Welcome to the Jimboverse

True to the spirit of NaNoWriMo, I completely abandoned all other projects during November.  I'll be updating here with progress on editing and publishing the book, as well as updates on the related video game.  If you're interested you can check out my NaNoWriMo profile.

Of course, now that I'm done it means real life comes screeching forward again.  I'm working on another extension to Firefox to submit for their Extend Firefox competition.  The extension is coming along nicely, and along with GeoNews - if I ever finish it - I will have two extensions to submit for the competition.

Last but certainly not least is my web related stuff.  I got another webpage job, and every time I do a new webpage I use it as an opportunity to refine my design skills.  The look I made for this site won't be changing much but I hope to gets rid of all the table elements and replace them with css styled DIV's.  I've only been putting it off because CSS is so wacky between different browsers.  I definitely want some drop shadows or some nice soft lighting blurs, but it also needs some purty background pics.

Obviously I upgraded my layout and design, I've still got some tweaking to do on it but it solves all of the design needs I have so the basic layout will be around for a while.

Work in the coming week on the site involves upgrading all of my subsections and defining their color themes.

I'm also hard at work on GeoNews, my news and RSS manager for firefox. Once it's finished I will be, of course, moving all of my news items into it.

Finally, I've joined the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) competition along with some friends from college. Rest assured the entire month of November will be eaten by this project (as I have nothing better to do).

I'm working on a new design methodology I'm calling the Golden Ratio Design. Basically it goes like this: Whenever there's a design choice that involves a set of linear possibilities, pick a value based on the golden ratio.

The first set of design documents I've created is GRD Colors. I have yet to write up the methodology behind this, but there is at least a GRD color picker based on this program I found on google.

Bascially, I've created a palette of colors based on the Golden Ratio, then - from the program I found - I've made a color picker that gives the phi color based on your primary and secondary color choices.

There's are still some bugs concerning the luminance of the phi color, but I'm working on it.

I made a sitemap for the Jimboverse that is a combination webpage and RSS feed. There was a few ways to go about doing this, but I went with the way that worked first and foremost as a webpage and only secondary as an RSS feed.  As a result, it doesn't seem to work in every RSS manager.  BUT, it does work in firefox (and hopefully IE7 when it eventually is released), and that was my target audience anyway.

I plan on adding an RSS feed / directory to every page on this site (Heck, I plan on upgrading the whole site), but the browser support just isn't there yet and Geocities as a backend is kinda difficult to work with.  And so, I'm upgrading the site piecemeal and trying to keep everything as organized as possible so that I can shift over to whatever the "next big thing" in web development is when it happens.

Also, my visual design just blows (I'm a minimalist when it comes to web design, but only because I fight the forces that make their webpages ENTIERLY in Photoshop or Dream Weaver - a webpage to me is information first, not art.), and I'd like to organize the huge list of links on the bar you see to the left.  You see, not only does this page keep track of my projects, it IS a project, and so like everything I do it only gets worked on when the inspiration strikes.  But rest assured that when inspiration strikes me, it strikes VERY hard.  How do you think I came up with a combo webpage RSS feed?

I've added a new short story to me short stories page, tentatively title Jimbo's theory of creation As it says in the description on my short stories page, I'd intended it as a mythology for a larger story I'm writing but it ended up being a good stand alone story as well.

If I put off updating any longer I was afraid Geocities would forgot I existed. I've been working on some random things, one of which is an RSS news manager for Geocities (which sorta explains the lack of news updates).  I did actually update the Jimboverse Construction Set a while ago with some new graphics and slightly improved code.  For making textures from scratch I think they turned out kinda good.

Also, I've been work on my DOOM maps recently (that craze from ID software circa the early 1990's).  There was an amateur contest on newdoom.com that I decided to make a map for which turned out better then I expected so I decided to go through my old maps an upload the one I'd actually finished to here.

For my particularly nostalgic college friends, the scale map I made of Zwingli (our dorm house) is there as well.

I have a site redesign in the works (to organize the ever growing list of projects you see to the left).  However, the next update should be coming sometime next week when I finish off a major chuck of my RSS manager, so until then folks (is that phrase supposed to end with something?).

After no updates for quite awhile, I've taken my first foray into Java programming tonight. I decided to work on a playing cards program, and the first thing I did was to draw the playing card symbols. I drew them all in CAD first to get the proper curve layouts and coordinates correct. Not bad for my first ever java program I think.

