Goals 25, 26, and 85: Scholar Design (dot com)

So after days of sitting at a desk, code-monkeying away like a World of Warcraft champion, I have finally produced something that I deem fit for the internets.

www.ScholarDesign.com

(yes, I DO own that hostname, as well as the hosting. Can you check #26 please?)

This is just another portfolio site that demonstrates the stuff that I do (which isn't much). It has gone through probably about 15 different phases of ideas and layouts before it finally came to this. Although there are plenty of things that still bother me about it, I think it looks pretty good, and I plan on keeping it for a while. I would certainly consider this the creation of an excellent personal website (#25).

It consists of an extremely simple three-sections: Design, About, and Contact. The Design section contains all of the pieces of work that I'm displaying.

(See the bottom of this post for a dumb secret about this section that is pertinent to the post!)

The navigation bar is very simple, but features all necessary links. The first three are anchor links to the respective three sections of the page. Using a scroll code from the Dynamic Drive DHTML library, when an anchor link is clicked, there is a smooth scroll to the appropriate section of the webpage.

The Contact and About sections are very simple, and have slight text-shadows to make them a bit more readable. Like most of this site, everything will work on a computer that is totally basic, 800x600 screen size, no java, no anything. It won't look as fancy, but everything will still be there. It was a bit difficult designing everything this way, and it may also be a bit pointless, but it's good form.

One of the coolest features of the site is the gallery of design works. I used an image magnification jquery code called Highslide. It is extremely customizable, and allows for everything I needed it to. You can find more information about Highslide at www.Highslide.com.

One of the cool features, demonstrated to the right, is that once you've enlarged an image, it disappears from the gallery, and the enlarged image can actually be moved around the screen.

The final feature can be demonstrated in the above two pictures. Notice the background smallens down? That's another nifty code created by Aaron Vanderzwan, called MaxImage. You can find out more about what he does at www.aaronvanderzwan.com. It's another jquery code that resizes an image to fit the background of any window. It also had a great built-in feature that I ended up utilizing that, if you haven't noticed yet, changes the background after a time delay.

That provided a great way to demonstrate some of my photography, as well as some pictures of myself, without having to include them anywhere in the layout. The bottom left of each page has a label of where the picture was taken, and the changing adds an excellent amount of life to the entire site, and I am a personal fan of photographic backgrounds.

A Secret from the Background (#85)

You can't tell, but it just so happens that for this site, I learned a good amount of PHP coding, and learned how to install and use a MySQL database. From above, the Design portion of the page is all dynamically created depending on the contents of my 'design' database. The same is also true for the background images. This will make this site incredibly easy to update, and I have learned a lot from creating it (at a cost of nothing except for about two weeks of life).

All that said...

If you take a look at the site, please let me know what you think. Let me know if something doesn't work, or if it's going too slow. I am happy enough with the site that I'm now advertising it, but I know that it is by no means complete or perfect. I need to know of problems before I can fix them, and it's all part of the learning process, so please give me any critiques or suggestions or anything, I'm open ears.

Goals 40, 97, 100: Belgium

March 3rd to 7th marked a trip to a country of B's. The beautiful and bright country of Belgium. In Belgium, we went to the Cities of Brussels, Gent, and Brugges(?), and had quite a time exploring without any real direction or instruction, besides knowing that Saturday was going to be Museum Night Fever, a museum extravaganza featuring 20 museums in Brussels.

Goal 97: Make Street Art

Because we travelled in a group of 9 people, we split up into two different groups of couchsurfers, and one group of 5 had to mix up our plans a bit when they decided to stay in Gent. A trip to Gent had been a possibility, and so this change of plans was welcome, and gave us business for our first day.

Gent was a beautiful little city with cute architecture everywhere. I got on a boat with Aaron Kahn after jumping some fences, and later we found a little alleyway with some really excellent street art on it that looked like a huge crossword puzzle. So guess what we did before we left.

It was a multinational wall with many different languages, so all of us chose a few words to add, and I added words from four different languages that I am fluent in.

Playa - Spanish - "beach" (not "Playa" in ebonics)

Progress was the group contribution to the wall. We made Progress the theme of this trip after reminiscing about a previous roadtrip to Canada.

Mycket - Swedish - "Very"

also

Et - French - "And"

Molto - Italian - "Very"

Design. My personal English contribution.

We also made additions in Finnish and Bulgarian.

Goal 100: Get In Brugge

The next day we got In Bruges.

"It's like a postcard"

This is the tower in Bruggs that guy jumps off an 'spodes all over the ground in the movie.

Look at this dog. He just sits there, like a dog. All day. This is his window in Brugges.

