If you haven’t heard, Nexon Mobile yesterday released a single-player iOS port of Maple Story – today a rather nice tipster has informed me that about half of the audio files inside of this port actually come directly from my Maple Story Soundtrack, noticeable by examining the track tags from the MP3 files contained in the app’s bundle. I’m both flattered and surprised that the developers chose to use the MP3 files available here for their project.

Kudos to Nexon for releasing an iOS Maple Story – I hope it does well for them! I haven’t played Maple Story in years myself, but I’m sure lots of people are out there now enjoying the iOS game with my rips in it. ;)

Although I usually think of myself as a decent photographer, Something inevitably happens that makes me think I don’t know as much as I think I do. That, recently, has been a side gig I picked up at local jeweler Diamond Dream.

I think I can safely say that jewelry photography has changed the way I think about photography. Everything must be precise, and there are no artsy beauty shots. You show the jewelry. That’s it. That’s a far cry from the food photography I did for Soup Shoppe last summer – food seemed to be what I was made for. Every shot was an opportunity to capture to beauty in food. With jewelry, I’ve come to appreciate that someone already worked hard to make the most beautiful ornaments they could imagine; I’m just there to take a picture of it.

Edward Shapiro, the owner of Diamond Dream, has been giving me tips on how to properly photograph jewelry. When I started, he essentially handed me a light box, an LED light, some props and a tray of jewelry, then told me to get to work. Unfamiliar with the props, I asked him to explain it to me – why the heck did I need wax? What were all these plastic pieces for?

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Whew, now I can focus on things that matter. Like getting that search bar in a better place.

Thanks to everyone who put up with my defeating the purpose of having a web design portfolio by letting it get full of bugs. If you see something icky on the site (unintentionally icky, anyway), let me know in the comments! I’m in full spring cleaning mode.

Whoa! Bet you never thought you’d be seeing this. After a few months of deadness, I’ve come back and updated my portfolio to include a bunch of my artwork from my AP days. I also come bearing the news that I’ll be switching majors at Lehigh come fall semester – I’m moving out of Integrated Business and Engineering, and into what I consider more true to my passions – Product Design (aka Industrial Design). There I’ll finally get the hands-on experience I want to have to build and create products in the future.

To celebrate my monumental decision to change majors (I nearly transferred schools!), I’m going to give this place a good sprucing up. There’s some code that doesn’t work, and the placement of the search bar has driven me mad for a while. And just look at the footer! A travesty. Well, I’ll fix that – and then some.

My updated portfolio contains selections (the good ones, anyway) from my AP portfolio. You can check it out under the “Artwork” section of the Portfolio tab on this site or click here!

Happy birthday, Dad. I miss you. I hope you’re enjoying your 54th… wherever you are.

A good friend of mine shared this article with me today. It was so shockingly accurate, I felt that it was my duty to share it with all of you. It’s just a little bit of insight into the world of web designers dealing with some very special clients. ;)

Here you go!

As you can probably tell from the rather poorly made banner above (sorry, I had an all-nighter last night), the tentative title of my next novel is The Collapse. I’ve decided to handle NaNoWriMo 2009 much differently than I’ve handled NaNo in the past. This is the first time I will be returning to a world I’ve already created in order to write a story. If you’ve read my NaNo 2008 novel, The Typist, then the cover above should easily explain itself and lend to what this novel is going to be about. But why am I doing this?

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I’ve finally done it. No, I haven’t extracted new tracks – I don’t play the game anymore and have NO way of identifying what songs are where, and now that I’m on a Mac have no way of extracting the tracks. However, I have sorted a HUGE chunk of the existing unknown tracks into their appropriate albums. Finally.

Most likely there will not be another soundtrack update. Seriously, I never touch the game anymore. I’ll always provide it here, though, and hopefully Wizet will never release enough new music to make the soundtrack feel awfully obsolete.

If I get enough petitions and emails and such to extract tracks and seriously update the soundtrack, I’ll do it. Otherwise, I’ve got too much other work to do to continue working on this project. You can find the updated soundtrack by visiting the Projects Page on this site. For a full list of changes made to the soundtrack, please keep reading!

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I’ve been working to fix a lot of the errors on the site to make it cross-browser compatible, and there are still a few quirks. However, the page now loads properly in IE8 (but without any of the rounded corners on the content area and navigation buttons). Javascript is also slow in IE8 – but that’s IE8′s problem. It can’t help being itself. I highly recommend using either a webkit-based browser like Safari or, even better, the new Firefox 3.5 RC2. If you use that, you’ll even see drop shadows on certain objects across the site!

In addition, I’ve added the projects page, which has been missing since I revamped the place. It’s still a draft, but it will provide you with access to things like the Maple Story soundtrack and Golden Sun soundtrack. So, if you’ve been trying to get to those, you can now get to them a bit more easily.

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Welcome to my new portfolio of design – The Jason Effect. Previously (as of five minutes prior to this post) it was simply a blog that I posted my day-to-day thoughts on. While it is certainly that still, I’ve revamped the entire site to bring focus towards a more professional portfolio. The site you see is the result of days of hard work creating and deploying a brand new website – something I hope to do quite a bit, since I’m looking for freelance work! (Yes, potential client, that plug was just for you.)

So please enjoy my new portfolio – although a bunch has yet to be set up, expect everything to be 100% complete in the coming days. I’ve already put up my most recent work, so take a look at that in the meantime. And if you’re a previous visitor wondering what the heck just happened to this site, read on for a full list of all the changes made to the locations of, well, everything!

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