Metallica on Weeklong for Craig Ferguson's Last Stand

These days, I don’t care about Metallica or The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson and the host's departure (well maybe I do a little). Back when I worked nights, I used to watch all late night talk shows. Nowadays I am in bed before the 11 o’clock news so I don’t watch The Late Show, The Tonight Show, much less The Late Late Show.

Come to think of it... I don't watch much TV in my spare time, seeing that I work in television I guess I am sick of it by the end of the day. However, when I read in The Hollywood Reporter that Metallica will be doing a weeklong stint to help send Craig Ferguson off, I quickly imagined what songs they would play for each of the five nights.

To start off with, I thought it would be badass if Metallica set the mood with the downright heavy as hell, “One.” Shit it’s a Monday night, we’re in the mood for something dark with a touch of speed metal.

 

"One" is a bit of a throwback so Tuesday night Metallica should play something the tweens in the audience are aware of. Maybe “Fuel” will do the trick. Plus “Fuel” is a slamming mosh pit track and who doesn’t like that?

Wednesday Night, I would go with “King Nothing.” The blood and cum CD cover for Load, from which “King Nothing” was released is fitting for the Humpday theme.

Thursday is the descent into the weekend and Craig Ferguson's last few episodes as host of the Late Late Show. For this night we go baaaaaccckkk. Way back. To say ….And Justice for All. “Harvester of Sarrow” fits in nice here and is under-appreciated in the Metallica catalog.

For the Friday, the final night of the weeklong Metallica stint, it’s a toss-up. A choice the band should make 5 minutes before they go on stage. But my toss-up vote would go to “And Nothing Else Matters” or “Unforgiven.”

Again it’s a toss-up. What tracks would you choose? We’ll see what the band actually plays, starting November 17th late night on CBS.

Another Update to My Website

Homepage with slideshow, crumpled-ripped paper.

Super Busy! Despite all that I have going on, I managed to update my website yet again. After the last update, I was not content with the homepage, footer, about page, and wanted a slideshow. So I did those things, go check it out: http://gabrielohhmedia.com/.

The homepage needed to show off my graphic art skills and I thought it would be really cool to have some crumpled/torn up paper with text on it. First, I tried making a graphic with regular HTML paragraphs superimposed on the graphic. I hard a hard time with that so I included the text on the graphic itself. I made the crumpled up torn paper in The GIMP. Love The GIMP! I used a tutorial you can find here.

In addition, the homepage needed a slideshow, because nowadays, every homepage has a slideshow. To accomplish this, I borrowed a bit of JavaScript from a class I had last May. I just replaced the pictures and tweaked some of the timing. Worked out great. I did find that the images where taking a long time to load so I had to resize the pictures in The GIMP. Again, love GIMP!

I felt that the footer was really boring. I see footers on websites that are cooler than the content of the main article. So I wanted to spruce up my footer. Fresh out of ideas I figured I could use my header graphic, which is just a picture of me, Warholized. I flipped in the image and added some gradient. Nice.

Unintentionally, I changed the font. I wanted a different font for the crumpled up paper on the homepage. Like typewriter style. As I mentioned earlier, I wanted to superimpose my HTML text over the graphic, so I changed the article fonts to monospace. This changed the font to monospace on every page so I decided to stick with it. Plus monospace is available on every computer, making it easy on the download.

The about page, the page that explains me, is still needing some work. Maybe another picture of me somewhere. I added a gradient to the article content so as you read down to the bottom, the colors get darker. Well work on that later.

Updated Website

The New Web Page Showing My Web Work

Took some time today to update my website. I added a page to show off my web development and design work. Go take a look, then hire me :)

My plans for later include re-coding the graphics galleries in the graphics page, but I think I am OK with how it looks for now. By re-coding, I mean incorporating a picture gallery from jQuery. Something that can replace some of the CSS3 visibility and hovers that I am using.

Luckily, the most recent Firefox update seemed to fix some of the CSS3-related errors I was seeing in that browser only. The errors I was experiencing were coming from the visibility property and hover selector used in the stylesheet. The errors where making some of the images huge and popup off screen when the user hovered over the image. Again, this occurred in Firefox only. Now everything seems fine. However, I will have to try the graphics page in other browsers later.

Construction Update, Columbus Day, The Sopranos, and 9/11

Light at the end of the tunnel. Actually the rough opening to a gable vent in my new office/garage.

So I have been taking a break from the web development and graphic design game as well as GabrielOhhMedia.com while I continue my office construction project. August was  a very busy month! As you can see, I did not post anything on Blogger this past August. The good news is I am starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

My goal is to have construction complete by October 13th, 2014 or Columbus Day. Speaking of, Columbus Day reminds me of one of my favorite episodes of The Sopranos, Christopher. This has to be among the most clumsy episodes out of The Soprano's six seasons. Check out a clip:


Here the crew is sitting in front of Satriale's when Bacala states, "Listen to this shit...", and begins reading a story out loud from the newspaper about a group of Native Americans planning to protest during the Columbus Day parade. Silvio proclaims, "it's Anti-Italian-American discrimination!" Which I thought was funny. In reference to the freshness of 9/11, Patsy Parisi exclaims, "Some fucking balls, bad-mouthing America, especially now." Takes you back to when 9/11 was still an open wound in American consciousness, especially on this day of the post. I think everyone was taking into question their own American-ness at the time and not willing to accept any kind of criticism.

