[Edit:  Ignore the "Brielle" tag, it's just there to make sure the tag shows up in the cloud]

Still no movement on the big client site yet.  It'll work out though. 

In the mean time I'm getting to learn Paint.Net for a quickie graphic editing app that will do a lot of stuff.  It's not great by any means, but it's free, easy to use, and does the job.  Of course, you need to download a ton of plugins to make it do anything really cool, and the developer community is really small.  I mentioned this before, but it bears mentioning again, mostly because I'm getting ready to break it back out and do some work on the sites I have up that I actually can work on.

So here's a quick rundown of What I'm Doing Right About Now, or the status of large projects.  A sidebar before I begin:  you'll notice that I rarely mention the name of a client on this site.  When I do, the site is always one of mine, or one that I've done for someone I have some other social relationship with, whether friends or co-workers or my high school class.  The reason for this is simple:  just as I would hope and expect that a client or potential client coming across this site who disagreed with my political opinions would (rightly) ignore them as irrelevant to the job, I'm sure that not all my clients would choose to be associated with my views on politics, religion, etc., and it would be poor business of me to imply that association here.

That said:

• Big Ol' Client Site - still waiting on action from them.  If I haven't seen something new happen by noon Wednesday I'm going to give them a call and see if they need me up there.  That will give me a chance to re-scan the graphics for the smaller client site that I finished a few weeks back but am still putting occasional finishing touches on.
• This site:  I put up a more 'formal' entry page for the section of pages and links related to the Kalamazoo Music Scene.  Other than that, what you see is what you get here, for now.
• NetOGraph.Com:  Pretty much holding off on this one until I get my new machine.  The complex graphics demand performance and professional software; this computer doesn't perform and Paint.Net isn't professional software (though it is very good, much better than Gimp in my opinion, but then I have a mostly acrimonious relationship with linux.
• TessaRawlinson.Com:  This blows hard, because Tessa's not just a client but a dear friend who fearlessly allowed my shaking hands and butter knife to perform brain surgery on her firstborn "child," Bound By Vengeance.  Basically where I'm at here is I have this beautiful graphic (linked in an earlier post) that is to be both the cover design for BBV and the backgroud graphic for TR.C.  That beautiful graphic...is on my main machine.  Which is down.  I think it's recoverable, but I'm risking all kinds of trouble if I try just yanking the hard drive out and putting it in a different machine as a backup drive.  I won't bore you with the esoteric details, but the end result is that a novel that was supposed to be released in time for Christmas of 2008 is going to be lucky to hit by Valentine's Day '09 the way things are going and the website just has a plain black background.  Plus I need to change the motto on the banner graphic, and THAT is all on my main machine as well.
• I need to send out hosting bills.  I always feel like a schmuck when I ask people for money, like I didn't earn it or they're not paying for a service rendered.  It hobbles me, business-wise, but I'm getting over it.  This current "big job" is really the first that I've been paid my shop rate.  More will come.
• New (old) Site:  RSPW.Net.  This will have something to do with professional wrestling, but I'm not sure what since I really don't pay any attention to professional wrestling any more and rarely have the time or inclination to visit the Usenet newsgroup that the domain is named for.
• New (not as old) Site:  OnStageUSA.Info.  THIS, I'm excited about.  I've owned this domain for a couple of years, and haven't been doing anything with it.  With the migration to DotNetNuke I have a really nice framework that makes building just this type of directory/social network site very easy.  Since I'm dead in the water with so many other things, I've decided to activate this space and start doing things with it. 
  
  We'll see how it goes - the root of the thing is a free national directory of musicians, bands, comedians, dancers, actors of stage, radio, and television, technicians, and venues.  Event listings, help/work wanted listings, anything you can think of to do with entertainment could be listed here, other than I'm not going to handle any 'adult' material because the legal implications completely suck and I'm not going to run the risk of inadvertently starting a meat market for pervs.  There are plenty of those already, and to put it in corporate-speak, "we believe that our core business is not compatible with expansion into that particular sub-market." 
  
  What's nice about this particular site is that I can start it small pretty easily and get a few people in the door even while I'm working on things like automated feeds of links to ticket sites and so forth.  Lots of potential here for affiliate traffic and advertising traffic as well - hotels, motels, restaurants, music sites, instrument makers, providers of editing equipment for radio, television, film, and the 'net.  Hell, I could even throw ads for LowGenius.Com up and maybe draw some business that way too. 
  
  The big trick is going to be organizing everything, really, and just doing the legowrk to make the site go, but the legwork is just...well, legwork.  Not like I haven't ever built a site before.  I've got all the tools, especially now - much better than what I had when I bought the domain in the first place.
  
  Anyway, this is getting away from an updated and into a stream-of-consciousness rant, and I can use that energy more productively.  The site's already online (though there's exactly nothing there right this second).  Check it out if you want, or wait until I tell you there's something worth seeing.  Your call.

And that's about it for me at the moment.  All the larger goals are still in sight; these are just the smaller ones that the larger ones are constructed from.