An Owl Friend For Our Little Penguin

The second cute cartoon character to roll out of the Simply Graphics digital collage sheet assembly line.

You can purchase these royalty free images from SimplyGraphics.etsy.com for only $3.00. You get 24 hi-res images on one 8.5" x 11" sheet.

They email you the sheet and you can print it out whenever you like, however many times you like. You can resize the digital collage sheet to fit any of your needs.

10 things you can do if you feel like being a dick.

Some days you need to treat yourself to the simpler pleasures of being a complete asshole. I mean, it's never fun to see anyone seriously hurt but sometimes it's worth it for a good laugh. They say laughter is the best medicine so anything that makes you laugh must be good right? Maybe not but I figured I'd give you some ideas anyways.

1. Talk about something to the person next to you that you know they have no interest in.
2. Make paper throwing stars with your blog URL and litter the office with them.
3. Create a new cartoon character of your boss and design a pornographic comic strip based around them. Post it on your blog.
   
4. Go and listen to someone's problem and convince them that they are at fault.
5. Sign up your friends on gay porn email lists.
6. Discuss your favorite subject with random people and ignore what they have to say.
7. Call up random people and try to hold a conversation with them in a drunk Irish accent. If they hang up right away, phone them back a few times before moving on.
   
8. Laugh at a child if they if you see them crying.
   
9. Try to brainwash your co-worker with subliminal messages throughout the year.
10. Sing old annoying catchy songs out loud. Hopefully, you'll get the song stuck in people's heads for the rest of the day. Try to seem like you're having a great time singing. Even better if you can't sing.

I'm sure that some of these suggestions will help fill that emptiness within your black heart and feed your hunger for dickishness. Have yourself a fun day.

Behringer Eurolive B212A PA Speakers - Even I could afford them

I wasn't sure what to talk about today but I found the answer staring me right in the face, literally. The Behringer Eurolive B212A avtive (self-powered) PA speakers.

I bought these speakers last year from Musician's Friend while attending school and have loved them everyday since then.

Here's my experience.

I researched a few products in a price range of under $300. Here are a few items I considered:

Nady PCS-12 Powered 12" 2-Way Speaker Enclosure


Alesis Transactive Mobile Roller PA With iPod Dock Black


Mackie SRM350 2-Way Active PA Speaker


The reason I went with the Behringer Eurolive series is becuase they had good reviews for the most part. Usually the bad reviews were from customers who were just unlucky and got a dud. That happens with every brand no matter what the price range is so I didn't pay too much attention. Still, you can't expect affordable low-end products to perform like the high end equipment.

Another deciding factor was that I could buy a Behringer PA package deal that had these speakers in it, also inside were 2 mics, 4 XLR cables, 2 speaker stands, and the UB1832FX mixing board.

Behringer UB1832FX / B212A PA Package $599.99 USD




I unfortunately Mackie did not offer a package deal as good as Behringer did so I researched some more about products that came in the package deal:

• Behringer Eurorack UB1832FX-PRO Mixer
• Behringer XM8500 Microphones (x2)
  

4 - 20" XLR cables and 2 speaker stands came in the package too but I didn't look very hard into these items because I already had cables so these were extras. From the pictures the speaker stands looked good enough.

So I ordered this package using Musician's Friend online shopping cart. Everything went through perfectly and a few days later I got the tracking numbers for my packages. I sort of picked a bad time to order because they were right in the middle of changing to a new warehouse and a few items in my order were shipped individually. That wasn't so good because I live in Canada and as so am subject to paying customs each time a package makes it to the border. I was a little upset and phoned up Musician's Friend with my complaint. I spoke with a very friendly woman who got everything sorted out and they even paid the shipping on the few items in my order that still weren't shipping at the time. Talk about awesome customer service! Great to deal with.

I should note that I did not just buy the Behringer PA package, I also bought a pre-amp, 2 50" XLR cables, a condenser mic, a USB sound card, and a pop filter. But this article is about my Eurolive speakers.

Okay, I'm now staring at all of my brand new sound equipment. I'm so excited, yet fearing that I might be another "dud" victim receiving a defective product. I carefully opened the boxes and set up my new equipment; plugged it into my laptop, and loaded Cubase. Wow, everything sounds so awesome! So full and rich. Thick low ends and bright highs. They're also extremely loud, 400watts loud, my god! These speakers sound fantasic. All of my music that I have been making and listening to on my Labtec computer speakers suddenly sounded so much better. The real test was when I used these speakers to DJ a Pizza Hut staff party. I set up these speakers in a mid-sized hall which held up to about 150 people. I used the stands that came with the Behringer PA package. By the way, the stands are sturdy, lightweight, and good quality. I put the speakers at about head level and started pumping the music. The hall was filled with with the sounds of deep resonating bass and the screams of a lot of happy people hearing their favorite song. The night went on smoothly and I had a lot of compliments by the end. The first and biggest test was a success.