We just happened to be there on the day that there was only 100 days of school left. All of the highschoolers and youngons take to the streets in ridiculous attire, and hit eachother with shaving cream and flour. This is called "The 100 Day Ravage." We went to a club bar, and it was about 3:00pm, it was selling meters of beer, and had a full nightclub going, equipped with all the kiddies you could handle. This is the beer I drank in Brugge.

There are two famous green boxes that sell Belgish food at the town square in Brooge. Apparently it's an age old competition between the two, and we chose the one on the right for whatever reason.

We played ping pong at our couchsurfer's house in Bruge.

"If I grew up on a farm, and was retarded, Bruges might impress me but I didn't, so it doesn't." -Colin Farrell in In Bruges

Goal 40: Perform a Heist

In Brussels, we attended Museum Night Fever, and at the Museum of Brussels, there was an odd arrangement of clothes and costumes that people were dressing up in and taking pictures with.

All of the stuff was just layin there on the table, with nothing really to do except to get wrangled and touched by all of these filthy museum-goers.

So I decided to wrangle some up and pick out some wicked awesome rags to take a few pictures in. This picture is of me shortly after scoring an ace and winning the Wimbelton cup.

There was a blonde wig that was pretty popular among our group.

So then I was getting ready to take this sweater off that was way cooler than anything else I own, and I started to reconsider.

Rather than be torn from an existence without the green sweater...I heisted it.

I own it now.

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Goals 50, 72, & 94: Italy

Let February 17th-22nd be named the most epic time period of the year. The trip to Milan, Italy included many of my favorite things such as dancing, design, destruction, dialects, and smuggling. This was all sponsored by a very good, old friend, Elis Bonini.

Goal 72: See my Italian friend, Elis, in Italy

It's been quite a while, at least 2 years since I've seen this old friend. Once a foreign exchange student to my high school, he knew me as the asshole that poorly imitated his accent for six months. We became good friends over doing ridiculous things in and around Albuquerque.

Well now it was my turn to return the favor with a ridiculous trip to Milan, where he now lives and goes to school. We wasted no time before beginning progress.

Goal 50: Eat an Italian Pizza

The first stop was a small pizzeria in Milan where pizza was sold by the gram, square, thick, and delicious.

They give you little forks to eat with.

I ate with those little forks.

Later on, Elis grabbed a couple of mushroom pizzas from another shop, and we dined on a circular Italian pizza.

After a day in Milan, we left to see the infamous town that formed Elis, Reggio Emilia. This town is very small, but has great importance. Not only did the Romans feature a road right through it, but it is also the birthplace of the current Italian flag. Reggio featured some incredible treats, including more Italian pizza at Piccolo Paradiso.

I had four different types of pizza here, all custom made, with different types of mushrooms and meats that I've never been privileged enough to see on my pizza dough.

The paradise had some unexpected bonuses as well. This was an anchovy bread combo that was gratis. In addition to this, I was seeking to eat a leftover pizza. The others I was with asked a waiter for permission, and he kindly rejected the privilege, but then brought out two of the largest sandwiches I had ever seen to be polite. These huge sandwiches play a major role in an adventure later on.

Goal 94: Laugh Until I Cry

The morning after our first night in Milan, Elis, Kenny and I were eating breakfast and discussing various things. One of the topics was of my previous night's rest with no blankets, on a bed in the living room. This was peculiar because I was awoken by Elis's roommates as they were eating breakfast at a table that was in direct line with my face while I was sleeping. We laughed about dumb things, but it was a good laugh we had.

Notice Elis is wearing the I heart 06 shirt, our senior shirt at St. Pius.

Nutella was the nice breakfast treat, who knew it would play an interesting role later on.

Epic Italia

Besides goals completed, Italy proved to be such an epic trip. We got free drinks at a club that left us wasted and bumbling about until 6am. That was then followed up by an authentic Italian meal by Elis's aunt and uncle where I nearly 'sploded from all the delicious, homemade food I ate.

After the drink and food, we found an abandoned factory that was inhabited by gypsies. We explored it a bit, and then started smashing up whatever we could.

That's not all though, because once we were getting ready to leave, we arrived at Bergamo Hotel/Airport the night before our 6am flight.

That was the worst of our problems though, because we had a 750g jar of Nutella that we had to smuggle back to Stockholm. Upon checking the rulebook, we saw that cremes can be in a maximum of 100g containers.

Lucky for us though, there is an exception to this rule...sorta. In the book, it cites that cremes "inside of sandwiches" is ok. Well then, it just so turns out we were given two oversized sandwiches that would be perfect for putting 750g of Nutella on.

My first time smuggling something across the border couldn't have been sweeter.

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