BogusRed's Sketchblog

Random musings from the PaperDemon admin.

As many of my followers know, I'm planing a Zelda Themed wedding. Unfortunately due to an ongoing family crisis, Mike and I have decided to postpone the wedding to summer 2011. No fears though. It will still be totally Zelda.

So far I've finished making the bomb centerpiece and am nearly done with the telescope. I've started working on the boomerang. I also have cute little bottles that I could fill with milk or fairies or something.

Mike and I are still picking a new wedding date. We will need to update our photographer and venue with the new info. We're also working on a wedding website. That should be up within a few months.

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Lately I've been sucked into this really stupid/awesome game on Facebook called Farmville. It's one of those games where it's so simple and can become so complex. They suck you in with how easy and simple it is to play and then make you wait before you can play it more.

So I found myself with lots of questions about this game and when I did Google searches, I couldn't find the answers. Probably because the game is still very new. So I thought, if I'm having these questions, I bet others are wondering the same things. So I thought I'd start a tips and tricks blog. HarvestGuide.net

Kind of stupid but you never know. There aren't any other sites out there like it so it's at least worth experimenting with. I keep hearing over and over again "diversify" if you want to become successful with websites. We'll see how far this goes.

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At last we have finally chosen a venue and selected our date. Mike and I will be getting married amongst the beautiful redwood trees at Hazlwood in July of 2010.

Hazlwood has the exact feeling I was looking for. I wanted an outdoors, forest-like setting and this will do nicely. The ceremony and reception areas will also be shaded so we can enjoy the ambiance of the outdoors without the discomforts of the sun. Being amongst the trees will be the perfect backdrop for our Zelda themed wedding.

I researched a lot of venues online before choosing the right one. I only visited a handful in person. HereComesTheGuide was my major source for venue research. As soon as I saw Hazlwood I knew it was the right one. Thankfully my Mom and fiance agreed!

I had considered doing something on the beach, as that would be most fitting for "Wind Waker" but I'm starting to think of this more as a general Zelda theme but with many of the artistic elements (the dress, decorations) done in the whimsical shapes/colors of Wind Waker. So there will likely be many elements from other Zelda games in our wedding as well.

I'm considering renaming Hazlwood to Kokiri Forest for a day...

From Wedding Stuff

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After thinking over the video-game-party-in-lieu-of-wedding idea, we are now back to a wedding. Major reason? There are many people that have been a part of our lives for the last several years that we believe should be there to share this special day with us and they can't all fit in our house.

Now that we've fully realized that this wedding is going to cost $20K and have accepted that fact, I can finally start the real wedding planning.

Before I had so many ideas for what I wanted to do for the theme of my wedding. I knew I wanted to do something different, non-traditional, but I had so many ideas that I had a hard time choosing a direction. But now I'm decided. It will be Zelda inspired through and through. No, Mike and I will not be dressed as Link and Zelda (and which one would be link anyway?). Rather, my dress, the cake, and our decor will be influenced by the whimsical style and colors of Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.

With the basis of the creatives decided on (Zelda themed wedding), I can come close to choosing a venue. I'm visiting two this weekend which I'm really excited about. I hope I'll have made my decision on the venue by end of the month so that I can begin booking my photographer, caterer, cake, etc.

Oh yes, and I'm still planning to design and sew my own wedding dress...... Don't laugh! It will be awesome. Just you wait!

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Mike and I have been thinking about this whole wedding thing and have decided the traditional wedding scene is not really for us. So we've come up with what we think will be a fun alternative that will save us money and be a better reflection of us and our interests.

Picture it...
A video-game-themed-masquerade-party-extravaganza!!!

Ok let me explain. Basically If we were going to do a traditional wedding the way that I would have wanted, it would have cost $20K. And that's a lot of money to spend on just one day. So instead, we want to put that money into improving the house. We'll just go to the court house to get married and then throw a big non-formal party at our house... mike and susie style.

