Posts Tagged “Personal”
Been working on a new design for the site over the weekend and I am really happy with what I have so far. I took a few cues from twitter, after using it for a week or so I really love the simplicity of how everything works. It really motivated me to try and think of simpler ways to do and display things.
As part of the design I felt a little nostalgic and wanted to put a version number or founded on date on the new design. So I went to the Wayback Machine on the Internet Archive to view past versions of my site. It’s was really fun reading some of the old posts, what I thought was important then and the terrible design.
When you look back at things from several years ago you wonder if you will be looking at the stuff you are doing now and laughing at it ten years in the future.
The design is just a starting point right now, and the main thing I need to do is figure out how to get rails to do everything I want.
I have been using FIOS at home for several months now, and it has been the best internet service I have ever had. I opted for the 20mbs down, 5mbp up plan because it was only $10 more a month. Every time I run the speedtest it is always pegged right at the cap amount, no dips or slows.
Today over on Ars Technica I just read that Verizon has increased the speeds of the service! When I get a chance to check it I should now have 25mbs down and 15mbs up!!!
The upload rate is huge for me, because I am starting to use services like DropBox much more frequently. Also suddenly online backup services like Carbonite (thanks Leo twit.tv) seem much more useful.
Anyway, I am excited to get back home and try it out.
UPDATE: They are not quite as awesome, they are just updating their new plans to these speeds. So it will cost more to get 15Mbs up, and not just a blanket upgrade for everyone like I first expected. Still great but I will have to think about it. 
Recently I have been moving away from electronic music, and have been listening to more rock based music. This is mostly due the lack of good original electronic music releases over the past few years.
However after hearing a Poney by Vitalic on a YouTube video I decided to pick up the whole album, and was glad that I did.
OK Cowboy by Vitalic contains some of the best electronic music I have heard in a long time, and I have listened to the whole album several times since buying it.
Poney (Part 1), Wooo, Trashion, and The Past are my favorite tracks. The others are still good, but these four tracks make the album a good buy. These days if I get three good tracks from an album I am pretty happy.
Vitalic manages to create a fresh sound, while at the same time keeping their roots in the old school electronic music I grew up listening too.
If you enjoy electronic music then I would suggest giving this one a try.
Well after a lot of shopping around and reading reviews I have decided to take the plunge and order a laptop. The laptop I finally settled on was the brand new Dell XPS M1330.
Buying a laptop has been in my mind for quite a while now, but there always seems to be a good reason to wait. Wait for the prices to drop, wait for the new processors, wait for LED screens, wait for new chipsets, etc etc. With the recent release of the Santa Rosa platform from Intel, and now the new XPS M1330 I believe now is the best time to buy.
This afternoon I made a special trip after work to get the new James Bond film (and a toy bond car for free 
). Bond films have been in a rut for quite awhile now, just feeding us the same formula that worked in the in the past, but got stale in recent years. Luckily it seems that Casino Royale is trying to break the mold a little.
It’s been quite awhile since my last post, and that’s because things have been pretty busy around here. For the past few years I have been working as a Graphic Designer/Color Print Technician for a whole sale print company. The job started off as a temporary thing while I was looking for a software development job, but the more I worked with graphic designs the more I liked doing it.
So after working and learning about graphic design, and using my previous knowledge of web design and programming I decided to start my own little business, Zimian Design Studio. At the moment I am mainly focused on print designs, but I am also planning on doing web designs once I get settled in. I think my experience with Drupal module and theme development might be a good place to start.
Anyway, that’s what’s been going on and why the site has been pretty barren for the past several weeks. The new site is for my tiny company is up at Zimian Design Studio, not much there at the moment, but I hope to add more content later. Right now most of the important stuff is there. Keep me in mind if you need some design work done.
When I first installed Windows on my new system I thought how cool it was that Windows would install without needing to additional drivers at install time. It seems that the ASUS P5B-E, and I assume most other Intel P965 motherboards allow you to make your SATA hard drives look like IDE hard drives. While this seemed like a good feature to me during installation, it soon started to cause me problems later.
For the past few years I have been working at a wholesale printing company doing pre-press, graphic and web design. After using several design products for that time it seemed like the right time to jump in and buy the Adobe Creative Suite 2.
This seems like a good time because Adobe is just setting up to release Creative Suite 2.3. Which now comes with the new Acrobat 8 and Dreamweaver. Even though I am hand web coder I have been looking into Dreamweaver and it seems like it is a pretty good hand coding enviroment with some WYSIWYG features thrown in.
Along with Acrobat 8 and Dreamweaver you also get Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, GoLive, Version Cue, and Bridge. I have been using most of these applications for awhile now, and they all rock.
Anyway, hopefully there will be some more graphic design related content up here from now on as I play around with these apps.
In the past my systems have been purely focused on getting the most gaming performance for my money. This time however I am working, and playing games a lot less. So my priorities in life, and in turn the requirements of my computer systems, have changed. Now having a stable, quiet, and powerful system are all equally important to me. So in this, and subsequent posts, I will focus on how each component helps me meet these three criteria.
The first time I built a computer I actually thought it was cool to put more fans in it. Five 80mm Panaflow fans are better than three… right!? Well now that’s all changed, one of my main focuses, this time around, was making a system that was as quiet as possible while still providing enough cooling to keep the system stable. When you are sitting quietly developing a website, programming, or writing the last thing you want to hear is the high pitched wine of several computer fans.
Not much has been happening around here for the past week or so, I have been spending most of my computer time trying to decide what components I want in my new system. So I thought I would share some of the movies I have seen, and music I am listening too.
I first found Ratatat when I was looking for music under the XL Music label. When I was younger living in England XL alway had the cool cutting edge groups and music. Most notable The Prodigy and the then new Rave and Jungle music.
Ratatat is not Rave or Jungle, but they are very good. Their sound is kind of a mix between alternative rock and electronic music. There are no vocals which make it perfect for listening to while working.
This is the first album I have bought in a long time that is original, and good. Just a good disc and I would recommend it to anyone. Because it is a mix between rock and electronic I think that the overall sound can appeal to a diverse audience.
