bwpdsigns.com

I’m still alive!!! I apparently took a few months off from blogging, I blame Twitter for this, I post pretty much everything there.
Let’s see here’s a quick overview….
New Job
Biggest news…I left my job at Arnold at the end of July and started at a new job at Digitas. I’ve been here since July 28th and am loving it. Arnold was a great place to work, but I’m doing so much more of the type of work that I want to be doing it’s amazing.
AS3 Projects
My first official AS3 project recently went live, it’s a section of Gillette’s site gillette.com called Clinical Strength. It was a great experience and it turned out really well. I did a few cool things and learned so much about AS3.
I’ve just started my 2nd AS3 micro site yesterday, it’s going live end of October, but the initial production schedule is pretty short, it’s a small site about 4 sections, so I’m not to worried.
Vacation
Spend a week at the beginning of September on the Cape. Found Cape Cod Brewery, great beer, gives me a new reason to take a trip to the Cape. Man I wish they were closer.
Music, WOW, etc…
Picked up a number of new CDs recently, the list is a bit longer then I can remember, I seem to be spending my Paintball money on CDs lately, yeah not to much paintball this year. Still dabbling with World of Warcraft, the expansion was announced and well I still don’t have a 70.
Awards!
The ESPN Endless Drama site that I was lead developer on back at Arnold pulled in an award.
ESPN’s 2008 Fantasy Baseball website Endlessdrama.com won a Standard of Excellence award!
Chief Creative Officer: Pete Favat
Executive Creative Director: Roger Baldacci
Creative Director: Mark St. Amant
Interactive Creative Director: Tim McCracken
Copywriters: Bryan Karr and Mark St. Amant
Art Directors: Mike Costello and Jonathan Ratcliff
Designers: Jonathan Ratcliff and Jamie Reiley
Producer: Julie Gilbert
Asst. Producer: Angela Narloch
Project Manager: Sarah Juselius
Business Affairs: Anne Joynt
Flash Production: Jonathan Ratcliff, Jamie Reiley and Dave Fernandez
Flash Programmers: Bryan Paulus, Derek Williams, Greg North
Interactive Production Artist: Jon Ratcliff
Information Architect: Priya Chitre and Ian Johnson
Interactive Production Supervisor: Azher Ahmed, Jonathan Sackett & Scott Savitt
Account Service: Don Lane, Michael Shonkoff, Ben Muldrew and Ryan Traeger
A/V Production: Mark Higgins
Quality Assurance: Bryan Raffetto

I’m tweaking my CSS to make this site a bit wider, I need to update some images and so on but all in all it’s a pretty quick fix. Look for that to happen sometime soon.

Since it appears that the only comments I get are from spammers, I’m turning comments off. No reason to keep them on since it only makes more work for me by having to log in and delete spam. I get enough of that to my email already.

RadioShack Mother’s Day Banner wins Beanie Award
RadioShack’s “Mother’s Day” Rich Media Unit
Chief Creative Officer: Pete Favat
Creative Directors: Stephen Potter and Paul Schauder
Art Director: Chris Geraghty
Copywriter: Matt Kaiser
Designer: Ben Daly
Producers: Skadi Gidionsen, Marcie Hartman
Backend Developer: Greg North
Flash Developers: Greg North, Bryan Paulus
UI Developers: Ben Daly and Bryan Paulus
Information Architect: Jennifer Dolan
Quality Assurance Manager: Bryan Raffetto
Account Service: Sarah Amitay, Caitlin Smith
Check it out:

PointRoll’s Beanie Award

Carnival Cruise Lines Selects Arnold And MPG As New Advertising Agency And Media Partner

