New image gallery available

I've added more images to my Shareapic.net account. I now have images of buildings available for download.

If you're not sure how to download the images, just click on their thumbnails to get to the full view page, and then right-click to save the image to your computer. Please refer to my previous post for the Terms of Use.

Updated the store

The Meteos-themed tee shirt has been removed from my Cafepress store for a long time now. I don't feel comfortable selling it because even though the shirt design is mine, the Meteos Geolyte character in the design is not. That and the design itself needs some serious revisions before being submitted for sale again. I bought a test shirt, and the design as it is now looked horrible on the dark (black) t-shirt.

For some reason, Cafepress decided to let members with basic stores sell framed art prints. So now I get to sell my paintings, the few I have that are worthy for sale. I only have one painting ready for print at this time. Click here to see it at the shop, or click the "store" link in the web site menu. I would like to find a better way to make the painting more affordable, though I feel the price is standard for oil art prints. If anyone knows a better place than Cafepress to use for art prints, post a comment.

Sharing music online the RIGHT way.

Yes, the title this post is another stab at HHB. I notice that some people were out searching for the HHB blog happened to come across my previous post about it. Behold the usefulness of visitor logs. :D It's only been a couple of people that found my site looking for the now defunct blog, but I expect more, and flames. Oh god, the flames...they cook food nicely. ^_^.

Don't think I care that the place is gone. They deserved to get caught. If Blogger gets the blame for others using their blogging network for illegal purposes, it could spell bad times for everyone who's a member of Blogger. I like being a Blogger member; I don't know if you guys do or not. I invested too much time here.

Seriously why make such a blog public? WTF were you thinking??? You don't make something of that magnitude public on a network where thousands of people can find it. Why don't you try to use your brain for something useful, like finding good music that is so SCARCE, not even Amazon.com would have it. Providing hip hop music that I can buy on Yahoo! Music with little difficulty, not to mention cheaper than most retail, makes you, HHB admin, a waste of good PR.

Alright, no more ranting.

So I found Orb months ago, an application that not only lets you share media with computers in your own home/office network, you can share with people all over the internet. You can stream music, video, and your live TV shows. Very cool. Despite the new leash on internet radio, Orb isn't going anywhere. You want to broadcast your music? Make it happen with Orb. That's what I'm going to do here, so please, don't be alarmed when you hear the music.

I picked an album that my boyfriend shared with me, After Dark: Chicago. He only shared to first disc of the entire album, but it's enough to make a smooth-flowing playlist in here. I'm using Orb to share the playlist, because it's one of the easiest ways to share the music but give visitors control over what songs they here from it. The media player is in the right sidebar. I swear, this is the last layout update I'm doing tonight. ^_^;;

Add my news feed to your reader!

I've tweaked the blog a bit. First of all, the RSS and ATOM feeds can now be accessed on the right side bar under the web site's menu. The same goes with the rest of the neat little buttons; I've now added "add my feed" buttons for all of those who like to use their My Yahoo!, Google Reader, and My MSN pages to view news feeds. There is also one for those who're myLot members. Don't worry if you're not a member of myLot; you can join the community with that button as well.

Also to the right is a form for email subscriptions. Several days back, I was trying to figure out the best way to go about making a mailing list without creating any account in some place I'll end up ignoring/forgetting about. Trust me, I feel like I have too many accounts with too many places already.

Fortunately with Google Groups, I created a group so that people can sign up there and receive my blog posts in their email. There will be no discussion on my group for now. I really just want to use the group strictly as a newsletter. That way people who are more comfortable with email announcements can have their cake.

Resume now online

I replaced the PDFolio link with a link to my updated resume. I also updated the Sketch and Design galleries yesterday night. There are two inked illustrations in the Sketch section and two new [to you] designs in the Design section. I will be adding descriptions to the new entries in the galleries shortly.

I also updated the Links page yesterday night too, and this evening. There are only a few links to the sites I view the most.

