Well life is going great and our new addition to the family is almost here. We have about a month left until my baby girl is born. My wife is already really excited about the she is so close to being here. Our son is happy that he is going to be a big brother and has started helping out more. He wants to show us that he can help with everything. I have no idea about what to expect with a girl since I haven't raised one yet. Some people tell me girls are easier than boys, but I guess i'll see about that. I still need to get a couple of baby things that I haven't got yet. It sucks that i've been slacking on that part, but the cash flow after the holidays isn't that great either. I'm going to post a new site design I did for a client not too far back, and would like your comments on the design of it.

In work related items, working for this new company has really helped me expand my ideas about web/graphic design. More and more they are asking me for ideas on their clients sites, and so far most of them have been used. Before I worked for myself at home finding my own clients and felt like my talents were needed to a point. Now I feel like part of a team, with my goals being achieved in a much faster time frame. The past month i've been working on one of their clients sites that happens to be a computer video card manufacturer. I was in charge of taking the layout they had and converting it over to a tableless design. Before it was just tables and flash in plain html. I have used the same design with minor changes to the look and feel, then added that into XHTML, CSS, AJAX and PHP. Everything is turning out great and has been more than I expected it to be. Next month I was told i'm going to be working on the company site since its going to be part of something larger (more details later). It makes the current site i'm working on look like a small 2-page website. Its just going to be huge.

Well as everyone can see I have been gone a long time again. I know it sucks, but what can I do when family and work calls. Anyways for those of you still here watching my stuff, here are some updates in my life. First off my wife and I are adding to our family. We found out that she was pregnant, and now we found out that the baby is a little girl. Its just what we wanted, our little girl after all this time. Its great our family is expanding, i'm a very proud husband and father. My son just turned 6 this month and time is flying by. It seems like not too long ago he was born and now he's in school.

As for work its been going great. I have been expanding my company as much as I can getting new clients more and more. Work has been picking up and its nice to have a more steady income coming in for my growing family. A little while back (last month) I was offered a position at a consulting company for a web designer doing the same thing i'm doing now. I took the job and i'm still able to work from home doing the work I love to do. They threw me into a big job right away, no questions asked. So I started doing some design work for one of our clients. They already had a design and the site coded up, but the code was in tables and really sucked. I was in charge of converting the existing code into a tableless/css design. I think it went quite well, but still has a lot of work thats needed to it. The bulk of the code was done so that got a lot of my chest since i'm responsible for it. I'll update you guys later as to who the client is if anyone cares to know. So in the future i'll be posting work i'm doing at my new job plus the work I now do on the side under my own company. One job I did finish lately was for a mouse pad company that makes professional gaming mouse pads for the masses. I'll be adding that design to my portfolio very shortly. Hope everyone has a great Christmas this year.

Well I haven't been on DA much in the past months. Thats only because a lot has been going on in my life. My son just started kindergarten last week. That has been a lot of fun. He likes it for the most part, but doesn't understand why he has to go to school. He will get used to it over time, so its not so bad. Also my wife and I found out that she is pregnant and we will be expecting our second child around February. She is wanting to have a girl, and for the first time I don't have a preference in gender of the baby. I already have my boy, and thats what I wanted from the start. Now hopefully she can have what she wants.

Also i'm getting more and more work to do so that keeps me plenty busy. My hardware review site Altgamer is doing well and expanding. I have been working on the new design for it the past couple of months and now i'm about 95% done with the coding. It should be going live in the next couple of weeks, just got some more things to work out on the code. When i'm done the new design it won't just be a main site redo, but also redone company pages with tons more links and info about us, a daily deals page which includes some of the hottest deals on electronics on the web (for that day only, most of the time), and a brand new forum theme that matches the website. As for right now the new forum theme only works in Mozilla/Firefox. IE7 doesn't support it (man does it look like crap in IE7), and I have no idea about IE6 since I have moved over to Vista and no longer own it. Once everything is done with the new design it will give me more space for content, look more professional on my part, and provide ad space for manufacturers wanting to buy ads. I really hate putting ads on the site, but hell I have to make money somehow since i'm not getting paid to run the site as it is. I put a lot of work into it for very little rewards each month. You can see the old site design by visiting Altgamer or looking at the design on here. So as you can see I have my hands full and thats why I have not been on DA for a long time now.

