Today I’m happy to announce another theme completion!

FreshBiz is a very simple, clean and effective template. It is extremely customizable and easy to use. It could easily be used for business or personal websites. It even includes a very nice logo which is worth the cost of the theme by itself.

This theme ended up taking longer in production that I liked. Sometimes that happens I suppose. This particular theme was also a two sided project. The theme will be used for a client’s website as well as being sold on ThemeForest.net.

My theme production time usually takes 2-3 days depending on complexity, features, etc. This theme should have only taken 2 days but instead was spread over more than a week totaling nearly 4 days of actual working time. That’s a lot!

I suppose it wasn’t actually that bad considering a good amount of that time was spent customizing the template for the client (which isn’t even finished yet).

Anyway, I’m pretty happy with the resulting theme which is available for purchase at ThemeForest.net. You can view the theme live here or view it at my portfolio at www.jremick.com.

If you’re looking for a website or some help on a website, let me know! I may be able to help you out at a very affordable price.

The next three themes are already planned and on my “To Do” list. The first will be a coffee shop focused template that I intend on presenting to some local businesses and hopefully establishing some new clients. The second will be a restaurant based theme which will also be used as presentational material for some local businesses.

The third theme I have planned is one I am probably the most excited about. The last theme I created for ThemeForest was called News360. It was a CNN style theme with lots of great features. During the production of that theme I had several ideas I would love to get built into a theme. The theme will have multiple page layout styles, navigation styles, footers, colors and higher quality design. It will most likely be the most complex and highest quality theme I will have produced in recent months.

So that’s my update on the web/online front. Hopefully I will be able to post more updates on other subjects of my day to day soon.

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I’m a freelance designer and web developer. I work at home and love every second of it. When I tell people what I do they always say, “Oh cool, I bet it’s nice to have the freedom of working at home”. Or at least they say something similar to that.

As great as it is to work at home, it’s not easy by any means. You are your own boss but being your own boss just means you have all the responsibilities of a normal company boss and then some. One of the things I struggle with is billing. That’s where FreshBooks comes into play.

FreshBooks is an online invoicing, billing, time tracking, estimation, etc. site. It’s great and saves me a huge amount of time and hassle while still helping me present my billing in a professional manner. Seriously, you can send your clients invoices via email or even snail mail straight from your account in FreshBooks.

You can manage your clients, your team, invoices, expenses, estimates, time and get reports. It does everything I need! I know several other freelancers that could really benefit from something like this. Anyway, FreshBooks.com is fantastic and is very well worth a try.

The last thing I want to say is that this is NOT an advertisement for FreshBooks. This is just a freelancer saying, “Hey, this is working great for me and would do wonders for others!”. That being said, FreshBooks has a referral program available as well. If you do plan on giving it a try click one of the links from this post or visit my sign up page here.

It isn’t going to cost you anything extra and at least someone else would benefit!

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Today I finished my third template for ThemeForest.net. I have named it News 360 after being requested to be “inspired” by CNN.com. It was somewhat of a rush getting this template finished and was severely delayed due to IE 6 problems.

You can view version 1 here: http://jremick.com/templates/news360v1/ and version 2 here: http://jremick.com/templates/news360v2/

The template is somewhat “barebones” but it has a lot of potential for someone looking for that particular style layout. It has a lot of great features which can be viewed at it’s page at ThemeForest.

Anyway, without a pause, break or rest I am moving from one project to the next. Break?! Rest!? You don’t do that in a normal working day, you say? Ok, so most people work a 8am - 5pm job. I currently, however, am working from home. That means my day could start at 6am or it could start at 11am.

Lately, my days have been starting at around 7am, eating breakfast at my desk while working. I take the usual 1 hour lunch break eating at my desk and working while watching something at Hulu.com. Dinner is usually around 5 or 6pm in which I step away from my desk to spend some time with my girlfriend (1-2 hours).

Then I keep working until 10-11pm. It won’t be for very long though! Sometimes when multitasking projects, it feels like nothing is getting done.

So, my next project amidst the rest of my currently ongoing projects is a website for a local company called Quality Chiropractic Center. When it is completed, I will have a fresh post online!

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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.

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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!

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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.

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