Ames and I have finally decided that we ARE going to get a sexy new 20-inch G5 iMac. I could really use a machine like that at home to expand my familiarity with the mac OS, and Amy has simply fallen in love with them. We currently have 3 PCs: a multimedia server, our main desktop computer, and our laptop. It may seem a bit abberant, but here’s our 5 step plan for becoming Mac users.

1. Sell our HP Laptop - We are definitely going to need some extra cash in order to afford what really ammounts to a luxury item. I got my HP laptop as a graduation present, and at 2.8 GHz with 512MB of ram, it’s a decent machine, but it doesn’t really fit our requirements for a laptop.
2. Buy a cheaper, more portable laptop - We want the iMac to be our main home computer, but we need to have a laptop that Amy can carry around for grad school, so the lighter/cheaper the better. We decided on the Avertec 3200 series, and got a good deal at Best Buy during the crazy holiday sales.
3. Accumulate resources - Even after exchanging our laptop for a lighter and cheaper one, we’re still a little too short on cash to buy a new iMac. It’s also almost Christmas, which means our holiday budget is going to eat into the iMac fund a little. When Amy graduates, she’ll be getting a raise and working full time. With that boost in income, we should be able to save up the remainder of what we need after a couple of months.
4. Make room for the new baby - No we’re not having kids. Kids would definitely hamper our iMac buying process and make this list much longer than 5 steps. I was talking about making room for the new G5. Our desktop machine is a 1.8 GHz machine that is still really useful, but the iMac would be replacing this machine, as well as stealing it’s desk space. I plan on gutting both the desktop and the media server and combining the best of both to build a better, faster version of “The Box”.
5. Bring her home - Once steps 1-4 are completed, we’ll be home free. Our computers will be up to date having well definied purposes, and we will have the money to put towards our new desktop machine, the 20-inch G5 iMac.

In much the same style as Mike Davidson’s permanant Ten Things page, I thought today would be an appropriate time to list off a few of the things in life that I’m particularly thankful for. I really feel that I’ve been blessed beyond measure, so this is by no means a complete list, just a few of the things that are fresh on my mind right now.

1. My Wife - I proposed to Amy exactly 3 years ago on Thanksgiving. Some people casually throw out the “better-half” description when talking about their spouses, but Ames really is the glue that holds my life together. Although she has never been able to get me to use a dayplanner the way she does, or to stop biting my nails, I am the man I am because she loves me. …and she’s graduating next month with her bachelors in Chem-E!
2. The Bible - I try to avoid plastering my beliefs up on this blog, but since this is almost Thanksgiving, a holiday that was established to give thanks, I can’t help but acknowledge the things God has done in my life through one little book.
3. Photoshop CS - Where would I be without being able to nest sets of layers. What would I do without the ability to create layer comps? …And those are just the features I love that are new to CS. I could talk all day about brush sets, patterns, and vector shapes.
4. Slurpees - There’s nothing quite like a 7-11 slurpee on a hot summer day. Gainesville has to be the only town in Florida without a 7-11 gas station, and after over a year of living here, I still get Slurpee cravings. Slush-Puppys, and ICEEs just don’t cut it.
5. Health - Especially since we don’t have health insurance. Although I haven’t done as much of this as I should, it’s great be able to roll out of bed in the morning and go for a run through the UF campus.

Back in August, Cameron Moll hosted the first Screen Grab Confab. I happened to be working on expresssunglasses.com at the time and posted a screenshot. Well he's done it again, and this time I'm working on a design for another e-commerce site. This one doesn't have a domain yet, but it will be selling skincare products.

It's been a while since I've mentioned anything about my little media server so I guess I should start by explaining that "The Box" is a puny 400MHz machine with a humongous hard drive. It is hooked into our home entertainment system, and although it isn't very fast, it's great for playing music, movies, and of course, Nintendo games.

Since this picture was taken, it has been spray painted black, but it's still the same die-hard trooper on the inside. The Nintendo looking panel on the front actually has the controller ports and buttons from an actual NES mounted on it. The buttons don't really do anything yet, but the controller ports are wired to power and a parallel port so that my old Nintendo pads can be used as joysticks for NES emulator games. It's just like having the old Nintendo working again, without blowing on cartridges and having the picture quality randomly go all pixelated.

