It’s been a while since my last post, and that’s due to life being crazy! Derek got married and I was in the wedding, and I quit my job at CYber SYtes because I got a better offer from AppRiver. Taking this job unfortunately meant for me that I had to move to Pensacola!
Well, I’ve been on the job search for about a month now and it’s finally over. I love being part of Eject Media, but it just hasn’t been netting me enough money, and when it does the work can be inconsistent. I plan to stay with it though, so don’t worry!
Last Wednesday I sent out about 15 nicely printed resumé’s and cover letters to various companies. On Friday of that week I got a call back from Cyber Sytes saying they wanted to meet with me soon....like the coming Monday. I went in, met with everyone (literally), and they offered me a job as a web designer on the spot! That was yesterday, and today was my first day there.
So far so good, I’ve got one day under my belt for now. Ironically when I start my first major project tomorrow it will be for a company I interviewed with several weeks ago and was turned down for!
If you don’t already know, I’m a huge advocate of the Ban Comic Sans site. It’s a bad font, and it’s just plain overused. Look for it next time you see anything that’s been designed, I’ve seen it everywhere from menus to billboards. Another font that I similarly despise is Papyrus, so much to that I own http://banpapyrus.com - one day I’ll get around to making a real site for it, I promise.
I suppose you can link the use of comic sans to print design, but it really can be used in any kind of media. But, I got to thinking the other day, every different type of media has it’s own “comic sans” per se. These are all extremely common to see in their respective media types, but that’s because they’ve become overused and bland now. Whenever I see any of these, it makes me wonder if the designer behind it is actually aware of how incredibly overused they are! The problem with any of these is that when you look at a design, I shouldn’t see the tools or fonts used, I should see the design and overall message.
I’ve got a more detailed write up about all these after the jump.
Well I haven’t posted on here in a while because I’ve really been working hard to get my personal portfolio online. I started sometime last week, and it’s really been a much larger project than I first thought! The hardest part was finding old projects, and deciding how the portfolio itself should work. Now that I’ve selected all my work and completed it, take a look! Just click on the new tabs up top.
Dang it, I scratched the crap of of my MacBook Pro! I was sitting on the couch and I reached down to get my cat, and my laptop slipped off and hit the corner of my coffee table.
I don’t really know of anything that I can fix this with, but I had an idea of possibly taking some sandpaper or steel wool to the lid and roughing it up a bit. This might give it a cool brushed metal look, but I haven’t heard of anyone doing this before, so I’m not so sure it’s a good idea yet.
Ideally, I would love to get my MacBook Pro laser etched, but I can’t find anywhere locally that uses high powered lasers. I could ship it off to some company to do it, but that starts to get expensive. Here’s some great examples of laser etched MacBook Pros.
Want to see one of the hardest games ever created? Someone modified the levels of Super Mario World to be incredibly hard, and they call it “Kaizo Mario”. Here’s level one being played
Now if you want to see something even crazier, how about 134 people playing that level at the same time? That’s right, 134 different plays of this level all superimposed on top of each other.
For a better explanation of that video, and what it has to do with quantum physics, you’d be better off reading the creators homepage: http://msm.grumpybumpers.com/?p=20
Do you get junk mail every day from credit card companies? I sure do, sometimes multiple offers each day! I've decided to write a simple tutorial on how to easily deal with your junk mail. Sure you could easily just throw it away, but that's not secure and not the least bit fun.
Step 1 - Recieve Junk Mail » This is the easiest step. Just check your mailbox and you're bound to find some. Open the envelope and make sure it contains a business reply envelope.
Step 2 - Tear it Up » Now comes the fun part. Set aside the business reply envelope, and tear up everything else into small pieces. This means the original containing envelope as well.
Step 3 - The Transfer » Now, take all the pieces you've torn up and put them into the business reply envelope.
Step 4 - Make it Fit » Now this is a lot of stuff to put in such a small envelope, but you can make it fit - I believe in you. Use tape if you have to.
Step 5 - Repeat » I got two credit card offers in one day, so I was able to send both companies their papers back, because they want them back and all I'm trying to do is help.
Step 6 - Send it » Now put them in the mailbox so that they can return to their rightful owners. Make sure you put the flag up on your mailbox!
I feel like I’m one of the last people to sign up for Netflix, but I finally did it back in November, and so far it’s been great. There’s no video rental place close to me, and there’s a lot of old movies I somehow missed seeing in my lifetime - Netflix seems to solve both of these problems for me very easily. I’m still amazed that I’ve never seen Pulp Fiction or Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but don’t worry, they’re in my queue and I’ll get to them eventually.
