Groggie.com

I’m just playing around with my new combo amp, and I ended up recording myself jamming to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”

Thriller

We’ve booked two more shows at The Lost Horizon for this spring! Be sure to check us out on March 28th and May 2nd at The Lost Horizon in East Syracuse! Posters and more information to come!

Our 11th  Hour will be playing at ShamROCKS Rock and Roll Irish Pub on April 4th. We’ll be playing with DJ Seedz at 9pm. If you’ve been waiting for a good night to come see us, this is the one to see. Our material is completed and we’ll be playing a full set. We will have our EP for sale at the show and can probably be convinced into giving away a few free copies. As always, check us out on Myspace for music downloads and future show dates. Here’s our super-fun-time show poster:

Here’s another easy trick you can do with Adobe Photoshop that I learned from the Something Awful forums a handful of years ago. Basically, all you’re going to do is mask out your (or whoever else’s) head, then mask out your facial features, then vertically flip your head and clone stamp the background. Sounds easy enough, eh? Let’s get started!

Step One

Using your masking technique of choice, select your entire head including your hair, ears, cheeks, and chin. Then copy and paste it right on top of itself. It’s going to look like nothing has changed, but that’s fine; it’s a few more minutes to look at your beautiful mug.

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Our initial Self-Titled EP is available now online at music retailers all over the internet. Here’s a list of places you can purchase our album:

Amazon
eMusic
iTunes
Lala
Napster
Rhapsody
Shockhound

Tracklist:

01 Bleed Me Dry
02 Falling For You
03 Untitled Two
04 11th Hour (Part II)
05 Epilogue
06 Falling For You (Acoustic)

Our 11th Hour is playing three shows in the next few weeks around Syracuse. The dates and times are as follows:

Friday, December 26th @ The Mill in Syracuse, at 8pm

Friday, January 2nd @ Station 58 in North Syracuse at 8pm

Friday, January 9th @ The Lost Horizon in Syracuse at 8pm
With Cursed From Birth and Paricia
$5 Ages 21+, $10 Under 21

http://www.myspace.com/our11thhour
http://www.our11thhour.com

My “Untitled” self-portrait has been featured in the DeviantArt compilation Best of Random Deviant Hello: Volume 8.

Groggie.com has received enough traffic to be ranked by large web traffic websites such as Alexa! It may not be in the top 10,000, but is under the 1,000,000 mark (That’s good for something, right?)!

Check it out on a few of these stat-tracking websites:
Alexa, Technorati, Compete, Yahoo! Site Explorer

Additionally, I’ve decided to add a few options to advertising on Groggie.com. Nothing intrusive- so the main focus will always still be the content. To see what kind of advertising options are available, check out the Advertising page (the link is also available in the top nav bar on the right side).

The Google Pagerank is currently messed up because of some downtime problems I was going through at the end of November. Here’s the post about that.

I was featured in another online article on DeviantArt for my design “Integrate the Type.”

http://news.deviantart.com/article/64102/

Our 11th Hour is a post-hardcore/metal band from Syracuse, NY. Their debut EP demonstrates the ambitious writing style and technically difficult playing skill. With award-winning members and innovative music, Our 11th Hour hopes to begin turning heads before their first full-length album, “Of Halos & Hand-Grenades” is released.

The album will soon be available on iTunes, Amazon, and many other online retailers. You can download “Falling For You” for free here, on our official website, and on our Myspace profile! Come see us at a show if you want to buy a CD, and soon enough we will have other merchandise available.

Tracklist:

01 - Bleed Me Dry
02 - Falling For You (Free Download Here)
03 - Untitled 2
04 - 11th Hour (Part II)
05 - Epilogue
06 - Falling For You (Acoustic)

I had some issues with my domain late last week, but have finally solved them. I always seemed to have a day or two of downtime every year when it came time to renew my domain name, but now I’ve fixed it and should not have the annual problems that I have previously encountered.

(12/09/08 Update) It would appear that the few days of downtime has adversely effected my Google Pagerank. Unfortunately, I’m no longer listed, but hopefully it will be back shortly when Google indexes my site again.

I just picked up my brand new 2009 Mitsubishi Lancer today. It’s a 5-speed manual and is impressive to look at to say the least. I will update this post with some pictures when I get them uploaded.

So here’s an acoustic cover that has been in the works for quite a while. I recorded it around early/mid-2007 and finally found Jon IX to sing it. We were planning on doing a bunch of select songs from Drowning Pool’s first album, but it sort of fell through. Anyway, here’s “Sinner” featuring Jon IX on vocals.

1.) Sinner [Drowning Pool Cover] / 2:45 / 5mb

I know a lot of people like my directory of desktop wallpapers, so I just added almost 200 more images to it. It now has 325 wallpapers in it. Many of the images are t-shirt designs from Threadless.com that I’ve turned into desktop wallpapers. A bunch more are from other online t-shirt retailers, and the rest are just a collection of funny pictures, other wallpapers, and a few of my own designs made into wallpapers.

Feel free to send me links to awesome designs or wallpapers that I should add to my collection! Anyway, here is the directory:

http://www.groggie.com/wallpaper

On November 22nd, Our 11th Hour will be recording their debut demo EP at Subcat Studios. The tracklist will include “Bleed Me Dry,” “Falling For You,” “Untitled 2,” and “11th Hour (Part II).” The demo will be available for $5 at any show, but for the release party, a set number of copies will be given away for free. It will also be available on iTunes and Amazon which will include a free acoustic version of “Falling For You.” “Bleed Me Dry” will be available for free on the band’s Myspace profile and official website.

I created an updated identity system for Syracuse Label. It is still in the preliminary stages, but this is the general idea of it. I modified the existing logo (which looks somewhat similar to the black “peeling away” label in the center of the new version) to incorporate the new name. It uses the negative space between the shapes to complete the background of the old logo, which I think worked out very well.

I found an old file that I was messing around with earlier today and edited it up a bit to experiment with vocal effects. It’s a short version of “Hear You Me” by Jimmy Eat World- just the first verse and chorus. It’s composed entirely of vocal recordings with effects placed on them. I think it turned out pretty well.

1.) Hear You Me [Jimmy Eat World Cover] / 1:13 / 1.4mb

Throughout the years, I’ve accumulated a handful of tips for making a successful web portfolio (from designers to photographers among others). By no means are these end-all rules, just suggestions that I’ve seen given to people from all over.

Be overly simple. When time means everything, you don’t want your viewers to need “training” on how to view your website. Don’t overload your visitors’ senses- instead, decide what they should be focusing on. This is easliy done by reducing the elements of your page to their bare necessities.

Your grandmother should be able to navigate your portfolio. Whether you plan on showing it to elderly people or not, you need to make sure that your navigation is so mind-numbingly easy that anyone can use it. Not everyone with the power to hire you knows how to use your complex multiple-dropdown flash-based rotary 3D psycho-nav. If your portfolio has a set of instructions of how to navigate the site, then it’s too complicated. Sometimes simple scrollbars (perhaps with anchor links) is the best route to go.
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Today I implemented a targeted custom Google search at the footer of every page. It’s cool because it gears your search string to the creative arts such as design, photography, animation, and writing. Best of all, it returns search results right within Groggie.com! Give it a shot and let me know if you have any other ideas of cool updates to make.

I finished recording and editing a song that we’ll be including in our first full length album which is now called “Of Halos & Hand-Grenades” as a hidden song at the end. It really pushes the stylistic ambient theme we use to represent the “afterlife” in the album (or at least our character’s perception of it).

Download the demo of it here for free:

1.) Epilogue / 4.2mb / 4:31