Now that I’ve pretty much finished all my projects for other people, it’s time for the regular blog design update. Now this won’t be a full redesign, because the current overall layout is still good. The only major design updates will come to the header, nav, and footer. There will be some minor color changes, and several of the graphics will be tightened up to look their best. The newer layout will be a bit less boxy, and will have more spacing to make it feel less confined. If any of you want to see what’s coming up, go to the test directory and see for yourself. However, the test site might not always look its best due to my trial-and-error method of designing, so be warned.
If this post made no sense at all, it’s because I’m writing it at 4:22 am. Yes, I have work tomorrow… errr… today, at 8 am. Oh well, let’s just call it an experiment to see how well I cope with an 8-hour work day after almost no sleep. Bring on the caffeine!
I don’t have much to write about right now, so I’ll post some pictures/artwork instead.
The average McDonald's worker
I drew that on Wednesday when I was slightly bored. The whole thing took me less than 20 minutes, thanks to my Wacom and Photoshop.
The new guitar
I finally got around to taking a decent picture of my new guitar. All that’s left is to practice constantly until I develop some kind of skill.
Hard Drive Tales
Today, Mac OS X popped up and reminded me that my hard disk space was running low. I opened up Finder, and found that I had a measly 400mb of space left. Now I could have just started deleting all my movies and music, but I decided to find a better solution to this never-ending problem. I dug out my old 500gb external hard drive, and found that it still worked quite well. All I had to do was format it to
FAT32, in case I’d ever need to access it with a
PC. In about 20 minutes, I filled up 100gb of the hard drive, so I don’t know how long it’ll last me…
Other Stuff
There are only 3 days of spring break left, until I have to go back to
forced-labor camp school. I’m also going to the
NYC International Auto Show tomorrow, and I might even take a few good pictures while I’m there.
It’s been ages since I’ve last posted something here, so here it goes:
New Electric Guitar
If you’ve been following my Twitter feed, you’ll have seen that I finally bought myself a new electric guitar, after several months of wanting to do so. It’s an ESP-200 Will Adler Signature guitar. It has a Les-Paul-style body, and a really cool-looking camouflage finish. For the amp, I got a 15-watt Line 6 Spider III. I got a great deal on the two; all that’s left is to get the neck adjusted on the guitar, and it’ll be perfect.
Spring Break
The vacation’s been good so far. My only complaint is that I still have work, which takes away precious web design-hours. Tomorrow, I will attempt to have a super-productive day, and to complete the 2 web design projects I’m doing for some people, before those people shoot me. I also have to get some new strings for my guitar tomorrow… I’m thinking Ernie Ball strings, as they’ve gotten pretty good reviews from a lot of people.
Layout Updates
As 3Cogs slowly nears completion (note the word slowly… don’t expect it anytime soon!), I’ll be tweaking the layout here to better match the new 3Cogs site. There won’t be any drastic changes, as the color scheme and layout are perfect as they are right now.
Theme Updates
Sadly, Apathy hasn’t progressed much from the .PSD stage, courtesy of my extreme laziness. I’ll attempt to release it soon, but no promises there. I’ve also got another theme in the works, but that’s looking a little too far ahead.
WPWebHost Best WordPress Design Awards
So far I’m in third place, and I’m rather pleased with how it’s come out so far. The top 2 designers are college graduates in their 20′s, and yet I, a 16-year-old kid in high school, am pretty close behind them. It just goes to show that no matter how fancy your diploma is, your skills are what really matter.
That’s what I got on the
SAT. It’s a good enough score, but I’m still going to take the
SAT again in June to see if I can reach my personal goal of 2000. Now that the
SAT’s are basically done with, college applications are the only thing I have to worry about, and they’re not due until around November.
Spring Break
Thursday is the first day of spring break, a time when I can mostly laze around, and maybe even get some work done.
I also made some small updates to the blog, such as removing the Flickr stream (It’s not really needed, and it adds extra loading time), and adding sticky posts. Sticky posts stay on top of all other posts, and I styled mine to be slightly different from the rest of the posts. That way, the web design contest stuff remains on the top of the page, while still allowing me to make new posts below it.
WPWebHost is holding a design competition to find the best-looking WordPress-powered blogs around the web. I submitted this blog to the “Best Clean & Minimalistic” category, and it made it into the top 10! I was quite excited and pleased to see my blog on the list, and I’m hoping that I may have some success in the final round. It’s no longer the judges’ decisions, it’s all up to you guys, the readers. You have to vote for the best-looking blogs in each category. I’m not going to directly say vote for me, I’m just going to suggest that you guys make the right choice 
You can vote here, my blog is under the “Best Clean & Minimalist” category.
The previous post was clearly an April Fool’s joke. A well-written, but rather unrealistic joke, though. I’d never give up blogging that easily.
Other websites pulled some pretty nice jokes as well. The guys over at Newgrounds completely reskinned the place, with the magic of
CSS. Google introduced “Brain Search,” which indexes your brain to give “more accurate results.” Neowin and Youtube flipped everything upside-down.
Other Stuff
SAT results are coming soon. April 7th, to be exact. Next week I only have three days of school, followed by a week off. Not much else to write about, though.