Here’s a little something I thought of a while back when Rick Rolling was becoming as ubiquitous as obesity. Feel free to Digg this or Stumble It, or Rick Roll me in the comments. You’d be clever.

No, no I didn’t. Not at all. I have been fully aware of the atrocious display of the blog in IE6 since I designed it and I’ve chosen to do absolutely nothing about it. I can hear it already: “You’re a shoddy web designer! Cross compatibility is an essential principle of web design! 30% of Internet users still use IE6, you can’t alienate them!” Yes, I can.

Let me clarify, however: I NEVER apply this same principle to client work. Cross compatibility IS extremely important to me and I spend a great amount of time debugging sites for IE6 using as few IE hacks as humanly possible. PNG hacks, box models, float issues, you name it, I’ll get that oh-so-wonderful standards-complient square peg into that IE round hole.

But regarding my personal site, frankly I’m just too busy to deal with IE6 and the headaches it incurs. Maybe one of these days I’ll get around to fixing things in IE6, but with a move to NYC, job searching in NYC, a wedding to plan, freelance work, touring, and my real job (not to mention the fact that IE8 is being beta tested), I probably won’t get around to it anytime soon.

I know, excuses are like wooden figurine sets depicting the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, everyone’s got one.

Melissa has been my better half for over three years now, and so much more than a girlfriend. Melissa is an extremely talented musician and artist, and has always offered much-needed criticism, support and motivation in all my endeavors. I am so excited to move to NYC to begin my creative journey with her.

Here’s a peek at the creative raw materials we are starting out with: 3 bass guitars, 2 acoustic guitars, 1 electric guitar, 4 keyboards (MIDI too), 1 banjo, 1 ukelele, 2 PCs, 1 Mac, Pro Tools, Adobe CS3, Premiere, After Effects, 1 high end Panasonic DV camera, canvases, acrylics, pastels, colored pencils, oils, charcoal, pen and ink, and two people in love that want to make it all happen. Lock and load.

The proposal was in the works in my head for a long time, but I didn’t know I was going to propose until the day I did it. So out to my local small town mall I went to pick out the perfect ring. The selection available was endless (read: there was barely any selection whatsoever). I came out with a modest yet elegant blue diamond, knowing that I would let her pick out what she really wanted once she said YES.

We broke the news to my family on Easter and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Just kidding. Everyone was really happy and supportive of our decision.

I finally broke the news of my departure to NYC to my current employer and I am very thankful that they are all very supportive. I truly enjoy working at Sharp Creative and its given me so many great opportunities. I’m glad the “marriage excuse” was acceptable enough. So here I am, looking for a job in the Big Apple. I will be moving up in July sometime, so if you know of a company looking for a passionate web/Flash designer, contact me.

Life is good.

Oh how I cannot wait to join my quasi-cyborg brethren on the streets! Our violent, obnoxious conversations performed in full public view will be our rallying cry for the cyborg cause, and mere humans will be left bewildered and annoyed by our advanced technology.  Set headset to STUN.

My blueprints are complete and although I can’t yet disclose my cyborg plan, let’s just say there’s an external brain pack involved to make room for the go go gadget copter.

Cleaning my room tonight I found the original scrap of paper that inspired me to make a painting out of the doodle. It was a simple drawing that was done in a meeting at work, and as I looked at it more, I saw the possibility of a cool painting. So a 3′ x 4′ canvas is in my room right now with this swirling lightbulb glaring at me and begging me to finish it.

I’ve been so incredibly busy lately…I feel like I’m living 8 lives at once. So finding this little doodle tonight really put things into perspective, that big things can be created from a mindless sketch, that great things can come accomplished with a simple optomistic mentality.

In other news, I will be on tour with Midnight Spaghetti next weekend in Burlington, VT (I’ve never been there) and Albany, NY (never been there either)! I’m quite excited to get back up on stage and lay down some funk, especially with such a great band that’s known for their energetic performances. I’ll fit right in.

I recently had the opportunity to construct a website and blog for Ledonne Creative, a web marketing firm in Pittsburgh, PA. Ledonne Creative specializes in search engine optimization, online marketing strategies, and design. Thus the design was nicely set up for me, all I needed to do was bust out the ole’ Photoshop knives and carve it up.

The main site is all Flash, leaving the blog section to do the heavy lifting from an SEO standpoint. For the Flash end of things, I mostly used Flash’s built in tween class, and simply added some little animations for rollover states. Subtle, but effective. I also executed a PHP contact form for the site from within Flash, which was a first for me.

In regards to the blog, I simply modified the existing site design and placed it within Wordpress’ architecture. The same arrows in the Flash site were regurgitated as list bullets and title headers, and Century Gothic (not your traditional web font) was used for the titles and some of the site nav.

