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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I’ve decided to undertake redesigning this joint to make it more focused on what I usually do in my spare time – writing, artwork, graphic design, and music. This will be a major redesign and I’ve been coming up with several drafts. The two I like most are currently competing with one another for my favor, in a ring of death no less. They’re quite dramatic, draft layouts…

This first design is quite similar in structure to what I have now, and doesn’t make any radical design changes. It does, however, go for a more detailed and realistic look. This design in particular is based heavily off of The Typist, my latest novel currently in its editing phase. At the moment, I’m debating whether or not to nix the sidebar menu and put it all on the bottom. I may even go with more radical interface changes, such as making the blog display only one post at a time, and then titles of earlier posts next to it. We’ll see what happens as my designs evolve.

This draft is meant to follow a more simple, vector-inspired style, not unlike Vimeo’s intro page. Originally it started out as a reworking of the layout of the first design, but I soon learned I didn’t have the stock imagery to make a realistic looking wooden bookshelf go down the center (which I may get and do anyway). I noticed that the flat colors I was blocking out looked kind of earthen, so I made a sky and grass, added some perspective, and began to build up a miniature world. The end result of this would be a hyper-detailed scale model of an environment with colors that pop and attract the eye in a cartoonish manner. The light bulb makes the whole environment look like a wee science model ;)… However, it doesn’t very well represent the purpose of this blog!

So, I think I’ll be retooling the first design to have the organization of the second design, and then rework that into an even more slightly different organization. I’m trying to make something that’s best for a portfolio and such! It really is time to rework and retool the way this blog works so it’s not so dependent on me actually posting my daily whatever, because in the end I’d rather this be a portfolio and repository of my work instead of a silly journal. It can be that as well, but only on the backburner!

It’s been wild ten days, but now I’m home for the summer. I’ve been in Portugal, actually, with the Lehigh University Choir, and we’ve been touring around Lisbon and the greater Lisbon area performing in various churches and palaces. Needless to say, it was an incredible experience! Although I didn’t write a journal like I did last time I went touring Europe in 2006, I did document the trip with over 1700 photos. Expect to see those photos appear sometime in the near future – or at least the good ones!

To my choirmates, awesome trip. We showed Portugal what good choral music sounds like! I hope the next tour is just as good, if not better. Now I think I’ll put my feet up and relax for the summer – at least until I get a job, finish up the new Lehigh Choir website, and fix up ZU and add some nice new content to the place. (Seriously, there’s cool stuff coming to ZU!)

Tah tah!

That about wraps it up for freshman year of college. Over the next two weeks I’ll be taking my final exams, and then it’s off to Portugal with the University Choir. I can’t believe summer came so fast! Of course, the Venti project is now entirely finished… it’s not going to become a real business (unless somebody would like to invest – I would love to keep the business going), and classes have ceased until the Fall semester.

That said, I’ll have time now to focus on cooler things, like bringing more features and events to Zelda Universe, as well as redesigning this damned blog!