I also added more ads to the site. I'm broke, can you blame me? :P I might be coming around to the expiration of my web hosting plan, so any visits to the advertised sites would be appreciated. The lot of them are geared toward my own interests, so no, no pyramid schemes, no links to phishing sites, none of that deceptive crap.

If there is one promotion I'd like to steer you all towards, it's SlashMySearch.com. With this search engine, you get paid to search. Yes, people actually get paid to use their search engine, and users make more money when they refer people to SlashMySearch.com. The reason for this is that SMS pays its users to refer people, thus letting SMS avoid paying out big bucks for advertisement and and outside affiliate programs elsewhere. SMS is partnered with Snap.com, which is a wonderful search engine. With Snap.com, you can preview snapshots of sites before going to them. That way you can avoid unnecessary search results. SlashMySearch.com is in beta right now, but the services offered are pretty good. If you don't mind making a bit of money essentially doing nothing, it wouldn't hurt you to spend a minute signing up there. :)

Chaos? In my poster?

So I goofed up doing my poster, which is supposed to be influenced by the Postmodern graphic style. As far as the postmodernism goes, the design went south.Don't get me wrong, I think my poster is cool. But not only does it not have the strong characteristics of postmodernism, it doesn't fit the game it's mock-advertising well. The game is "Meteos". The poster is retro-looking. Meteos is contemporary and cute. Not necessarily a good combination, but I gave it a try. What is graphic design without a little trial and error? :P

Anyway, the poster needs to be done over. Not all the way over, but some significant changes are in the new poster. The old poster is uploaded to the Gallery nonetheless. It's still good design, and I'm pleased with it. I think it'll even make a nice pop art t-shirt. Not the bottom half with the text and screen shots, just the top half. Any feedback on whether I make it a t-shirt or not will be greatly appreciated! It would be nice to wear something that I designed myself.

I also uploaded an old design I did for an assignment given back in 2004. Someone must have saw my design and decided to take it a step further, putting great detail in the coffee mug and adding books. Whoever the show-off is, I'm still jealous. T_T

Gallerie Update

I updated the Color Gallery 2 days ago, but didn't have the time to post about it. I added two paintings, both from my last semesters Painting 1 class. They're both the last paintings I've ever done for that class and some of the best paintings I've ever done. If anyone thinks I can make some nice quality prints with any of the paintings I have listed, please don't hesistate to give your opinion.

I'm not looking to do any high quality prints like professional painters, just a solution that will look great on anyone's wall. I was thinking CafePress. The company provides good printing services and can provide me a way to make a bit of money while I look for work in my field, which is illustration. Also, I'm looking for an inexpensive way for me to take photos/transparencies of work.

Speaking of photography, I updated the Photography Gallery too. Just one photo this time. I believe it's the best and simplest black and white photo I've ever done. It was a class exercise in foreground and background. I Thought it made an interesting enough piece to add to my photography portfolio at the time; the composition works really well. I think I'll call it "Frenching the Fountain". :P

Added Gallery: Design

Read title. I've added a design gallery for the sake of all of the design work I have. They don't fit into the other categories for obvious reasons, so it was time for a gallery for the stuff that's supposed to increase my chances at getting a job. :P I haven't cleaned out my color gallery like I said I would; there's a lot of crap in there.

I added the Design gallery yesterday, but didn't get to finish completely integrating it into the rest of the site (See the Multimedia message I left earlier this morning). It was easy to add, and integrating it is a cinch. If anyone wants to use the L.E.A.P. Gallery that I use (though there are better scripts out there), please contact me. I would never charge for something so simple for people to use. I may go ahead and put it up for download one of these days. I just have to clean up and update some of the commenting inside of the scripts.

Yup! It looks like the site is coming along nicely. I've been thinking of re-designing the site again. It's cute, but it's just not the edgy design I want for my site. I like using red and black along with some gray, and I want to avoid colors that can be too bold. We'll just have to see. Maybe this time around I'll have a site menu with rollovers. I haven't done anything like that since my old site's flash-based menu.

