Journal
The Nine Star Story
Archive for April, 2006
Hot Dogs! and Kool-Aid!
I am still waiting for my PIN number to come in for my Financial Aid. Apparently when I signed up for it I gave them the wrong e-mail so now I have to wait for it to come by land. I never payed for the classes yet but the HCC site says that I am enrolled. Hopefully it will come in by tomorrow so I can finish this.
I bought The Simpsons’ seventh DVD set this week. My sister wanted to get a season of it and I thought it was a good idea. We went to Target the other day to buy it. I’m enjoying the great quality of it because when I watch it on TV it’s kinda fuzzy. The Aeon Flux DVD came out this week which I really wanted to buy. I should wait for a “special edition/collectors” set of it because I really liked it.
Claudia, Hossana, and I are going to hang out this Saturday. We’re going to have lunch together to have a little reunion. It will be fun because I haven’t seen them since they graduated. We’re going to Chili’s on near the ol AIH.
Hot Dogs and Kool-Aid taste great together by the way.
Earth Day Polaroids
On Saturday I wanted to go out and celebrate Earth Day by taking photos of the earth. So I went out and bought a pack of Polaroid film and set out with my ol’ Polaroid Silver Express. I didn’t want to go it alone so I asked Lara to acompany me to find some nice nature shots. We stayed in the Katy area because I felt it would better to be within my surroundings, and I didn’t want to use so much of my gas. I found a nice looking park that had a beautiful tree and a perfect bench. There was a swimming pool that had a whale and a floating alligator. We then drove around the corner and found a pavilion. There was a softball laying by it so we kicked it around before finding a prefect shot of vines. Lara directed us to a water fountain and fall. It was a nice photo session. This conjured up a plan of become more of a Polaroid enthusiast. I took photos of the polaroids with my digital just so I can show you them. They aren’t that great looking far away and on my wall. I really need a scanner. There are more polaroids that I have that I neede to scan. I uploaded my old polaroid website because I plan to add these and more too it. Polaroids!
Earth Day Photos
Toggle the hold switch
My nano froze today; it was stuck on the “do not disconnect” screen. Luckly the Apple Support site has a lot of information on troubleshooting. They’ve won awards because of it. So yeah I experienced my first nano problem after five days. That seems a little weird. The only reason why I believe this happend was because I let the nano’s battery drain low while at work. When I got home I plugged it in while the hold switch was on and set to sleep. It’s just kind of depressing because I thought these things wouldn’t run into problems. Oh well…
I designed a layout that I am proud of today. I’d show you a screen shot but I am still working on entering their content. I will definatly post it by this weekend along with the others I have done. The site was for an insurance and financial service company based here in Houston. They wanted me to design them an indentity as well which turned out pretty well. The colors that they wanted on the site were Red, White, and Blue. I am not a fan of using this scheme but I think it turned out pretty well. The more I look at it the better it looks to me. Now it just needs the copy to fill things out. I used some css tricks that I would not usually use on sites at work. So I think this is my step into doing sites a little bit better than now. I still had to use tables though.
Daily
Vitamin has recently launched it’s website. It was a long wait for the release and with no disappointment. They have many of the web’s well known designers and developers to help write articles. I think I will be keeping track of Vitamin.I goto a lot of websites on a daily basis. Many of them are technology and design based. One of my favorites that I kind of check more than once a day is Lifehacker. Engadget is a nice site to visit because they seem to update every thirty minutes.Dee and I had a fun Easter weekend. On Friday we ate fishsticks and macaroni and then watched tv all night. Saturday morning we went to Shipley Do-Nuts. We then went to the outlet mall to find matching slip-on shoes. After no luck there we decided to goto the Barton Creek mall in Austin. I bought a 1Gig iPod nano at the Apple store. My Jetta’s cd player never seems to read any of the cd’s I put in anymore. I really wanted to wait for the next generation but I decided that I really don’t need one so expensive. Then after the mall we went straight to Driftwood to have dinner at the famous Salt Lick. The wait wasn’t too long since it was just the two of us. It seems like a really fun place if you’re with a group of people. When we got back to San Marcos we rented MirrorMask. It was a nice little story and the visuals were stunning. On Sunday after chuch we prepared a Easter feast with chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes, and corn. Then we had lemon squares afterwards. Then I left at four and the drive took longer than usual.
