While I’m all for transparency when it comes to job postings, especially with regard to compensation, the whole idea of suggesting that one can’t pay a decent wage due to the overall economic situation seems a little absurd and dishonest to me. It’s my opinion that by using the economy as an excuse, some businesses hope to get professional services at a fraction of their cost. Those companies can’t be blamed, because they’re probably right. The freelancers and contractors out there are the ones that tend to hurt the most when economic hard times abound. Said freelancers are more likely to take a lower hourly wage in order to compensate for the lack of work that’s available.

Hopefully the concept of “you get what you pay for” comes back to haunt a lot of these not-overly-honest businesses and, in turn, will causes a nice boom in pay and opportunities for creative types in the near future.

Gwynn (my wife), Gela (my daughter), and I ran some errands and we visited our friend Jeni, mostly to hang out and catch up and, a little, because Jeni wants me to re-redesign a logo for the plumbing business her and her husband, Brad, own.

I designed them a few logos a while back, then they decided to change the business name; which they ended up not doing, and finally they decided they’d like to go a different direction with the look and feel for the logo. Here are the rough logos we stopped at before the ‘almost’ name change back in September 2007:

It was cool hanging out, sketching ideas, and brainstorming. We ended up staying there almost 3 hours. When we got home I spent about an hour and a half or so doing some research and rough sketches of some of the ideas and themes we talked about. I’m not sure how it’s all going to turn out, but some of the concepts we all came up with have potential.

At 9:30pm or 10:00pm I decided I wanted tortillas, so I did what any self-respecting tortilla wanting person does: I made some tortillas. I used the recipe from “How To Cook Everything” by Mark Bittman. His recipe is:

• 1 1/2 cup flour (plus some for rolling the tortillas out)
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 2 tablespoons lard/butter/oil — I used Canola oil
• Water to make dough
• Profit!

They turned out alright, maybe a little too flour-y, but they didn’t take very long to make at all. My tortilla desires have been fulfilled.

Fast forward a few days, several glasses of iced tea, and a lot of research later and here’s my newly updated blog. Of course once I figured out the bigger picture, like using my own header image or using a custom background for the page element only, the little details started to kick my ass…like, how to make that whole header image a link and why that custom page background didn’t seem to be repeating correctly. I found work arounds to most of the problems I encountered.

The majority of the changes I made were to the style.css file, which is how it’s supposed to be. I made very minor changes to the header.php and index.php pages. Here are some tips for those that encounter the same problems I did:

Making a Header Image a Link

Per the WordPress Codex, find the <div id=”header”> link in header.php (it’s toward the bottom) and change it to this:

<div id=”header” onclick=”location.href=’http://www.your-url.com/’;” style=”cursor: pointer;”>

Page Background Image Issues

You have the option to have a tiled/repeating background image either for the entire page of your blog (the area to the right and left of this content, the empty white space) and/or you can have a page only (the content area of your blog posts and sidebar, like this page is set up) tiled/repeating background image. As you can see I chose to use a page background, so when I designed the site I set it up so that the header, the Screaming Ink graphic, would blend with the page body and then with the footer below. I had little splash marks tying everything together, to make the page appear seamless. I didn’t use the standard background tile that has all four sides equally tiled so you can repeat it without seeing a pattern. I specifically wanted the ink splatters running the length of the right side.

For some reason the background image didn’t start below the Screaming Ink graphic and the effect was jarring, since there were ink splatters that were not lining up. I spent hours changing the settings for the header and the page in the style sheet; I added padding and changed margins to no avail. Finally, I realized that the page tag is actually for the whole page. Essentially, the page background starts at the very top of the page, not underneath the header, like I had thought. My header is 129 pixels tall, so my background (which is much taller than the header) had 129 pixel hidden from view behind the header. I fixed this in Photoshop to make them appear slightly more seamless.

So remember: Unless your header and reapeting background image are the same height, your header is hiding part of your background image.

That’s pretty much all I can remember right now, since those are the most recent things I dealt with. It was a fun learning experience and it took a lot of patience. There are some minor tweaks I still need to make to the typography, but those can wait for a few days.

Today I received a catalog from a company called Uline Shipping Supplies. As usual, I chuckled when I saw the large array of boxes listed on the front and at the strange collection of products inside, as I flipped through it. Later when I picked it back up and started actually looking at the kind of products they actually sell…holy friggin’ crap, this place is amazing. I’m being totally honest.

Anything you could possibly need that’s either shipping, warehouse, storage, food/beverage, office supply, or retail merchandising related, they have.

You need baggies? They got ‘em.

What’s that, you need a variety of rubber gloves to suit different purposes…oh yeah, they’ve got those.

Say, weren’t you just asking about expandable packing foam?? You were? They’ve got it.

Excuse me? Do I know where you can get Chinese food containers? Why, yes I do!

Do I know a place that sells a box cutting knife with a glow in the dark fish skeleton on it?? Actually, I do…seriously.

Like I’ve said before, it doesn’t take much to amaze or amuse me these days, but this place is awesome. I’m pissed that I don’t do more shipping, retailing, and merchandising. This place makes me want to find excuses to buy metallic silver sharpies and scales that not only weigh but also count parts. The fricking scale counts parts, ladies and gents.

I need to figure out how to buy a warehouse.