The only wires connected to "The Box" are power, network, sound, and SVideo. I don't have a monitor, keyboard, or a mouse hooked up to it, so the only display is the TV, and the only way to control it is remotely. I have the storage drive (aka The Monster) mapped on our 2 other computers, so accessing files is a snap. I also have Winamp set to run on startup and have Wawi setup to make playing music on the box easy as well.

Accessing "The Box" from remote desktop works great for using it like a server. I can login to it from the home computers or even at work to check on torrents and grab documents and pictures. Problems come in however, when we want to watch movies or play Nintendo from it. Because Remote Desktop logs the local user out when you log in remotely, there was no way to see the display on the TV when you are logged in from another computer.

Every time we wanted to watch a movie, or play Nintendo, I had to steal the keyboard and mouse from another computer. That got old really fast, and I've been looking for a solution to this problem for a while now. Last week, I found the option I was looking for. Enter Virtual Network Computing. VNC is a cross-platform software app developed by AT&T Labs that's been around since 1998. It works very much like Remote Desktop, but with a lot more options. One of those options being the ability to leave the local user logged in when you log in remotely. That means I can login to the computer wirelessly from our laptop, and see my mouse move around on the laptop screen, as well as the TV.

Genius!

How do you know that you’ve done a good job as a designer? Every time I’ve ever created a new design in the form of a website, or a print piece, or a painting I always try to get feedback. Interestingly enough, even when I think I’ve done a killer job, I can never predict what the responses to my work will be. I’ve designed very rushed and generic website design demos that clients have fallen in love with. On the other hand, I’ve designed demos that were stunning examples of cutting edge design and been asked, “Could you make it more green, get rid of the rounded corners, and just re-do the top section?” So how DO you know?

The new design for jasongraphix has been up for exactly two weeks today, and I’ve been getting lots of great feedback on all aspects of the design and workings of the site. Some good, some bad, but all helpful. It wasn’t until today though, that I’ve felt really proud of my new design. Why is that you ask? Because people are stealing it!

I guess the best part of creating unique graphics and textures for a site design is knowing how easily they will be spotted when used by others. Apparently Dale Cruse - the “designer” of Big Bottom (feeder) offers:

“Complete website design with web standards technologies including HTML, XHTML, DHTML, JavaScript, CSS, Writing, Editing, Photography and others upon request.”

Apparently he took a different meaning from Cameron Moll’s article, “Good Designers Copy, Great Designers Steal” than I did.

A friend of mine noted this weekend that the calendar that shows up on my archive pages wasn’t working properly:

When looking at one of your archived entries, say:
20 inch Intimidation
the calendar shows all the red days with posts before the currently shown entry, but only the first entry following it instead of an accurate look at the whole month.

The error was due to a very simple principle that I had overlooked when creating my individual archive pages, MTCalendar isn’t dynamic. I don’t know how I missed this, but when you publish an entry in Movable Type, an archive page for that entry is created. If you include the MTCalendar in the template for that page, it produces the calendar showing all of the entries up to that date. If you publish another entry later, it will not show up on that calendar because it wouldn’t be updated unless you republished the entire site.

I thought this would be a well documented problem for which I could Google up dozens of fixes, but I was wrong. I couldn’t find a single solution. After about an hour of trial and error brainstorming, I had an answer.

In order to make the calendar dynamic, I had to modularize it. My initial idea was to create a second monthly date-based archive template and then include it on my individual entry archives. Because I could only have one preferred monthly archive, I had to settle for making it a weekly archive with the Archive File Template set to:

<$MTEntryDate format="%Y/%m"$>/calendar.php

This way, every archive/YYYY/MM folder has a file called calendar.php in it. Whenever I publish an entry during a given week, the monthly calendar file will be rebuilt by movable type. Since each individual entry file includes that calendar.php file, there will never be an out of date calendar on the site.

One of my best friends and roommate for 3 years at UCF is now serving full time in the Army at Ft. Benning, GA. Sometime between playing with C4, Bangalore Torpedos, and 120mm mortars Jhon emailed the picture below to ORock1059.com (a radio station in Orlando, FL) to show his support for the station. They put it on the front page with the caption “O-ROCK 105.9 SUPPORTS THE TROOPS” and told him he could have any CD he wanted. Sweet deal!

I have to agree with Blake Ross’ opinion that cookies are delicious delicacies. I eat, I mean use them as often as possible. I must admit that at first, I was afraid to touch the things, but now I can’t get enough of them. Most movable type users recognize the javascript on their individual entry archive template that bakes a cookie whenever a commenter wants to be remembered, but there are so many other great uses for cookies.

