Chicago: The Eponymous Thread

As I understand it, visual effects is special effects, like CGI, scale models, explosions, etc., whereas art direction is like the cinematic equivalent of "set design." [i]Pan's Labyrinth[/i] was a deserving winner here because it created a unified look from the old house and the woods and the labyrinth: old and dark and mysterious. I think the category has to have some overlap with costumes, too.

Still can't log in at work, Kevin?

I am listening to Giant Brain.

from chicagoist:

You can't throw a stone amongst a bunch of hipsters in the Wicker Park / Humboldt area without a decent chance of accidentally hitting Plastic Crimewave's carefully managed -- and now more tightly clipped -- 'fro. Long a staple of the local psych rock scene, at least as a prodigious historian and record-keeper with a killer collection (some of which saw airtime on a recent Market Frenzy podcast), Crimewave is assembling what he calls his Vision Celestial Guitarkestra at The Empty Bottle. The idea is to get dozens of guitarists together to play a single chord -- admission is free if you bring your own axe and a short lesson on how to play the single chords will be given -- in an attempt to either a) summon our alien overlords or b) shatter every fucking window at The Bottle. Either way, we're curious to see how the whole thing pans out.
Empty Bottle, Tuesday, 9:30 p.m., $8 (free if you bring a guitar and play), 21+

You still can't get in from work? I think I type for all of us when I type: W.T.F.?

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seems like a LIFETIME ago already.

bump?

I wish people wouldn't change their handles so drastically when in the Sandbox.

Or whatever. But if you're going to, I'm going to eye you with suspicion and indignance.

hahaha my name was Armando
i forgot

i made a hasty decision, as all of my decisions are, and now i am stuck worrying about being sued by a perfectly decent organization. hooray!

Okay "CrunkleJ".

ay dios mio, pobrecito Jesse!

I keep reading that name as "cacahuate blanco".

You mean "cacahuete"?

"CrunkleJ" was my name during a different period of my life. The last time I used the sandbox, I was in a stinky office in a once-great American city scraped flat by the roller of the deluge and man's apathy toward man.

xp - No, I mean "cacahuate"

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cacahuate

jajajajajaja

Oh LL, the LWV will not sue you because your user name falls under fair use and then also, the first legal step in a copyright action is a c&d letter, and once you comply, they can't pursue it. And even if they do, the remedy is an injunction, not damages.

thank you! i appreciate your expert opinion.

Are you a lawyer giving legal advice?

no way, she is a mongoose giving financial advice

Huh, apparently "cacahuate" is used in Mexico and "cacahuete" in Spain. I guess the latter was what was used in my Spanish II textbook.

Let's call the whole thing off.

I have had to track my work hours for a couple months now and you know, if you put it off, it turns into a huge nightmare. I'm trying to piece together what I did last Tuesday, and I'm just not sure. Eek.

Yeah, that's me basically every week.

I do keep a to-do list, though, so I know what my assignments were during the week, and I can also consult my e-mail to see what I notified people about.

Yeh, I'm going through my emails, but there is some stuff I do that doesn't leave much of a trail. The two hardest parts for me are:

1. It's hard to track how much time I spend playing IT Guy.
2. I worry about accuracy and ethics when the time is billable to a client.

It's concerning when at the end of the a busy 8 hour day, I wind up with a total of 6 hours on my time sheet.

can you develop a template or something?
a list of things you normally do and then check off stuff at the end of the day?

that way you can just ask yourself "did i do this y/n" rather than "what did i do all day"

back when I had to do billable hours (which is the worst work task on the face of the earth btw) I always added 15 minutes to everything I did and, if all else failed, padded the remaining time in my day w/ like "misc. -- time management"

then one day the vp told me they just want it to add up to 40 every week so I stopped caring

Meh, it's not usually a problem b/c I keep an Excel doc open all day and keep a note pad nearby. But last week I was just like, fuck this, I know it's going to suck on Monday, but I truly do not feel like doing my time sheet.

I have certain recurring tasks, but for the most part they're all unique events.

Fortunately I don't actually have to account for all my time every day, only work I do for the firm that does not directly employ me and any billable time.

It's concerning when at the end of the a busy 8 hour day, I wind up with a total of 6 hours on my time sheet.

Oh man YES.

For me, there aren't a whole lot of unique events, but the proportion of time I devote to each event changes from week to week: one week it may be a lot of fact-checking, another week more editing, etc.

I hate having to come up with appropriate wording for billable stuff. Verbs are important.

We had a case that was being paid for by our client's (a corporation) liability insurance coverage and there were certain trigger words that caused them to reject an entry. One was "draft." Our agreement was apparently that they would not pay for "drafts" of written documents b/c they only paid for "work product" and a "draft" was not "work product," b/c it didn't get used. Or something??? It was really stupid! All writing is a draft, FFS.

Anyway, we changed "draft" to "prepare," and that solved the problem.