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Author Micah Cambre

elance is as bad as aol

I cannot delete my account off of elance.

In order to get to their customer service, I have to go to their About page and THEN I find a Contact page. If you see the link on the bottom right that say “Send us your feedback”, it goes to a forum. I didn’t want a forum, I wanted an email address, contact us form, or at the very least a phone number. I just want to delete my account.

Elance has been of no use to me. I won’t sit here and say it doesn’t work at all because, of course, many people make a living from the site. But I find Elance’s methods and system far too complicated, convoluted and just plain annoying.

One of my biggest beefs? The test to show your proficiency in WordPress refers you to either version 2.5 or 2.3. That was about 2 years ago, Elance! Do you think I remember WordPress from 2 years ago? Half of those questions are outdated or inconsistent with the most recent versions. Why can’t they keep their survey question and content up to date?

I didn’t even bother trying to get freelance jobs because I’m bidding against other crappy designers who are willing to work for next to nothing. I can’t compete with their prices if I want to make a living.

All I want to do is get rid of my account. Why don’t you offer an easy, non-aol like experience to delete your account online? I don’t wanna make a phone call, either. Besides, it’s after 5pm on a weekend night and your customer support center is closed.

I’m disappointed in Elance and want my search results and history completely deleted. I’m sure other people have similar experiences and I feel sorry for others like me who found this site to be of no service and much more of a nuisance.

headshot

New design.
If you come visit my real site instead of reading this in your RSS feed reader, you’ll see my hair as of February 21st. I found a very minimalistic theme that looked great and modified it with my hair!

I think I’m gonna do a little more code play on this site, such as converting the front end code to HTML5 and adding some minimal javascript behaviors. Maybe I’ll get too busy, maybe I’ll go crazy, who knows. But this website kinda has no purpose right now except to archive my life.

So, for a quick update into Micah 2010:

  • January was my great depression. It was one of the worst months all around that I’ve had for years. Very depressing for some many reasons. Just a terrible month in general. Glad it’s behind me.
  • February is looking up but there’s still some reflections of January in the mirror. Not sure how to shake off this personal recession but time will take its toll.
  • I have started a new part-time contract job that makes me drive to Brentwood about 3 times a week. It’s a challenging web design job that will push my skills to their limits and force me to learn new languages. It’s a little overwhelming but a challenge I need to push myself through.
  • I also work with another graphic designer to help him with his new and existing clients. It’s not as much busy work as my part-timer but different challenges to overcome. I’m very lucky to be continuing a their part-time job which I’ve held since March 2005.
  • I have no news on the music front, sadly. I have a personal goal in the back of my mind to actually record something, anything, and publish it online. This has been the same story for nearly 10 years however. And being the musical perfectionist that I can be, I don’t know if I will fight my demons on this but feel free to leave your motivational comments.
  • For the first time my whole life, my dedicated DVD player is actually hooked up to my 27″ TV. I’ve never had this personally for myself as I’ve always relied on my computer’s DVD player or just downloaded shows/films online. It’s a nice little change!
  • Here are my travel goals this year: Moscow, London, Houston, and wherever my mother ends up being. As of right now, I have no travel plans and won’t make any anytime soon. Stability comes first, then travel.

2010 is shaping up to be a year of big changes and the most potential I’ve ever had.

pee wee herman show

What a nice evening. I took my roommate down to Nokia Club in the new Nokia Live center in downtown LA. The place is so artificial and corporate looking but nice nonetheless. It was built to help revitalize downtown Los Angeles. While it looks like, parking around there is much more expensive than it should be. Luckily, we found free parking about 5 blocks away.

We met a couple of my friends along with two of their friends who showed up. Got VIP passes which literally meant nothing special. It was just a special trip to the 4th floor where we had private access to another bar and kitchen. Meh.

We got GA tickets so we had to stand in the back. It was still very nice to be there, however. Seeing Pee Wee in person was more or less a childhood dream. Not that I ever had a fantasy to meet him when I was young but I DID get a lot of the Pee Wee toys that were out for my 10th birthday. I still even have the playhouse!

If you’d never seen the TV show or movies, you’d think this guy is on drugs or something. I can totally get how his humor seems ridiculous from the outside. But, since we were all fans there, the whole show was really great! The funniest part for me was that he took the whole thing really seriously. It’s as though his show never ended!

What I didn’t realize until after the show tonight is many of his scenes and bits used in this show were taken right out of his show he put on at the Groundlings and Roxy so many years ago. You can find different clips of those shows on Youtube.

He appropriately made fun of his brush with the law so many years ago by saying he was wearing an abstinence ring! As he was showing it to the audience, he starts pumping his fists. There was a whole bit about it and the audience was cracking up.

We got to sit in on the last 20 minutes of a Q&A session too. It’s neat to see him talking as Paul and not just Pee Wee. He seems generally excited about everything going on. He thanked his fans a lot and was so happy that he gets to hear the feedback from everyone now. He said when he was doing the show so many years ago he was so busy he never got to really talk to the fans.

You can tell he knows he’s lucky. Either that or he’s putting on a damn good show. He was born to entertain and is brilliant at what he does.

I didn’t get to meet him personally but I did meet the King of Cartoons up close. Saw a couple other of his actors up close, too.

It was great reliving my childhood for one night. :o)