This last weekend was pretty sad… I basically spent ALL weekend doing homework (with the exception of church on Sunday). However, I did take a few minutes on Sunday night to finalize Tobin’s site. So now tobinsprings.com is live. Exciting! :-)

Tobin wanted a site of his own to 1). Showcase his artwork 2. For his art classes at the University of Idaho (where he’s working toward a masters degree). So on his site, I built him a portfolio for his artwork and sketches, and a masters section. The Masters section is set up so that he can add subsequent classes and keep track of them easily.

As far as the back-end of the site goes… I used a combination of WordPress, ZenPhoto and a Flash plugin called SlideShowPro. SlideShowPro powers the slideshow on the homepage. That slideshow reads a dynamic xml document that is written from data pulled from the ZenPhoto database. Gotta love PHP. Nathan Smith of SonSpring.com blogged about the plugin on his site awhile ago, so when I wanted a nice slideshow, I decided to give SlideShowPro a shot. I’m happy with my purchase, and I think it looks great in Tobin’s site.

ZenPhoto runs Tobin’s portfolio. If you are looking for a simple, clean photo gallery solution – look no further than ZenPhoto. I have used it on a number of websites, and it’s great.

WordPress runs the rest of the site (Masters, About, etc.). I did a little magic here… Tobin’s Masters pages are all pages – not posts. But I wanted to structure this section using classes and assignments. I wanted to show an excerpt (including images) for each assignment on the class page. That’s not really built into WordPress… So I ended up figuring out the code to pull an excerpt for a page – including images. If you’re wanting to do something like that, contact me using the contact form.

I also tweaked the ZenPress WordPress plugin a bit so it inputs a specific-width for thumbnails – and they are linked to a larger image which opens using Lighbox. I’d already done this tweaking for my website, so this was a pretty quick change for his site.

So go ahead and jet over to tobinsprings.com and look it over. In the future we’d like to add a shopping cart to the site so you can purchase Tobin’s artwork. If something catches your eye now, you can contact me and we can work something out.

p.s.  Happy Halloween…  Too bad I’m sitting in class rather than hanging out with the Youth at Trunk or Treat!

I didn’t do much this weekend ‘cept hang out with my brother and his wife (and Tobin of course) and do homework. The highlights of the weekend? Well besides just hanging out with family, I went to Fry’s on Saturday and picked up another 500 gig HD (bought another last week). Also grabbed a Netgear network storage device, and now I have 1 TB sitting on my network. That’s pretty cool. I backed up my 100+ gigs of photos, so I feel a little better now (having a backup as opposed to nothing).

Anyways I’m sitting here finishing up my Case Analysis for my Software Analysis and Design class, and I decided to take a little comic-relief break. Have you seen the new Weird Al music video, White and Nerdy? lol Well it totally cracked me up, so I thought I’d post it on my site for all of you to enjoy. :-)

[Sorry, I pulled the video... ]

Hope you enjoy the video as much as I did.

So this last weekend, Rhys & Margie Lou came over to visit. It was great. We packed a bunch of activities into the weekend!

Friday Night

Rhys & Margie Lou arrived Friday night. They first went to Stephen & Heather’s to drop off their stuff, then rode up to our place with Stephen. We had a BBQ of blue-cheese burgers (Tobin’s new specialty). Yum! Then we drove up to Seattle in Vader (Heather couldn’t come so there were only 5 of us). Once in Seattle we basically roamed the streets for a few hours. (We thought that TheatreSports started at 10, not 10:30.) We did end up getting coffee at the Starbucks outside of Westlake Center. But we seriously walked a ton while we were killing time. It was fun (‘cept for my feet as I was wearing boots – oh well).

At 10:30 we went to Market Theatre (at Pike Place Market) where we watched TheatreSports. Fun! I’m not sure it was AS funny as the last time we went but it was pretty hillarious all the same. We all had a good time. Walking from there to our car (parked under the Viaduct) we saw a bunch of rats – maybe 20-30. It was pretty gross. They were everywhere!

Saturday

Saturday started off with breakfast at our house. Tobin and I made Belgian Waffles from scratch, complete with a from-scratch strawberry sauce. Tobin also made sausage links. Yum that was good. Our house smelled great! (I’m getting hungry now just thinking about it.)

From our house we drove to the Seattle Center, and got coffee at the Starbucks in the center. Then we went to the Pacific Science Center where we debated whether or not we should buy a membership. We ended up doing the math and realized it was $6 more to have a membership and go see a 3d IMAX movie, than it was to just visit the center and see the movie. So we are now members of the Pacific Science Center. :-)

We had wanted to see the Dead Sea Scrolls, but didn’t realize how much it cost (on top of membership), AND it was sold out so we didn’t get to see that – but we did have fun exploring the Science Center. Rhys had never been there so we made sure he saw everything. While we were at the Science Center, we went and saw Open Season on IMAX in 3d. That was pretty fun! The whole movie was in 3d instead of Superman (which we saw there but was only 3d in several sections of the movie). I honestly don’t know what I would’ve thought of the movie had I seen it at a normal theatre, but it the fact that it was in 3d just made it super cool. lol I think we’ll go back and watch Happy Feet when it comes to IMAX in 3d starting in November.

