TheJoey.Net

It was in October of last year that I went to a couple of my friends and mentioned to them that I wanted to start a t-shirt company. I felt I had a couple of good ideas and enough business know-how to do it. They were the creative ones that could be the personality of the company.

Then nothing happened for a while. We kept track of ideas, but nothing more than that. Finally in February, we put out our first product for Scranton’s widely celebrated Parade Day. We did pretty well, especially considering the competition. But then we all got busy and put pursuing anything further off. Until now.

We decided to finally launch a site with some flagship designs, which you can find here. The site has been what I’m calling ’soft launched,’ which I guess you can equate to a beta. But everything, as far as I know, is working. You can order shirts! Now it’s time to promote and generate enough cash to pursue some other designs we’ve come up with.

If you’d like to help out, you can find all kinds of stuff on our Promote page. And as always, any feedback is welcomed. Since this is probably the most involved site I’ve done, I’ll be doing a write up of the design/programming in a later post. For now, let’s cross our fingers and hope for the best!

On a final note, we also want our company to be the middleman between people who want shirts and people who print shirts. So if you want to have shirts done, please fill out this form. We will do the artwork, and take care of ordering. We can also work something out for distributing if you’d like. Just let us know!

Update:

Special thanks to Bring Back the Stache! and Consumer Whore for the links. Much Appreciated.

posted on August 6th, 2008 in Business, News, Websites| No Comments »

About a week and a half ago I decided I wanted to start a new blog with something fun to post daily. I got the idea from Sean Blanda, who started the website Consumer Whore, a blog with something new to buy every day. 101 Things is simply a website that posts some activity to do every day- whether you are looking to pick up a hobby or are just plain bored. There are also featured posts that will change weekly and take a little longer to do.

Hopefully this takes off- I think it could be a fun website where people can try new things and share their experiences. This week (and next week’s) featured post is about how to start a blog. Today’s daily is “Solve the Rubik’s Cube.” Check it out- and if you have any suggestions, you can make them here.

posted on August 1st, 2008 in Websites| | show comment » « hide comment

Last week, popular web development website A List Apart (ALA) released the results of it’s 2007 Web Design Survey. I’ve spent the last few days reading over the 82 page document and found a good amount of the results interesting.

• Over 80% of the respondents were White Males
• 48% came from the USA
• When asked if they were excited by their field, 43.6% said Fequently, 35% said Very Frequently, meaning 78.6% like what they do most of the time.
• About 20% want to start their own business as their next move.
• Of that 20%, 89.9% were men.
• 47.9% are in the salary range of $20,000 - $80,000, where 52.3% have been in the industry 5 years or less.
• 1/2 of the people in my age group (21-24) make less than $20,000. Something to consider is most people who graduate college are 21 or 22.
• ALA found that Job Satisfaction increases with age. I think this is because when starting out, (for me anyway), you’re not doing the cool and exciting stuff you’d like to. My internships consisted mostly of fixing HTML, and not any real development.
• Of those who saw an age bias, Under 21 and 21-24 combined made up for 70.2% of the respondents.
• 22% of female respondents saw gender bias, where only 1.5% of male respondents did. (NOTE- that is 22% of the females, which made up ~16% and 1.5% of the males, which made up ~84%).

What was most surprising to me was how big the gap between male and female respondents is. I knew the computing field is male dominated, but I didn’t think it was that one sided. This survey also gave me a pretty good idea of what I can expect as a salary once I get out of Grad School. You can download and review the results here, and if you are a web professional, I strongly recommend it. It’s extremely informative.

posted on October 23rd, 2007 in Computer Stuff, Design, Links, News, Thoughts, Websites| No Comments »

Over at Wired Blog, they are having a little running poll on the most influential, most unappreciated and best fictional scientists of all time. I’ve decided to weigh in with my picks:

Best Fictional: Q

This was a pretty tough decision as a nerd. There are scores of fictional scientists that are awesome (take for example, Doc Brown from Back to the Future). But I had to go with Q, the brain behind James Bond’s amazing gadgets and fun toys. It would be totally awesome if Q made stuff for me. I mean, who doesn’t want a class four grenade disguised as a ballpoint pen?

Most Unappreciated: Philo T. Farnsworth

Inventor of the first picture tube with his designs he created at just 13 years old, Farnsworth made monumental contributions to the media industry. However, due to corporate overshadowing by RCA, he never got recognition for his work until after his death in 1971.

Most Influential: Issac Newton

I was going to go with Einstein, however, Newton founded that thing called Calculus. Without out, We’d really have no basis for any modern physics and all of the work Einstein did.

So what do you think? Who are your best fictional, most unappreciated and most influential scientists?

posted on October 14th, 2007 in Thoughts, Websites| No Comments »

Just recently I started using Plaxo, an online calendar and contacts manager. When Plaxo first started, it was a contacts manager that bought out the online calendar I was using at the time, HipCal. I never really got into Plaxo, especially once I got my Treo, but revisiting it, I’ve got to say it’s quite powerful and has a great interface.

It handles everything Outlook can handle in a web-based format. A really nice feature of Plaxo is that it automatically updates your address book with any changes other friends on Plaxo make. It also give you access to the RSS feeds they choose to share with Plaxo Pulse. The calendar is very slick, displaying the next two days in agenda form and then the next 3 weeks in calendar form. It also displays the local weather and any ‘countdowns’ you add, such as days until your birthday. My favorite part, however, is the powerful syncing options Plaxo offers.

Online calendars have always been a project of mine. GCal has been my web-based one of choice for a while because it’s easy to access when I use GMail. But since getting Yahoo! Go on my Blackberry, I’ve tried going back to Yahoo! Calendar because it autosyncs with Outlook. But this means at any given time, GCal, Outlook/Yahoo and my Blackberry could have different calendars. With Plaxo’s Sync Dashboard, I can set up my Plaxo calendar to sync with GCal and all of Plaxo (calendar, contacts, tasks, notes) to sync with Outlook. Then I sync my Blackberry with my computer. Yahoo is automatically updated, though Plaxo offers Calendar and contacts sync for that too, as well as MSN, Outlook Express, Mac OSX, AOL/AIM and LinkedIn. It also offers a mobile web interface so I can access it via my blackberry. The only thing that would make this better is over the air (wireless) sync with my Blackberry, which I believe they are working on.

All in all, Plaxo is a very nice web app that I am glad I discovered before the start of the school year. With it’s awesome accessibility and sync options, it will definitely keep me more organized.

posted on August 16th, 2007 in Productivity, Software, Websites| No Comments »