All good things must come to an end...at least for something better to come along.

Today I left my job at Dierbergs. The pay sucked, but the coworkers were kind and usually entertaining to interact with. Can't forget the jerk customers that came through. I wouldn't have toughened up without them.

I want to get the hell out this house as soon as possible. I'm 23, and I don't have my dream job yet. I'm working on it, and getting my foot through the door seems possible now, but I just wish I had my job just a little bit longer. Even though my mom's doing extremely well for a real estate agent (rookie agent), she doesn't make enough to even match what I was getting at Dierbergs. When I used to baby sit, I'd make $100/month to do it. I can't live off of that! My mom said that she would send people my way who need web sites done for them. That hasn't happened yet. I'm not letting her trap me here. I love her, but I want my own life and way of doing things.

Ok, rant over. So like I said above before going all emo - I've been working on the site again. The Contact page has been updated; I added a contact form for those who may just be lazy enough to not want to open Outlook/Eudora/Thunderbird or open another browser window to access their webmail accounts. It's faster. It's convenient. And hopefully it won't get detected by spam bots. I wish the form mailer script came with a captcha filter added in. Good news is that it catches more than 90% of the spambots out there. Bad news is that spamming companies now hire people to pass captcha filters. Good thing I'm not so popular. :P Whilst watching my sister's children tomorrow, the new job hunt begins, and this time I'm looking for a job in my field. I will update my resume and post it here, at my college's Experience database, and other various job sites across the web. Cross your fingers for me, everybody! :D

The next 10 weeks are going to be hell.

Not only do I have to have a 10-minute Power Point presentation of the Postmodern Graphic Style complete with 500+ word essay done by sometime during the last 2 weeks of the semester, I have to create a somewhat costly portfolio setup after Spring Break, complete with Business cards, envelopes, first sheet, second sheet, and tear sheet. I have only begun digging through all of my work in order to pull together a portfolio with at least 12-15 pieces. I say 12 to 15 because I have no idea how many pieces are needed for the companies I will be applying at. Since illustration itself was a small part of my degree (even though it focuses on illustration), I don't have as many pieces as I want. I may have to come up with some stuff to add to my portfolio for its first incarnation.

Meanwhile at my part-time job at Dierbergs, I've been getting less hours. On average, I used to get 20 hours. Now we have more people, so the hours have to be scheduled amongst more people, which means less hours for everyone. Some people already work another job besides working at Dierbergs. There was a graphic designer position open at Dierbergs, and I would have a better chance at getting the job because they like to hire from within the company. However, I don't have much to show at the moment, so I think I missed that boat.

One poster I did a few years back was nice, and I wish I could find the file. It's most likely on the backup discs I created when I wiped out my old computer. It was a good example of graphic design using raster and vector in Photoshop CS, and it kills me that I don't have a hard copy of the poster. My teacher does so hopefully she kept the file of the project too in case I can't find mine.

Well, regardless of the status of my portfolio, I do have samples of work already available on my website and more to add, so I can just direct employers to my website. Or I can re-do my PDF portfolio and email that to them instead of just my resume. That would be good at this point.

OR!!! I can go ahead and make this announcement. In case you haven't noticed, The Service page of my site has been updated to reflect my project availability status. Please read it for details. If you're interested, please contact me ASAP so I can get back to you as soon as possible. I'd like to get more experience, and I need the money. ^^;;

Gallery Update for Jan. 16

Updated the Color Gallery with another one of my class projects. This one is a food illustration for my Illustration 2 class. Not the best scan; it was done with my mother's digital camera. The camera is great, but the lighting in my room is poor and using a flash on a painting isn't a very good idea. I corrected as much as possible for the time being. I have to be on my way to my first class of the week soon. It's not a long class, so I have plenty of time to work or do other things. I'll see what I can do to make the latest color image more pleasing to the eye. ^^;

I'm still pimping AllRightCounter. If you're put off by places like OKCounter, Bravenet, Statcounter, then ARC is a good alternative. Even though it's still in beta, the fact that it's already customizable enough to completely blend in with your website makes it worth using. So if you don't have one yet, please consider ARC for your web site's visitor counter.

