It feels strange changing the header on my emails, but that’s what this week has turned into: change.

This week, I am moving six hundred miles away from Las Vegas, Nevada, into the city of Sacramento, California, in part to further my education in software engineering (I am learning this to further my programming skills; I will still be designing) as well as to look into more design-type jobs.

While Las Vegas has plenty of jobs in my area of expertise, I am looking forward to the change. It is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, and now that I finally have the opportunity, I’ve definitely become terribly excited over it. I will be leaving Las Vegas Thursday morning and stopping in Fresno for the night, and then continuing onward and upwards to Sacramento the following Friday morning. Read more »

I rarely make my political beliefs public, as I feel that they are something which I hold close to my heart. Nevertheless, I am always willing to take on any project, no matter how controversial it may be – and that includes political or religious projects. My work with Forward Focus Media can only be described as one word: rewarding. Honestly, I have greatly enjoyed the month of work which I put into the site, and the month which I worked closely with the people behind the company.

That being said, I’m quite sure that they give their clients the same amount of brilliant treatment. If your political beliefs happen to fall under “libertarian” or “conservative” and you happen to be politically involved, this Alabama-based firm can certainly help you out – but how? Why not check out their site to find out!

Specifically, my work with this site was to customize a pre-built WordPress template. The original design was very nice, I must admit, but I saw many ways in which it could be changed in order to better suit the site’s purpose. From coding an RSS puller in order to display their latest posts to editing a Twitter widget, the facelift to this design was actually pretty large; I may as well have written the theme myself from scratch. However, Forward Focus had already selected this template, and I noted that certain things could be thrown out altogether and that certain things could be redone. We started small, working on the graphics you see – the logo was provided, but I did create all of the graphics such as the Twitter and Facebook graphics (after all, graphics were how I was pulled into design in the first place).

Life is a river; it is always changing and moving with rhythm and time. It’s not always refreshing, but it certainly has plenty of rocks along the way.

Lately I’ve been looking back a bit, at the same time as forward. I’m enjoying the present one day at a time, but there are moments during which I am reminded of something from childhood. Today, someone I’m following on Twitter linked some older pictures from the original (and best) Star Wars. What a great piece of history, I thought to myself. I remember watching the original movies when I was really young. At the time, we didn’t have DVD players, and music came on casette tapes. We didn’t have Black Eyed Peas, and rock was still the major form of music style – there wasn’t really much in the way of “rap” that took the mainstream until much later.

I remember that my mom practically raised my brother and I on real originals. Things like The Neverending Story, The Labyrinth, and a mess of other Jim Henson movies – and alongside those, like a great sage in and of itself, the original Star Wars trilogy. What she didn’t realize at the time was that she had just made the recipe to create a daughter who grew to be an absolute technology junky and a geek to the core. I bear these titles with pride. Read more »

This weekend I will be going out of town again in order to visit a cousin of mine due to a personal issue – let’s just state that it is pressing.

I will be leaving early Friday morning, and returning later Monday afternoon. Once I return, normal business operations will commence. I just ask that you please bear with me for this weekend (I realize I was just recently out of town last weekend for personal business as well). Thus far things are going well, and I won’t be back in California until the second weekend of August as far as things are going.

Anyway – take care all.

I am very surprised at myself.

And I don’t mean in a bad way. I mean as in – wow, I can’t believe it’s a redesign!

As you can see, the comment form is back to where it was before. Provided it’s not abused by spammers again, it should hopefully stay as it is. If spammers do choose to abuse it as much as they possibly can, expect a much stricter captcha to be put into it. Oh, and yes, I’m aware that it disappears after you submit it; that’s to prevent you from re-submitting it. No, really, it is!

There are a lot more small tweaks to this theme than meets the eye. The older one was a bit more static; it worked pretty well, but I mostly wanted to do a few things with this design that I hadn’t done before. Read more »