SplineArt.com

Yes, yes, yes… I know.

I suck at keeping this blog up to date. And even though I am posting right now, I’m not going to promise the obligatory “I’m going to try harder…” post. I have moved this domain over to a new registar as well as new hosting company.

And although that doesn’t mean I’ll spend more time here, it does mean I’ve invested enough to keep it up. So maybe….

What? Again? I’ve switched blogging engines again and went with WordPress. Mainly I did this because it uses MySQL as a backend instead of an xml file that DasBlog used. This should hopefully speed the blog up a bit.  WordPress uses php for the front end instead of aspx, but I can live with that.

signal coming in. So, you see I took a couple of weeks off from modeling.  Usual story of, you know, stuff is happening.  Shortly, however, I will be starting…. you guess it, two more ships.  British Battleships this time.  I’ve also thought about doing some more organic modeling.  After I left school in the organic modeling block I didn’t really get to learn all the skills involved.  In addition to that, I do enjoy hardware modeling the best. So over the last few months that’s what I’ve concentrated on (you know, a bazillion ships). So basically that leaves me without full training, I wasn’t the best at it to begin with, and have had months to forget what I did know.  All that adds up to, “hummm, I should do some organic modeling.”  Anything to avoid texturing I say!

Green. I had a strange urge to replace the top banner tonight. So i did. The gallery is missing, but it was in a serious need of a rewrite, so I’m not mourning it at the moment. I can say that cross-browser development blows. It was so easy to get this page to do what I wanted in Firefox, but IE was giving me grief. IE is still displaying a horizontal scroll bar for no reason that I can figure out. Since I use Firefox I’m leaving the IE weirdness; good enough for government work, I like to say.  I think IE has become the new Netscape 4!  It’s just too old, even though I am running the IE 7 beta.

At school no more. This announcement is way over due (if you were following my DAVE School Blog), but here it finally is. In early November I dropped out of school to return home. At the time my wife was in the hospital due to a blood clot, so the decision was made that an immediate departure from school was in order. My wife ended up staying nearly two weeks in the hospital, suffering through several operations. I’m happy to say that she has fully recovered, although she will need to remain on blood thinners.

During the last few months life for me return to my pre-school normal life. As my wife recovered, work became very busy and time just past on by. Now, as things begin to calm down, my thoughts return to school and Lightwave. So here is the reincarnation of the DAVE School blog and my rusty return to modeling with the iPods. It is my hope to start something more difficult soon.

Not so pretty. All basic functions of the site are up and running. I’m not necessarily happy with how it all looks, but I could sweat that stuff for hours. So the idea was to just get it working and tweak the look as time goes by.  Interestingly, the Blog is a canned asp.net 1.1 app I found (dasBlog), the Forum is a canned php app (phpBB), and the Gallery is something I whipped up in about an hour in asp.net (though I should note that the sliding pop-up picture effect is some canned javascript I found (Lightbox)). All this has the side affect of cutting down on development time and not reinventing the wheel, but has the drawback of making the site look visually disconnected.  Something I’ll need to work on.

Kicking if off. This was formerly “The D.A.V.E. School Chronicles” Blog. I’m not going to say too much in this post as I still have quite a bit of work to do and I feel my time can be better spent in other areas of the site at the moment. Mainly I need to get the site gallery up and running, so until then I’ll keep any posts short and sweet.