Since this blog will be used for SEO, I installed some of the most popular SEO plugins for Wordpress, including Headspace 2 and Google XML Sitemap Generator. Since the client knows all about optimization, these simple tools and tweaks will provide the necessary framework for the company to boost its rankings and provide some killer content.

All in all I’m quite happy results for it being a quick and dirty job. I look forward to seeing what sort of helpful SEO and design tips Ledonne Creative writes about in the near future.

I’ve been in close collaboration with Seth and Mickey of Midnight Spaghetti for the last 4 and a half years, working together on many projects: organizing benefit concerts, recording side projects together, and Seth jumping on stage with Dangus Kahn to drop some freestyle rhymes. But I’ve never had a chance to play with them, so I’m excited to finally perform with a band that has made me get up and dance so many times.

I want to say it will be a challenge to learn their entire set, but I feel it will be easy. The songs ARE technically difficult, but I’ve been listening to them since I entered college and my bass style naturally fits in with the funk genre. Plus, I’m just super excited to play with other people again. I’m pumped.

Until I post some dates, listen to their long-awaited debut album, Velour on the Floor.

Music has always been an integral part of my life, and I have tried to experience as many musical outlets as possible. Performing, attending concerts, recording and even working in music have all done so much for my appreciation of music. At the end of the day, however, it all comes down to LISTENING (the thing you do with your ears). Its a simple process, but the amount of musical channels we can choose from can make it very difficult to concentrate on music we want to hear.

With so many ways to listen to music (radio, CDs, concerts, media player, internet…), I have gravitated towards social music websites that (attempt to) play nicely with other musical mediums and also easily introduce me to new music. There are a host of music-oriented social sites out there, but I have gravitated towards 3 of the more popular: Pandora, Last.fm, and imeem.

While none of the three get near to my ideal music-listening experience, they each have their own inherent strengths and unique weaknesses. After much usage on all three platforms, I’ve rated them in this order:

3.

I use imeem primarily to listen to any song on demand. Unlike pandora or last.fm, imeem allows you to search for just about any song and play the full version right there on the spot. Last.fm is making progress in this area, however, and imeem seems to be losing battles to keep full-length tracks up instead of chopping them into 30 second previews.

imeem Strengths:

1. On demand listening - As stated above, imeem makes it easy to search for a particular track and listen to it right there on the spot.
2. Extremely social - imeem is a social network that revolves around media, so its easy to find people who listen to the same music as you. Of course you can friend, message, comment, feature, blah blah whatever any imeem user, and even join groups based on your tastes . My personal favorite is the “I Hate Phil Collins” group, which apparently really doesn’t like Phil Collins (note: I enjoy Phil’s work in Genesis and some of his solo stuff, just not the “I’m shackled in Disney’s basement forced to write schlocky soundtracks” era).
3. Customizable - Out of all three social music platforms, imeem definitely has the most customizable interface, allowing users to change colors, background images, and quite a few of the basic CSS-controlled objects.

imeem weaknesses

1. Tries to be too many things - imeem definitely bites off way too much more than it can chew. “Hey let’s share/feature/favorite/embed/rate music, videos, photos, blogs, playlists…” Way too much going on. Leave a lot of the features to the already-successful social sites and concentrate on a few of your strong features.
2. Poorly-tagged songs - Did you know Led Zeppelin did “Dream On?” Neither did I. That’s what you get for letting a 14 year old upload music.
3. Discovering new artists isn’t tailored to the user - They have a “discover” button that takes you to a random song, which is cool, but if you’re going to be putting the energy into creating a strong music profile, you should be able to use that profile to discover new artists based on your interests.

Check out my profile on imeem, and add me as a friend IF YOU DARE.

2.

Last.fm is both an online radio station and a client that sits on your computer and beams whatever you’re listening to in iTunes, WMP or Winamp up to your online profile. It gathers your listening history, and then generates a radio station based on your listening history. Pretty awesome if you ask me. I use less as an online radio station and more for keeping track of the songs I listen to on my computers.

Last.fm strengths

1. “Scrobbling” is awesome - Scrobbling is the process of taking what your media player is playing and shooting it up to your online profile. From there it makes recommendations and lays it out in a beautiful histogram. Want to see how many times you’ve listened to the Beatles compared to Culture Club? Last.fm is the tool for you.
2. See what your friends are listening to - Once you become friends with other Last.fm users, you can see what they’ve just listened to. I’ve freaked out my girlfriend by stating “Gorillaz are awesome” as soon as she started playing “Kids with Guns.”
3. Very Social - Last.fm is social in the areas where its supposed to be for a music site. Unlike imeem that tries to do everything, Last.fm allows you to connect with bands, similar listeners, labels, and groups that revolve around the music you love.
4. Full-length Tracks - Because last.fm got snatched up by CBS, they had the clout to negotiate with the big record labels to offer full-length tracks from artists on the Big 4 labels.

