Today Keith Haring would have been 54 years old. Haring was a artist and social activist in the 1980s mainly working in New York City. He is best known for his Crack Is Wack billboard in a New York City playground. I was first introduced to Haring through my high school art teacher Mrs. Tetler, where I had to write a paper on him. I grew to love and appreciate his art for how simple and expressive his art is. In college for my art history final we had to do a research paper on an artist and recreate some of their work in our own way. For my project I decided on doing a paper on Haring.

Living in Brookline at the time and taking the T to travel everywhere I was inspired by what Haring had done to the subway ads in the New York subway. For the project I set out for the green line with some poster board and sharpies. I then looked at the ads on different trains and drew and wrote a short message on a piece of poster board and stuck it over the subway ad. I got many strange looks from people but nobody bothered me.

In honor of Haring’s birthday Google created a “Google Doodle” of his drawings spelling out Google to celebrate his birthday. Haring has and always will be one of my favorite artists and I hope to one day own some of his work. He was a positive influence wherever he went and wherever his art was.

Last month I took my friend Adam to Las Vegas for his bachelor party. It turned into being a 5 day vacation with a bachelor party on Saturday. It was my first trip to Las Vegas and anywhere in a different time zone. We stayed at the Excalibur hotel which is a giant castle. For his bachelor party we went to Old Vegas and ate at the Heart Attack Grill and then had a VIP table at this really cool bar called Insert Coins. It’s a bar, but instead of showing sports and news on the TVs they show video games that people can play. The VIP table came with 2 TVs and choice of any 2 video game systems. It was a really cool bar for my friends and I to be able to relax and enjoy our selves.

Las Vegas as a whole was amazing. I would describe it as a Disney Land for adults. Where attention to detail is everywhere. Nothing is over looked and nothing is spared. There was always something to do, something to eat, and something to drink at all hours of the day. It’s a little sad to see people just sitting there losing their money, but its their choice to do it. There were tons of families and young kids there and I don’t think I would ever take a kid there. We did a couple of shows, The Price is Right Life and Penn & Teller.

We decided that we didn’t know the next time we were going to get to that part of the country again so we caved in and took a tour of the Grand Canyon. The views were spectacular. Such depth and distance, such a wide verity of colors and shades. One of the most amazing places I have ever seen. Completely different ecosystem from up here in New England.

Overall it was amazing amazing trip and too many things to do crammed into a few short days. I’ve added a few pictures and if you would like to see more you can see some after the jump (at some point I will add descriptions of the pictures).

Kelly Shoppach’s first career steal and probably the best slide in Red Sox and baseball history. His first steal took place on Friday April 13th 2012. The Red Sox home opener as they start their 100th year at Fenway Park against the Tampa Bay Rays.

I have recently started working a little bit on on of my new websites DiscGolfPictures.com. I was debating on what CMS to use and I finally decided for now to go with WordPress and then maybe as the site grows to move onto a new full featured CMS. But I recently figured out what type of font and what colors as well as theme I am going to use for the site. So up above is the logo, on the site it will be straight. Below is a little preview of the site still in progress. I am in search of an image that I want to use for the top header. I think I might have to make it out to one of the courses and take a picture myself.

WordPress is an amazing blogging and CMS system to use and create websites with. This blog right here was created using WordPress. I have started using WordPress when creating any new sites because its easy to use, customize and update. The only thing that gets to me is that I always seem to have to completely recreate the whole WordPress system when making a new theme. So I decided to create a very basic WordPress theme and save that so I will always have a valid theme to build off of. So I decided to give this Basic WordPress theme away to anybody that wants it to build off of. Now this is a very basic theme. Its not something to use as your blogs theme, its something to build off of. It has all the basic elements of WordPress along with a widgets enabled sidebar. It has minimal CSS just so all the classes are in the CSS file. As you can see from the image above there’s no real styling at all, no images, nothing but the standard WordPress install. Feel free to download it and let me know what you think or let me know if you find it useful. Hit the button to download the theme.

I have trying to do photo corrections and photo restoration for these pictures to give to my Grandma. I think I did well on the picture of just my Grandpa from when he was in the military. I also think I need well on the Christmas picture, although some detail was lost and needs some sharpening done. The last picture was such a pain to do. There’s still a finger print over my aunts face and its still some work to do there. I need more practice on doing photo restoration. I think that I’m off to a good start. Any tips? Critiques? Tricks? Improvements? Let me know! I am open to advice! (old picture on the left, restored on the right)

So I blogged (link) about the Capitol One having 4 adds running on CNN.com at once and it ended up getting a lot of traffic from people searching so I assume I am not the only one finds the ads annoying. The adds have come back a couple of times since, including today. Now Capitol one is in the business of making money and wouldn’t have these ads running for nothing. So now my question isn’t why are they running these ads, its whose clicking on them that make them worth it? The ads do wrap around the main content of CNN.com so is it people thinking its part of the site? The top banner does occasionally scroll across and maybe people think its a new ticker?Is there enough people like me who click their mouse randomly when reading something that accidentally click on them? There has to be a healthy amount of people that click on the ads to justify spending that much money on them. I would love to see a click heatmap of the main page to see where these people are clicking. I guess it must be good advertising design if its worth it, no matter how annoying or intrusive it is.