I put together a collection of my favorite images from my first year of photography over on my Flickr site. It’s crazy to think I’ve only been doing this for a little over a year, but it has become one of my favorite things to do; I just need more time to do it. Brandon and I went to a Joe McNally lighting seminar in Houston; it was awsome! I’ve read Joe’s blog all year and his books are a must read for any photographer, so to see him in person was by far the highlight of my year. The only problem is I left the seminar regretting the fact that I own Canon equipment; Joe does everything with Nikon equipment and it doesn’t take him long to show you why Nikon is kicking Canon’s butt in flash photography.

Since it’s now 2010 I know I should make a new year resolution, but I think setting out some goals would be a better idea.

Goal 1: Take More Photos

As a beginning photographer you can never take enough photos. I’m a bit of an equipment junky, I see a shot and immediately want to purchase equipment so I can take that type of photo. In 2010 I want to start pushing the limits of what I can do with all the equipment I currently own (and it’s more than enough to make some damn good shots). I want to buy the Canon 5D mark III next year because my 40D is dead from taking too many photos not because it’s the hot new camera; like how I snuck a purchase into the goal, lol

Goal 2: Be Healthy and Happy

With juggling work and school my health tends to take a low priority and my quality of life tends to be nil. I want to focus more on making sure I’m around in 10 years so I can actually use my degree.

Goal 3: Put the Toys Away

I’ve lived the bachelor life for quite awhile, and looking back I’ve have had no shortage of toys, trips, and fun. I want to try and go a year without buying everything I want and try to limit it to what I need. I know several of you are laughing you ass off right now, but you’re the people I expect to help me stick to this

Well, that’s enough writing for me. See you in another six months….

Goal 4: Update This Website

…… 3 out of 4 ain’t bad

I’ve heard several complaints that the front page for codygreen.com takes a long time to load. While the web site is image heavy the pages are optimized as much as they can be. The problem was largely due to the service provider, Lunar Pages, which took forever to pull content off their servers. I was working on a process to try and use JQuery to load the first image and then pull the remaining images on the front page down once the page had loaded when Lunar Pages started having hosting problems for almost two days. I finally had enough and I’ve moved everything to GoDaddy.com. I’ve used GoDaddy for several consulting projects so I figured I would give them a shot with my personal web site. So far I’m very happy with the speed of the servers and the site loads 2/3′s faster than before. I had to upgrade my account to get everything working but I’m not too worried about that; now I can host my Python webapps here.

Well as the new semester begins I hope to start blogging again and my plan is to do more reviews and technical articles about things I use or problems I run into at work. So if you don’t see a new post every few days feel free to post a comment and tell me to get my shit in gear

I created a mockup of the site using Pixelmator. It’s a nice product developed for the mac that uses the GPU instead of the CPU for rendering. This allows you to see effects in real time. If you have a mac I highly recommend that you try it out; there’s a 30 day demo. I have to say it is much easier to create a mockup in an image editor and make changes versus doing the mockup in code. Being a programmer I prefer to just sit down and code, but in the end I usually end up not getting the look I want and scrapping the entire concept. As for the results, I like the new design but I think it needs some work. Keep in mind I am not a graphic designer, so if you think it sucks please keep it to yourself .

As for the home page, this was a concept I took from a JQuery tutorial and I modified it to work with WordPress. While I like the concept I need to rewrite the JQuery from scratch and change how pictures are loaded. I’ve had several people tell me that the images take too long to load. So I would like to have the page load and then use JQuery to pull the remaining 5 images (1 image per featured post). This way, if someone clicks on a post and the image has not loaded yet they’ll get a loading bar versus the entire page taking 30 seconds or more to load. There are a few problems I have with the limitations of some WordPress function calls. At the moment I’m trying not to modify the WordPress code base, this would be bad for future upgrades, but I need to find a better way to better customize the WordPress output. An example is the “[..]” for each except on the home page. You can’t remove this and you can’t make that a link to the full article without modifying the WordPress code. Oh well, sometimes you have to just deal with the lemons you’re given.

Not sure if I’ll be able to fix it this week but I will get to it.

Going to Dallas this weekend to visit my little bother who just finished Marine boot camp; should be fun. Hopefully I’ll get some time to take pictures and update my blog. Maggie is coming to Dallas with us this weekend so I hope she’ll have fun and not learn any bad habits from Rascal, a.k.a. pisser.

More after the weekend….

It’s funny to me that two or three years ago this type of programming was my specialty. Now, I spend so much time doing systems work or systems programming this “make it work in multiple browsers” crap is pissing me off!.