First painting uploaded!

Yeah, like the title says. A color oil painting has been uploaded into the Color Gallery. It's actually my fourth assignment in my Painting 1 class. My teacher really liked it, and said that in his opinion it was the best painting for the assignment out of all the students. I find that flattering, because there were 3 classes bunched into one time-slot: Painting 1, 2, and Advanced Painting. If he thinks I did better on that than the more advanced students, then that's awesome. He didn't want to put it up for exhibition during the mid terms though. Out of all the the work shown, it would've been the strongest piece. So he took my next best one. -_-; I think the lot of my paintings are nice; I'll be uploading more as soon as I can take pictures of them.

Another year completed! Whoohoo!

Happy new year, everyone! I couldn't get out, because my car's still messed up. Even though there was work done on it today, the mechanic told me my car has a bad valve. Go figure. My throat's been sore since this morning, but I feel a little better. I guess I should be glad I didn't go out; too many sick fuckers (with colds and flu, that is), and it's supposed to rain in the area tonight. Not to mention the shooting. Oh god, better duck.

I got some more work done on the gallery. No new entries, but I updated the image viewer script.  Now there are fields where the name, date, medium, and description of the art submitted will be. I changed the way it reads the flat files, so that I can use the likes of Microsoft Works Database to do the dirty work of formatting the entries for me. I haven't played with Perl in a long time. I'm still somewhat newb at it, but I'm proud of what I can do. I learned to implement some new stuff this evening, and frankly, it's gotten me a lot closer to my future plans of creating admin controls such as image upload and description adding/editing. I need to go ahead and invest in a more in-depth book on Perl, like O'Reilly's. That'll have to wait until most of my major money woes are taken care of.

I think those idiots have started shooting already. I'm going to go spend my new year's day like I did when it was 1999-2000: taking a hot shower and washing my hair to Prince's "1999" on the radio. Peace out, and may your resolutions be something that can actually be obtainable this year. ^__^

On a roll

I updated my website a little bit more today. I formatted the comments template to better blend with the site, and it no longer shows comments in a pop-up window. However, I had to sacrifice showing more than 1 blog entry on the main page just in case of multiple comments. I've finally uploaded my PDF portfolio and linked it in the side bar over there --->. In time, I guess that will also be updated along with my gallery.

I thought about adding a BBS to my site, just a simple one. The loss of traffic since my last hiatus justfies me not installing one. I think the comment system works well enough. If that doesn't work (or is just too damn unattractive), I'll go back to the comment CGI script I was using before. But no BBS or forum system for now. I don't even need a guestbook at this point. :P

I do plan on adding a Photography directory to the Gallery soon. Any photoscans of my paintings can go under "Color" for now. Most of the junk/incompleted art I have in the Gallery will be moved to another directory that will be accessible to all; looking at all of the work that's not completed or even my best is starting to make me cringe. I'll probably watermark the stuff that's my own original work regardless of it being junk. I still think that the majority of my work is too bad to justify theft and infringment, but even so, stay away, posers! I'm a student for Perl's sake; let me have my bread and butter.

And the site progresses. ^.^

I finally added my personal logo to my site. It's the logo I'll be using for all my professional and personal work. I can't wait to see it on a business card that I can stick onto my portfolio. XD I also changed the background a bit. Fun Mecha, my site's past mascot, is back, but not as her cute animated self. Even though it's clean, the background was just so empty. She doesn't seem to crowd the page, which is good, because I don't want it to be too busy.