Slow Times
Yesterday I finished the admission process for HCC. It took shorter than I expected it would be. It was a nice day because everything went pretty good. I have until June 8th to register for my classes. They don’t offer the two art classes that I need to transfer safely to Texas State in the summer. So that means I would have to take those during the fall.
The projects at my job are coming in slow these days. Most of the websites we have to create from scratch are almost gone. We wait for people to call in for web changes, and to respond to our messages. Our supervisor asked if anyone wanted to volunteer to leave early, and I wanted to since I’ve always come to work and do all my work.
I started playing my Game Boy Advance again today. I’ve been playing it a lot ever since I slapped the pixel skull sticker onto the lid of it. I really want to purchase LittleSound DJ for it. I can use it to company with my ukulele music.
Speaking of the ukulele; I found a cool ukulele podcast called the UkeCast. He gives some ukulele news and plays some of the coolest songs. It is a really nice podcast to listen to when you have a ukulele. I love playing around on my flying v uke. I might record some of the songs I’ve made; they just don’t have any lyrics.
Panic has released the new version of CandyBar today. It isn’t a huge update but now it is Universal Binary. I love upgrading my applications so I’ll download it anyway. You should check out CandyBar if you want to change your OS X icons.
CSS Mastery
I recently bought CSS Mastery over the weekend. It contains a lot of the latest CSS techniques and information about browser bugs and ways to get around them. I haven’t read many books on CSS techniques and I really needed a new one on what is being done by the masters recently. After the first two chapters I really wanted to recode my whole website. Which will be the plan within the next few weeks. Apparently I’ve been using div and id tags too much in my code. It’s just the way I have done it for a long while. There is a better review of it in the current issue of Treehouse Magazine.
I did some nice websites over the week and I really wanted to update my portfolio with them. The only reason why that never happend was because I bought the book. This seems like a better place to post selective websites I did this week. I will probably post more details to them later and add the links to what it looks like live.
I-10 Auto Auction
This is one of my favorites of what I’ve done so far. I spent most of the two hours of initial design time on the header and menu. We didn’t recieve much content so it was quite easy finishing that.
Vintage Glamour
This site design was fun to work on. I didn’t want to spend too much time on it because we were unable to contact them for their logo and content. It is a pretty simple design that worked out the way I wanted it.
Parsons Mortgage Group
One of the many mortgage websites our company has done. We’ve used just about every stock photo of a house out on the internet. I found a dover illustration of a nice house on a illustrations CD that I bought years ago and I really think it looks great with the green. It makes me think of the clients location.
Cypress Heating and Air-Conditioning
This is a pretty well designed layout that I’ve done. I’m glad this client had a good logo to begin with. A lot of the small companies that come to us don’t have one and we have to try and come up with it in a short time.
A Relaxing Weekend
I had a nice relaxing weekend. On Friday I bought the Lemony Snicket dvd that comes with the first book. It was the only one I could find at Best Buy. I was going to spend the alone so I decided to order take out at Willies. After the movie I played the drums till my blisters came back.
My parents were out of town on Saturday. I spent the morning solving puzzles ripping the head of off a gang of medusas in God of War. Around three I went to Burger King with my sister to have lunch. Then I cleaned my room untill I had the urge to drum.
Sunday I started to apply to HCC online. If you haven’t heard I am going to attend HCC to earn the credit hours I need to get into Texas State. I finished the first part of it so now I need to goto the admissions building to finalize it. I really hope I can take all of the classes online or at least on the weekends. I then bought a new set of car cleaning supplies at Target. It made cleaning my car a lot better and it was only sixteen dollars. Now my car is clean as I could make it. My windows have streaks because I still don’t know how to better clean the windows on my car. I had to goto church again since my sister slept in late.
I hope you like the new logo and background for my journal.