Look Here!

Since around 9:00 this evening I've been sitting on my computer trying to come up with a good page layout for the next version of my website. It's nearly midnight now and the furthest I got turned out to be a dead end. I got a basic layout constructed with a header, body, and what would have been a footer but decided it was crap and trashed it...

I'm wish I hadn't deleted it because I think now parts may have been salvageable. I'm way too quick at just deleting things and I really hate that, but the bigger problem is that I just can't get anything into photoshop right lately. I have in my head the way I want things to look. I can vividly see the way I want the pages laid out and how the site should be constructed. It's just not going from my head to my computer... I don't know what I can do to fix this.

I'm thinking about just getting a piece of paper and drafting a design in a sketchbook. Maybe that will help the flow of ideas and if I can get a basic layout down on paper I can easily just scan that into a digital form. The problem with this is that I left all my sketchbooks at home as well as my set of pencils. So I'm stuck here sitting on my hands until this weekend when I get back home. If anyone reads this and has any ideas on how to get through this funk I'm in please I'm open to just about anything at this point...

So, I can't help but be hopelessly addicted to this show. It's really got me hooked and damn the producers for delaying the next episodes until the end of April. Thankfully I found a link earlier on this new thing called twitter to the web-comics that are being published every week. They're really well done and high quality although I could live without the Nissan Versa ad at the beginning of each issue.

Despite the short length of each one (they're all less than 10 pages) there's about 23 episodes out right now which is a good amount of material to sift through. I've only gone through the first 7 or so issues, and I'm hoping by the time I get through to the end the show will just about be ready to start back up. I'll probably get bored later tonight and read it all at once though which will leave me heroes-less for weeks.

Grab 'em up here: NBC Heroes Novels

Just want to give an update to anyone who runs across this page about what to expect content wise in the near future. This site started out as just a project for a class but I'm planning to expand it into something that should prove useful to some others out there on the interwebs.

Due to some frustration I had earlier today regarding video conversion under Mac OSX, I have in the works, a series of comprehensive tutorials that should provide a badly needed reference to many people looking to convert video on their Mac. As far as I can see there really isn't a site that contains a lot of easy to access information on OSX video encoding in one central place. Doom9 is a good source of information regarding encoding video however very little of their content is relevant to the average Mac user. Look for those to start showing up in the coming weeks.

I've also put up a new video that I just finished under my artwork page here. A pretty major graphical facelift to the main layout is also in the works, that should provide a more unique feel to the site. Once this site is graded for my comp. app. class I'll be re-designing the site and using Wordpress as a CMS. That should be coming in the next couple of weeks as well.

So I was stoked to see this movie pretty well before it came out. I convinced and dragged my friends to see the midnight showing of 300 last night 2.5 hours before the movie began to get a spot in line for the best seats. That said this is probably about as one sided and biased an impression of this movie you'll ever get... well maybe not.

I would say it's pretty much the best action movie I've seen in the last 5 years. All sorts of comparisons are being made to Sin City but 300 is on a whole other level. Sin City's storyline was fragmented, confusing, and content-wise okay at best. 300 combines the best of both worlds, with a compelling story and the most brutal battles ever created. The over-the-top slow motion sex scene between Leonidas (the main character and one pictured above) and his wife was also a good way justify for the $9.50 I paid for a ticket. Sex and gratuitous violence... what more can you really ask for in a film?

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Earlier last year I made the switch over from Windows to Mac. I couldn't be more happy with the decision and have no regrets about leaving the grip of Big Bill behind. Despite switching OS's I managed to bring some of the same software I was familiar with in Windows over to my Mac. Apps like Firefox, Skype, VLC, and photoshop are all available in Mac formats. Most of them function pretty much the same but the one program I probably use the most, Firefox, has some pretty major issues in it's OSX build.

So after Firefox crashed on me for the 5 billionth time this morning I decided that it was time for a change. There's plenty of options for browsers as far as OSX goes. There's a lot more viable options than I ever experienced with Windows. I looked around at some of these options and decided to switch over to Camino. Camino is built on the same rendering engine as Firefox, but it's way more optimized and much more stable. It's interface is also a little more 'sleek' thank Firefox's default theme. Importing bookmarks from Firefox was a breeze and the bookmark management tools that come with Camino are better designed than Firefox's.

There's plenty of choices to look at when switching browsers. All of the pro's and con's of each browser are detailed really clearly here at this page.

Really happy with Camino so far and I highly recommend it to anyone who's frustrated with the problems that come along with Firefox.

Politically I classify myself as somewhere in a gray area. There's the people who don't care if congress decides to outlaw breathing on one end of the spectrum, and people who get SMS messages on their cell phones about what color panties Hillary Clinton is wearing that day on the other end. I care about what goes on in our country and how policies Washington makes affect me, but I also realize that beyond writing my congressional representatives there's not a WHOLE lot I can do to have an impact on those policies. Even then it's usually hit or miss... mostly miss.

The 2008 elections have caught my interest though. I've found myself paying a lot more attention than I normally would because the people participating in this year's election are fascinating.

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I'm sure I'm breaking multiple non-disclosure agreements by writing this post but to hell with it. Most of my impressions about this brand new program have been extremely positive and there's really no such thing as bad press.

Joost, is a new internet TV service that really seems to be gaining a lot of credibility with the mass media. I first heard about the program through a Digg post that made it's way to the front page and proceeded to apply for the beta through their website (which you can get to by clicking their logo up there).

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A long time ago, what seems like ages, I used to help run and organize a competitive gaming team. When I say ages ago it was more like 2 or 3 years past... which pretty much is ages ago. The team I helped found with 2 other people became known as Phaze II and at it's peak grew to over 50 members spanning the United States, and parts of Canada.

The game was Desert Combat, a Battlefield 1942 mod, and we were the best. The competitive gaming scene had been in full swing since years after the first tribes game had been released and Battlefield was running off of that series successes. Back then gaming was fun, we did it because competing against other teams for #1 spot on the ladder was awesome. Then along came CAL and with it the fun died.

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Yesterday I finished all the motions that I needed to go through to officially drop out of college. It was actually a lot easier than I first thought it was going to be. Getting anything else done here would have required me to go through a load of forms and red tape before anything actually got done. I guess if you wanna leave they make it easy for you.

Since I know no one besides maybe a couple people will ever read this there's no harm in really saying why I left and how I feel about the overall college experience I got here.

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Yo check yoself befo yo reck yoself....

Words of a wise man. I swore I'd never make a blog because who really wants to read what other random people have to say about life over the internet. I don't read other people's blogs and I don't really expect anyone to read mine. Maybe one day I'll have some insight so big this blog will get posted on Digg and I'll become e-famous... one can only hope for such a future.

That is this blog's mission.

Oh yea this blog was created on a Mac using RapidWeaver. This program works completely offline and for some reason I'm really liking it a lot. It's simple and so far hasn't presented any program breaking bugs. It even lets you add podcasts to your posts, which I will never use.

I just thought everyone should know that... everyone being like the 2 people who may read this one day. The 2 people who read this before SCAD realizes I'm no longer a student here and shut's down my webspace.



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