I made a small change to this site, now I’ve got a page dedicated to displaying my Netflix Queue and recently viewed movies which you can view right here (or in the footer at the bottom). Basically I just used the Magpie RSS/Atom Parser plugin that comes with Expression Engine just parses the RSS feed from Netflix. It was a lot simpler than I imagined, and it even works better than a plugin someone wrote specifically to work with Netflix.
Well I’ve been pretty busy running around for the past few weeks and haven’t had time to sit down and write something new here. So, here we are in 2008, what’s new with me? For one, I finally got Super Mario Galaxy and it’s incredible. I haven’t gotten too far yet (only 8 stars or so) but i’m having as much or more fun with this game than I did when I first player Mario64 back in the day. It’s such an inventive game, always presenting you with new ways of solving puzzles you have to wrap your mind around. I really need to take a few days and sit down to play this and complete it, then I can have time to get back to playing Zelda which I’m ashamed to say I still haven’t finished.
After my long Christmas/New Years stay in North Carolina my dad and I took a trip down to Alabama to visit a friend of his for a few days. I had a great time down there meeting great people, and doing some fun stuff. We went to a sporting clay range, which I’d never heard of but it was a whole lot of fun. Basically it’s golf....but with shotguns. You go to different stations, and shoot the clay pidgins coming from different directions as accurately as you can. My dad put some pictures up from our trip on a picasa web album.
Now I’m back home here in Panama City, and back to work on the multiple internets that I must make. Currently I’m finishing up the new website for my church, Hiland Park. It’s getting very close to being done, mostly content needs to be added, then find a good flash video player to put the web streams into. After that comes the fun of transferring everything from the testing domain I’m using to the real website and then switching the church email over to gMail via Google Apps.
Oh, and I finally set up time machine since I now know it doesn’t take over your external drive, and it’s great. I no longer have to worry about manually making backups, I just plug in my drive and it works.
On another note, I’m still amazed at how well Ron Paul is doing everywhere I look. The ONLY,and I mean only, political signs I’ve seen anywhere have been for Paul. On the drive back from Alabama a man at a gas station saw my bumper sticker and complimented me on it, I loved it. He’s no longer viewed as just some 3rd party candidate that has no chance of winning. He’s raised more money that some of the “frontrunners” and even beat out a few of them in the few caucuses that have been held so far. ALl I can say is good for him, and great for America. If you don’t know who he is, look at his site, read up on him, and search youtube - you’ll like what you find.
On Wednesday I drove up to North Carolina to spend Christmas/New Years with family and friends. It’s one heck of a drive, just over 10 hours straight in the car. I had plenty of caffeine and a good audio book [iTunes link] to keep me awake though.
So far I’ve seen I Am Legend, which I liked a lot. It had a rather abrupt ending, but overall a good movie. I’ve just got to do my final Christmas preparations this weekend and I should be all set. Which reminds me, be sure to try wrapping gifts with a rip cord, it’s a lot cooler than the old way of doing things.
I always remember hearing about alternate keyboard layouts and a recent discussion on the Godbit Forum about ergonomics led to the use of the Dvorak simplified keyboard layout which interested me. So I switched my layout and printed out a set of keys to tape onto my laptop so I can begin to learn it. So far it’s been very slow (I’m 10 minutes into this post already!), but I’m finding the letter placements intuitive. I suppose I’m just used to QWERTY now, so I feel like I’m back in 4th grade learning to type again. Chances are I’ll get tired of this and switch back, but at least it’s something I can say I tried.
Hi, I’m Chris. I’m a web designer/developer who lives in Panama City, Florida and this is my site. I co-own a web design company called Eject Media with my good friend and business partner Derek Boggs. We started Eject Media just over a year and a half ago after I graduated from school and moved up here to Panama City. It took a while to get a business website for our company online, but we finally managed to do it. Eject Media used to be just a fake company name I made up when I was in school and I used it for my blog and all kinds of personal projects, but now it’s a real company and I can’t put all that on there anymore which is why this site now exists.
This is the first site I’ve built on top of Expression Engine and it’s had a bit of a steep learning curve, but it’s worth learning. It seems to be very powerful and easy to use once the site is up and running, and it’s certainly what I plan on building all future sites on. Leave a comment and let me know if you think anything is broken or needs changing on this site.
I finally signed up for Twitter today. 
