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A step in the right direction 22nd May 2008  After two solid years as a web designer, I've finally landed my first professional job in the career I'd like to persue. The name of the company that hired me is "WiganIT" and they specialise in a wide range of computer based services. I won't say anymore until the end of my first week, but I'm over the moon. I'm a winner! 19th May 2008  If you remember me mentioning that I entered a photography competition through my brother (who is any employee of Merseytravel) you may be happy to know I won the St Helens section and managed to get the image in this year's calendar. My brother attended the ceremony at the Crown Plaza Hotel in Liverpool and was fed like a king. He was called on stage to accept the prize under the St Helens photography category and had his pictures taken with a group of Merseytravel representatives. The prize was £50 of M&S vouchers (to which I have given to my mum) and your photo displayed within the calendar that is sold all over Merseyside. Below are some images of the envelope he recieved:   I'm fairly happy with the success, and I'm glad that I could involve my brother in the process. We won the voucher and I'll be sure to post calendar pictures as soon as it comes out. Butternut Squash 19th May 2008  A long time ago when me and Reb was browsing through cards in town, I noticed that very few of them are original. Most of the best comedy ones contained old school snapshots with text displaying a funny message, like so. This is fine and dandy in the long run, but where's the variety? Where are the cards that an 18 year old can get his best mate? Cards that display more than the average birthday card? That's why I've decided to design my own line of greeting cards. The aim of this project is to promote a more graphic and 18+ outcome. I'm not talking about adding pictures of perverse things and calling it a card, I'm talking more along the lines of keeping up with the times and integrating modern events within the messages and content. An example of this can be using the "15 minutes of fame" Youtube group; such as "Don't taze me bro" or the famous "Miss teen 2007". These kinds of things are spoke about all over the web on a daily basis and even find themselves into the pub afetr a few pints. The aim is to bring the latest and greatest into comedy greeting cards, and help bring the modern world into something new. I'll be suer to post more on this project when I have time to make some examples. Please note that the logo for this update has no necessary relation to the final product. The "Stop & Paint" project 13th May 2008  I've been meaning to start up a community few community projects over the past couple of weeks but it's been hard to pick the best ones out of the hat. I wrote at least 14-15 ideas down on a piece of paper but one by one each fell off the logic scale and I was left with a final three. Stop & Paint is one of the three that survived the filter stage and is the first one to be put into action. With it still being in the BETA stage I want to see how it goes before I go ahead and give it it's own place on the web, it's just a matter of time until we see if this is a failure or not. If you want to participate in the project just follow the on screen instructions and you're good to go! Click here to visit Stop & Paint » The Mist 12th May 2008  If you're struggling to find a good movie to watch, I strongly recommend Frank Darabont's "The Mist" (based on the Stephen King novel). Being released in UK cinemas on the 4th July, The DVD has already arrived in the states and I have some really kind contacts over there with far too much money. So I was sent a copy of the disk to which I received yesterday morning, and with me being in charge yesterday in work I've only just had a chance to watch it. I won't try and write my own brief description as IMDB and Wiki are far better at doing that sort of thing: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0884328/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mist I'm now placing this movie in my overall top 20 and it will defiantely take something special to take it away. Without giving too much away I just want to say that the ending to this film is like one I have never seen before in my life! Without sounding cheesy it's a masterpiece :o I'm a finalist! 09th May 2008  My brother returned home today with some great news regarding the Merseytravel photography competition I entered (through him) a couple of weeks ago or so. The entry we used was of the welcome sign coming in from Knowsley, it was the best out of my shots and I'm glad I went with it. Because my brother works for Merseytravel he has been invited to attend the ceremony dinner and accept the award if he wins. I'm a little gutted because it's my photo, but I guess I should just thrive on the achievement more than anything. All in all my brother gets fed like a king and could potentially win £50 and a printed (front page) picture in next years "Merseytravel calendar". Below are the scanned invite and letter my brother recieved earlier today:   Alfa Romeo 159 shoot! 08th May 2008  A friend of mine managed to get insured on his stepdad's Alfa Romeo 159 and we've been crusing like champions ever since. It's a completely different kind of driving when you're in a £25,000 car, let alone a car that hasn't cost him a penny! After 2 weeks of cruising we decided it's time to snap up some shots of the black beast at different times of the day. And with the weather being so nice lately (???) it was great lighting no matter where we was! Overall I only took around 20 pictures and one of those I took and edited into an advert mock piece for my portfolio. The others can be found in the flash gallery below:  Mike's EU Pathway website 08th May 2008  After endless speculation in the puc regarding my brother's EU Pathway website being real or not, the proof has finally arrived! I designed a template for my brother a while ago now so he can voice his knowledge on the European Union to the world wide web. Ever since then he has been collecting information and writing up content in word and I placed it into the rightful pages. I've had a good read as I've been working through it and I've learnt a few fun facts! I especially like how it's laid out. It's nice and easy to read and it isn't unecessarily full of useless crap that you don't care about whilst browsing a website. Click here to view the site » Flash presentation 07th May 2008 I've been playing around with a wide range of flash software lately and I've popped a few things out that are worth a quick blog. First up is the crappy flash banner I did for the LemonLime drink project. It isn't meant to be serious, It's just me pissing around and trying to make sense of the mechanics. The software I made this with was pretty limited and crappy, but that's no excuse on my behalf: Click for banner » You may notice the picture of me that scrolls up the right overlaps the 1px border around the whole thing. Why does this happen? Because I was only allowed to use .jpg images and they don't allow alpha transaprency. Even the 1px border had a white background :(. Anyway, I started searching around a little more and found a really impressive flash tutorial teaching me how to portray my pictures in a more professional manner. As I'm a fan of websites with a little bit of flash I thought I'd give it a whirl ... Click for gallery » On a different note: My brother's EU website that he's been working on for 3-4 weeks or so is set to go online tonight. I designed the template a good 3-4 months ago and I've finalised a few things for him ready to confirm. There's still a couple of outstanding pages that he needs to complete, so it's a little sketchy in areas. Another member of the family joins the wonderful world of websiting. Where has everything gone!? 07th May 2008 If you're wondering where all the updates have got to that are usually on this page they are now archived in the navigation on the left. I'm doing this to avoid large loading times as the site grows and grows, so splitting it up on a monthly basis seems the best option. This will happen every month and continue until the end of the year. For the first few months I'll be sure to announce just incase people missed a month and are confused when they return. Adios!
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