It all starts with the shell. Seriously, a good site shell can make or break a project. It needs to be a combination of structure and flexibility, simple yet complex enough to keep the project from falling apart. Okay maybe that’s a bit much but truth be told the base structure of the site can really have an impact on the way a site performs.
I ran into this on many occasions. When I set out to in the initial stages of the build for Endlessdrama.com it became obvious that if the structure wasn’t though out well we’d never get through the project. Three developers with varying levels of experience tackling a high profile site.
As anyone that’s dabbled with Flash for more then 5 minutes can tell you there’s about a million and a half ways to accomplish the same thing. Solutions as simple or as complex as you could possibly imagine. When facing the fact that we had to have a site live in just over 2 weeks it became very important that even with a tight schedule we needed to thing things through.
We’d build a few sites in house before, I started to ask around and received varying feedback on the builds, it wasn’t sounding like I’d be able to leverage anything we’d built previously. Which was both a blessing and curse. A blessing because I’d be able to think through and design my own shell.
Bringing this back to the point and not be a dramatic story teller here’s what I did. I took a look around, didn’t find anything that seemed promising, found again that there were a 100 different ways to approach this. Being a fan of reusable code, I planned out a few different approaches using various object models. I planned before coding, thought about what the core functionality of every shell for any kind of site would be and went from there.
In the end deadlines caused me to have to stray from the generic abstract shell in order to keep our designer happy. The site turned out great and still had a really solid foundation that should allow me to go back and continue to abstract a bit more. I haven’t had a ton of time to rework the code much but when I do I’ll let you know.

Somewhere back in the early 90s mostly likely before I got out of High School I got the bright idea that I’d rip apart all my guitar magazines and collect the sheet music into a giant binder. All these years later I’m not sure if that was a good thing or not. First, 3 hole punched sheet music in a binder doesn’t hold together well, something I learned really quickly. Second binders fill up pretty fast. Third, the paper they use in magazines, isn’t so great, and finally it’s an organizational nightmare.
What do you do all these years later? I guess hope that all those songs that you wanted to learn back in 1992 are not songs that you’d even consider playing in 2008. Which of course is a problem for me, since much of my musical listening hasn’t really progressed much since 1992. Now that’s not to say that there’s not some pages that can’t be burned before anyone finds out that I ever tried playing them. After looking through the binder and sorting through 3 folders of random pages I found quite a bit of music that I had to wonder why it was there.
There were a few gems though, I found a copy of Pantera – Cowboys from Hell from Guitar School – September 1992. A few Megadeth songs and a few other things that I should really noodle around with. Most of the pages will probably sit for another 20 years waiting for me to finally just cast them away to the recycling bins.
So what’s the plan, well I’m going to scan and PDF all that interest me for the moment, not going to be a quick thing but if I do one or two a day I’ll get through them. After all they’ve been around this long what’s another 15 years.
Do you care? Didn’t think so, go do something useful.

For some reason I feel really busy…had Thursday and Friday off last week, resolved a few things that needed to be done, mostly relaxing days while trying to catch up on a few freelance projects. There’s still plenty to do unfortunately. ZenCart and CSS styling still aren’t playing nice. I bit off a bit more then I could handle there. I’m handling it and ZenCart is handling it but man it’s just a bit more digging through PHP then I was hoping for. Remind me never to take on another shopping cart design and implementation.
A few new toys have shown up, picked up a HTC Mogul (PPC – 6800) a few weeks ago, pretty cool phone/pda. It’s not an iPhone but I’m not one of the trendy kids and mine was half the price. We also picked up a Wii. They just happened to be available at Target and well since I haven’t seen one available to buy in about 4 months, I jumped on the chance. Played it for a few hours, it’s cool. I still feel like there’s no games that I really want to play on it though. All the games I want to play are on xbox 360 or ps3. I do feel sort of cheated , but hell it’s not like I’d be able to be in a different room playing a game.
There’s a few new developments in other areas but I’ll post them in the appropriate sections…until then…