I've been trying to dig up my old Photography 1 photos. There's this photo I did of a water fountain that looked really good. It's my best black and white photo, and I think it's a must for my portfolio. If only I can remember what I did with the binder my old negatives are in. T___T

I also plan on updating the galleries again soon. I'm going to re-sort all of my images into a more organized gallery. Traditional art, Colored Digital Art, Oekaki (Despite being digital, I think the oekaki stuff should be separate always.), Sketch, and finally a Photography gallery will be uploaded. I want to get my hands on my painting work done in class, but they're still on display in the hallways. If I don't receive them by next week, then hopefully I will remember to get them during finals. I'm still tweaking the site as I write this, so stay tuned. :)

Updated the gallery a little

It matches the site now, with a couple of new images in the Sketch gallery. They're drawings I did in my Drawing For Graphics 2 class last spring semester. They're not complete, but I like them, because I've gotten as close to the model as I could without killing them in detail. It was only an exercise in hair rendering. o.o;;

Bringing back the blogger!

Redesigned my website, which may be temporary still. This is just a test to see if the page works well within the frame, and notifying all that I'm not dead. Just lazy, like other people who make the same statement.

A bit of tweaking...

I updated the flash-based menu to the left; I added the Paint BBS link like I said. I will be adding a link to my new journal some time in the near future until then, you all can access it here: Yet another Journal. I will be working on more shortly; I just need to get somethings in order before then. I have a more interesting journal elsewhere. Look it up; if you know some of the cooler places for gamers to hang out at on the web, then the search should not be too hard. ;P

The Ol' HTML Site Is Back (For Now....)

Yup, I got tired of the perl-based portal site. For one, I don't get enough visitors for it; two, it started getting problems, like with the memberlist page. Even if I switch back to a webportal-based site, it probably won't be WebApp. Perl is just too much of a beast, because of Window's and *nix's (Unix or Linux) different ways of programming and compiling Perl scripts. WebApp is programmed to work on *nix environments, and was never supported for the newby Windows servers. Hacking it to work decently on my host's Windows server was relatively easy, but there are still problems that I don't feel like tolerating anymore... Not to say that I don't support WebApp anymore, it's a wonderful portal script; anyone's that interested in using it should by all means go download it at http://www.web-app.org .

The only Perl scripts that will run on my site from now on are my old Cute Cast forum, my Paint BBS and my self-written image gallery script. I will probably get a FFAL script to handle links that visitors will add themselves, and a downloads script to handle future files I want to share with the public. Everything else will have to be updated by hand. I really shouldn't mind, because I need to stay keen on HTML and other various scripting langauges.

Besides moving back to the old site format, there are no real updates. I will have to update the site's main menu, which is made with Flash technology, to add links to the Paint BBS, contacts page, downloads page, and radio station (on hiatus). Other than that, I don't know when I will be able to do a real update. Right now, I'm supposed to be working on my last paper of the semester. >__>;;

Blog switch: Back to Blogger!

I'm switching back to Blogger, because I don't feel like programming a commenting system for the blog that's installed in my portal site. I'll just have to include the cute emoticons some other way; I really would like a commenting system so I can get feedback on my entries. That's all. Hopefully, the transition will work as smoothly as planned. :/

More art!

Yippy! A big fat update for the Sketch Gallery. It consists of some of my best work done in Spring '02 and Fall '03. Warning for the 'kiddies': I have three pics with nudity. Nothing sexual, so don't worry about getting a nosebleed or telling on me to your parents. :P Sorry they're a bit dark; I was "scanning" them with my digital camera. ^__^;;

Lexi's Lounge: Blogger Beginnings

Testing new update system. Using Blogger now. :)

Yeah, it's been a long time since I did any updates (besides the usual gallery post, but even that seems to be a while ago). Well, just wanted everyone to know that one, I haven't stopped comming to my site (in other words, I'm not dead), and two, I haven't forgotten about that flash cartoon I promised. I do have a bit of it online already, so I'll post a link as soon as I can remember what I did with it, lol.