09/24/2008
16 days until I get my Nitro RC. I've got everything I need (with the exception of the gas) ready to go. It's expensive to get started but I'm excited about digging in. True to form I have read about all I can about nitro RC's and already have plans for things I'm going to work on with it. There are tons of informational websites out there about the Nitro RC cars. Seems to have a good community built around it as well. They are eager to help or share how they fixed a problem. I think there will be a slight difference in how I drive my RC. People seem to be really rough of them, jumping over 7 feet into the air off of ramps and such. They call it bashing. No wonder they break things. I plan to keep mine on the ground. Found a nice parking lot to drive in for break in period and then once I get the driving down I plan to take it to the beach. Our beaches here are huge at low tide, lots of room to run and very well packed sand. Somewhere in the future I plan to make a custom body for it, paint decals and such. I have checked with my local Kinko's and they do custom decals for $10 a square foot. So if I use Photoshop I can put all the images I want into a 1'x1' square and then cut them out later with a hobby knife and put them on the car. It'll probably be Halo themed as you might have guessed. Gotta tie my hobbies together somehow. Jermaine is going to be up in October and he's bringing his RC car as well. So then we'll go race them in the parking lots. I'll have some pictures up once I get it.
09/19/2008
This
game is
really quite fun. I passed every level, although on a few I had to get
some idea help. Mainly levels 17, 19 and 20 threw me and I couldn't
figure them out. Once you beat a level you can go back and look at how
other people beat it. Very interesting really. You don't have to sign up
or anything like that. Just figure out your way through the puzzles.
09/17/2008
Well another point for organization. I appear to have killed all the Photoshop files for the banners on these pages when cleaning my desktop of old files. Granted they didn't take long to make but it's a bother. I still fixed the Hobbies page by just covering the old text on the jpg image. Found my local hobby shop to have at least one not so helpful employee so far. Hopefully it's better if there is someone else there because it's the only hobby shop within 50 miles. But thanks to the internet they can still loose business, and thusly should be polite and helpful to their customers. I'm still going to buy the actual car from them because if anything dies horribly they might be more inclined to help if I bought it from them. Supporting my local hobby shop and all that.
09/13/2008
Merged the Halo and Nitro pages into the Hobbies section. I'll have to edit the banner once I get home later today as I don't have Photoshop on this laptop. I feel that helps organize the site a little better. Put a bunch of links to hobby shops that carry the Traxxas Nitro Rustler parts. Also changed the site navigation again. I've pretty much given up on flash navigation at this point, I don't have the skills to create a navigation system that I like and I can't seem to find one that I like enough to keep. So for now the flash intro movie will have to suffice. You don't have to wait for the flash movie either, you can just click on the navigation and get to wherever you want to go. I always hate having to wait for flash movies to go away. I changed the archives page as well removing it from the main navigation bar and placing the small link on this page. It's not something most people go digging through so I felt there wasn't a need to create a whole page for it. Also I'm going to go through the portfolio and edit some of those pictures to make them a little more dramatic. Really just cropping the wasted space around the various pictures, still not entirely sure I like that flash viewer but it seems to distort the image quality the least amount.
Update:
You have got to do a search on YouTube for Giant piano. Some of those people are amazing! Also I think I've figured out a nice way to do the portfolio. Because although flash lowers the picture quality and they are a little small but really it's not too bad. I was going to go with another one but I'll use that one later as this one does a better job.
09/12/2008
I got myself a Youtube profile for some of the videos, this was a move to save space on the server as videos can take up a lot of room. Granted I can't put all of them on there because I don't know how all the copyright stuff works. But the ones I've taken I've put on there. Just random stuff. Avery, and places we've been. Check it out!
09/11/2008
Changed up some things on here. Got rid of that navigation bar to the left and added a temporary one across the top. I didn't like how if the page gets long the navigation bar didn't go down with the rest of the page. Learned some more CSS in the process of all this. Working on getting some nice navigation across the top there. I'm also changing the "news" page to my Nitro RC page. I really should put Halo and Nitro under hobbies... maybe I'll switch that up later on.
09/10/2008
The hurricane was a bust. We got some rain, no wind at all at the apartment and that was it. It was no different than normal rain storms. Oh well.
09/05/2008
My sister had her baby, they are both healthy and doing well. Makes me an uncle now. Hurricane effects have just started as well, it's not a direct hit but we should get a substantial amount of rain. It's hitting right at high tide so downtown should be flooded pretty good. Other than that it shouldn't be a lot more than some gusty rain.
09/02/2008
So here we go, this will be our first hurricane in Charleston SC. And given how it floods here if there is a high tide it should be quite interesting. I scored us some water at Wal-mart by taking it off the pallet. Thankfully the stockers all dress in casual clothes so no one thought anything of me unpacking the pallet for them. Figured I might as well get some on hand just in case. They will be treating it as the apocalypse as Jen pointed out. So it's worth the preparation just to be safe. Most of the stores are sold out of water and a lady was watching me unpack it like she was going to take it from me. Little did she know I didn't work there. So I'll try to take pictures if stuff starts flooding, although I don't have a boat or a 4x4 truck so they will be limited if it gets deep.
08/31/2008
Uploaded the picture portfolio, It's flash based but it seems to be the one that displays the images with the least amount of distortion. I may try some others as time goes along.
08/29/2008
Haven't got much done for working on this place. I'm going to redo the menu buttons with new ones. Toying with the idea of the button backgrounds matching the banners on the page. Not sure if I'll keep it flash since the photo galleries will be flash, and I'm not good enough at flash to build my own buttons that I like. We'll see how it goes.
08/25/2008
Working on a few things still. Trying to get the white bar out from under the main title up there. Not quite sure why it's there as it doesn't show up in preview but online there it is. Working on the title banners for each page as well. They are subject to change of course. Also not really feeling the navigational buttons on the side (left) They don't fit in well. I'll see what I can do about that. Once layout is complete I'll work on content. All images seen on this site are photo's taken by me with my camera.
8/24/2008
Welcome to the new and improved website. We've gone through a number of changes these past couple weeks as I learned about flash media and how to apply it and somewhat how it works. I'm self taught of course but nothing like learning through reverse engineering. This website will be more focused around my interest in photography rather than Halo. Not that I'm any less interested in video games mind you. It's just that I was board of the old website.
During the transition from the old one to this one I created an entirely flash based website just to play around with it. You can find it HERE. Although the photo links will no longer work the basic premise of the site is there. Although I liked the look and feel of the site it was to limited in what I could do content wise. So I've moved forward and just incorporated flash content into my normal pages. The photo galleries will also be flash as well. The drawback to using flash for photo galleries is that the image quality suffers.
Portfolio - I'm going to try to keep favorites of my work on the portfolio page and keep them updated as I get time to take new pictures.