Last.fm weaknesses

1. Shaky platform - technical difficulties are aplenty with last.fm. Many times scrobbling seems to freeze and not submit your tracks to your profile, and listening data seems to get lost sometimes. This problem is not helped by the following point…
2. Hostile staff - Their staff seems angry whenever users post problems, and never seem to be happy to help users out. I don’t want to cut them down too much, because they have a good thing going, they should just learn to say “Oh sorry about that, here’s what you can do…” a little more.
3. No multiple listening histories - One of the things I was most excited about when I signed up for last.fm was the prospect of importing my listening data from Windows Media Player and iTunes on my home computer, my work computer, and my laptop. I was so excited to see what my complete listening history over the past 5 years was like. How quickly my bubble was burst. Unfortunately, the last.fm client only imports your listening data from ONE media player on ONE computer (the first computer you install the client on). It would really be amazing if last.fm could import multiple listening histories so recommendations would be more accurate and charts would better represent the user rather than one computer.

Last.fm seems like its still pretty fresh and has a lot of potential. I’m willing to stick around and grow with the platform in the hopes that one day, my favorite artists will be laid out in a beautiful histogram depicting how often I’ve listened to them.

Check out my last.fm profile to see what I’m listening to right this second.

1.

As a constant seeker of new music, I have found a best friend in Pandora. As a web and Flash designer, I love the interface, usability, and even the creative way they display ads (a creative blend of CSS background images and Flash banner that change as the song changes or the user interacts with the interface). I will admit I’ve used Pandora longer than Last.fm and imeem so I may be biased, but there’s a reason I keep coming back. Pandora is simple the same way Stumble is simple to use. “Thumbs up or Thumbs down. Like it or not. If you like it, we’ll throw more similar stuff at you; if you don’t, we’re sorry.” Insanely easy, increasingly targeted to your interests. How cool is that!

Pandora Strengths

1. Helps you find new music based on your tastes - This aspect of Pandora is what makes it stand out from the pack. Because Pandora uses data from its Music Genome Project, the correlation between songs goes beyond “related artists,” as Last.fm’s recommended radio station does. I’ve discovered so many bands that I now consider my favorites through Pandora. Bonus: you can bookmark songs and artists, listen to a preview of any bookmarked song, and buy it from iTunes or Amazon in a snap.
2. Ease of Use - As stated above, the thumbs up/thumbs down approach to music is incredibly easy to grasp and even more fun as you get going with a station. The more you rate, the more specific your station mimics your musical tastes.
3. Social Features limited - You might say, “Hold up, yo yo gangsta dawg, that’s a weakness!” but you’d be wrong. Pandora’s social features are exactly what you would want from such a streamlined and simple service: see what your friends recently bookmarked and listened to, message them, and most importantly listen to their personalized station. Its great to see what someone else’s musical tastes conjures up in the Pandora machine.

Pandora Weaknesses

1. Repetition - Because I listen to Pandora for extended periods of time, I’ve noticed that after a couple hours the same songs begin to replay. In a typical 8 hour workday, I start to get a lot of duplicates. Sometimes the only way to work around it is to give a previously thumbs-upped track a thumbs down just so it will quit playing the song. The obvious disadvantage is that you don’t ever want to give CAKE thumbs down. Ever.
2. Limited Integration - Pandora lives in its own universe, and unless you want to shell out some dough to get a player that streams Pandora in your house, you have to go to the Pandora website in order to partake in its greatness. This is where Last.fm has the advantage. Its not intrusive and doesn’t make you change your listening habits in order to benefit from the service, and also can scrobble your iPod. I’m sure Pandora’s working on ways to make itself more ubiquitous, but for now, pandora.com is the only place to listen.
3. Its hard to add a friend - I know. You’re saying, “You just said you liked the limited social functions!” and you’d be right. All I’m saying is that if I want to add someone as a friend, I should be able to do it without having to exert much effort.

Check out my Pandora profile to see my bookmarked songs and radio stations.

In conclusion

I hope this as least helped one person. I do enjoy all three of the services I talked about, and I would like to enjoy more. What do YOU use? (My buddy Andrew recently got me onto the Hype Machine, which is freaking great for finding new underground music, but don’t know enough yet to write about it). Do you have any tricks for Last.fm, Pandora, or imeem? Let me know! Post a comment. Disagree with what I said? Let me know (so we can roshambo on a 5 ft platform above a pungee pit).

This was a school project I did when I was first learning Photoshop. I recently stumbled onto it hiding in my folders and thought that I’d share it. *Important Note* This project was done almost 3 years ago, before the Chuck Norris revival movement hit full swing.