Anyways, should everything go well I should be done with construction by Columbus Day. After that, maybe I can take some time to watch this episode somewhere in deeper reflection.

Using Inkscape to draw floor plans

When designing a space or trying to get a top view of a room or building, there are many ways to draw a floorplan. The easiest method is to simply draw the layout on paper. However, if you want to share the floor plan with someone else such as a contractor, prospective tenant, or property owner, you need to make a legible digital floor plan. Being fond of the open source way of life, Inkscape is an excellent tool to use for drawing a floor plan. If you are unfamiliar with Inkscape, it can take some time getting used to. However, within a few hours, any novice can have an intermediate grasp of it.

Recently I have begun a repair/remodel of a garage that I am turning into an office. See my previous blog post about the progress on the office. In preparation for the electrical work, I drew up a floor plan in Inkscape showing where I want the outlets and lights. This will help when I create the circuits because most of my measurements are already drawn out to scale. To draw to scale in Inkscape, you can change the units to feet. (or inches, meters, millimeters, centimeters, pixels) by selecting File, Document Properties.

Example of my office electrical plan. The blue lines are guide markers.

Should you need to print your drawing, you need to scale the drawing down to the size of the paper you plan to print to. First, select the area you would like to print using the Select and Transform Objects (or the mouse arrow on the left side in Inkscape's main interface). Then select File, Export Bitmap.

Change the export area to Selection. In Inkscape's main interface (the place where you draw), change the units to px (pixels). In an 8x11 piece of paper, at 300 ppi, there are 2400x3300 pixels. So after you make the selection to print, select the lock that is in the main toolbar (to lock the aspect ratio), and make your selection less than or equal to 2400x3300 pixels. Then select Export in Export Bitmap. After the export, the Export Bitmap window stays open. You can close this. Check your directory where you exported the image. Open it and print.

Work on the new office space continues

after

before

Work on my new office space is continuing. Take a look at the before and after shots showing some of the progress.  These shots are from the same general angle. We removed the garage door and put up a wall, using much of the same style cedar shiplap siding that was originally on the exterior walls.

We removed the ladder that went to the small attic space, removed some rotted wood at the bottom plate, replaced some rotted studs, and added pressure-treated lumber where the bottom plate meets the masonry. I also removed the traditional frame and sill from the windows. We have not bought the windows yet but I hope to begin working on the windows next week.

The project began back in early May. As you can see from the photo of the trailer full of junk, I had to clear out over 2 tons of garbage and random junk before I could even begin work. Originally, I had a "handyman" who had agreed to do most of the work. The only thing he was good for was hauling the garbage out, and for that, I am thankful. However, he bailed out on the job at the last minute so my brother and I have decided to handle this small repair/remodel job ourselves. Word to the wise, never get into business with an "handyman" masquerading as a contractor.

garage after wet scrape

This space is actually the garage behind my Mom's home. It has alleyway access and faces the Union Pacific railroad tracks that lead to a busy rail yard and roundhouse in Roseville, CA. Currently, I actually live by the roundhouse, a loud facility pumping out pullutants that I will not miss living down the street from. I plan on staying here awhile and working out of the new office until things shape up with my career.

I am happy that things are starting to come along now. After a major lead paint removal hurdle, I hope that most difficult tasks with the repair/remodel are behind us. Wet scraping lead paint, cleaning up the paint scrapings and chips, wearing full-body suits with respirators in Sacramento Valley 100 degree heat is not fun at all.

Hoping to get back into doing more web development work and taking more classes on web design and development for applications soon after this project is finished. Hopefully, if everything goes as scheduled, I should be done with this project by mid-August. Until then, stay cool.

New Website Published

Examples of free art from Pixabay.com used on my site

Finally found the time to put the finishing touches on the code for To Katch A Kitty.com. It's a website about trap, neuter, release for feral cats. My goal with the site was to make it as informative, easy to read, and engaging as I could. Most of my research came from the many well established feral cat and animal welfare organizations out there such as Alley Cat Allies, Neighborhood Cats, and the Humane Society of the United States. Other bits of information came courtesy of my local animal shelter, the Placer SPCA.

Other resources for elements such as graphics and pictures were used thanks to the various Creative Commons licensed material available on Flickr, Wikimedia Commons, and Pixabay. Although most of the site's content was produced by myself, I could not have rounded up all of the the elements needed without these free-licensed materials.

Mouseover the tabby to see what message he has for you.

The website employs some of the latest CSS3 :hover techniques that I have learned recently. I used the CSS transform and transition properties on several photos to not only engage the user but to provide attribution to photos used that were not my own.

For the overall design, I wanted the main article to appear as a sheet of transparent glass hovering over the background and I think I achieved that. The images in the background are sized in percents so they change size depending on the device screen width. I used the CSS background-attachment property to fix the images to the background so that they do not move. Also, I created two additional stylesheets for screen widths smaller than 900px and 700px. I found that at smaller screen widths, the cat face graphics get in the way of the background so I removed them at smaller widths. There is also a stylesheet for the printed page that removes certain elements that are not necessary to print.

There is a bit of JavaScript on the page. I used JavaScript to help iOS devices with the CSS :hover. I also used JavaScript to include a site search bar in the footer and add some sound effects.

Overall, I am glad the website is up. It has been about a two-three month project. The site could have been up sooner but I have had some personal issues arise that has made it difficult to find time to work on my projects.