Posts Tagged ‘UWSP’

Starting over.


01 Apr

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Posted in Crazyness, Updates | 1 Comment »

So,

This is me starting from scratch, as I clearly lost interest in my old blog(s) and they fell along the way of the phonograph(Small round things that when you used a needle on them, they played music or something? :p )

What is new?

Well.  For starters, a new theme that I’ve been tweaking.  Going to be a work in progress, but you know that’s what life is all about.  I originally started this post a few days ago while I was on vacation, but decided that spending more time with the person I was with was much more important.

Note to self, road trips are fun. :)

Anyways, back on topic.  A little short of a year ago, I graduated from the University of Wisconsin — Stevens Point, with a degree in Web and Digital Media development.  Since i graduated, I’ve been working at the rubber-band-ball place, as a technology supervisor.  While this was great experience for the resume, it was exhausting, and just not something that left me happy at the end of the day.  I had a short stint going tech support for a phone company in there, but that was even worse.  Nothing like having customers calling just to yell at you.

Around February, my brother told me about a web design place that his friend worked at, and that they were looking for a developer.  I applied, and got a very quick interview.  As part of the interview process, they asked me to design a mock-up for them.  Working where I did, I couldn’t finish it in the time allowed.   It was a major bummer, and I felt pretty crummy that my chance slipped thru my fingers.

In early March, I was blessed to spend a week off of work,(getting paid even) with one of my best friends, and now girl friend.  Was very relaxing not having to think about work or anything but having fun.  Around the end of the vacation, I got a call from my brother, saying that he had heard they were still looking for someone.  I quickly gave their HR person an e-mail, and she sent me a test to do.  A few days later, with the test in, I got called in for an interview, and two weeks later I started my job.  That day is today.

My Desk at work with dual monitors and a window!I have a nice desk, even with a dark picture from my phone, two monitors and even get a window to look out of.  I’m not sure how the window will help  or hurt with productivity, but it wasn’t bad the first day.

I’m hoping now that I have more time, that I can actually use this to share more of my rants and raves about life, and some cool stuff about web design and computers.

 

Thanks for reading…

 

– C

 

 

GoogleGoogleGoogleGoogle and Branding


08 Feb

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Posted in Rants, Raves, School | No Comments »

Tonights ranting is on: Trademark and branding

Over my winter session of classes, my professor introduced us to a website. It was more so to show us how social media and random websites can have such a larger following then even our local papers.  We compared our Stevens Point Journal, to GoogleGoogleGoogleGoogle.com

Alexa's Reach of Google*4 and UWSP

As you can see, GoogleGoogleGoogleGoogle has a higher daily reach then even UWSP, and even a lot more than the Stevens Point Journal.

GoogleGoogleGoogleGoogle’s idea was quite simple.  It was 4 iframes on the page each pointing to Google.  You could resize the windows; point them to other sites and a few other pretty cool tasks.  I made a comment to Professor Krause, about wondering how long it would take before Google complained about the use of their trademark.  The site clearly didn’t alter content or gain anything from the users, however because of the domain name, it does violate Google’s trademark claims. We were not sure how long it would be, but figured Google would likely find it soon enough.

Today during class, I went to GoogleGoogleGoogleGoogle to do some side-by-side searching, to find a note from the site’s author saying the site was going to be taken down because of a take down notice that they received from Google.

I am going to miss the site, because it did come to be pretty useful.  Trademarks and branding are important to a person and company.  From Google’s side, if they don’t protect their trademark, they risk losing it.

It brings me to a new point as well.  I’ve gone by the nickname Freekie for most of my “Online” life.  I’ve moved away from it slightly, using CoreyRants.com instead of my old Freekie.net.  Mostly because the projects I’ve started on freekie.net have never worked, and Corey Rants seems to be more about what I blog about. Rants, raves and other stuff that happens in my life.    I’m thinking of possibly switching my twitter nickname from Freekie to Corey Rants.  It would create a single online presence, but haven’t decided what I want to do just yet.

I’ll keep you all updated as I progress on the Twitter handle.

Feel free to stop over to GoogleGoogleGoogleGoogle.com and write the author a few well wishes.

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Edit

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Professor Krause also wrote about this, check out his take on the topic.

Text Rental and Chegg


07 Jan

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Posted in Raves, Reviews | 3 Comments »

A friend was asking me about our text rental system at UWSP the other day, and started asking me questions about chegg, so I thought I’d take time and share a great experience that i had with them

I am blessed to attend a school that provides text rental as part of our tuition, which means that we have very few books that we have to purchase, as most of them are provided in form of rental, for free. Well, somewhat free, it’s included in the weird fees that they charge us, but that’s another story.  The main benefit to these rentals is that it saves us money, but also the environment.

Well, what if you attend a school that doesn’t provide text rental, or that you want to just read a book that your local library doesn’t have?  The solution came to me last year when I needed to buy a book that was quite expensive and I only needed it for a few weeks of a class.  The answer is Chegg.

Chegg is the online version of my local text rental system.  You look for the books that you need, and odds are the book is in their system.  It tells you the price to rent the book for different lengths of times, ranging from a few weeks to a few months.  The books ship promptly, either from chegg’s offices, or from the publisher or Amazon if it’s a newer book.  In my case, the book arrived two days after I ordered it, directly from Amazon.  The system is also great, because for each book that is rented, they plant a tree to help restock the rain forests.

When you are done with the books, you log back into Chegg’s system and tell them that you want to return the book, and they provide you with a shipping label that is prepaid, and you drop it off at a shipping point. Boom. You are done and don’t get charged anything more than the rental charge.

But what happens if I don’t like the book or it’s the wrong one? Chegg offers a 30 day no questions return policy where you get your entire rental price back.

The system honestly is one of the coolest and quickest options for a text or book rental system.  If you do have books that you no longer want that you have purchased, you can sell them to Chegg, which is a cool option.  They take into factors things such as how many classes might be using this book, the update frequencies and stuff like that, but still, it’s a cool system to take a peek at.

Do something green for the environment and that is also easy on the wallet, and check out this cool system for any books that you need for the upcoming terms.

Corey's Rants

A Web Developer's rants, raves and randomness.