After the movie we drove down to the waterfront and parked our car (we were driving the Bomber in case you were wondering) under the Viaduct. From there we walked to the Pike Place Market. Heather wanted to get crumpets – but that store had closed at 4 (it was 5:30 or so). While we were at the Market it closed (at 6), so we walked down to Ivars and had dinner there. That was pretty fun – it was getting dark and was rather cold – but we opted to eat outside (cheaper). Rhys got a kick out of feeding the seagulls after dinner. I have some pictures of that in the gallery… He tried to hit one and then they wouldn’t come back after that (good job Rhys). lol

After dinner we walked along the waterfront and visited Ye Olde Curiosity Shop. That was fun (as always). Heather and I entertained ourself with some magnetized hematite – fun. lol

From Seattle we drove back to our place, then took two cars down to Stephen and Heather’s. On the way, ML and I swung by the Auburn Supermall and stayed there ’till it closed (we might have been there an hour or so). For all the clothes I tried on, I ended up buying a belt – ML didn’t find anything. From there we joined everyone else at Stephen and Heather’s where we downloaded pics from the day and the guys played Halo.

Sunday

Heather has started going to a church out in Bonney Lake so on Sunday morning we decided to go there with her. We drove down to Stephen and Heather’s for breakfast, then drove to Bonney Lake for church. It was a special service – not one like they normally do – this one was promoting life groups. Heather got some information on those, then we left and went to Starbucks. We contemplated what exactly we could do on Sunday (it was raining cats and dogs, so anything outside was out of the question). We were going to go shooting but decided we didn’t have the time. We ended up drawing some group pictures at Starbucks, then headed back to Stephen and Heather’s where we ordered Pizza Hut and played Apples to Apples. Now that I think about it, I don’t think anyone actually won at Apples to Apples, as we stopped playing when the pizza got there – but that was fun. After we finished lunch, ML and Rhys headed back to Wenatchee and we went home. And that was our weekend.

Be sure to check out the photos from this weekend in the photo gallery!

Note: I wrote this out by hand while I was sitting in my class. I’m just now posting it, several weeks after the fact (I have back-dated it the date I wrote it).

We’re back into the school year now, so life seems especially busy. (Though being busy isn’t exactly foreign to us!)

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it before, but to bring you up to speed on another aspect of our lives, Tobin and I help out at a youth group, Illuminate. It is an extension of Neighborhood Life Center. Illuminate had a pretty amazing attendance rate over the summer (higher than I’ve seen in the past), so I don’t think we’vre really seen too much of an upswing in attendance now that we’re back into the school year. With that said, the quality of the youth group has been especially encouraging. The messages have been good – we’re recording them now and posting them on the website (which I recently rebuilt). Worship has been great – I play the paino, and we’re back to having a bass – which really adds depth. I take pictures every Tuesday, process them in Photoshop and upload them to the youth’s website – all by the time the kids are ready to go home.

So everything for youth group has been rolling right along. Unfortunately, I found out last Thursday that I did make it into the one class I could take this quarter toward my masters, and it’s on Tuesday nights! Bummer! This will pull me out of youth for the next 10 weeks. In fact as I’m writing this I’m in the second hour of my first week of class. The youth kids keep asking me what class I’m taking. It’s CS560 – Software Development – on the small chance you actually care. :-) Actually I think that it’s going to be a great quarter (at least I hope so!). The teacher seems like he knows what’s going on, and I’ve had several other classes with two of my classmates, so that’s nice.

What is going to happen at youth? Well Tobin will take two cameras (hopefully) and have kids take pictures. We’ve already had the kids taking photos, so we should be ok there. We just got a new hand-me-down computer that we installed a new EMU404 Sounds Card in, so we’ve got a bit of a learning curve there. So far I’m pretty impressed with the sound quality coming out of the card – it’s 100% better than the sound we got out of the laptop. Tonight is the first time we’ve actually recorded with the new sound cars, so we’ll see how that goes.

It’s Wednesday now as I’m writing this… The recording yesterday wasn’t all that great – we’ve got to figure out the quirks of that new sound card! Last night I swung by the tail-end of Illuminate after class. That was fun. It was better than missing all together. When I got home, I processed the pictures and got those up on the website. Then I checked my email. There was an email waiting for me from Dreamhost (that’s who I host this site through). Anyways, the first paragraph of that email told me that Dreamhost had bumped up hosting space on our accounts. Log in to your control panel and find out what your space is at now. Well I had 50 gigs (which I thought was great) – I paid about $400 for two years of hosting. When I logged in to my email, I had a (drumroll please) whopping 400 gigs of space. AWESOME! Ok, so I basically love Dreamhost now (as if I didn’t before). If you’re looking for some new/better hosting, I’d highly encourage you to go with Dreamhost (and use that link so I get some credit). lol

So I started off this post discussing our youth group, Illuminate, but never mentioned some things about our church itself. Two Sundays ago, we had an evening worship service at Safeco Field! How cool is that? There were serveral hundred people in attendance. It was so cool. Pastor Gary Vanderhoff said that the Lord has really been laying on his heart to have a worship service at Safeco – eventually packing the stadium out with worshippers. Well this year was a trial run for that – but I hope that the door is now open and the wheels rolling for this to be a massive, AWESOME event next year. (It was awesome this year, just a little smaller-scale.) :-) I took my camera and got a lot of pictures. Surprisingly a lot of them turned out. :-) I sped up my “film” to 1600 and lowered the exposure, then “push-processed” the pictures in Photoshop. Some of them even made it into the Sunday morning worship service – so I guess I’m following closely in my fathers footsteps. :-)