DanHagen.com

In the realm of web coding and design, the line between amateur work and professionalism is extremely blurry… a line that’s blurry enough to trick you into thinking that you need glasses.

Corny metaphors aside: Think about it. I believe the real designers here are the ones who bust open their favorite text editor and graphics program in order to create an attractive and standards-compliant layout, completely from scratch. On the other hand, many people simply acquire their own copy of Dreamweaver and immediately dub themselves a web-developer.

So, with this in mind, I can honestly admit that I’m not a professional. On a scale from beginner to expert, I would consider myself an intermediate (at the most). Do you believe me? Luckily, my friend Kilroy referred me to a nice list of reasons why I might be a hardcore web/graphics designer. I considered it worthy enough to post right here on my own blog. In addition, my responses to each of the tips will be written in non-bold style. Why don’t you click past the break and take a looksee?

Continue reading ‘25 reasons you might be a hardcore web/graphic designer’ »

Many of you may know James Rolfe.

Not only is he the driving force behind Cinemassacre Productions, but he is undoubtedly recognized best for his character “The Angry Video Game Nerd”. I believe that name singlehandedly reminds his fans of his crude, profane, yet delightful video reviews of retro gaming titles. I could go on for a while about how much I enjoy his work, but that’s not exactly what I wanted to discuss (I suggest checking out the AVGN page… as long as you are not easily offended).

One of the things I really admire about Rolfe is his philosophy in film making. Upon entering his frequently-asked-questions page, you get a nice explanation on how he works:

What does Cinemassacre mean?

Cinemassacring refers to the efficient way in which my films are made, without a ton of equipment or pre-production meetings, ignoring all the extraneous things that happen behind the camera, when all that matters is what comes up on the screen in the end.

The Cinemassacre is the lifeforce and driving power behind my work; the pure insanity to make these wild films. When the obstacles are stacking up and it looks like there is no way to finish a project, I just go on a rampage and “cinemassacre” my way to the end.

To cinemassacre is to let loose with what you’re doing. In doubt? Just “cinemassacre” it, the same way a crazy artist would splatter paint all over his work and let the art gods take control.

The cinemassacre is me, my one-man production company which I started when I first got my hands on a video camera, in 1989, making over 130 short movies that “massacre” both Hollywood and Independent trends, but with one main purpose: to entertain.

Bingo. I can’t really say a lot, other than the fact that I am reminded of myself. If you really know me, then you know that I hate planning. I don’t want to write a lame graphic organizer or some kind of chart before I even start the real thing. It sucks, no?

In a way, it comes to me as good encouragement. Because of my strong interest in movie-making, and because I am in a multimedia class at school, there’s no better way than to get a new digital camcorder for my films - schoolwork or not. Unfortunately, because of my financial situation, I am limited as to what kind of equipment I can use in my free time. For now, I have settled on something that can be afforded as a Christmas or birthday present. The Panasonic Camcorder you see to the left seems to be a great balance between price and quality. Of course, if I were rich, I would buy one of those slick HD camcorders with gigabytes of built-in hard-drive storage, but that’s not going to be happening anytime soon. Again, the Panasonic model will suffice because of it’s image quality, compact recording medium, and firewire capability.

With all of this, lately I’ve had a tendency to get excited about a future of independent film making. Here’s to good times.

Now if only I had a higher-end PC…

Wow. Just wow.

How long have I been troubleshooting my website? I’ve been facing the debacle of trying to get my domain name fully functional ever since I moved to a new web host. When was that? Over a week ago. A week.

And yet, that whole wait wasn’t even necessary. My domain name has still not been transferred over to my new service - perhaps because the guys over at the 1&1 transfer department are difficult to cooperate with (I almost called them douchebags) - but fortunately, before I had canceled my old hosting account, I had set up a DNS with the domain name to work with my new service, and I simply just had to tinker with some of the settings with my new host to get things working. Once my domain expires, I will reregister it with NFSN.

