Here’s a great way to behave yourself right out another work opportunity if you sub for others: sign up for a conference and spend four days there, one day before a critical project deadline on a multiphase job – and don’t tell the people who hired you.

I couldn’t believe this, from an adult, experienced consultant, not a kid who’s never held a job as a sub. I’ll never consider hiring this person again, and we plan to bring in another consultant on the next phase.

That’s just ridiculous behavior.  Unbelievable.

I have a Hanns-G HW191D flat-panel monitor I got myself (for work) last Christmas. It’s beautiful – except that one of its critical settings for my viewing situation resets to the default of ‘off’ every time the monitor hibernates. I have to turn this feature back on 10 times per day, and that’s pretty irritating.

I wrote to Hanns-G explaining the problem, and (2 days later) someone wrote me back to explain that my monitor in fact doesn’t even have this feature.

Hmm.

I took photos of the menu where said nonexistent feature is turned on and off and sent them back to this tech. Hopefully he’ll believe me and I’ll get something done about this. The monitor’s great in every other way.

If you’re a fontaholic like myself, here’s a nice resource – Open Font Library. Get free fonts, and upload your own free fonts. My only issue with the site is that you have to click on a font face to see an example, but there are many nice fonts here.

Yes, it’s starting off wonderfully. A support request to activeCollab resulted in a request to me to provide an admin-level account on my activeCollab install – but I can’t do that without an email address. Impediment to Being Productive #1.

My client who’s vacationing in Germany got his site in Minnesota back up this morning. I tried installing the CMS software, but because his host has some strange FTP setup going on, was unable to use the autoinstaller. I now have to wait for permission from the client (who’s still in Germany) to take extra time with a manual installation (the same thing happened with another client yesterday). Impediment to Being Productive #2.

I have to get out of the house for a few hours for some maintenance work, so I’m out of their way, but that’s Impediment to Being Productive #3 and it’s only 9:15 here. This does not bode well for the rest of the day.

Oh, lest I forget – the new TweetDeck update causes TD to always open off the bottom of the screen on my second monitor. That’s a real annoyance that’s got a lot of TD users irritated, but nothing’s been done about it yet. I suppose that could be Minor Impediment to Being Productive #1.

I just finished another WordPress integration into an existing XHTML/CSS site I built for a client last year. This was the fastest one yet – just under 2 1/2 hours.

I follow Jonathon Wold’s tutorial; it’s dated now, but still it gets the point across. And I have yet to find a better tutorial.

Perhaps I should write one myself…

You never know when a competitor might become an ally or even a partner – so it’s a good idea not to alienate the like-minded professionals in your own community.

I just read a post in a local web design company’s blog in which they described themselves as ‘the leading web design company in Fort Collins and the Front Range’ and referred to the rest of us as the ‘nearly 100 companies in Northern Colorado claiming to do web development.’

That’s pretty arrogant. Certainly not claims that my own studio would ever feel comfortable making.

There are plenty of professional web designers and developers in our region who do not fall into the ‘kid just out of school’ camp. Many of them do excellent work, and some even go to great lengths to educate their clients on how to make good decisions about their websites.

For the most part, I’ve found my competitors to be excellent colleagues when I’ve had the opportunity to work with them. As design pros in a smaller market, I think banding together can be more important for us – and more beneficial for clients – than standing apart and making claims that are actually pretty hard to substantiate.

Two of my clients were in the Fort Collins Coloradoan today.

Katy Piotrowski of Career Solutions Group was named Outstanding Career Practitioner of the Year by the National Career Development Association. Congrats Katy!

And Marie Hornback of HMS Protocol & Etiquette shared modern manners tips in this article.

I bought a Hanns-G HW191D flat-panel monitor in January so I could finally have a dual-monitor setup. It’s got a beautiful display and works great with my Samsung SyncMaster 941BW.

But there’s one glitch – the Hanns-G has a setting called X-Contrast that greatly increases the quality of the images displayed. Every morning when I boot up the computer I have to turn X-Contrast on. And every time the monitor sleeps, I have to turn it on again.

Hanns-G says I’ll have to send it in for service and it may take ‘weeks.’ I don’ t want to be without my dual monitors for ‘weeks’ and I’d really rather them send me a replacement. I need to test it on another computer to see if the settings are changing there, too…