Pros:

• Catering may be cheaper since it's casual instead of formal. Though I don't have quotes yet so I don't know for sure. Seeing as I don't have an industrial style kitchen, they may need to bring a portable kitchen which may cost more.
• Have unlimited time to decorate before and after. When you rent a venue, you only have a couple hours to decorate and then a couple hours to take-down. If it's at our house, we can decorate and take-down at our convenience. 
• Decorate like crazy to make it totally with the theme.
• Don't have to spend money on expensive wedding attire stuff like a dress that I'll only wear once.
• Can spend money on permanent improvements to the house that we can enjoy at the party and far beyond.
• Might be able to convince a friend to do photography for us (they all said no to photographing a wedding. they don't want to deal with "Bridezillas"
• Masquerade! Dude, that would be totally awesome. My friends would totally dress up. Those that don't can pick from some masks, hats, and accessories from a bin at the party.
• Don't need to hire a DJ. Just spend a bit of money installing outdoor speakers and hook it up to our computer.
• Can have video games hooked up on the main tv for people to play.

Cons:

• Limited space = limited guests. Our house is not very large. Of course we'll utilize the outside but we may be looking at limiting it to just 60 guests.
• Need to rent chairs, tables, linens, etc.
• Need to rent a canopy to protect everyone from the sun.
• May need to rent a port-a-potty. I hear septic tanks can't handle all the flushes from a big party.
• May cause some wear and tear on our carpet and lawn.

Anyway, it's something to think about.

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So I've been working on rewriting my code into almost like a turnkey website sort of thing where i can easily install it on other websites. But I'm not quite sure of the best way to do it. But one thing that's really made a lot of decisions easier is Smarty. Man I can keep the display component completely separate. Totally awesome. Unfortunately, you can't define multiple template directories. I was hoping to keep all art gallery stuff in one folder, all profile stuff in another folder, etc. But then again, keeping all the templates in one folder may make sense if you want to make it so the designer can only access the template files.

jQuery has been really helpful as well. It's been really quick to turn an app into an ajax one. Damnit I love Ajax. And I've been playing around with jQuery UI which has some nifty features too. I hope to convert all my ajax stuff from Sarissa to jQuery.

It's really hard to organize everything though. It may make sense to keep everything related to a compent (such as art gallery, photo gallery, web page cms, profile) in its own folder. In that folder would be the php class, php pages, template files, JS, CSS. But it's hard to do that. Sure you could put all the JS together in one folder, all the PHP in another, etc. But then when you need to install a component in another site you gotta copy paste stuff into like 5 different folders rather than just copying one folder.

Still trying to figure it out. Maybe it shouldn't be componentized. Maybe everytime I install my software on a site they get all the components. I dunno. I need help with this one.

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 I'm pretty excited to say that I'm getting back into working on my animation projects again. My friends are excited too. This past weekend we recorded the finale for Zarbon's Masterpiece Theater. This episode is pretty epic. So epic that it will require me to storyboard it. Something I've never done for ZMT.

And we are getting back into working on the other new Anime Spoof show which we still don't have a name for. Anyway, I'm fucking excited. Yeah.

BogusRed Out!

Oh and I just watched Snakes on a Plane. I hate that movie.

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In general, I'm a fan of texture.

Isn't it obvious by the subtle textures on PaperDemon and BogusRed.net?

Anyway, I wanted to express this passion in a new blog. On my new blog, Rough It Up, I'll connect people to great photoshop brushes, patterns, textures, and stock images to help you in your web design and digital art endeavors. I'll also be posting links to inspirational artwork that uses great textures. In addition, I'll be posting some of my own brushes and textures under Creative Commons license for you to use in your works.

Who knows, maybe your artwork will be featured!

Check it out at:

http://roughitup.blogspot.com

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 Just about every PHP programmer has heard of or used Smarty Templates.

I had heard of it a long time ago, but only just recently started using it. For the longest time, I have been using good old phpLib's Template.inc. It is simple and suits most of my needs. But it's quite old. I've been using it for like 7 years.

A colleague of mine convinced me to try out Smarty. I used it to create a new RSS feature for PaperDemon.com's blogs (and also added an RSS feed for my blog on BogusRed.net as well, subscribe to me!). I did it using Smarty because it seamed like a good thing to templatize and also because Smarty has a really good caching system. So if people's RSS readers are constantly pinging the RSS feed pages, the PHP won't have to pull from the database every time. +1 for performance!

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Today I visited my first two possible venues for my wedding. They both have their pros and cons.   

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