I joined a gym, and for a while I went there. I worked out at their facil­i­ties and found them clean, and brim­ming with machines and weights in which to sculpt my body. I used their excep­tion­ally clean and well kept bath­rooms and facil­i­ties. The staff was always cour­te­ous, the light­ing great, the music well selected, and the food offered was healthy and scrump­tious. They even had a cloth­ing store where one could buy stuff 30% with the mem­ber­ship card, and a day car for those who dragged their chil­dren around.

All in all, a fan­tas­tic expe­ri­ence from a cus­tomer point of view. Every­thing scored 7/10 or higher (more often higher). So why am I angry with this chain? They dropped the ball in a key area: my leaving.

Holy hell, a per­sonal post! You know what that means every­one: Corey doesn’t have any­thing spe­cific to write about, but is guilt-​ridden enough to write some­thing in an attempt to rid him­self of the self-​loathing that he’s now feeling.

Thank­fully, I’ve got enough random crap to talk about, that it will actu­ally seem like I’ve some­how planned this post. I should at least be able to get back to my reg­u­lar sched­ule for post­ing stuff now that I’m in school (some­body quote me on this when I’m study­ing my brains out and aban­don the sched­ule once again.)

Side note: Do you say “skedual” or “scheduel”? I found that after watch­ing far too much Doctor Who over the years that I’ve been con­verted to saying “scheduel” instead of skedual.” Ruined me, I tell you.

I’ve found myself using online music sources when I’m not around my home com­puter or too lazy to plug in my iPod. I’ve found myself going between two dif­fer­ent pro­grams: Last.fm and Deezer.com.

Both have pros and cons, and I felt that it’d make a good arti­cle to com­pare my find­ings and con­trast the two ser­vices. I’m not going to gives scores, because com­par­isons like this are sub­jec­tive. I’ll let the read­ers come to their own conclusions.

Seri­ously, it’s so white that it actu­ally seems to give off light itself. It stands out so harshly against the rest of my room because it looks so clean and min­i­mal. It’s like a work of art sit­ting on top of a rubble pile in Cher­nobyl. It’s so clean and pris­tine that I feel like I’m sul­ly­ing it every time I lay my grubby fin­gers on it.

Some of you may be won­der­ing why I’d now be a Mac owner. Those of you who know me know that I’ve never been a fan of Macs gen­er­ally speak­ing. I find them overly simple, their mouse scares and dis­trubes me, they have some extra keys, and Mac users tend to be just so damned snooty. Have I sold out?

This is the sev­enth and final part in an ongo­ing series of arti­cles that depicts my process to becom­ing a graphic designer. I will reit­er­ate that this is not a sure-​fire guide on how to become one, but merely my process which I am shar­ing to the gen­eral public.

Though this is the last arti­cle of this par­tic­u­lar series, trust me when I say there will still be many more.

So I’m making this post while bla­tantly aware that some of my read­ers will prob­a­bly have no Idea what I’m talk­ing about. If you’re one of those people, just nod your head and pre­tend to listen.

Setting up the scene

A while back I came across a little web­site called 9rules. As it turned out 9rules was very much sim­i­lar to Digg.com, Design Float, Mixx, and so on. It was a social hub where ideas were exchanged, par­tic­i­pa­tion was rewarded, and all was well. Some­what of an oppor­tunist, I took advan­tage of 9rules and their con­tent sub­mis­sion to help my site gain some pop­u­lar­ity (I’m sure I gained noth­ing from it) by sub­mit­ting my design-​related posts to their ever-​flowing river of content.

I admit that this is a bit dubi­ous in nature, but it is a white hat way to get your name out there, and that’s some­thing I’m still work­ing on doing. Hate me if you want, but that’s what I used it for. I regret that a little in ret­ro­spect, because they had a good com­mu­nity, and I chose to throw my sto­ries into the pile instead of par­tic­i­pat­ing and making it better.

The lament­ing has a point, so stick with me.

I’ve never really used a Linux system before. I used Redhat in col­lege for a semes­ter, but con­sid­er­ing I almost failed that class, it is safe to say that my knowl­edge of the free OS(es) is lim­ited. Ubuntu was brought to my atten­tion by my friend and tech­no­log­i­cal supe­rior, Bart. Intrigued by this user-​friendly OS I decided to give it a whirl.