot to tell me what to do with my bank account. The bot should not be more confused than I am.
Anyway, I set up some budgets and swore that I would stick with it. We'll see how that goes.
Mint.com pulls information from your online checking account in order to determine where you spend your money. It allows you to set specific budgets for different categories of spending (rent, restaurants, travel, shopping) and keeps track of how well you stick to your budget. I figured the fancy tracking-my-checking-account's-every-move feature would finally answer my eternal "where did my money go" question, so I pulled up a pie chart of my account activity for the past few months. This is what it looked like:
So about 50% of my spending falls into the "Uncategorized" category. What the fuck does that mean? How is it that even this magical new-fangled interwebz thingamabob can't figure out where my money goes? All I want is for some fancy technological bot to tell me what to do with my bank account. The bot should not be more confused than I am.
Anyway, I set up some budgets and swore that I would stick with it. We'll see how that goes.
1/6/10
I finished a semester of grad school.
So the groundbreaking maturity updates have been few and far between lately. This is probably because I've stopped doing exciting and meaningful things with my life ... but it could also be because I've been doing so many meaningful things that I no longer have time to blog about them. I'll let you decide.
Anyway, I did manage to finish my first semester of grad school without any major disasters - which is something worth telling the world ("the world" being a select readership of very close friends, plus probably my mom). And now that I've got a whole semester under my belt, I can more confidently conclude the following:
1) I like Pratt.
2) I like doing graphic design.
3) I therefore chose the correct school.
4) I also therefore chose the correct career path.
These are all reassuring things. Sure, I didn't sleep for the last month of school and nearly went blind after three straight days in the cutting room and spent the equivalent of half my rent on printing and binding - plus, I might have ended up with the lowest GPA of my life (apparently grad school is, in fact, harder than college) - but as my eyesight returns and my x-acto wounds heal, I still think that grad school is pretty awesome.
So now I'm in the middle of a month-long vacation that's allowed me to recover from the end-of-semester madness, pick up some extra hours at work, get started on the freelance gigs that I totally neglected until now, catch up on ANTM, and get all my wisdom teeth pulled out of my head. If that's not multitasking, I don't know what is.
Anyway, I did manage to finish my first semester of grad school without any major disasters - which is something worth telling the world ("the world" being a select readership of very close friends, plus probably my mom). And now that I've got a whole semester under my belt, I can more confidently conclude the following:
1) I like Pratt.
2) I like doing graphic design.
3) I therefore chose the correct school.
4) I also therefore chose the correct career path.
These are all reassuring things. Sure, I didn't sleep for the last month of school and nearly went blind after three straight days in the cutting room and spent the equivalent of half my rent on printing and binding - plus, I might have ended up with the lowest GPA of my life (apparently grad school is, in fact, harder than college) - but as my eyesight returns and my x-acto wounds heal, I still think that grad school is pretty awesome.
So now I'm in the middle of a month-long vacation that's allowed me to recover from the end-of-semester madness, pick up some extra hours at work, get started on the freelance gigs that I totally neglected until now, catch up on ANTM, and get all my wisdom teeth pulled out of my head. If that's not multitasking, I don't know what is.
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