The portfolio section of my website is one place I knew that I would be using a cookie. The entire section consists of only 2 dynamic pages (portfolio.php, and portfoliobig.php) that pull all of the content on the page from a couple tables in a MySQL database. The default destination for the Folio link on my main navigation bar is the portfolio.php page displaying content from the latest item in my webdesign category. When you click on one of the icons at the bottom, the id for that item is passed through the query string to the portfoliobig.php page. When you click on one of the categories on the right side navigation though, you are sent to a page that uses the header() function in php to direct you back to the portfolio.php page while setting a cookie that lets the page know what category you would like to see. If that sounds too complicated, check out what it looks like:

<?php

setcookie("folioCat", 5, time()+60*60*24*30, "/", "jasongraphix.com" );

header("Location: http://www.jasongraphix.com/portfolio.php");

exit;

?>

All I have to do is throw the setcookie function out there and put in the name of the cookie, folioCat; the value of the cookie, which is the id of the category I want to pull; the amount of time till it expires, which is the current time plus the number of seconds in a minute times the number of minutes in an hour times the number of hours in a day times 30 to make the cookie last 30 days; the directory the cookie will work for on the site, in this case it’s root (/); and the site which the cookie will work on, jasongraphix.com.

Now that we have a cookie, the next line tells the browser to go to the portfolio.php page (it’s always a good idea to use the full URL here), and then we exit. The true beauty of the cookie is that if a visitor leaves the portfolio or closes the window, they will get the same category they were looking at when they return. See!? CoOoKiEs GoOD!!!

For my next cookie trick: I have a php include called linkrel which is what I am using to add the stylesheets to my site. As soon as I can whip up another fancy style for my site, I’m going to give you all a choice of which style you would like to greet you when you visit. I know, I know…it’s been done, but don’t spoil my fun.

You know I really thought that by going to Google's Firefox Start page in any other browser besides Firefox that I would be promptly forwarded to Get Firefox. I assumed that I would at least get a recomendation to try it out. Not the case. Instead, when visiting the page in Internet Explorer, I am greeted with, "Welcome to Firefox 1.0, the new, easy to use browser from Mozilla." I feel dirty.

What do all of the following people have in common?

Greg Storey, Andy Budd, D. Kieth Robinson, Cameron Moll, Andrei Herasimchuk, Jon Hicks, Jason Santa Maria, Garrett Murray, Eric Meyer, Dave Shea, Mike Davidson, Shaun Inman, Dan Cederholm, Douglas Bowman, Jeffrey Veen, Sean Voisen, Jeffrey Zeldman

1. They all have amazing websites with blogs that I read on a regular basis.
2. They’re all people who have made great contributions to the web and standards-based design.
3. Every single one of them uses a Mac.
   Even if they don’t like to admit it.

My first computer was an Apple IIe that my cousin passed onto me when he moved to New Mexico to work for Intel. Although I really loved that machine, I’ve never felt the need to buy an Apple computer. I made it all the way through Graphic Design school with a PC that I built myself. I used Macs in the labs when I had to and know my way around OS 9 and OS X as a result. When the graphic design school at UCF started to require us to bring our own computers however, my buddy Jeremy Darty and I would always get a lot of flack from our professor and classmates for our Dell laptops. To me, the whole thing was a joke. Even if it was a little uncool, I was convinced that I could do anything with my PCs that the Mac addicts could do with their shiny Apples.

I currently have a PC laptop, desktop, and file server at home and do my design work at Acceleration on a blazing fast dual-monitor machine with a gig of ram. So why am I thinking so much about making the switch now? Well, it’s simple really… My wife wants one. She really wanted a 2nd generation iMac, and now she wants the new 20-inch G5 model even more. We spent the morning before we left for school/work customizing them online. This is it. My chance to be the man, bare the financial responsibility, and give the final word on this major decision. And I say we should go for it. It would be a personal computer that she would love for daily use, and a tool for myself that would grant me a little more diversity with my skills and software knowledge. It may mean we have to take out a student loan to make it happen, but Ames will be working on her phD for the next 5 years so what do we have to lose?

For anybody out there looking for an adventure, the “Wild Cave Tour” at Mammoth Caves in Kentucky is awesome! I appended 2004 to the title of this post because I would most definitely do it again next year.