Well i'm starting set 2 of my pixel cell phones. It will take me a while to complete considering how many phones will be in the set, and the fact that pixel art takes forever. I have had a huge interest from all of you on DA from my last set. So now i'm taking requests for phones that you would like to see in the set. Last time I made one phone for someone that was a request, that wasn't included in the final set. Phone manufacturers included in set 2 with be Sony Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola, some LG, Samsung, and maybe some others. I know there are a lot of phone manufacturers out there besides what I have just listed. Those are some of the more popular ones out there, plus there are still a lot more overseas that most people here in the states have never even heard of. I'm just hoping for a lot of people to give me ideas of what they would like to see in the set. I make these for all of you people out there that have requested some phones, and those that have download the crap out of the last set.

I hope to make this set 3 times larger than the previous set. The reason the first set was so small is because I was testing the waters to see how people would take them, and it turned out to be very good. Be patient though, they will come out, but will take some time as I have a lot on my plate. So my free time is split between work, my hardware review site, and family. Please just send me a note or leave some comments about the new set if you have a request for a certain phone model. Just make sure that there is at least one picture of the phone available on the net. I don't care if its a new phone or one not out yet. I need at least one image for reference to make the pixel phone. If anyone would like to donate, please just send me a note about it. Not saying any will, but it does help out with making these for everyone to enjoy. I wouldn't mind a DA subscription either. Just a thought, but take it as you will.

Well its been a while since I have posted anything on here. I know I have a lot of people watching me now, and a lot asking for certain files for my deviations that DA somehow lost. I have been trying to find those files people, but I have rather large hard drives to look through. Not only that, but my wonderful system decided to die. So I built a new one in no time, and i'm using a nice dual core cpu now. So now I have a work/gaming system, something of which I didn't have before. Everything was going good and then last week my hard drive died (just my luck). I got two Seagate 320gb SATAII drives on order to put into raid when I get them. Now i'll be able to ditch the old IDE drives, and use drives that are a lot faster and quieter. Windows wouldn't show the drive in the OS, but I knew it was hooked up. I thought I lost all my web/graphic design work from 4+ years ago to now. Everything I have ever done was on that drive, even the very first one. I have no idea why I keep everything like that, but I just do. What I needed was a NAS system to sit on my network that I could put all of my work on without having to worry about drive failure. I know that the NAS drives will fail sometime, but not as soon as drives used in a system like mine thats almost in use, and turned on 24/7. So D-Link sent me a new NAS system to review and put on my Hardware Review site. Now how lucky is that? So now I have everything offloaded to the NAS system while i'm waiting for my new drives to get here from Seagate. Right now i'm using a very old IDE drive around 10GB. It sucks, but its only for a week or so. The only thing I hate is having to reinstall every damn program I had on here. I had way too many programs since I do a little of everything.

Well my site Altgamer.org is doing very well now. We started to make some money off of the ads on the site finally. Its not much right now, but it is something, better than nothing, and it does pay for the server bills as of right now. Altgamer is coming up on its 1st birthday in the next couple of months. I know a lot of people have told me that the site design looks great already and I shouldn't mess with it, but i'm going to. So for the 1st birthday i'm going to rollout a very new design, but it will still look somewhat like the current design on the site. I'm just going to change things up a bit, make it wider, make somethings more simple, and add a lot more features for the site and the forum. We are trying to get a lot of manufacturers join in for the birthday bash and donate some gear that we can give away to our readers. Everyone likes free computer gear, don't they? Well we do already have some on board at this moment, but i'm not saying who just yet. We did get a new forum system for the site and now it looks like the stock skin that comes with it. It sucks and I want to change it, but I don't really want to mess with vBulletin at this time. If someone out there would like to help me develop a skin for the Altgamer Forum, please send me a message and we can work something out. I'm asking this cause I have never messed with this forum system before, and I have a lot on my plate right now to do.