So a year later and I mainly use these speakers for mixing and mastering my music as well regular music listening. I would say they are on for about 8 hours a day, everyday. No problems at all yet. I would totally buy these speakers again. If I had more money I'd probably look into a higher end brand but for now I couldn't ask for more than I got with the Behringer Eurolive B212A speakers. A very good buy.

Behringer EUROLIVE B212A Active Loudspeaker

Cute Little Baby Penguins

I was messing about in photoshop today and came up with this simple little character. Isn't he cute? Every time I make a new depiction of this toon I point at it and shout, "kuwaii". I think it means "cute" or something similar in Japanese. My boyfriend hates it when I do that so I do it to get a rouse out of him.

I know he looks like a South Park character but he's not inspired from that show at all. My inspiration was to create a cute little character using only shapes. It's sort of funny to use the most basic of tools in a powerful piece of software like photoshop. Sort of like buying a Ferarri and never taking it past 50km/h (30mph).

I made up an 8.5" x 11" digital collage sheet of 24 of these litle guys that you can buy at simplygraphics.etsy.com for only $3.00. When you print out the sheet each picture is sized for 1" x 1" square at 300 dpi, so it's very high quality. I will be making more theme based one in the near future so keep an eye out.

The Road Hound Pet Carrier for Motorcycles and Scooters

I can't say that I really like the idea of taking your dog with you on a motorcycle but I think if you did then you should probably do so in a Moto-Pets Accessories Inc Road Hound pet carrier.

The pet carrier is a molded ABS plastic cage that mounts to the back of your motorcycle or scooter, or anything else for that matter. Moto-Pets Accessories also makes mount kits that they sell separately. The Road Hound pet carrier comes in quite a few different sizes ranging from toy sized to medium sized dogs.

Reviews of the pet carrier have been positive so if you're thinking about taking your pooch along with you on your cycle, powered or otherwise, I suggest you looking into this product.

I came across the OCZ 64GB SATA-300 2.5" Solid State Drive. Talk about a cool drive to own right now. I can hear my laptop screaming at me to replace the hard drive even as I write this. Of course right now the cost for this hard drive is about $1100 CAN$; not something I'm willing to put that much money towards. Many people claim to have a large increase in system performance after installing this drive. One guy even claimed he went from POST to his windows desktop in about 9 seconds after a fresh install.

I don't see myself buying one anytime soon though. I find myself wanting to put food in my belly rather than saving a few seconds of load time on my laptop. I can see solid state drives taking off in the years to come as prices drop and storage capacities increase. Personally I was hoping for a more radical type of mass storage like laser-based hard drive technology but this will do for now.

Photoshop Zombies

I thought it would be cool if I could use photoshop to turn portraits of people into zombies. I consulted Google and it directed me to a nice example of what I was looking for in a zombie portrait.


Here's a link to the original article: Decay tutorial in photoshop

I love the way the texture really makes it look like his flesh missing. For me this sets a good standard in what can be done in photoshop to make people look like a zombie.

Warcraft Destroyed My Life: Love or Addiction?

I'm sure many of your have heard of the massive multiplayer online role playing game (mmorpg) called The World of Warcraft (WoW). I have been playing it since it came out. I have 8 level 70 "toons" and I know I'll have 9 in a little while. When the second major expansion comes out I'll have 10 characters which I play.

I have no idea what it is about that game that keeps me coming back. I've taken breaks from the game saying, "I'll never play that game again, what a waste of time." A few months later I find myself at the control of a 70 resto shaman healing my way through some dungeon. Am I addicted? Maybe I should consider what addiction is.

Addiction \ə-ˈdik-shən, a-\
Function: noun
Date: 1599

1: the quality or state of being addicted
2: compulsive need for and use of a habit-forming substance (as heroin, nicotine, or alcohol) characterized by tolerance and by well-defined physiological symptoms upon withdrawal; broadly : persistent compulsive use of a substance known by the user to be harmful.

Well I'm not trying to sell my body or steal my best friend's TV to pay for another month of Warcraft but even when I grow tired of doing the same thing day in and day out within the video game, I still find myself playing it almost everyday since it came out.

