Miscellaneous

Here's the home for assorted material that doesn’t fit elsewhere.

Web Design

For a number of years, mainly during high school, I worked on and off as a freelance web designer. I got into it as a throwaway vocation while poking around online—a basic knowledge of HTML seemed like a valuable thing to have—and ended up interested enough that I kept at it, eventually doing it for pay. I’d pick up work doing small sites for local businesses, via word-of-mouth referrals or occasional advertising through Craigslist or the like. I didn’t work very much, but because I was a high school student with no real expenses, everything I made was cash in my pocket, and I could essentially pick up and put down the business as I pleased; there were times when I literally thought, “I could use some cash,” and sought out work to fill my pockets.

Toward the end of 2005, I came to terms with the grim realities that (1) The general practice of web design had largely lost its allure, and (2) I had never been a very good designer. (I was a competent coder and a conscientious one, which put me ahead of many of the page-butchers out there, but in the aesthetic sense of design, I had no training and no talent other than trial and error.) So I decided to give it up. Nowadays I only get involved with design for the purpose of specific personal projects; my single active site is run through WordPress, which requires little backend involvement on my part.

Below are some of the sites I worked on from start to finish. Nothing is linked that I didn’t create 100% on my own (except where otherwise stated), and at least one complete site is omitted that I’m so ashamed of I’d like to retcon it from my portfolio.

All of my work, incidentally, is standards-correct (though toward the end, not zealously so; I eventually came to terms with the fact that standards were a tool, not a religious practice), valid (X)HTML with CSS used for all positioning. No tables to be found; this was actually an easy accomplishment for me, because I entered the field after the standards movement was widespread, so there was never a tables-to-CSS shift to weather. I hand-code in BBEdit or more recently TextMate, plus Photoshop for graphics, Adobe fonts, Transmit for FTP, Textile for encoding web text, and a few other toys. I habitually use PHPwebhosting.com for hosting, an excellent small-to-moderate-scale host with a dead-low cemented rate and every feature I’ve ever wanted.

Halo & Bungie

In early 2001, I entered the fan community surrounding the video game Halo, which would eventually be released for the Xbox after a long and tumultuous development cycle. I have remained a part of the Bungie community in various guises and to various degrees ever since, though my actual connection to the game (and the later sequel) faded to casual interest.

Later Bungie, or rather a group of contracted studios, ported the original Halo to the PC and Macintosh. I picked up the Mac version and checked it out, finding it largely lackluster—on one hand essentially no different from the already-passé Xbox game, and on the other hand technically flakey and poorly ported. However, there was one essential difference: in this version, the Banshee, one of the user-controllable aircraft, was usable in online multiplayer.

I found myself fascinated with the Banshee, loving how it felt and how it behaved in the air. I had never much cared for it either way in the Xbox game, but then, you only could use it several times in the single-player campaign and not at all in multiplayer. Being able to really sink my teeth into it, and use it against others in online play, was a novel experience, and soon I found myself flying it constantly—indeed, I had essentially no interest in the game itself anymore, just in using the Banshee. Eventually I was playing for hours every day, on the same handful of maps (those with enough space and set up appropriately for flying), and getting pretty good at it.

At some point I was one of the better pilots online—not a patch on decent players outside of the Banshee, I could lose a pistol duel or grenade pitch-off like anyone else, but with my ride I could work magic. I loved it to death. Outside of this, I have never really been gifted at much; maybe competent at many things, but never the best in a competitive realm, at least nothing that interested me. It was a new experience.

I ended up writing some tutorial pieces that I posted to several community sites, discussing use of the Banshee. In part they were for me, as putting my tactics and methods into words helped me formulate and understand them better. In part it was just nice to share what I’d learned.

On the whole, the Bungie community has given me so much that it’s hard to quantify. You could say that, at such a formative period of my life, I’d have been affected no matter what I was doing, and that may be true; but the particular ways that these folks and activities influenced me are ones that I’m very glad about. I’m a better writer, a better communicator, a more mature person, a tolerable web designer, an experienced hand with online interactions (a skillset that has carried me even further, amongst other communities and sites, to learn and explore other fields and skills), and more. It’s a darned cool thing and the main reason that I’m so fond of such groups . . . and so emphatic that even “newbies,” young members, and “unpolished” folks be treated well when encountered in the digital ether. You can have a big effect on them. Honest.

Banshee Handling Articles

Other Banshee Video Clips

Halo PC Screenshots