While I’ve been working with Flash for several years now Flex is something I’ve been wishing I had a reason to work with. Up until this point I’ve just assumed that you’d use the Flex Builder to produce Flex Apps with but it seems that Eclipse may offer a better coding environment. So my day has been spent downloading and installing Eclipse, various plug ins and Flex Builder trials. I haven’t had a ton of time to work with any but all I know if I’m coming up with plenty of questions.
Is there any advantage to Flex Builder over Eclipse with the Flex Plug-in?
How do you purchase the Flex Plug-in? I can’t find it anywhere on the Adobe site?
Do you need to have the Flex SDK for FDT to work? It seems to be the only way I can get it to work so far.
:::UPDATE:::
After about an hour or so of toying around and lots of google searches, I have Eclipse working with the Flex Plug-in and FDT. I also have MTASC running. I haven’t had much time to actually try to use Eclipse at this point but I’m not really in the middle of any Flash work at the moment so. I’ll let you know when I do get to do some experiments.

It seems today that everyone is into passing around YouTube clips of various guitar heroes. Well I’m trying to avoid that thread because, well I’ve seen people iTunes shares, you guessed it a dozen emails with EVH playing Eruption. The musical depth and variety here is tragic.
Here’s a few tasty bits that I happened to track down on YouTube. Warning lots of hair and spandex in the following links…
Spread Eagle – Switchblade Serenade
http://youtube.com/watch?v=GnQ7mWWi7Gs
Possibly one of my favorite guitar songs of all time, this band was totally out of place back in 1990, they gave us 2 albums, one of the few bands from that era that I can still throw on and actually listen to without wanting to turn it off halfway through.
Roxxi – Drive it to ya hard
http://youtube.com/watch?v=kOhiS66YgSQ
Okay I’m putting this one here because watching this today is only the 2nd time I’ve ever seen this video. It aired once on HBB and was never seen again. Great band (for 1990) great album.
Ha this is turning into a “holy crap I forgot all about them” kind of post…
Heaven’s Edge – Skin To Skin
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ywR19g-rdY
Yeah I remember these guys, decent 1990s shredding glammy kind of stuff. Some crazy solo work on this album, I think I may have it on CD, if not it’s in one of the 3 16′ cube boxes of cassettes in my storage area.
XYZ – inside out
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7H2HBZ8lYU
Yep, crazy tapping solo going on here somewhere, decent guitar tone, ha I know I don’t have these guys on CD..Heck I remember learning this song at one of my guitar lessons back in umm…1990ish? My guitar teacher at the time used to hate when I’d bring this stuff in for him to play. Wow it’s kind of strange that I could remember there was a crazy tapping part at the end of the solo but I can’t remember what happened yesterday…
Roxx Gang – Scratch My Back
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7DzkHw4_xA
Okay here’s another band’s CD that I can throw on and rock out, this and Spread Eagle never leave my iPod. There are some great examples of 1990 guitar on here. I think this is the video where the trash the Gibson SG…drag it around behind a car on a chain or something.
HFS!!! See this is why I love YouTube…
Vain – Beat the Bullet
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQrpgsiSIU4
A few years ago this CD was going for $100 on amazon. No I didn’t sell it. I’m not sure I can make it through this whole album, there may be a track or two that I’d skip but you know it was the 1990s, they all had the same thing going on. track 1&2 rockin, track 3 was usually a ballad, track 4 would rock again, 5 or 6 would most likely be a ballad, flip the tape, track 1 hit or miss, could go either way, 2-3 more rockin tracks, another ballad and possibly finish it off with another rocker.
Moving on…
Hey another one I fogot about, Tom loved this band, can remember much about much about them.
Sea Hags – Half the way Valley
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fMvsJRga_8
Salty Dog – Come Along
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpeveNqlXoM
Ha, I remember these guys, I think I remember hearing that the singer graduated from one of the local high schools. Decent album, couple of ballads, #6 and #12, even some banjo in this album if I recall…
Roxy Blue – Rob The Cradle
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnT0Jjrx15k
Just for fun. I think they were trying to be Van Halen…
Okay enough, more trips down memory lane later…