I feel like this blog is getting away from what I originally intended its primary content to be - my spiritual walk in like. But you know what oh wells at least I am posting something new :).

So I decided I wanted to try and be one of the people on the leading edge of HTML 5 so it can be one less thing in the future that I am trying to play catch up with. True, full HTML 5 support won’t be out until sometime in the 2020s (I am pretty sure I read that somewhere but of course when I go to search for the year I can’t find it ><) but might as well start now since Firefox 3.5 is now supporting HTML 5. And thanks to the folks at Smashing Magazine I can get a great running start on my HTML 5 learnin’ by following their “HTML 5 Layout from Scratch” tutorial.

How does Pixelmator fit in to this you ask (and if you didn’t let’s just pretend you did ;))? Well unsatisfied to learn and tinker with only HTML 5, I will be doing the design work in Pixelmator, a really nice Mac graphics program that I just bought and have so far enjoyed using. It’s true that doing the design end would be easier in Photoshop, but unfortunately I am no longer privy to Adobe’s image editing juggernaut (write or tweet me if you want to know the story). But then again if I used Photoshop I wouldn’t get to share even more new stuff about my experiences with Pixelmator.

I will be doing my testing/designing at this site: hangerbay.fxrdesign.com and trying to keep you up do date here at CToW about it’s progress.

So far what I have learned from starting to code my uber simple HTML 5 page is:

• Though the SM tutorial shows that <meta charset=”utf-8″ /> is the tag to use for declaring your character set, the w3c validator errors out on it. Solution: use the the standard meta tag declaration <meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=utf-8″>. Yes its more to remember but it validates like soft butter…err something like that.
• Panic’s Coda doesn’t have code prompts for the semantic HTML 5 tags…let’s get with in Panic I have a 2020 deadline to meet

Every so often I will check my cafepress account to see if any of the shirts I have designed, have been bought. I checked early this week to find that one of my designs has sold 2 shirts to 2 different people and though is is great, it’s kinda perplexing that the selling design is the one that I put the least thought into and the one I don’t think I executed the best?!

Here is the shirt:

The original idea behind this shirt came from Kristy saying I was always so warm and me joking that I was powered by a thermonuclear reactor as opposed to a heart. So I get why I would buy this shirt (which oddly enough I haven’t) but are there really that many people out there that have thought the same thing?

This shirt on the other hand no one has bought and I think it is one of my cooler designs:

I call it the Robot Zero shirt. This shirt came from me wanting to do a grungy, sci-fi design using a robot illustration I did that I was really happy with.

What are your thoughts, CToW reader, would you join the masses (masses being 3 so far) of people clamouring for the Nuclear Core shirt, or do you think the resisting the Robot Zero shirt is futile? And feel free to leave a comment with links to any shirts you have designed that you don’t get why they are, or why they aren’t selling.

So in case you neglected to read the post title, there is a ton of new stuff happening in my life, some small some smaller ;), that I wanted to share. Here goes.

Auralia's Colors

I finished a book by a new-to-me author recently called “Auralia’s Colors”. It was really good and I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys fantasy/fairy tales/just a good story.  I am on to the next book in the series called “Cyndere’s Ember”. I was about mid way through posting a new my book review of Auralia’s Colors using Mozilla’s Flock browser’s blog posting tool, but I think saving a post through flock doesn’t save the draft to Wordpress, instead saving to the local machine (which doesn’t help me since I like to blog from multiple machines). But suffice it to say I will be posting that soon for any who are interested :). Continue Reading…

Howdy friends! As many of you know I was in an Advocare weight loss competition called the Biggest Winner, for which I was hoping to win $500. Unfortunately I got third place, and only came away with a total of 13 pounds lost, which is great in itself, but I was wanting more. I did however come in first place out of all the guys that participated, hence the post title. So where do I go from here? Well Kristy and I are trying to work out fitting in the core Advocare products in our budget so that they can continue to catalyze our weight loss, but if not, it will have to boil down to eating healthy and working out. Not a problem though, since I actually like things like salad, broccoli, and spinach now :). Continue Reading…

My wife and I have been thinking about a craft that we could do together for the holidays. My first suggestion was to make construction paper snowflakes, but apparently she wanted something more challenging. Can you believe that? I think cutting intricate patterns with safety scissors would be plenty difficult! It wasn’t to be however and we ended up going with learning how to knit. Continue Reading…