And that it has. Just short of a year since the last update, you can imagine there's a lot that's changed in my life and this is true.

I've graduated uni and scored myself a job as Web Developer down at Burleigh. I've stayed up here in Brissie though, friends and family being the roots. Wow fuck it's been a while since I've actually had to sit down and write a structured piece of writing for human consumption. These days my life is CSS declarations, Javascript/jQuery syntax or 140char tweets, so this is really fucking hard. Which is a shame because I love English and some wit. I love reading over a well written article and admiring vocabulary that's normally reserved for old texts, but alas, I guess when you leave High School and aren't forced to write letters to the editor or analytical essays, you will start to lose the writer's touch.

Uni didn't really help, well not my degree, being predominately the aforementioned technical writing. However, whilst cleaning up my room, I did manage to find a new comparative essay I wrote for my Creative Industries major of my degree. I smiled while reading, I guess when push comes to shove, I can still write. And as you've gathered, there hasn't been a lot of push and shove in my life, otherwise I wouldn't have been on hiatus from the blogosphere for the last 10 months. Well, here I am now, typing madly away, sorta with an evil glean in my eyes as I know that I'll actually hit publish on this article and not just draft it.

Being 10 months ago since my last update, there is a lot I could write about, but fuck, it's too hard to sit and structure all of it while typing. If I start along that track, this post will be a draft, because it'll get thrown into the too hard basket. So here I go, I'll just brain dump this entry, random information slotted in between long sentences that really could of been summed up with short words like, "I'm lazy" or ... fuck I don't know. Well to some content, I suppose...

I joined some sports teams and it's been fucking great. Indoor soccer, which unfortunately is dead and dusted now (until hopefully Summer) and Touch Footy. I love playing both, although I say I preform better in Touch then Soccer. It's good to be in a team, makes you feel less like one and more like a whole. We started shit, losing every game, then in the second season managed to win the C grade grand final. Third season in and we're 4th (from 8) so shaping up to be heading into the B grade finals. I do write up little snippets about each game over on the G-Team blog if you feel so inclined to read it.

Uhh, I think I've hit point where my mind is teetering on the point of drafting and going to waste some time on the internets, so I'll finish up quickly. This site is currently hosted on shared hosting, which has been good and all, but I've bought a slice at slicehost, and actually do plan to move this site across to that eventually (read: fucking soon I hope). This design will change, and I'm contemplating leaving all these old articles in semi-hidden archives, after all, I'm 21 now and the teen angst is fading and reading those old articles makes me look moronic. Maybe one day, when browsers support CSS printing to the standard, I'll print them all off and have a nice little coffee table book of my early years. In fact, would you believe I still have a MySQL dump of my first few years blogging (I'm thinking this would be about 02/03) when I was really angsty with a whole load of emo thrown in, so as you can imagine, it's an amusing read these days. 

So yes this new design. Well it's put me between a rock and a hard place (or so the saying goes, hold up, I'm wiking it so I can add another some more random knowledge to my kip) as all my blogging years (and my friends @ the-group, who like me have all grown up and gotten equally as lazy) I have used a custom CMS that I coded from the ground up to help me learn PHP. The code is as ugly as a hat full of assholes (thanks Davo), and I would love to revisit it, but I've been introduced to Symphony (not Symfony) which is pretty fucking kickass (although has a few shortcomings). In one mind, it's good for me to code a custom CMS, it keeps my mind fresh and offers a nice break from Symphony and the code is fucking legacy, it still has functions in I wrote back in 02/03! But then again, Symphony's separation into XML/XSLT and the normal HTML/CSS is very nice. Sigh, and then there's the other elephant in the room that is beckoning for me to play with it.

Who knows, but I do know that this blog will take a new direction, less personal and more professional (sorry friends, you'll have to rely on Facebook to get the rawness). The design I'm sketching away is more typographical, because lets face it, I'm shit at graphic design. I know the principles, I get what is nice and what isn't. I can even pick out pros/cons in other designs, but for the life of me, just can't communicate that into Photoshop. One day!

This marks the end of this post, hopefully the next one won't be as crude or verbose and won't be far away.

That's how long it's been since I wrote this article where I wrote about redesigning this website. I finally did it today, somewhat to cure boredom, moreso because I finally grew sick of that design to the point where it had to go. This is the first design that uses all my own images, taken with my phone, instead of scouring stock image sites

The main image is a photo of Fingal Beach from my recent coast adventure which has been ran through a Photoshop filter. The music page uses an image I took during the Black Crusade tour of Machine Head. It's a fantastic photo, my favourite from the night, but due to the phone quality, I filtered it in Photoshop again to make it more bearable. Finally, viewing individual articles results in a picture of our shack during it's construction, unedited.

Regardless, enjoy the new design

I'm sick of this design, not in a 'it means nothing to me sorta way', more in a 'the features are outgrowing it and I never really liked the scrollbar inside the page design'. Wish You Were Here was Bloodbone version four, and probably one of the better ones.

Anyway, going off my stats, I have a four way split of screen resolutions between 1024x768, 1280x1024, 1680x1050 (benji?) and 1280 x 800 (yank?) so I'll have to keep that in mind, I generally forget about the > 1280x1024 crowd. The statistics of browsers is very nice, 75% use a recent edition of Firefox and with the rest falling to IE6/7. I'm glad of this split, it gives me a bit of freedom to design something that uses a little bit more advanced CSS and not have to worry about IE5 hacks and what not.

I realise this was a terribly geeky post and probably left alot of you in the dust, but thought I'd just update for the sake of it. I've implemented tagging now, as you can see by the left. It's pretty beta at the moment, but acts a quick and visual way to sift through the articles. Clicking on a 'tag' will take you to all the articles I have tagged as that. I realise it's a bit messy at the moment, but a new design should alleviate that.

In saying that, if you come across this site over the next week and it bursts into flames, just continue on your merry way and check back later, chances are you will have caught me moving files around and so forth. The new design should feature galleries (keke, it's already done just hidden ), a profile, expanded now playing, blog links and... *maybe* search and paging. Enough geek overload.

Night, OaO