Check out these 44 great design tools for a freelance web developer (or graphic designer) that I stumbled across today. Lots of useful stuff to help you during any stage of the design process.

While Chegg may seem awesome, they have horrible customer service, extremely ridiculous shipping times, and their books are in bad condition.

Good luck trying to get in touch with them by phone or email if you ever have any problems. And good luck in getting your books within 2 weeks of your order being placed.

Stay away from Chegg until they improve their customer service and shipping.

I’ve been using Surpass Hosting since around August 2004. I’ve gone through shared accounts, reseller accounts, and multiple dedicated servers. I’ve been through a lot with this company but overall it’s been an awesome experience.

I started with a simple shared account to host a personal website, but quickly moved into a reseller account so that I could host as many websites as I wanted. I have to say that Surpass Hosting is really what brought me to the internet. I’d been using it like every other person, but once I started making websites everything just exploded.

Most of the websites that I’ve hosted are personal sites: blogs, crazy ideas that I had but never really made them happen, random websites that only I would get. I’ve done a few business sites for other people, and even ran a dedicated server for my work, where we hosted our city’s website and local chamber of commerce.

With Surpass, the support has usually been great. I’ve had a couple of oddities, but every problem I’ve ever had (which were usually created by me) has been solved to my satisfaction in a timely manner. The prices are great for the support and service you receive. Their servers are not oversold like a bunch of other hosts that I’ve used. They place a reasonable amount of clients on their super fast servers, and move people off if the server gets overloaded.

My favorite thing about Surpass Hosting is the community. Surmunity is the awesomest thing that was ever invented. Many of the staff are active in the community, and you can go there for help with any sort of problem. Anything from spam email to tacos, Surmunity is there for you. I’ve been sent an Xbox 360 and sent to Orlando to check out the data center because Surmunity is filled with a bunch of great people.

Of course there are always things in any company that can be improved. One thing I would like to see improved is support tickets. Sometimes all of the people responding to tickets don’t read the entire ticket, causing a delay when they ask for something that was already provided. How the tickets are ordered and run is weird as well (limitation of the software). It would be nice to see a custom written help desk, tailored to exactly what they need. If they integrated their new service status that would be great as well in helping users find out if a server is down, or maybe if their IP was just blocked.

So overall: Surpass rocks, and I expect to continue seeing awesome things out of them. I know they will continue to work on any problems there might be and always try to make the service better. This review is entirely mine, and you’ll see no affiliate codes or anything similar that you might find elsewhere and for other hosts. This was written because I’ve had a great experience.

Entrecard, the revolutionary blog to blog advertising network has partnered with SezWho to reward users for flooding blogs across the internet with quality, well though comments.

Entrecard has chosen to team up with SezWho to give you credits for your comments. All you have to do is register for SezWho from your dashboard, install SezWho on your blog using the provided Wordpress plugin or paste some code in for Blogger. Next you start commenting, rating comments, and earning credits.

You can earn up to 150 credits per day for quality comments on blogs with Entrecard and Sezwho installed. The credits are on a scale of 10, depending on the quality of your comment (which is determined by other users that rate your comment). This is great for people looking for more credits and more comments. This is absolutely full of awesome for those looking for better quality comments. There is going to be a huge flood of comments all around the internet. There is no incentive to leave comments that suck because you won’t get credit for them.

Partnering with SezWho is a genius move by EntreCard. Getting a network of 14,000 bloggers together commenting on blogs every day is really going to help revive the blogosphere. I can’t wait to see the burst of traffic that thousands of blogs start receiving because of this. This is going to cause the quality of blogs to increase substantially. Graham over at Entrecard has written an amazing post on the Entrecard Blog about this partnership, and how to use it effectively.

Starting back around November (or even earlier) I started to have many weird problems with my cable internet service that I get from US Cable. There would be high ping times, dropped packets, and generally just weirdness. At first I thought it might have been my router, but I tried a new one and even bypassing the router and had the same weirdness. I called the Warp Drive Online support number probably 10 times to tell them that my internet was either out or behaving oddly. I used to sell this service and do know mostly how it all works so I was able to provide them with a ton of information as well as go through most of the diagnostics before I called them.

Unfortunately none of the people I called seemed to be able to help, or even cared to help. They were nice on the phone and I’m sure they used all the tools they could, but each time they just said that nothing looked wrong from their end. They suggested my router or cable modem could be bad. They said they could send somebody out to test the modem, but if it needed replacing I would have to pay for it (This is their equipment that they installed when they put in the internet, and that I must give back if I cancel). They never tried to escalate my calls to somebody higher up that might be able to help, despite the numerous times I called.

I got really fed up with this about a month ago and was very close to canceling. I decided to make one last attempt to get it fixed and sent them an email through their website explaining what had been happening. The next day I got an email from somebody and then a phone call. The person told me that he wanted to help find out what the problem was, and he would be working on it and call me back.

It turned out that there was something wrong with a whole node in my town. This problem had been affecting numerous people in my town, causing just weirdness with everybody’s internet service. He was able to see this because he had the tools available. He took the time to find out what my problem was, offered to send a technician out at no charge if it was needed, and even credited my account for the problems. I was ready to cancel my service because it seemed like the company didn’t care, but this guy turned it around.

While the people I talked to in tech support months before this were nice, they never really seemed to care. I’m glad that this was resolved and that some people at US Cable do seem to care. I only wish that some of the lower level people would look more into an issue. Look into the history of the issue when I call, see that a problem keeps happening and try to fix it, or try to refer me to the person that can fix it. US Cable has redeemed itself for the problems and I still recommend them for great internet service.

I’ve heard good things about Short Stop Hamburgers in Colorado Springs, CO from many people for a while now so I decided to check it out today. Unfortunately they failed at delivering good service and good food.

I’m a weird, obsessive compulsive person so I order my cheeseburgers plain. It’s something I’ve done forever and I believe that a good burger shouldn’t need any of that extra junk on top of it to make it taste better.

Apparently in Short Stop land plain means you get ketchup, mustard, and possibly even mayonnaise on your burger. I had already driven away by the time I discovered this, assuming they were smart enough to know what plain means. I decided to just go with it and scraped it off.

After getting past the awful mustard taste the burger didn’t really satisfy. It wasn’t exceptional, it wasn’t very tasty. It was just a regular old frozen meat patty. McDonalds makes better burgers than this.

On to the fries. While they were nice and greasy (just they way I like em), they didn’t taste like much of anything. They could have used a little more salt and they even seemed as if they were frozen.

So Short Stop Hamburgers failed at delivering what I ordered, and at delivering a tasty burger. Maybe next time I’ll just stop at Big Kahuna Burger