Make Me A Baseball Card is Live!

I’ve always been a coding tinker-er but most of my personal projects never really “went live”.  This year I made a new years resolution to design, develop and deploy an app all the way through.

I’m proud to announce that I flipped the switch and my first personal project went live last night!  You can check it out here: MakeMeABaseballcard.com  There were lots of late nights and lots of coffee.  It was like having a 2nd part-time job.  Whew…

What is it?

MakeMeABaseballcard.com lets someone track their baseball stats and print out their very own baseball card.

When they click the Print Card link, we open a new window and they can print their card directly through the browser’s print functionality.  Here’s my printed card.

What’s next?

There are a TON of things I want to add.  Keep an eye on the facebook page for new features!

 

My First Beer Label

And my realization that I SUCK at photoshop….

I decided to call my latest batch of homebrew Rosie IPA (in honor of the Puppy’s first christmas) and I had an idea for a label in mind.  After stumbling and bumbling through the wealth of photoshop tutorials I realized that I SUCK AT PHOTOSHOP.  Actually, let me clarify, I suck and graphic designing in Photoshop.  I can rock Bridge + Camera Raw for photo editing, but when it comes to graphics and text and layouts and layers I SUCK.  It took me an hour to figure out how to draw a rectangle that fit across the top third of the canvas!!

Anyway, I stumbled through it and I’m actually pretty happy with the result:

The crazy thing is that I think I can do all of this even easier in the simplified editor that comes with Snagit!

But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness. No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?

Minor Productivity Tips with QuickSilver

I love QuickSilver on my mac.  When I have to get a new mac, Quicksilver will be the first application I install.  I know there are a TON of sites that have great Quicksilver tips and tricks, but I wanted to take a few minutes and show some of the shortcuts I use everyday.

1.  Bookmarks for QS

I love the fact that Quicksilver indexes my internet browser’s bookmarks.  99% of the time I open my favorite web pages through Quicksilver.  Example: ctrl+space > “min” > Mint.com is opened in Safari.

Also, when I land on a site that I want to come back to but I don’t necessarily want to clutter up the bookmarks bar, I’ll bookmark the site and dump it into the “Bookmarks for QS” folder.  That way I can easily get back without having to drill through tons of folders or browser history to remember where I was.

2.  Google search from QS

Love this one but I can’t take credit for figuring it out.  See Setting up a Google web search Trigger for instructions.

3.  Opening a folder for developing in TextMate

ctrl+space > navigate to the desired folder > tab > open with > textmate.  And it opens the folder in TextMate as a project.  Here’s a little attempt at a screen cast I made while playing with Camtasia.

Chili, Baking and Homebrew

Today was a wonderful saturday.  The weather was gorgeous, I didn’t have any commitments, I had a batch of beer to brew, AND, to top things off, Jason came over with all the ingredients for homemade chili.  He had a hankering and I wasn’t going to let an offer like this pass me by.

As I worked on brewing my Chinook IPA, Jason made up some fantastic chili.  Then Jen got home and decided to whip up some Tastefully Simple Beer Bread.

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