I've made up excuses to avoid going out to parties or hanging out with my friends simply because I wanted to play Warcraft. All forms of general "real life" socializing seems to be unappealing when compared to WoW. In fact I can genuinely say that between this blog, my websites, and a few others business type ventures Warcraft is probably what I spend most of my life doing. So I should ask myself a question; am I wasting my life playing a video game? I think so. Why don't I stop playing the game altogether, just cancel the account? If I had the answer to that perhaps I would be a lot more successful. I guess it's a good thing that after a while my wrists start to hurt so bad that I can't possibly play anymore Warcraft.

I don't know where I'm going with this entry but I do know one thing. I've been playing The World of Warcraft the whole time I've been writing this.

Your Hobby Could Earn You a Few Bucks!

I've been tinkering around with paint programs since Deluxe Paint came out for my Amiga. I think the key work is "tinkering". I've never really taken doodling in a paint program too seriously. Usually for websites I just need to make some buttons or re-size images to suit the size of the web page but I recently found out that I can also sell some of those images I've created and more.

Etsy.com is a buy & sell web site for people who like to buy handmade crafts and people who create the items to sell. Often, the buyer from one shop is the seller in another etsy shop. The result is a wonderful community of people doing what they enjoy.

I have discovered many cool items people make by hand at etsy.com but what stuck me was that I could help supply some the the artists with graphics that I make. Score!

Now I can practice and build upon my graphics design skills and help fund my hobby too(graphics software isn't cheap).

If you have a minute and want to see some cool items people have made, I'm sure you'll be amazed at what you find.

Flooded Opportunities on the World Wide Web

You've all heard about people making their fortunes on the internet. There seems to be a vast number of people making some form on incoming doing this or that. Well, this is my that. I have a number of websites running as a way to help me become a better web and graphics designer and maybe even make a buck or two on the side. The sad reality is that chances are none of my websites will make it beyond initial opening stage. Why you ask? Well simply put, the web is flooded with everyone else trying to do the same thing. Let's look at my Yamaha C3 website and pick it apart shall we?

Yamaha C3 Collective

I am a big fan of scooters. I've never owned one but I know a lot about scooters; how to fix scooters, modify scooters, and shop around for them. After all my research I feel that I am a bit of an expert on the subject. Enter Yamaha C3 Collective. I figured that since I enjoyed learning about my favorite model of scooter that I should take everything I've learned and put it up on my own website, complete with Google Adsense and some affiliate links. Sounds reasonable right? I think so. Well here comes the problem. Getting attention to my website and building a user base.

Getting attention in a large crowd often means you have to do something that may seem silly or desperate. In my case, I want the people who are looking for information about the Yamaha C3 to be able to find my website. Enter SEO (search engine optimization).

Every time I add a new page to my website I need to consider what words I use in the articles. They should be relevant to the Yamaha C3 and to the information on the page, be it tires, engine mods, etc. The pages meta data should pertain to the page as well. It's a never ending battle because major search engines like Google change the way they index data all the time in order to give their users the most relevant search returns. Meaning, that even after I make a perfect page it may not be enough to get me ranked high up on Google searches.

So what else can I do?

How about a marketing campaign? Well I don't have any spare money to be able to sink it into a hobby site about Yamaha C3's so I need to explore other options. One way to generate a lot of traffic is to have other websites link to your site. Furthermore, the more websites that link to your website will increase your ranking on major search engines. Imagine finding the beginning of a spiderweb and following all the pathways to the center of the web. Eventually, if you follow the threads you will find the center of the web and the spider as well. Now the threads are other websites and I'm the spider. I want other websites to link to me so that when people follow the threads they'll eventually get to the center of the web and find my site. It's now time for me to ensnare my audience.

It's not enough that people are coming to my website. I need them to stay there for a while and then return the next day. Repeat traffic is what drives your site. A user base will make or break your website. I must make sure that my site is easy to navigate, full of useful information, offer something other similar websites might not, and most importantly be a genuine public service. Something like a website about the Yamaha C3 means that there will always be new information coming out about that scooter so it's up to me to make sure I find it and list it on my website. Staying up to date is extremely important when running a website. Even if you only ever update your site once a week, at least you're doing something for it and your users. Remember that your are taking on a responsibility to the public when you create a website and therefore you must keep it up to date, bug free, and interactive.

Oh yeah, don't forget to visit
Yamaha C3 Collective too.