Added my collection of Windows LCD Enhanced Cursors to the Jimboverse. Also added my resume.

Added an Appreciate Your Lawn Day section to the Jimboverse, and added some more stories to the Short Stories section, included an infamous short story generator.

An offshoot of the Jimboverse Construction Set, I've begun work on my "edutainment" game tentatively titled "book binders". Basically the people have been turned into books and the books into monsters, and it's your job to save them. A little bit of "Typing of the Dead" and a little bit "Carmen Sandiego", with a lot of color and wit I hope it'll turn out as good as I see it in my head.

Anyway, the only thing I've gotten done so far, besides thinking up everything, is drawing and modeling the books (a.k.a people turned into books), go have a look.

Another update to The Jimboverse Construction Set, in this so far three day programming marathon. The editor now supports doors, as well as hidden doors - same as the Bard's Tale construction set. I also updated the map generator to compress the map into hexadecimal, which will help in the long run. Also new are a key and directions on how to use the editor. Next on my list is scripted events, which will be the biggest update.

Update to the The Jimboverse Construction Set. the buttons make more sense now, and there's also an example map for everyone to see what exactly it does.

Well, after a weeks worth of work The Jimboverse Construction Set is finally working. There's much left to do, and I plan to document everything I've done to get it working as it was quite complicated, but for now it's just there for you to play with.

To use it you'll need a realtively new browser such as Mozilla Firefox or Internet Explorer 6. You'll also need a VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) plugin. I suggest the Cortona plugin from Parallel Graphics.

Based largely on the Bard's Tale Construction Set (that's where the graphics are from actually), this project of mine will allow you to make your own 3D adventure games. for now though, it's just allows you to edit an 8x8 map.

Dez, from FYE, sent in her review of the Jimboflix she "rented".  I added it to that movies page in a user review's section I added to the bottom.  Watch your movies people!

In other news I added a color/black & white entry to my database, but I haven't gotten around to actually looking up what format each movie is, so I'll put that up later.

I added a favorites icon to the website today.  It's a cropped version of our ratty mascot.  It should show up if you bookmark the page, or if your viewing the page in mozilla or firefox.  It'll only show up in Jimboflix for now, because I wanna make a different one for the main Jimboverse page.  Insanely complicated process though, because geocities doesn't actually support icon files.  So, I needed to upload it as a shockwave file, and rename it for it to work correctly.  Also, it was acting funny in firefox, so I decided to copy their favicon and edit it with my editor just to be sure - since whatever works on their homepage must work on my page.

It adds that nice touch of professionalism (at least I think so).

I finally got around to adding the rest of the movies I had into the database, there are currently 22 in total as the running count on the Jimboflix page shows.  Also, the Jimboflix front page is now almost completely Javascript.  If you have any trouble running the scripts all you will see is my introduction and then the rats rating description, there will be no list of movies.  If this happens please let me know and I will try to fix it.  The page does work in the latest versions of both IE and Mozilla, but you have to bypass IE's inane security settings first.  I'll be adding some more info about each movie into the database in the near future such as color/b&w, screen format, and dvd extras.  If you have any suggestions, let me know.  I also removed the links to my review pages, because you can now just click on the movie's name to get to the review page, and having two links seemed, at the least, redundant.  I'm considering a different layout for the giant list of movies once the data in the database gets sorted our.

I'm suddenly realizing that these updates are amazingly technical.  Basically, cleaned things up, added more movies, and if you don't see any movies that you need to change a setting in order to see them.

I feel better.

I was toying around with some programming stuff and decided to move the Jimboflix list of movies to a psuedo-database in Javascript. This is good because now you can sort the list by name, year, or rats rating. Just sort by the same type again to switch from ascending to descending. A possibly bad side effect is that it probably won't work on older browsers, your mileage may vary. Post a comment or e-mail me if you encounter any errors. My next major change will be to add the same Javascript functionality to each of the review pages so that I can add movies only in the database without having to remake every single page.

Well, here it is.  This website is the result of about a months worth of movie buying, watching, and cataloging.  To get started click on the Jimboflix link on your left.  You might be able to guess from the name, but everything else should be explained on the Jimboflix page.

I'll be adding a lot to this page in the near future such as my various writings from Literary Society, my various programming projects, my (various) game designs, and (finally) my web development work.

Anyway, enjoy and Merry Christmas everyone!