Internet Wanderer

Today Microsoft released a update to the Zune to bring it to 3.1 included in this update is software fixes, better social support and three new games along with an update to Texas Hold’Em. The three new games are Checkers, Sudoku and Space Battle. They are pretty explanatory except for Space Battle. In Space Battle you fly around and shoot other enemies out of the sky. You can get upgrades like better shields, more ammo, and weapon upgrade along with more spaceship parts to customize your spaceship. On my first playing it the game seems more in-depth then I was expecting, which is a good thing. For Texas Hold’Em they added multi-player over WiFi. Some screen caps grabbed from Zune Insider.

This weekend we in West Boylston celebrated the towns Bicentennial with a art show, bonfire, grand parade and ended it with a fantastic firework show. It was indeed a grand weekend with hundreds of people showed up for the arts show and thousands showed up for the grand parade and fireworks. I took part in helping my mother set up at the art show and I was impressed with both the amount of people set up, and the amount of people that showed up. I saw the bonfire set up and from what I saw it was going to be huge, I wasn’t in attendance but from what I’ve heard it was big and well attended. Overall the day earned an estimated $20,000 for the West Boylston Arts Foundation which is great news because money is needed to protect the arts in West Boylston.

On Sunday was the grand parade and how grand it was. There was thousands of people in attendance and it was great to see the town come together and celebrate as one. The parade had over 2000 participants of various acts and floats. Some of the highlights were the Shriners and their different cars and bikes, the West Boylston school system and their floats, UMASS Amherst band, UMASS Lowell band, and many many classic cars. One of the let downs was the WalMart truck and Dunkin’ Donuts truck, they were both out of place. The day ended with a fantastic fireworks show at Goodale Park and the football field. It was resemblance of the old West Boylston Days and a great way to end a great weekend.

Banner Article of the weekend

Telegram and Gazette Photo Gallery

Towns Photo Gallery of the Parade and all events

Some pictures of the Parade in the ‘OntheCommon.com’

Today was the release of the Zune 3.0 software and they finally added a clock. That whole update was worth it just for the clock. But 3.0 also brings a lot of nice features and improvements. After the release of Apples Genius feature where it picks songs that match your taste, the new Zune software comes with Mixview which is:

Dynamic representations of your collection, as well as artist and song recommendations based on what you and other members of the Social are listening to.

Its quite interesting to play around with, Jesus Diaz gives a good review over at Gizmodo. Some of the other more notable features added are games (Hexic and Texas Hold’Em), browse Zune marketplace by WiFi, buy from FM, which when your listening to a song on the radio you can add it to your cart and buy the song next time you sync it with your computer. Another notable feature is Zune Channels, which if you have a Zune Pass you can subscribe to the channel and it will add songs to a play list based on your listening habits. You can get a complete rundown of what’s new here.

Overall I think this new software is a step in the right direction for Microsoft and for the Zune team. I am glad that when I had the chance I chose the Zune over the iPod. Hit the jump for a couple of screen shots of the new software. I also scored a free episode of The Office off of the Zune Marketplace!!! So that along with the clock addition made it worth it.

If you haven’t heard already Google came out with their own web browser today called Google Chrome. Google Chrome is a browser that looks to compete with the IE market share more then the Firefox market share. Chrome is an open source browser but is currently only made for windows PCs. There is however a portable version for your thumbdrives. Overall its a pretty impressive browser however it does have a long way to go. There have been some talk about it being a little intrusive about your personal life but nothing that bothers me, yet at least. The second thing was the amount of ads that I saw, I hope when this takes off somebody ports over AdBlock Plus for it, then it would be useable. Hit the jump for some screen shots and things that Chrome does.