The cave system at Mammoth Cave National Park is the largest in the world with over 630 miles of known tunnels and passage ways. To give you an idea of how much that is, we spent about 6 ½ hours in the caves and covered 5 ½ miles of it. Most of the tours at the park involve walking through the well-lit, even-surfaced, chasms and avenues in the cave system. I’m sure these would be nice if you were breezing through Kentucky in your travels, but to really experience the caves, you need to crawl through areas like Bare Hole, Kathleen’s Crawl, Cheese Grader, Hell Hole, and Hooter Alley. It’s only then that you get to see amazing things like Cathedral Domes, Otter Slide, The Lion’s Head, Lida’s Pass, Big Break - and of course the rock formation that looks like the Starship Enterprise.

You can see most of the pictures I took on my trip at Amesnjas, but here are a few of the best.

• The before-picture of our crew in front of the bus that would take us to the Carmichael Entrance to begin our Wild Cave Tour.
  
• Doug squeezing his way out of Bare Hole. This path got its name from the stories of explorers needing to remove clothing in order to make it out the other side.
  
• Obviously, the lighting scenario underground isn’t the best for photography. This is the best shot I could get in Cathedral Domes.
  
• One of the most interesting holes was called Shotgun. You could choose between a tight squeeze in the top path, or a somewhat easy crawl through the very wet bottom barrel.
  
• My favorite crawl on the trip was called No-Name Pass. The width of the tunnel is about 5 or 6 feet, but the height narrows down to exactly 9 inches before you come out. This is so tight that you can’t even turn you helmet vertically to see where you’re going.
  
• …and here’s the after shot. We were all tired, hungry, and ready for a hot shower!
  

Woke up this morning to find out that I made Jason Santa Maria's Oddities and Diversions list. There I am, right there between Rogue Taxidermy and Sacfree Underwear! Thanks, Jason!

Over the last few months I have been doing such a great job of convincing myself and my co-workers that I couldn't afford to go on their annual caving trip to the Mammoth Caves in Kentucky. Then last Friday after a few more persuasive cost conversations with Kent, I cracked. I said I'd ask my wife, and she said GO! So I bought the necessary thick socks, waterproof boots, elbow pads, and snack food, and I am ready to roll!

We leave this morning in a rental van on an 11 hour drive, cave all day Friday, and come back to Gainesville on Saturday. This isn't "Walk around and see the pretty stalactites." caving either. We're going on the Wild Cave Tour - a 6 hour, 5.5 mile trek of free climbing, crawling, twisting, sliding, and squeezing through tight spaces and bat filled caverns. I didn't really understand why Amy didn't want in :), but how could I not go for a trip like that?

It is November 2nd, so I should point out the title isn’t a political statement. Or maybe it is.

Update: Nope. Definitely not a political statement.

Regardless, welcome to the 20th Century! That’s the surprise theme I picked for the redesign of jasongraphix. It’s a little bit wicked worn, a little bit Carousel of Progress, and a whole lot of turn-of-the-century postcard art.

Most of the images you will see in this theme are either inspired by, or are photoshopped scans of actual postcards from the early 1900s. The story behind the theme goes back to February of 2003, when my wife, my sister, my brother and I took a photography trip to an old abandoned house that was soon to be destroyed to make room for commercial property. My hometown of Vero (aka Zero) Beach, isn’t known as much except a sleepy beach town, and the home of Indian River Fruit. Recently however, Vero has made headlines as ground zero for both hurricanes Frances and Jeanne.

The abandoned, overgrown, Spanish-style house was located along state road 60, and had no-doubt been a shelter for the homeless and vagrant since its last owners moved out.

It sat way back on several acres of property which also featured a two-story guesthouse and an amazing algae filled pool.

The mansion-like home was in a very dilapidated state, but with at least 6 bedrooms that we counted, it was definitely awe inspiring.

Inside and out the house was a bit spooky. The guest house looked like it had recently partially burned down. I’m not one to get creeped out, but this picture from one of the burned rooms of the guesthouse still gives me goosebumps.

Although there was no furniture left in the house, the garages and shed were littered with all sorts of dated trash. Old games, golf clubs, a Christmas tree stand, children’s toys, rusty paint cans, etc. It was an amazing assortment of junk. We decided against taking anything from the house, but on the way out of the shed, trampled and scattered on the ground, was an old postcard scrapbook that I picked up. As a graphic design student at the time, I was amazed at how well preserved this collection of turn-of-the-century media was. I’ve always wanted to do something with the graphical ideas I got from that find, and now, over a year later I’ve redesigned my website around it.