TeamSD: Adventures of Lawyer Girl and Demian Man

Yoyo. I haven’t posted in awhile, but I’ve been doing more twitter updates lately (see above for work hilarity). I just wanted to take a quick moment to write a post to gloat about something.

A few weeks ago EVGA (makers of the BEST video cards in the world) — no bias here at all — held a bunch of really cool contests. One of which, was FREE to sign up for, where all you had to do was play this video game (Team Fortress 2) on one of EVGA’s servers on “TF2 Weekend” and then you’re entered to win a drawing for a bunch of different prizes.

Anyhow, I sent the link to a bunch of my friends and I got mixed responses from “Ohh maan, I’m not very good, I don’t think I’d be able to win anything” (it’s a free raffle, just enter, play, and win), to “bah, I’m just too lazy” (apparently too lazy to win free stuff).

Either way, what happened was, the TF2 weekend came about, I queued up to join the EVGA server and play a round… loh and behold, all my other friends we’re playing TF2 at the exact same time (just on a different server) when they could have been playing on the EVGA server. Anyways, I played a few rounds on the EVGA server, quit that server to play on the same server with my friends and a few weeks later I am now a winnar:

My winnings! (New 23" Samsung 120mhz widescreen monitor, and 3d evga glasses -- floss not included)

EAT IT!

Well in an effort to beef up my web devleopment category as well hopefully provide some page rank to this new site I’ve developed, I’ll start posting some of the new websites that I’ve been developing and working on (well, at least the fun ones).

How it got started:
I met Terry at a comic book convention a couple of years ago (Super Con in San Jose) and we somehow got talking about some previous issues he had with his website and I offered to help out if he ever needed it. Recently we got in touch and developed this beauty below!

Terry Dodson's homepage

Terry Dodson's Portfolio

Design: All of the design was done by Terry Dodson

Development: Built this mostly with plain html/css, just using php for includes and other simple functions. Used a little bit of jquery to get some fade effects and for the portfolio slideshows.

Visit Terry Dodson’s Official Website

So I’m pretty sure everyone knows, but I <3 Zazzle. Perhaps the greatest place to work at, but it’s also a great place to get gifts and shop around.

So at work I don’t have a mousepad and so I’ve been waiting around and decided to just buy one from Zazzle to have at my desk. Then it suddenly dawned on me, “DUH, I collect all this art at home, I might as well turn one of them into this awesome mousepad”. So I printed the mousepad below!

Philip Tan Supergirl Mousepad

Pretty cool huh? Anyways, I’m really pleased with the way the mousepad turned out, I’m thinking of getting some mugs or something else with the art on it.

On a semi related note, there is a sort of new restaurant with the chef from the Grateful Dead/Google in town and country village in Palo Alto called Calafia and they have the moooossttt delciious smoothies. My favorite smoothie has organic orange juice, carrot juice, peaches, honey, agave and vanilla yogurt. So everyone should go visit and try that smoothie. Oh yeah… and it’s called the Zazzle Zinger (coincidence? I think not… Awesome T-Shirts = Awesome Smoothie). In all seriousness, the smoothies ARE really good and the Zazzle Zinger is the best one…

Zazzle Zinger

If you haven’t noticed, I’ve updated the wishlists for me and jaci in the navigation above.

I’ve had the functionality updates done for a little over a year but just got too lazy to implement the back-end to update it. Some new functionality that the wishlist provides includes: new jquery sorting, print page option which removes all styling and prints all the notes, additional sidebar navigation, and new icons that you can hover over which will say when the item was added or if it was updated recently. The big new edits were in the admin section which most of you won’t see, but I enabled one click completion, one click delete, and a tabbed interface to allow for quicker loading.

Some things I plan to work on still / troubleshoot: The entire teamsiudemian.com domain seems to be running a bit slow. I’m not sure what might be causing that but I’ll keep looking into. The lag seems to also pass on to the wishlist. I’d also like to take a look into adding auto completion, shared wishlists, and hidden wishlists for the admin side.

Anyhoo, if you guys run into any problems with the new wishlist let me know so I can take a look into it.

New Wishlist Interface

Wishlist Admin

Oh… and btw, my bday is next week. Coincidence? I THINK NOT!

Whew, so this was a pretty exciting weekend (Well at least Saturday was)! Saturday morning (after lunch at Broadway Bistro) we headed up to the Los Altos Rod and Gun Club! My Uncle Fritz collects a bunch of guns and rifles and Jaci and Michael were both interested in going shooting sometime (and I always love going) so with Uncle Fritz was in town we decided to head up and give some of his guns a workout!

We shot quite a few different of pistols including, two .22 pistols, 2 .357 revolvers (long barrel and short barrel), a .40 pistol, an mp5 variant submachine gun (although classified as a pistol I guess since it was modified to be a single shot). For the rifles we had a .22 rifle, something that was similar to a m15 assault rifle (I forget what it actually was), an AK 47 variant, and a pretty big rifle which was a called a PAL, FPL or something… like that. For the pistols we shot at 10 yard and 20 yards and all the rifles we shot at 50 yards.

Anyways, so since this would have been a very picture heavy post rather than having a story for every picture, I just threw a bunch of mini thumbnails below. Going shooting was super fun as always, but some oddities of the day include Steph, who was literally just crocheting the whole time, and the first 10 minutes we were there, Jaci was literally jumping every time a gun was shot.

Pictures below!