Stupid Sucks!

Today, I am very pleased to announce the official launch of www.jremick.com JRemick.com is the professional portfolio of Jarel Remick (that’s me), which covers Web / Online, Print and Logos (primarily the first two).

Over 6 months ago I designed the look of my portfolio. During that time I was working full time on a 6 month contract so my spare time was pretty limited. When I did have spare time it was spent doing other things for other people or just trying to take a break.

I finally buckled down and used all my spare time to revamp my original design and recode the site from scratch. I still have some features and content design ideas I will be implementing but what’s important is that it is available for the world to see!

I also want to mention that I will be building themes/templates which will be posted for sale at ThemeForest.net. You are more than welcome to request a theme build which would be posted at ThemeForest.net which would allow you to purchase it for cheap! (Usually $10-$20)

If you are looking for a unique theme that the rest of the world won’t be able to purchase, feel free to contact me! I have pretty affordable rates and I am looking to expand my Web / Online portfolio as much as possible.

So 3 years ago I was in a motorcycle accident that resulted in a smashed up lower right leg. My tibia and fibula were broken in half and shoved through the front of my leg into an X. My foot was sliced up fairly good too.

Overall though, I’d say I was extremely fortunate and believe the only reason I’m alive is because God. I smashed into the front right of a pickup truck at over 100mph. Being young and reckless is extremely expensive! I’m glad I’m not any more.

Anyway, here are a few pics!

I still have the titanium rod and screws in my leg and my fibula is still broken and not lined up (it never healed). The picture of my legs was when I finally got back to walking. As you can tell the broken one is super skinny. Of course I was very skinny overall because I lost a lot of weight.

I’m back to normal and very active!

Awhile ago I wanted to give my iMac a performance bump but I’ve already done everything I could, or so I thought! The last remaining upgrade that was possible for my AL iMac was to give hard drive performance a bump.

I looked up the specs on the stock 320GB and obviously had lots of room for improvment. So I had to decide between performance and space. Although some of the newer large hard drives are pretty fast thanks in part to perpendicular storage and much higher density platters.

Western Digital came out with a replacement for the Western Digital Raptor 10K RPM drive which is the VelociRaptor 10K RPM drive. The VelociRaptor is faster, quiter, cooler and the drive itself is actually much much smaller. So I picked up the 150GB version since I couldn’t quite afford the 300GB version.

So once the drive showed up I took apart the iMac which was suprisingly easy. Made the drive swap which was a easy as pie and restored OS X from my backup. Overall process took about 15 minutes to swap the drive and 20 minutes to restore the backup.

The 320GB drive read speed on average was about 60Mb/s and the new VelociRaptor is over the 100Mb/s mark. I’d say this is a great speed bump. Anyway, the iMac boots almost twice as fast as well as applications. It’s quite amazing! I love it!

Anyway, I snapped a few pictures so here they are.

If you’re thinking about doing this and you have any questions, feel free to email me using my contact form or post a comment here. It was well worth the work but you might stop in at your local Apple store and have a pro do the job.

With the economy in the slump it’s in, any additional way to make some extra money is something most of us are watching out for. Especially if you are a freelancer. Thanks to Twitter, I was introduced to ThemeForest.net. A website where you can purchase and download website themes as well as upload and sell your own.

At the time of this writing, there are less than 200 site templates, 75 WordPress templates, 15 Joomla templates and 25 misc templates. That’s definitely a small selection to choose from but the website was just launched very recently. That makes for a good opportunity to get in on it at the start (not that it would be beneficial).

If you need a template, it’s worth checking out, especially since the site is growing and should be growing fast. You can pick up templates for $10-$20 (more for WordPress and Joomla). That’s pretty dang cheap and a quick way to get yourself a website up in a matter of minutes.

What interests me about this site is how easy it is to have your own work sold there. Many more people will see it and potentially purchase it than if you tried to sell it yourself. You can make from 25% of each sold template up to 50%. Plus, you get 50% of the deposits made from referrals.

I don’t think this is going to bring in a significant amount of income but a few hundred extra dollars each month might be worth it. Plus, as you get more and more templates online for purchase it could go from a few hundred to a few thousand extra dollars each month. Now that’s what I would be interested in but I would settle for a few hundred for now.

This is not an advertisement for them. It’s just me spreading the word about a cool new site that I think has a lot of potential. Plus, I wouldn’t mind making a few extra bucks. If you need a template, click any of the links to ThemeForest.net on this blog post so I can get a referral too. It won’t cost you anything!

Anyway, check it out, let me know what you think!