Archive for the ‘personal’ Category

Workflow: Mac vs Windows

February 26th, 2008

Workflow: Mac vs Windows

Everyone knows the value of improving your workflow. Well it turns out I work a whole lot faster on a Mac, both in web development and web design. I think the OSX developers must have thought a great deal about workflow, because Mac has a lot of great features: from much more drag-and-drop integration between programs than windows, to little things like the mouse command to fly out all windows or show the desktop (this saves me so much time). But workflow on a Mac goes much deeper than these features.

Web development is great on a Mac, since the programs you need for coding run very quickly and the terminal is really handy for doing lots of things, its really easy to move between the terminal and the finder/other programs. Also since the terminal is Shell based, its … Read more…

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Full Time Development

August 16th, 2007

For a while, I’ve been doing odd design jobs and tutoring high school students to stabilize my income while I do the freelance web development. Recently, this has seemed a bit silly to me so I started applying to full time development positions. I think going full time would be good because I think that a team environment would be really helpful to me. I want to have my code critiqued, so I can become a lot better.

I had an interview yesterday for a design/development position, but I’m not sure it went so well, since I didn’t know a lot of the lingo. He seemed interested in my 3D and design portfolios though, which is nice because although I want to code I definitely want to be on the design side of it.

Well they called me back today, so I’m going to go for it. 8 to … Read more…

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Site Facelift

August 8th, 2007

Over the past couple days I’ve been redesigning my website.First, I made a design for my website in Illustrator that I’m happy with. What’s better is that I was able to implement it fully in a matter of minutes because of the clean template structure I used previously. I had wanted for some time to add some flare to the site, but not to do too much, since I would never want to detract from the content. I hope this design is successful, I don’t think it’s too flashy. Please let me know what you think. Next, I made a lot of minor appearance changes and cleaned up a good amount of the code, fixing up a few sections that had had minor bugs for some time. This is mostly done, but I’m still not happy with the video playback JavaScript. It works fine in FireFox but InternetExplorer shows … Read more…

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Mac Crossover

July 9th, 2007

Mac Crossover

Well I finally broke down and bought a brand new MacBook. I’m a lifetime PC user, but with the CS3 beta looking pretty nice, I decided that it was time to make the cross-over. Now, I’ve always been able to use a Mac but I love being able to really learn the OS like you can only do when you own a machine (I’m always a little more careful if it doesn’t belong to me 😉 )

The adjustment to MacOSX has been surprisingly easy. I’m really liking the OS actually, especially dragging programs from the .dmg file to the applications folder to install them, and being able to save preference changes without restarting applications. It’s so much easier! Also I really like how it mounts everything. I kept asking my friend what he uses to mount disc images with on Mac and he … Read more…

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Photo Editing Gig

May 30th, 2007

For the past couple months I’ve been working a photo-editing job, working on old family photos for an estate. The work is pretty interesting, and I really like my coworkers. We do crazy amounts of scanning and then have only a few minutes to retouch each photo. It’s really helping me get faster with Photoshop, and a lot of the photos are very old, and therefore really interesting.

I’ve also been working for the past couple days on an illustration of Kate to give her for her birthday. It’s an important one, so I’m spending extra time perfecting all the vectors in Illustrator. I also made a pretty cool pattern for the background. She already knows that I’ve been working on it, so it’s ok for me to talk about, but I can’t upload it until I actually give it to her, you know, surprises and all.

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Blog Ho!

May 25th, 2007

Wordpress

So my friend told me that it would be a good idea to keep a blog. Blogging has always seemed to be sort of a strange thing to me, like people talking to themselves. But he said it would be good to show potential clients what I’ve been up to, and also to keep records for myself of my learning process. Sort of a combination of talking to myself and to other people.

Well, here goes, I doubt if anyone is reading this, but if you are, I hope you enjoy it.

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