Marcus McCurdy’s Blog

I found this article on Wired via Digg and wanted to post about it. If you are hoping to one day don a metal suit and fly around through the sky like Iron Man then prepare to be disappointed. According to the article the energy requirements needed to put a person in the air and then fly around are simply too great to be supplied by the small suit with present day technology. One can only hope that those evil genuises / scientists work faster so we can get our sweet Iron Man suits.

The article did say that one feature of the suit that isn’t so much fiction is the cybernetic helmet and similar technology is already being developed.

read more | digg story

I came across this tutorial on design float and decided to try it out. The tutorial is from Vile Works blog. My end result of the tutorial can be viewed after the jump. [Read the rest of this entry...]

I stumbled upon (not the stumble upon site) this great post on Gamasutra about using the highpass filter in photoshop to make it easier to tile textures. The focus is on textures in games and 3D graphics, but it is sill pertinant for any kind of texture use. http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20010523/hajba_pfv.htm

I just found this really cool free grunge texture photo site called Urban Dirty. I checked out some of the textures and they look really top-notch.

Today is Earth Day if you weren’t already aware and I just wanted to make a special post wishing everyone a happy day. Take a moment to step outside and enjoy nature for a few minutes to help celebrate the day.

I found these advanced tips to speed up your website at Jaisen Mathai’s blog. He used yslow to get a grade on his website’s speed then used the tips from that program to speed up his site. He went from an F to an A so check it out. I’m going to run yslow on my site later. http://www.jaisenmathai.com/blog/2008/02/27/speed-up-apache-how-i-went-from-f-to-a-in-yslow/

Here is Lola the Chihuahua performing her newest trick.

Everything has been switched over to the new media temple server and is working great. The only hiccup I had was that I needed to change my .htaccess file slightly due to the different server configuration, but everything is copacetic now.

The servers are too slow!

I’ve decided to switch hosting from Go Daddy to Media Temple. Go daddy is just too slow. I’m not sure if it is the database server that is causing my wordpress to be unacceptably slow or if I just got stuck on a bad shared hosting server e.g. someone else is bogging the server down. Hopefully there will be no downtime as I’ve already transfered everything over and the only thing I have to do now is change my DNS information. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

I’ve read many posts complaining about Go Daddy’s support, but I haven’t had to use their support for anything. They are very economical, but when the server is so slow that the page times out when you try to make a post that just isn’t acceptable.

First, I know there are plugins that do this, but I didn’t feel like using a plugin. Second, I got the idea for this from Jennifer Slegg’s blog post 52 easy ways to optimize your blog while on your coffee break. The link that she gave to Matt Cutt’s blog post How to highlight author comments in WordPress didn’t match up with the code my theme is using or the the default Kubrick theme (I think he designed his own theme). I’ll show you the method I used to modify my comments.php and style.css. [Read the rest of this entry...]