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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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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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!

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I was hoping to write up a nice post full of fixes for Battlefield 2142 for Mac but I don’t really have time so, I think I will tackle the different problems as I have time.

First up, PunkBuster! If there is an application for OS X I really hate, it’s this one. This application has been the biggest problem in getting Battlefield 2142 to work properly on my iMac. Now, I really think EA is the one to blame for these problems but most people know, I think EA failed spectacularly with this game for Mac. It is what it is though. Anyway…

If you’re having problems updating PunkBuster for Battlefield 2142 on Mac, then doing the manual update with PunkBuster is probably updating the files in the wrong location. Navigate to your Applications folder (Apple + Shift + A while in Finder). Right click on Battlefield 2142.app and select “Show Package Contents”.

See the folder in there called “pb” ? When you download and run PunkBuster to manually update Battlefield, PunkBuster creates a folder in your Applications directory called “pb”. It’s in the wrong place!

Visit the Battlefield 2142 update page for PunkBuster and download pbsec.htm and your client update file (I download the first two). Copy pbsec.htm into your “pb” folder. Then copy the client update file into the “htm” folder within the “pb” folder.

And there you go! PunkBuster is updated and you should be able to play without getting kicked out of every server. If you are having other problems, feel free to comment to this post and I might be able to help out. Enjoy!

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Update: You can download the patch via my server here: http://www.stupidsucks.com/downloads/public/Battlefield2142-485and941A-to-1512.zip

Yes, I am a mac “gamer”. Two words that don’t belong in the same sentence. I’m not really a big gamer (I used to be) since I usually just work all the time now BUT for quite awhile I’ve been waiting on EA to release the 1.50 Patch for Battlefield 2142 for Mac users.

EA is terrible about supporting their Mac gamers. Everything comes WAY WAY later for Mac than for the PC guys. But, I guess you can’t blame them. The Mac guys are definitely the minority, lol. Anyway, the patch has finally been released! I’m downloading it now but it is going slow as heck so once I get it downloaded, I’ll upload to my server and post a link here for others to download it faster (who likes waiting an hour for a download? Not me.. ).

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I’m still amazed at how many people out there despise Apple and their products. The most common thing I hear now is, “It has the same hardware as my computer (Windows/PC), it just costs $1k more.”, which absolutely drives me nuts.

Apple might use the same processor, hard drive, graphics card, etc. but they used the components better than any other computer manufacturer for the price. What gives Apple the edge over the competition? Their operating system and their quality casing designs.

OSX is the best operating system I have ever used. I don’t even have Leopard yet but people love it so far and it blows Vista and XP out of the water (so does Tiger).

Apple is a name that is gaining popularity very quickly. So many friends & family are making the switch and wondering why they hadn’t done so earlier. But this is exactly what Apple users have been saying for awhile now. Switch, it’s better.

Before you think about posting a comment flaming me Mr. Windows user, I DO use both platforms (well, I run XP within OSX ). If you want to be a gamer, either buy a console or get Windows (which can also run on Mac). Now you may flame…

Anyway, the purpose of this post was because while perusing Gizmodo I saw that Apple is now the #3 U.S. computer manufacturer (no surprise). Who is their competition? Dell and HP. Dell is sitting at almost 32% of the market, HP with just over 25%. Then there’s Apple… Apple is sitting at 8.5%.

They have a long ways to go but I don’t think it will take all that long. Apple has had a 38% growth in Mac sales and it’ll continue to grow.

So for all you Apple haters out there! Beware, the day of the Apple is coming!

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