Road trips and music

May 5, 2008 – 10:30 am

I love going on road trips with my friends. We listen to music and reminisce about shows we’ve gone too and all the great music that has graced our lives. I don’t know how many shows I’ve gone to in my life it has to be around 500. Maybe that’s an exaggeration but it definitely feels like that many if not more. Let’s just settle on, I’ve seen a ton of bands.

We tell stories stories about seeing Ink & Dagger in someones basement and getting that first 7″ vinyl that only 200 or so where made with a cover hand made by one of the members. We talk about bands like Drive Like Jehu and the amazing guitar work that leads too Rocket From The Crypt and seeing Rocket at the 31st Pub and we are only a foot away from these music gods with only 100 other people in the room. The conversation circles back to Hot Snakes which has two members of Drive Like Jehu. We can go on and on for hours about music and we do.

We always agree that our all time favorite band is Sunny Day Real Estate. Here’s this weeks Muxtape inspired by that road trip. I apologize for the quality of some of the songs they are from vinyl and I can’t even remember how I got them converted to mp3.

Muxtape 3 roadtrip inspired

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Refreshed

May 2, 2008 – 1:53 pm

Today I refreshed the look of the site. I wasn’t too happy with my first design of the site. That first attempt was more of a learning exercise for me. I wanted to learn how to implement a site using Wordpress and also it was an exercise of remembering CSS and such. It’s been a while since I’ve had to develop anything. All day at work I only push pixels in Photoshop for 8 hours.

I’m not done yet, but a nice foundation is now down and I can build from here. Next steps will probably be moving to Wordpress 2.5.1. Also expanding the portfolio section and doing some more tweaks here and there.

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On the Interwebs

April 22, 2008 – 3:12 pm

First off here’s a new Muxtape. My intentions where to make a new one every week but so far I have failed. Interestingly now you can purchase songs from Muxtape through an Amazon referral program. It’s having a difficult time with most of my stuff and giving me returns of books on “String Theory” for the band “Endpoint”. Which does make sense, but doesn’t at the same time. Anyways, this is an interesting site too me as I watch it stay simple but add nice additional features.

Also on the interwebs.

I’ve found myself listening to the YLNT podcast. Alex is Awesome! I need this Calendar. I just read this book. Oh and one more thing. Apparently Twitter went down this past weekend and I didn’t even notice!

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Day Job vs. Freelance

April 8, 2008 – 9:57 pm

I love my Day Job but it seems to me that I don’t have as much control as I do in my Freelance ventures. Sure I have pretty good control over the design of my day time projects but there is a lot of interference.

In my day job we have very specialized roles. You have User Experience, Content Writers, Client Service, Designers, Front End Coders, Flash Developers, Back End Programmers, IT and of course all the managers of each of those functions.

Where as in my freelance work I’m personally doing UE, Content Organization (not writing), Client Service and Design. I get others to do the development and such, because that is definitely not one of my strengths, but I don’t mind doing it for myself.

I could never handle all that stuff on my own during my day time job, the projects are far too large and much more complicated than my freelance jobs. But, by the time my projects launch I don’t feel as satisfied. It’s usually been months since I’ve last seen the project or been involved in it. There are always a lot of things I would like tweaked. Move this a pixel here, tweak this a bit there maybe completely rework something because it’s not really working. Maybe, it’s our process and I should be more involved as things get developed.

Mean while in my freelance jobs I can have something moved a pixel, completely rework something that may not be working as well as initially intended. I can be more involved in the development of the site. Because the developers look to me for approval on everything and I can pay attention more to the little details and have the changes made.

When there are more cooks in the kitchen there just seems to be a lot more noise, be it for the better or not. I guess that’s one of the great parts of doing freelance, you have more control. Then again the projects we do at work are great I’m always dissatisfied with little pieces here and there. But maybe my freelance projects aren’t the best solution either because I’m wearing too many hats and not getting enough of others feedback.

I guess at the end of the day things can always be improved, so does it really matter?

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Visitannapolis.org by BarkleyREI

April 3, 2008 – 11:07 am

Yesterday, BarkleyREI launched the new visit annapolis site. visitannapolis.org

I personally had nothing to do with this project except a little design feedback. Super clean design was provided by Scott Riemenschneider and Ryan Sprake did the flash work for the homepage and interactive map. The back end is powered by BarkleyREI’s Reignite CMS. The site turned out fantastic, kudos.

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