I've always had a mild fascination with fonts. after my old boss came to me and had me create a font for him I've gotten into making fonts for myself. I've always had a mind for organization and I find font making to be a very monotonous task in a good way.
I've made myself about 6 fonts since then, and I love doing it. I will have more to say later.
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There is nothing more frustrating than coding a lot of things, and then realizing that in order to move forward with a project, you must now recode all those things. You must check for new redundancies. You must correct new errors, while improving old hacks. It's annoying as all get out, and I have to do it CONSTANTLY.
maybe I'm a bad programmer...
I'd be willing to concede that. I believe I am an excellent problem solver. But being a good programmer means being more than just a good problem solver. It involves perceiving problems long before they raise their head, and readying your hammer beforehand. I often write code days ahead of time in anticipation of a problem. I'm always amazed when I write a function only to be reviewing my code later and realizing that I had already written in a contingency function for the very problem I was now fixing. It's like beating a burglar to death with a bat, because you forgot you had placed a gun in your cabinet weeks earlier.
It's frustrating, and at the same time, every time it happens i think to myself "Damn, self. You scary smart." I probably do a lot more congratulating of mediocrity than I should. But when you live in the middle it can be difficult to see what's more appropriate.
I drew a friend today for his anniversary.
I would like to do more quick caricatures like this. It makes me happy, but more than 5 of them in a row starts feeling like a job. ... Maybe just 2 or 3 every day. That would be nice.
When dynamically adding a new image, if the image is already cached, the browser has a habit of kicking back a value of zero when .width() and .height() are called on it. This can be especially annoying if the programmer is trying to resize the image dynamically, since no assessment of the image's real width and height can be ascertained.
My current script grabs all image links and all embedded image urls from the current dom, and makes an array of them. Links are no problem usually, since the image hasn't been loaded yet, but i found that after testing my chrome extension on a single page multiple times, I would eventually run into a point when the browser would decide the image was already cached, and would give me the problem that all embedded images already had. It would load, but with a width and height of 0. Terribly annoying.
I tried making a .load() function and that worked sometimes, but eventually there would be a problem again. and then I came upon the solution, I had to add a timestamp to the end of the image to grab a new image. But of course if the timestamp is added dynamically every time, then the images are never cached at all in a good or bad way. Then I figured it out. Since my script creates a large image list object, I added a timestamp when the image was added to the list. I couldn't add it to the link itself, because then matches couldn't easily be made on the links. By separating the timestamp, and adding it at time of load, it allows me to make sure my cache is dynamic, but i still get a local cache.
This solved my problem and hopefully it can solve someone else's.
Have you ever heard the song "video killed the radio star"? Well I believe the opposite has happened now. The MP3 has killed the video star. It's possible that this is based merely on my own perception, but I haven't watched a music video on purpose in years. I have no doubt that they're still being produced, but the machine that was present in the 90's pushing videos on teens just isn't there anymore.
The flipside of being able to produce and distribute product for cheap on the internet is that consumers no longer rely on one outlet for their product and news. It is now on the consumer to seek out their own information, and so there is no where to focus the media push like there was when it was just MTV and VH1.
An argument could be made that youtube is the current Big Media playground, but even that is so fragmented. Each record label has their own channel and even if youtube has an ad on their main page, that is a page you never have to visit.
The era of Big Media push is coming to an end. We are on the cusp. I for one can't wait.
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jquery just does it. i mean... i just didn't get into it because i didn't want to be depending on loading a code, but christ, it makes everything so much easier. I am a convert. welcome to the church of jquery, this is my first sermon. Worship this shit. I stand at the altar of jquery and say to you that it is good.
I have been doing a lot of working on my portfolio. And when i say work on my portfolio, i mean that i have been working on the code that runs my portfolio. Some of you might not know this, but i love coding. It makes me quite happy. If you go to hamiltondraws.com/portfolio, you can see the very work that i have been doing. Mainly i've been working on the lightbox for the thumbnail mode. I'm sure that I will eventually add this to the directory mode, but for now it seemed most appropriate for the thumb mode.
So I wrote the php portion of the default index script quite a while ago. It's a small script in a single php file with just a simple but added to a .htaccess file that directs any folder without an index file to point at this default index.
I've used the greased lightbox script from shifting pixel for a long time, which was based on the original lightbox gallery script, and I've always wanted to add this functionality to my own galleries, but I never like to use other people's scripts. So I have finally made my own. Even the images used in this script are just base64 text so that this script can be implemented on a system quickly and efficiently.
There is more i would like to do with this and it has features that I always wanted Joe to add to greased lightbox, but for now I think I might leave it alone for a bit.
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i am sitting on the toilet thinking about how things have gone down recently. it's always hard to figure things out in the moment, and i often find myself pondering topics long into the night when sleep would be preferable.
i want to be happy. i want to live a life where i learn the skills that let me do the things i enjoy, and allow me to use my talents to benefit those around me. it frustrates me to no end when i think about what i could be doing if i just had someone who could genuinely show me how to do it. some people are incapable of learning new things. i have difficulty deciding which new things to focus on learning.
i recently got a new computer and discovered that linux works relatively fine on my old laptops. in doing so i managed to save some of my website files off of those harddrives, but honestly not enough. i am genuinely sad that i dont have a backup of those files anywhere.
i keep thinking i should write some music. i want to get a new guitar.
... but i dont really need another distraction.
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I did some work today on my old website code. I was on a server previously that was not completely up to date, and this new server has allowed me to implement some of the newer flashier php5 elements. I have been learning Java in order to program for the android phone, and its more advanced object oriented programming has taught me how to better utilize the php5 oop setup. I find myself to be an infinitely more efficient coder than I was a mere year ago. And I am also a better artist. I'm going to implement some gui changes on this blog, and then get back into coding on the android, but i will always have a soft spot for php, as it was the language that taught me to love.
Some people may be interested in what I've been up to. I'm engaged to be married to the marvelous Victoria Calderon. I have a job as an art director at a company called Concept Art House, and that job means that I now live in San Francisco.
I have also been reading a lot lately. I have managed to read through 8 Wheel of Time books in the past 5 months, and almost all of it done on the Bart between home and work. Maybe I'll even draw some more art for it when I'm done.
My website went down about a year ago, and that might have also contributed to my not updating this blog. I downloaded and android app called ljbeetle and I'm writing this on my way home. Maybe I'll start blogging again if this turns out to be convenient enough.