Freelancer's Office: Blog

I knew there was a reason why I bought so many notebooks when they went on sale at the start of the school year.  Normally they are what I use for outlining chapters in my novels, short stories and articles that I want to write (as well as countless other uses around the office like tracking supplies and so on and so forth), but now I have found a new use for them.

I have dedicated some of them to being editorial notebooks for my websites.

Yup, that’s right, editorial notebooks.  I take the notebook and write down on a page what topics I want to cover on the website and as I get those topics completed I check them off (or tear the page out).  This lets me keep running notes on what I am working on for each website with a single notebook dedicated to each of my sites.

It seems to be working fairly good so far and reminds me that I have to get things on one site or another done.

I want to build a place on a shelf for the notebooks to be kept, then I am going to cut strips of card stock to about two inches wide and create backs over the spiral binding on them so that a) they won’t grab one another on the shelf and b) I can tell at a glance at the spine what website each of the notebooks is for.

This is my cat, Harry Potter, who I suppose you could say is my muse/editor/critic… well, the office cat. Here he is making sure that he is impossible to ignore. Usually he just sits beside me and reaches up to tap my leg with a paw, however, this time he was not getting attention doing that, so he decided that he knew how to get my attention. He jumped up and sat himself on the mouse pad as I worked at the computer. He was not particularly interested in allowing me to have enough room to move the mouse, not when I should have been petting him instead. Silly human.

I got a new Dell Photo 926 All-In-One printer. You can see it here in the below picture I took of my desktop as I was getting the printer set up. (That’s Eric Close in his role as Vin Tanner on the Magnificent Seven on my computer’s desktop screen.)

Setting up the printer was fast and easy, the only thing that tripped me up was when to hook it into the computer. That ended up to be nearly the last step in the process because the Dell Photo 926 can be used with or without a computer. I want to get one now for my mom so she can make photocopies of things, since she is not a technosavy person this would allow her to get photocopies of important paperwork without needing to have a working knowledge of computers and without having to go somewhere to get the thing copied.

As I was playing with the printer I made up a little sample sheet for print quality. I wrote a line of text, printed on draft. Put the page back in the printer and moved the text down a little, printed on normal. Then put paper back in, moved text down a little more, and printed on photo quality. It turned out really good. Good enough in fact that I snipped it down to just the size of the writing and glued it to my printer as a permanent record of how the print looks at each quality setting.

I really like this new printer, and would recommend the Dell Photo 926 All-In-One printer as a home office printer to anyone that is looking for a good all-in-one printer.

I’ve got the board that I need to finish the desk area in the office, so I am going to be in there working on that for a while tomorrow, see if I can finish things off enough to set up the new printer that I got today.