BlizzardHello.

It's been an interesting week. Floods, thunderstorm, blizzards,and C-4 here in North Dakota. What's awesome is how many volunteers there were to help with sandbagging. Here's a picture of Sandbag Central, at the Bismarck Civic Center. In 1997, the Red River flooded, but I don't know the last time the Missouri River flooded. Ice jams caused the Missouri River to flood, and they decided to stop all flow from Garrison Dam, which has never been done before since its creation.

Then the Blizzards. Bismarck got hit by that too, but Dickenson and the surrounding area got the most snow from that. Over 15 inches. Today Bismarck is getting even more snow. No school for me that means. That's how bad it is again. They don't just cancel school because of weather very often. We're not wimps up here :). In fact last Tuesday we had a Blizzard, and Bismarck was pretty much the only ones to not cancel school right away. At 1:00, my college let out and so did my mom's school (she's a teacher at a Christian school). They should have canceled school. I was suprised at how many people showed up for classes though. Over half of my class was there, which is almost more than how many usually show up.

Anyways, that's the weather business. I'm tinkering with a new website again. I won't get a chance to really work on it until summer, but yeah. I know the layout, but I need to find a design. I kinda have a theme, but it has a lot of possibilities. That looks spelt wrong. Possibilities. Hmm. It's right though. Oh well.

Anyways, the design. As a website developer, I go through a different process almost every time. This website is different again. I had an idea for a website. I did some general research. I thought I could do it. Then I had an idea for the layout already brewing. The design though. The banner, and look and feel of the website. I just didn't know what to do. So I thought, "What is my website going to be about?" and I of course knew that. But I wasn't thinking what the design should be in relation to that. A theme of the website came up. Which brought to mind some colors that related to the theme. So I have a theme. Which differs from the design, in my mind. Design is the actual colors you'll use. The actual look. Theme is mainly the feel of the site I guess in my mind. I'm just letting you know how I do things.

This website is being a particular pain though. I don't know. I have a few ideas, and they are so different I almost need to create several test webpages with these designs implimented so I can see them. I can't even draw them out. My main problem is that I kinda know what I want to do with one part of the design, but don't know what to do for another.

For example, I think I know what I want to do for boxes around news posts, but I have no idea what to do for background images/colors. I can't really test out the box design, before I know the background images/colors, but I can't decided what to do for background images/colors because I don't know how they'll look with the other parts of the site. So it's the chicken and the egg. But after talking this out, I think I need to settle on some background images/colors. At least background colors. That's usually the first part of my design that I have in mind.

I'll have to show you the conecepts for my Hellgate London website. I like them a lot. I'll upload it some time. I need to tinker with it so that it's in a showcase design, and not my incoherrent testing phases. That's the website I was working on last year, but then Hellgate London died, so I thought there was no point is getting information for it. The design was pretty much done though. You see how my process is different. I had a theme and design in mind, but I didn't have information. I guess that's not entirely true. I knew I wanted a wiki. But that's pretty much all.

Enough of design talking. Video games time. I've been playing Starcraft again. I finished the original game, again. Whenever I want to replay Starcraft, I usually get through the Terran campaign, and half way through the Zerg campaign, but never finish. So it's a big deal that I'm on the expansion. I'm half way through the Protoss campaign in Brood War. More than half way. I think I have three mission left on the Protoss.

Anyways, what spurred me to play through again is because I read the book Starcraft: I, Mengsk. It's a must read for any Starcraft fan. Has a lot crammed into it's 450 pages, but easy to follow still. Usually if an author crams a lot into book, it's hard to follow, but Graham McNeill did a great job.

Basically covers a span of over 20 years of Arcturus's life, including his father, Agnus, and his son, Valerian. You get inside his head, and you understand why he did the things that he did in the game. You also meet some people. Duran is in there. So is Duke. It's a good read. Maybe not if you aren't a Starcraft fan, but for a Starcraft fan it's fantastic.

I bought a PSP 3000. I had to. My old PSP 1000 is too old. There's screen blur because it has a low response time, and a darker screen. I like the PSP 3000 a lot. First it has a better response time. Then it has a brighter screen. I can also hook it up to my TV. It has Skype. And it's lighter. It was worth the 180 bucks I spent.

I was going to buy the core pack for 170 bucks, but the Ratchet and Clank bundle was on sale for $180. Comes with a 1 GB card, Ratchet and Clank size matters, and Nation Treasure book of secrets. Didn't really care about the UMD movie, but I figured I would play Ratchet and Clank and the 1 GB card is nice to have. Ratchet and Clank isn't my favorite series. I played the demo for the PS3 game, and just shrugged it off as Okay. Size Matters passes the time when I'm bored, but I wouldn't have paid 20 bucks for it.

Anyways, I wanted a new PSP 3000 to play Resistance Retribution. I played a little bit of it, but not too much. About a stage worth. It's fun. The story is really good so far. The controls are Okay. They are good considering the system it's on, but they aren't the best. I can manage for the story's sake. I'm not playing it right now, becuase I'm waiting for a guide to pop up on GameFAQs for it. So yeah.

That's all. I'm going to let you go. I'm gonna probably tinker with that Hellgate London website and upload it later.

Byes.