Its been awhile since I’ve posted, there’s been a lot going on in the month of August/September. The most important thing being my sisters wedding. The wedding was perfect, went off without any problems at al, good weather, good food, interesting dancing. The week before her wedding I spent it in Key West Fl, for Sean’s 21st birthday/ graduation present. That vacation was amazing after dealing with “Hurricane Fay.” I’ll post a couple of pictures on the next page. Other then the wedding and Key West I’ve been busy moving, and juggling three freelance jobs. Its a lot of work but I’m handling it well and all of the projects are fun and creative. Hit the jump for the pictures.

So this supposedly is the closest I could come to getting this web site to look like me. I saw the post on metafilter and thought I would give it a shot. What do you guys think?

As of writing this entry right now there have been 1,001 unique visitors to my blog. I started this blog back on December 3ed 2007, so a day before 9 complete months there have been 1,001 visitors or about 111.17 visitors per month. The most visitors were 19 on January 13, 2008. I think its pretty impressive for such little work that I’ve actually put into it. I also currently have a google page rank of 4 out of 10. There have been visitors from 63 different countries with the top 5 being(these are all time visits):

1. US- 998 visitors
2. Canada- 50 visitors
3. UK- 42 visitors
4. Germany- 18 visitors
5. India- 16 visitors

These are the top 5 searches:

1. Digsby review- 199
2. evernote3- 18
3. zalternator download- 14
4. Keith Keristead- 12
5. zune alternative- 9

As for my main portfolio site I’ve only had 281 unique visitors. My main site has a google page rank of 2 out of 10.

Over the past couple of weeks I have been updating my web site as well as learning and implementing CSS (Cascading Style Sheets ) into my design. Now since I had little clue of how CSS worked and how to design with it I was a little intimidated to say the least. After reading some articles online, watching some examples on youtube and looking at some examples I got the basics down and was able to get the gist of it. While searching for examples and information I had to wade through a lot of websites that weren’t all that helpful or were to vague to figure out, so I decided to compile a list here so people could have easy access to many of the sites.

1. w3schools.com-Where to get all the basic info that you need to get started. Also check out the example pages where you can view and test out some of the basic CSS skills.
2. Youtube tutorial-Its a little long at a little under 40 mins. But it goes step by step starting for the beginning of how to create a page using CSS.
3. DynamicDrive-Where I figured out how to get the menu and other examples to work right and implemented. They also have a lot of other information on web design.
4. Smashing Magazine-This is more a collection of links but is been a very good resource for me. They show you good designs, layouts, and navigation along with having  links to how to create different things like graphs, forms, and image galleries. Keep checking back here for good CSS techniques and other design software.

*Bonus little bit of information that I was having trouble with. When I was entering different lines of information the line spacing was way off. So to get the line information you just enter this into your CSS and then add the class to the lines that are spaced to far apart. Just change the percentage to what you want:

p.small {line-height: 90%}

This is a slide show of a powerpoint that I made following my dad and I’s trip up to New Brunswick, Canada for the Keirstead Family Reunion in the year 2000. I meant to post this awhile ago but I just found it while searching for something on my external harddrive. As you can tell by watching this that its old and outdated. A couple of things I noticed off the bat Comic Sans typeface…horrible, Some really bad clip art/images (random Bart Simpson?), the third and most disappointing was the slow and obnoxious animations for all of the slides, luckily for you when I turned it into a slide show to be upload online I lost all of the slide animations so you guys don’t have to put up with it. Also some of the things I can’t believe that I put on there, the horrible excel graph and used the template from powerpoint. Although I guess I have to take into consideration that I was 14 when I created this and it was before I had even started high school so I guess I can give my self a break.

EDIT: For some reason its coming out really small. Click here to view it full screen.

If you check out www.keithkeirstead.com there is a new design up. Nothing to tricky, nice simple and clean. Got rid of that slow flash opening and the flash gallery for displaying my work. I also was able to add descriptions to my portfolio page as well as adding some new work and PDF versions for those who need it. Looking back at all the years I decided to take a screen shot of the so far of the 3 different designs that I have had. Hit the jump to seem them in all of their glory.