I went on a awesome hike with Larisssa’s Great Uncle Roy Austin, Vivian his lady friend, and Larissa’s cousin Evan Pickering. The hike followed the Fall Creek located near Santa Cruz map. The redwoods were amazing as usual, and seeing how limestone was processed in the giant “earth kilns” to help rebuild San Francisco after the big quake in 1906 was quite awesome. Check out the gallery for all the pics
Last weekend Larissa, and I were invited by our extended west-coast family the Wyckoffs to visit the Monterey Bay Aquarium. We saw all kinds of amazing sea life at this world renound aquarium. I’ll just let you see for yourself. Make sure to check out the photo gallery i uploaded here.
Don’t know if it’s just me, but i noticed something very peculiar about the new Honda hydrogen powered concept car. Now i know there are some major differences, but aside from some contours being upside-down, i think Lucas might send his team of attack lawyers to the far east 
You be the judge.
I’ve just updated my long-time artist friend Derek DeYoung’s website canvasfish.com. I’m a huge fan of his style, and greatly honored to work with him on his site. His style of painting has been attracting people from all over the world, and he desperately needed a stronger web-site to display his wonderful artistic gift to that growing audience. I’ve been tracking his sites analytic’s via Google for the last several years, and let me tell you, the visitors are unlike any I’ve seen before. He captures an average users attention for close to 10 minutes “insane”. The gallery of the site seems to keep people integrated for an astonishing duration. This of course opens lots of opportunities to market his merchandise to this captive audience. What i came up with, seems to be working already.
I went on an amazing hike today c.o. the Cupertino Seniors Hiking Group. The hike began with a short drive from the valley out to the Purisma Creek Redwood Open Space Preserve (map). Upon arriving i found a Skink warming itself on a rock by the park entrance. The trail was not very challenging, but experiencing the redwood’s up close with a camera was all the challenge i needed. With Larissa’s great uncle Roy leading the way, and pointing out all kinds of interesting facts about the surroundings I drank in a wealth of Californian knowledge. Apparently the redwoods we were seeing were 2nd generation trees. The trees grew in a a tight circle, which i learned was a ring around where the old growth trees that were forrested many years ago stood. Judging by the circles they grew in, the 1st generation trees must have been quite a lot larger. It’s a pity they were taken, but after the fires in San Francisco they needed wood from somewhere to rebuild.
Team Burger Bonanza rocked out @flashcamp. I had a lot of fun working on a quick project with Kevin, Winrich, and Ed over the weekend trying to cover all the new Flash Player 10 features while letting Adobe buy me 3 squares a day, and as much beer as i could drink.  The project used inverse kinematics (IK) controlled by a webcam feed that focused on a RGB value filetered green-screen style with a Pixel Blender filter to catch burger parts, and serve them to very good looking customers. I’ll post a link as soon as i get all the project files sorted out.. It was a intense weekend, but we made it through. Thanks again to Adobe for sponsoring!
link to presentation
Re-launched LarissaCleveland.com. The site uses my first custom wordpress theme, and the Gallery Project for her wedding photography portfolio’s image management. I created some custom flash galleries in Actionscript 3.0 (all OOP Programming), that pull the images from the gallery database via xml to keep everything easy for the client to maintain with CMS tools.
One of the most challenging tasks about creating this website, was the portfolio, and how it needs to be very intuitive, simple, and extremely functional. To solve this problem i researched tons of other photographers portfolio sites. Many of them have issues that are fairly obvious pertaining to navigation, heavy image loading, audio, thumbnails, etc. So I took what i found from these other sites, and attempted to create a flash portfolio that stay’s attractive, but retains it’s functionality while being subtle.
The main controller of the portfolio featured to the right has a back, audio, timer, and forward icon. These simple buttons are intuitive enough for normal users to understand them without touching them. The visibility of this controller is key to keeping the portfolio sexy. It only appears when a user rolls their mouse over the main image being displayed. After rolling off it disappears with a fade-out, and blurr. I love the Tweener Actionscript class! As you can see in the 2nd screen-shot when you roll-over the audio icon it displays credits for the song again keeping it subtle. The audio button has a simple on/off functionality, and being the thoughtful developer i am it only pauses the song instead of restarting the song altogether. (more…)
Re-launched Skylinediamond.com. Site now uses Wordpress as a CMS, and the Gallery Project for showcase image management. I was able to create some custom flash gallery image loaders that pull the images from the gallery database to keep everything easy for the client to maintain, while having a polished look.
One of my Corp-Comm sites went live last week. I designed the site, and it was built-out, and programmed by several developers i work with.
~ thehousingcouncil.org
Looking back on my trip to the BWCA i still can’t believe the size of the Bass i caught.. Monster BWCA Bass. btw.. we had to grow mustasche’s for the trip, and this is the end of a week without shaving.