It’s been a long time since I’ve updated the site. Work has been keeping me extremely busy. One of my most recent projects has been a flash website for Club Ash Bar & Lounge, a new club opening in Barrie, Ontario this fall. I’m pleased to announce that the site is now complete and online.

The site features, a music player, on-line VIP sign up, reservations and job applications as well as restaurant and bottle service menus updated from xml… Continue reading.

Someone on twitter posted a link to this satirical video about “The Vendor Client relationship – in real world situations” and I couldn’t believe how true it rang. So much so that I really didn’t laugh at it the first time, I just thought “Yes. Yes I know what that’s like.” Particularly the guy at the video store. I’ve had people say exactly the same thing to me while discussing a potential web design project. Continue reading.

One of the pitfalls of being a freelancer is that, on occasion, you run into situations where it’s necessary to do some work to get some work.

By that I mean, you have to attend meetings, prepare design sketches and present them to a client all before being paid a penny. Some times this pays off and some times it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, you find yourself in possession of “orphans”, designs that are doomed to walk the earth, never fully realized and unattached to a project.

This is the story of just such a scenario and the designs that resulted. Continue reading.

I have found that, since turning forty, it’s become a lot harder to keep on top of all the hair that’s suddenly sprouting up all over my body. It’s like some sort of late-onset puberty. This post demonstrates a typical scenario. Continue reading.

My sister had a baby last year and immediately caught the photography bug. She’s taken some amazing photos with her digital SLR camera and has decided that she wants a serious venue to display her shots. She’s found a number of photoblogs she admires and has ask me to design one for her. The sites she likes are all wide, one column designs and she wants to have a nice animated flash box in the header. Continue reading.

I avoided jumping onto the list bandwagon thinking that it was too self-promotional and oozed with, as my wife put it, “Oh, look at me! I have such interesting and eclectic tastes!” Until a friend from my OCA days tagged me on her 15 Albums list and I found I agreed with an astonishing number of her choices. Despite my misgivings, I started to ruminate on albums that somehow made a difference in my life. As luck would have it, this blog has been sitting here begging me for content for some time now so I’ve decided to just start writing about music in my life and see where it goes. I should be able to avoid appearing “interesting and eclectic” as there are some records that had profound effects on me but which I would hardly classify as artistic masterpieces or even listen to today. Having said that, these albums were once important to me and shaped my growth as a wannabe rock star. Continue reading.

Just for fun I ran the Russian text of the spam in my last entry through Google Translate to see if I could get a better idea of what it read.  The result was much more natural in tone but I still don’t know what the spammer was trying to achieve.  The Google translation was as follows: Continue reading.