…NFSN, that is, NearlyFreeSpeech.net. They are my new web hosting provider. There are multiple reasons why I switched, which I will sort into an easy-to-comprehend bulleted list:

• Customer service. 1and1.com really isn’t too bad of a host… but they aren’t too good either. While they settle with outsourced tech support in India, NearlyFreeSpeech actually really cares about their customers.
• Pricing. What really struck me about NFSN is the way the payment works. You only pay for what you use. It can be equated to a pay-as-you-go cell phone plan: You pay one cent per megabyte per month, one dollar per gigabyte of data transfer, etc. At this rate, I am only paying about one dollar a month for hosting. I need to be careful, though; obviously I don’t want to store gigabytes of data on my server for the sake of not paying a ton more money.
• SQL. 1&1’s MySQL service was pretty slow. Thanks to NFSN, my site loads a couple seconds faster. This may not seem like much, but since Wordpress relies on SQL for dynamically generating pages then it can really mean a lot.

I think that’s all I’m really going to say for now. There are plenty of other things I could write about, but at the moment I’m just sick and tired of being sick and tired.

I’ll conclude by recommending NearlyFreeSpeech.net as a great web host. There’s just two things I want to emphasize if you’re considering using it: If you’re a newbie to web administration, or if you plan on using it for storing large files, then I suggest you go somewhere else.

My new TI-84 Plus graphing calculator:

And now, for the first time, here is actual footage of myself beating up the old TV in my basement. This is not an act. As you can see, I utilize a lengthy two-by-four in order to efficiently correct the on-screen picture.

Here it is, guys. I’m finally going to post an update and give a word on my first couple days of high school.

My thoughts? It’s great… as far as I know. See, everything is still setting into my mind. But, as of now, I’m really enjoying it. I’m enjoying the people. The environment. The schedule. Classes too, more or less. One of my main goals is to make the next few years not awkward, and I think it’s working out well. Again, it’s only been the first couple of days, so I can’t say a whole lot. So far, so good.

I have multiple other topics to write about in the near future, but for now I will leave you with another video. Now, I promise you: I’ve been trying as hard as I can to not turn this into a video blog. Unfortunately, there is so much great stuff out there that I must share it with you. In this case, today I found a music video featured on YouTube that I happen to like (it’s amazing how the internet can introduce you to so many different genres of musical stylings).

Enjoy.

In this little tutorial, I will show you an example of how stupidly complicated it is to find a song I like. In all seriousness, my tastes in music are fairly obscure - I’ve probably already told you this - so it makes it that much harder to get my hands on the tracks I want. At most, I can buy a pricy album from Amazon. Or, I can download the song from some other online store that I’ve never heard of. Great.

Ready for this? Ok. Here is how I go about finding my music.

1. Go onto di.fm and find a radio station of the genre I like.
2. Listen and wait for a particular song that I might want.
3. If something especially awesome comes up, I look at my media player to see the title of the song.
4. Dang! It doesn’t actually show the name. The song is really just part of a bigger mix.
5. Go onto Google and search for the mix with the song in it.
6. Well, eventually I find out where I can download it on the internet. (But I just want the one song!)
7. This stupid thing doesn’t even have a track listing. I have a seventy-minute MP3 file of songs and I don’t know the titles of any of them.
8. Perhaps this thread has what I’m looking for?
9. Yes, it does. It has a track listing. The song I really want is “Mirage of Hope” by Hemstock & Jennings.
10. Huh? I can’t even find a friggin’ official website for this artist…
11. …however, I am able to get some results on Amazon. I would probably want this album.
12. “Import”? Twenty-seven bucks?! F#@%!
13. For the record, I don’t even have a credit card or anything like that. (And to think that the album only comes from a different country.)
14. The file-sharing networks don’t have it. I wonder why I’m not surprised.
15. I’m not even going to try to find a torrent.

That’s all it takes, folks. My life is so hard.