murfSTUFF

Hey there every-peoples! murf here to deliver yet another not-very rousing tale in the chronicles of my life. I assure, it's as pointless and unnecessary as is the majority of my previous rantings, but it makes me feel better writing these things. Ya know, get stuff off my chest.

So, here's the haps! My college-type education progresses at what seems to be a very expidient pace. Why, it only seems like the other day I had started school, my grandmother had passed away, Katrina reeked havoc upon the Gulf Coast and various other events that occured within my first few months. Now, here I stand before the final stretch of path. With only 4 months to go, I feel as though my brain is reaching critical mass. I fear the effects of the infamous “senior-itious” returning to claim me as they did in High School. Yet, I think the looming mutliple 10s of thousands of dollars spent on my education hanging over my head will keep me straight.

So, how are things progressing? Slower, thankfully. The two classes I'm currently in are Digital Media Production [DMP] and Interactive Media Design [IMD], both 2 month courses which are now half over. DMP covers the work of flow of a project, from concept to completion. However, they use video production as the model. This is both good and bad too me, mostly for the same reason. I've done this kind of thing before in High School. I, by no means, profess myself an expert in the field, far from it. However, alot of the information I hear spewed out is all stuff I know, with a slight interjection of some minor, totally out there, thing I don't know. Lecture is boring as sin, and I feel like it's drilling a hole into the side of my skull. On the plus side, I've been getting a lot of concept work for an upcoming personal project done.

IMD's first month seems to be a rehashing of stuff we learned in Flash, only with a different coding language. The project seemed very similar to what we did in Flash. This month's project falls into the category of: make a game. Should be interesting, not 100% sure what I'm gonna do, but it'll give me a reason to maybe pay attention now.

After these two classes finish, only a handful of classes remain. Digtial Media Assembly and Business Communications in April, DMA continues along with Media & Society for May, and then June is dedicated all to one class: Digital Publishing. Hard to imagine how fast it has gone by. I should start working with carrer placement come April/May, and hopefully I'll land myself a good job somewhere. It's fairly definate that I'm going into web. I've got a lot to still learn for the more advanced stuff, but I've started taking some private lessons on PHP under the tutelage of Mike G. (My Advanced Web Design teacher), so hopefully I'll be able to better work on the upcoming sections of murf-STUFF.

Speaking of that, with my first lesson done, I'm doing some test work for what will become murf-ART. There's a lot of fancy database/PHP work at hand, so we'll see how that flies. I'm hoping to get murf-ART underway within the week. Also, I recently aided my buddy Joe Laurino in his own webcomic endeavor by coding the PHP for his site. So they'll be up soon.

In other news, I've started up a new character on a new server in FF-XI. This may seem odd, as restarting after attaining Lv. 60 seems counter productive. This may be true, but I did this to sort of “re-invigorate” the game. Oddly, it's working. I used to log in without knowing what I should do, but know I can start up with the only worry being knowing what to do, and I know how to do because I've already done it before. It's nice. Adding to the list of cool accomplishments I've achieved in FF-XI, I managed to solo to 18, with no subjob. That's a feat. Trust me.

Now that I have hi-speed type internets, I tend to watch a lot of video things. I've seen some cool ones. So I'm gonna start sharing a few that I really like. For this rant, only one, it's called [Balancing Point]. It takes a little while to get going… but it's pretty cool. With that, I'm off for now. Take care now.

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And so begins a new era here at murf-STUFF. I welcome you, dear guest, back to my humble digital abode. Renovations are underway, with the entry area, what I commonly refer to as “main-STUFF,” having had it’s HTML, CSS and PHP/MySQL work completed, save for the About page, which will be coming later, but isn’t linked for now.

It’s been a while since I last ranted, since before Christmas. I’ve had a lot to do, and I learned a lot. My web classes are done now, and I’ve spent a lot of time bringing murf-STUFF back after tearing it down from the ground up. Fresh code and everything. Nice, clean, W3C standards compliant code. What does that mean to you? Prolly very litte actually. Unless you use Internet Explorer or its spinoffs. Then you may have some issues. IE doesn’t adhere fully to the W3C stanard (which is THE standard of the web). So, got IE, and want the full murf-STUFF experience to be the way it was intended? Here’s my answer to that…

Yes, use Firefox. The most glorious browser EVER! It pwns IE like I get pwned in First Person Shooters… and that is to say, quite royally.

I still need to finish getting some the databases up to speed, but that’s easy work now. Built me a nice admin system to run the site. So that’s all coolness. Anyway, enough about murf-STUFF, you can run off and play with it and see the cool new look. Let’s fill in on me.

Another month at Full Sail is done. I’ve completed Game Content Creation, where we built a level in Unreal. That was neat…. but not really my deal. Now… Mike G’s awesome Advanced Web Design 2 class. That was moment to shine. Finally I got to learn PHP/MySQL, which is now pouring throughout this site like you wouldn’t believe. After we presented our web projects (wherein we had to make a website for a real client), we headed over to the Ale House for some celebration.

After web presentations

From left to right: Joe Purpora, Me, Chad Lyons, Shawn Buckmaster (who is from Waynesboro, a city near C-ville), Tim Hebble, and then Joe Laurino down in front. There were more peeps there, but this is the only picture I managed to get my hands on. I need to get my own camera.

I’m sure there’s more for me to rant about, but my mind is frazzled like you couldn’t believe. My new Digital Media Production class is at 9am, and bores the hell out of me. Then I come home, work on code for murf-STUFF. So, yea… brain go ow! I’m gonna head out for now, but y’all take care and I’ll catch somewhere down the line.

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