This year my mother got a Nikon D3000 for her birthday. Over the past couple of weeks as the weather has gotten warmer I have decided to start messing around with it and taking and editing some pictures. Here are some of the recent pictures mostly close up shots. Let me know what you think!

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%}

I’ve mentioned Last.fm before (here) to track my listen habits and statistics. It gives you pretty much endless statistics and graphs and list, yet I crave more, I need more. Then along comes the wonderful and re-launched Lastgraph. Lastgraph creates, you guessed it, graphs based on your last.fm feed. All you have to do is go to their site and enter in your Last.fm username and then click on posters and pick from what dates you want data to be collected. Then after awhile your data will be collected and made into a graph similar to what’s pictured above. The way the graph is made is that the more songs you listened to by an artist the bigger their color section gets. So for February/March I was listening to a lot of Pink Floyd and Boston, then for April it was Blue Oyster Cult Then for May it seems to be Elton John and Michael Jackson and since then its pretty much dominated by The Beatles. The huge increase with The Beatles has to be attributed to me watching Across the Universe. The picture above is really bad quality, but you can download a PDF version from Lastgraph that you can zoom in to see every bend and curve and name. You can view a PDF of mine here.

Big Buck Bunny is a animation movie that was released last month both digitally and physically. Its licensed under the Creative Commons License so anybody can view and use it and its source files. The movie is a little under 10 minutes long so make sure you have time to watch it. I found it to be entertaining and the animation to be amazing, I wish I could do anything close to that. While the story line could have been a little better and the characters could have been developed more the technical side of the project was amazingly done. You can head over to their web site to download the movie or purchase the DVD and support them.

This movie was created by a team of 7 who have spent the past 7 months working on it in Amsterdam. What makes this so interesting and amazing is that its licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License. Which means that anybody can use the images, movie, or source files if they want. I think the only limiting factor is that they can’t use it for profit. It was created by Blender Institute completely using Blender. Blender is a completely free application for a creating 3D animation and objects.

I’ve grown bored with my old web site design so I’m in the process of completely redoing it. I’m hoping that I will be able to completely redo my web site using CSS, which is going to be a lot of learning for me to do. This going to be a major undertaking for me but I feel that I will be able to accomplish it. The only thing that I have to over come is getting so distracted and getting down to work. So this is the markup I have so far. Its a little bit web 2.0 but I think once I’m finished with it and its all done it will really look good. One of the design problems that I’m having right now is figuring out the background color or if I should keep it white. Its far from finished but its an early mock up and so far I like it, but it will be interesting to see how it changes. Any thoughts or comments?