Vimello.com

Stupid forms

Whenever I get a new form, I skip right to the limited registry question, that asks if the person agrees that our puppies are destined to be lovely pets, period. If the person says yes and I like their answer, I procede to reading the rest of the form and then emailing them back. However, if the person says no or something along the same lines, I used to proceed to writing them a huge, well educated and informative email listing all of my reasons, statistics and benefits of spaying/neutering their dogs. But sometimes I get so frustrated over some ridiculous forms that I don’t even bother answering.

But today I got a new form that mentioned around five times that they wanted to know “how much was an intact female” with intact in CAPS, and that she didn’t agree to “mutilate a dog, since not even the homeless animals were spayed/neutered. What the hell?! Which leads me to think, do these people even bother reading all of the stuff I put online? And it also pains me to think that yes, the lady will find an intact female that she can breed her guts out, unfortunately.

It was so unbelievable that I just had to answer something, anything, so I sent her a short email going along the lines of “please visit nearest pet shelter center and see statistics on homeless dogs in our country” and “it’s because of people like you that I see EVERYDAY stray dogs, thin as hell, looking for food scrapes and falling apart with diseases”.

Seriously!

Survey and SEO

I am very pleased with my Puppy Inquiry Form on the Chantilly Exclusive website. The amount of unsuitable people that look for frenchies and email me have dropped considerably. Now I only have few selected emails a day and I can tend to them correctly by referring another ethic breeders or giving them predictions on when my next litter will be due. 2009 doesn’t look like it, probably, but there are people who are willing to wait. How cool is that?

Speaking of the website, I restructured it last June. It was a small website and I was not at all happy with it. I wanted to add a few pages on the breed and how I took on the whole deal of becoming a breeder and what came with this decision. I knew I had to rebuild a huge part of it and that it would drop on google results. Eventually, when google caught up with the changes, we left the fourth or fifth place we used to have when searching for “bulldog frances” on google Brazil and after about two months, we were back on the first page but as the last result. As this affected greatly on our pageviews and visitors, I didn’t really mind. I trusted my studies. Well, around September it was back to the top as number six result. And as I was looking at the statistics the other day, I was stunned at how many visitors I was getting. When I went to google, we were number two! I am so happy, especially because there are more things that I can think of to improve the SEO, I just have to get around to that.

Going back to the first topic, I am also stunned at the forms I’ve been receiving. Intelligent, well educated people looking for frenchies to add to their families. No one that intends to breed. They know that it’s a tough job. Most of them are willing to spay/neuter their dogs and no mentions of “it’s mah damn dog and I cans do what I wants with it, if I has moneh, you gon sell me da dog, you hear me woman?”. Instead, I am left satisfied with these people, knowing that when the time comes for me to have babies again, I will be able to find awesome families for them.

Price of beauty

I like dogs.

Oh, you don’t say? Never would’ve guessed.

Yep. Maybe I’m a typical dog person, whatever that means. I’m not all dressed up, hair perfectly brushed and beautifully tied into a knot. No. I don’t do fancy clothes and the closest I ever get to being halfway presentable to the outside world is at work, when I put on something that vaguely resembles my dogshow outfit.

So you’ll believe me when I say I don’t do girly either. But I have just spent more than one paycheck’s worth of girly stuff at the beauty parlor. Between all of the middle age rituals that women are supposed to go through to look bearably passable, a ridiculous amount of that was spent on my hair, which will be done tomorrow morning. I also had a pedicure, which is something nearly orgasmic after spending my days walking up and down from home to college to home to work to walking the dogs in the wrong kind of shoes (always).

And as I think of every curse word I didn’t even know existed (and probably 70% of that I’ll never have the guts to say aloud) while the woman pluckes my eyebrows, I also wonder if it’s all worthy. I mean, I pay them high money so they can hurt me?! What the hell is wrong with the world?

But, yeah, of course it’s worthy. Who am I kidding, right? I just wish I could fastforward this to the moment when I’m all ready and shiny. Besides, this is once in an year or something (yes, I know. Tomboy much?), so I can go back to spending all of my money on dogs the other 11 months of the year.

Because, let’s face it. There’s nothing better than spending a few hundred bucks on chicken necks. Or vets. Gotta feed those vets, right?

My days of work

A great (and true) comic by HijiNKS Ensue

This, internet. This is how I spend my days at work. Not that I don’t love being a webdesigner, but debugging for IE (6, especially) breaks my days.

Grades are out

For the first time in my life I am happy with my college results.

8.3 and 8 in Portuguese I and Sociology.

Okay, average-ish. But it was to be expected.

10 and 10 in Introduction to Advertising and Computer Graphics.

Both had huge and important assignments, both are more like “hands on” subjects and I fell in love with both. I fell in love with my college major! I know what I want to do for the rest of my life, and it makes me happy, and I think I’m pretty damn good at it too, and I’ll be even happier if I can hone these skills and learn design-y stuff over the years, so that one day I’ll be making one hell of an art director.

After dwelling over college and computer science for four years or so, this is a pretty big deal. I feel like celebrating!

I build (other people’s) websites

It’s a joke. A good one, too.

I spend my days, several hours, bent over code over code over code. HTML, CSS, the occasional actionscript and whatnot. Building solid, SEO friendly and nicely designed websites. But I don’t have half an effing hour to finish up MY website. I’ve been trying since JUNE. And I just can’t seem to finish it. So all my websites right now are supermegasucky and it’s making me beyond uneasy.

I also have to reinstall The Sims with all the expansion packs and all the custom content. That will be around 20gb of junk I’ll have to delete from one of my hard drives, but at least it’ll take a little bit of my stress away.

Is it time to start planning my huge-to-do-list for my december school vacations? I’ll still have to go to work, but I’ll have the mornings free.

IE 6 and the hate in me

At some point of any given day at work, I will start cursing and hating Internet Explorer 6. If a design looks perfect in Firefox, I’ll go to IE 7 and most of the time it works okayish at the very least. On IE 6, it’s always WRECKED. Always.

Please, if you have IE 6, upgrade your browser to IE 7 at the very least. Most preferrably, download another browser such as Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome.

I bet the Webdesigners Suicide Ratio will dramatically decrease if people stop using this thing from hell.