Archive

We need to get rid of our inventory and are selling these CrossFit t-shirts at cost to all gym owners and trainers, if you buy 10 or more.

Men’s Red

Sizes

Small Medium Large X-Large

Men’s Green

Sizes

Small Medium Large X-Large

Women’s Red

Sizes

Small Medium Large

Women’s Purple

Sizes

Small Medium Large

Anyone out there who has children, especially teen-agers, will understand the need for parental control software. Even if your not concerned about your kiddo going to the “naughty” sites, there are many other sites out there that will fill your computer with viruses and turn your child into an online addict.
After our last visit to the computer doctor to fix our childs machine we decided we were done policing and arguing and decided to investigate parental control software.
What we were looking for-
Because we home school, our child is on the computer much of the day. We were not as concerned about him viewing inappropriate sites, but we were fed up with trying to constantly look over his shoulder to see if he was staying on track with school. As well, we wanted to limit his overall computer time with out having to police it. Lastly, we wanted to keep him off gaming sites and other sites that are notorious for malware and viruses.
What we found -
My initial search brought me to a site called Well-Researched Reviews. It supposedly provides unbiased reviews for various types of software. They recommended a program called Web-Watcher, which was the most expensive one listed on the site. The email I received from the customer support seemed a little fishy, so I continued my research and discovered that the Web-watcher software was most likely a scam. They charge you for the initial software, then keep charging you for upgrades, threatening to take away your access if you don’t pay. It’s likely the well -researched reviews site is owned by the same makers of the software. After doing a bit a reading, I discovered that many of the parental control software companies are actually scams, some even getting your log on and password information to various sites, including bank accounts and using this information to with draw money. I decided on a giving Web Nanny a shot, which I found on www.cnet.com, a good place to find legitimate, unbiased reviews.
Web Nanny has the ability to do everything I was looking for plus the following features: Profanity masking, Social Network Monitoring, Proxy filtering, URL blocking plus provides you with detailed reports on your kiddo’s Google Searches and usage. I am in the process of setting it up and I think it will make our life as parents much easier. Web Nanny also has developed software to for hand held devices such as smart phones. I will report back in a month or so with an update and let you know if we are happy with the features.
As a parent I think technology has made our job a lot harder. I honestly hate all the hand held devices and can’t believe the number of parents I know that don’t monitor or restrict the time their kids are “plugged in”. We have no idea what our kids are encountering on-line and with so many ways to access the internet, it’s nearly impossible to shield them from a world that they are possibly not ready for.

Visual Adventures was recently contracted by Dayzign Graphics to create three interactive flash slideshows for Kahtoola, an outdoor company that makes snowshoes, and crampons.  Working on flash projects often provides me with opportunities to challenge and develop my Flash skills.  First I needed to design a slide-show that would slide sideways and included a product image which would extend beyond the square frame.  Logistically, this can’t really be done in that way without getting really complicated.  I suggested another solution that performed the needed function with efficiency and grace, having the product fade in over the sliding images.  This project required a fair amount of actionscipt code and time but the end result was a success.

Links to the flash slideshows:

• http://www.kahtoola.com/
• http://www.kahtoola.com/snowshoes.php
• http://www.kahtoola.com/microspikes.php
• http://www.kahtoola.com/crampons.php

Guy Lacelle died yesterday in an avalanche while climbing during the opening day of the Bozeman Ice Festival. This is the third friend I’ve lost this year to avalanches alone.

This comes as such a loss for all of us and a sad way to begin the Bozeman Ice Festival. Guy was just such a kindhearted fellow and I see this repeated over and over on facebook posts.
Beyond just being a great guy, he climbed very challenging ice climbs rope-less regularly. He was a standalone in this category.

So here my toast to you Guy, glass raised high to an outstanding individual, both as a person and as a climber. Thanks for letting me stay in your room when I was sick in Quebec.  I haven’t forgotten that little bit of generosity.  It was always great competing with you too at the ice festival competitions.  You were such a sportsman, and we all respected you for that.

First you need to find some good dark chocolate. I’ve been a fan of the Dove Dark chocolate since I was a kid. A lot of the other brands are waxy and have no flavor.
The trick to eating the chocolate is to go slow. In fact, it’s best if you just let it melt in your mouth. No chewing is allowed. You will not need much chocolate to succeed in satisfaction.
The next flavor to add is a nice, strongly made espresso or latte. It’s important not to have too much milk (like those latte’s made at Starbucks). You need to be able to taste the coffee.
Ahhh, yes, there it is. I think I’m ready for the afternoons load of work now. Smile!

I’ve spent the past two mornings (plus more time previously) working on an expandable layout for the Visual Adventures website. An expandable layout means that as the browser window is resized, the content will grow or shrink to fit. This initially sounds wonderful and you might be wondering “why aren’t all web sites like this?” Well, here is the answer. Even in a text only web site, the look will change dramatically in a 50% to 100% increase in size. It may likely become less readable if there is too much horizontal text or if it is squashed down becoming a skinny vertical tower of text. Then of course you add images into that layout and all hell starts breaking loose.

Instead of everyone having the same web experience with an expandable layout, just the opposite happens. Everybody has a different experience. Being able to adjust your own experience with the web was one of the “amazing things” about it. By changing your screen resolution or default text size, you can customize your web content to how you want it, in theory anyway. Very few users know how to even change their screen resolution or that it can be done. Even fewer know that you can change the default text size in your internet browser. As a result, most of the people who need these features have no idea that they even exist.

On top of the joys of different screen resolutions, there are also different web browsers that display sites differently from one another. On top of that, the different versions of various web browsers also display sites different from one another. This is getting exponential here. In case designing one web site was not enough, you now sometimes have to create several versions of a site for various browsers/versions.

What’s a web designer to do? We’d like to design so that everybody can view the web site right? Well, not really. Something’s gotta somewhere. There’s a balance between cool, usable, expandable, and the amount of time that is needed to build a site(s).

Note to prospective clients: there are ways to accomplish everything; it’s just a matter of finding the solution that works for you.

Hopefully I have found some sort of balance with the Visual Adventures site. I’m sure I’ll have new ideas for it in a few weeks. Of course it may be a few months before I get the time to try them out. In the meantime, I learned a lot about the various do’s and don’ts of creating expandable layouts.