Evernote ftw

Today, my accountant asked me what a particular charge was for because it was uncategorized in my Quickbooks. I had no clue whatsoever what it was and my only hope was that I took a picture of the receipt and stored it in evernote. At first I tried doing the search for the amount, and it came up with nothing. It was awesome though, because it was able to do character recognition on my search. When I went to the date of the transaction, I found the receipt and realized why it couldn't find it during the search. It was the amount after tip and my handwriting is, well, let's say my penmanship needs a little work. So, the little act of keeping track of receipts kind of helped me. And it isn't that bad of a pain in the ass anymore. It's pretty much habit now. The only problem that I have had is that my iPhone 3gs is lagging badly. I think I have too much crap on it. Where is my iPhone 5????

Image Resolution, Photoshop Actions, and $.

It's amazing how much I didn't know about how photos were edited and printed! Today I was doing research on image resolution and learned that, while 72 pixels/in is sufficient for the web, if I wanted a high quality print, I'd need to be printing at 300 pixels/in. So I took one of my favorite photos of the night and created 4x6, 5x7, and 8x10 versions of it and sent it off through Aperture to be printed, just to see how it turns out. I've never had any image sent off to be printed before, so learning how they get delivered, what they'll look like, the type of paper, etc. I believe will be valuable. This is the photo btw:

I'm also starting to learn about photoshop actions and getting some sort of process going on. I'm an engineer and I'm a big process guy, coming out of an Agile Development background, that thinks doing things over and over again is dumb. Problem is, I'm pretty dumb in the photoshop world right now, so learning actions is going to take some time. I plan on using it to add some kind of banner to the bottom of the pics. Lots of pics. And hopefully by Friday...

So, obvious by my self imposed time crunch, I would like to sell some of these pictures at some point, and having them as normal pics would be kind of lame, no matter how good the are. Sprucing them up should be good. Which leads to the final thing I've done today, which is sign up for dotphoto.com to see how it works. I'm probably going to end up putting another test photo up there and ordering again, just to see the ordering process and quality that comes out of there. That is, until I get some kind of store going on for the dance studio, and, hopefully, eventually for me.

Minority owned business

Was asked a random question today from the company that I am subcontracting from. I was asked if I was a certified minority owned business and at first I thought, sure, why not? I am a minority after all. But the key was if I was certified. So I did some googling and found out that I wasn't. I'm going to check out if I could become one. It wouldn't hurt to have the certification, especially if it doesn't cost much. Gonna visit the local SBA joint and let everyone know how it turns out.