i am ryanarrowsmith

Life is good.
Do you ever just wake up in the morning feeling joyful for no specific reason? I mean, there isn’t one thing I can put my finger on that’s making me feel so happy. In fact, things could probably be a little better right now. After breaking my cell phone almost [...]

Brian is working late tonight so I’ve been left to my own devices. What to do when you are all alone? I’ve actually been meaning to take a few pics of me for my site so I spent a little bit messing around with my digital camera and iPhoto. You can check [...]

For each of my Top 100 songs, I’m going to post a snippet of the song in the MP3 format. If you enjoy the song, please buy a legal copy from iTunes, Amazon or your favorite CD store, k?
So far, I have two of them up and running: Scratch and Twist of Fate. There [...]

I was reading a post on Entertainment Weekly’s website about Lance Bass coming out when I came across this story. I am deeply troubled by their numbers.
In a story on their website, GLSEN writes:
The study also found that about 10 percent of Massachusetts high school students attempted suicide, according to a survey of about [...]

This may be a big shock to some, not so much to others. Lance Bass of Nsync fame came out of the closet recently. More importantly, Lance says he’s in a “stable relationship” with Reichen Lehmkuhl of Amazing Race fame.
I am a little protective of Lance, I was a total Nsync fan when they [...]

Song: Gone
Artist: Jack Johnson
Album: On and On

Why Gone?
Aside from the fact that Jack Johnson is easy on the eyes (grin), he’s also one of my favorite musicians. He has the amazing ability to churn out unforgettable melodies on demand. [...]

I’m so happy I could kiss a woman! My new Samsung A900 arrived last night after 2 weeks of being sans cell phone. I’ve never had a phone this nice before. A rotating 1.3 megapixel camera that also captures video, a MP3 player (that actually sounds like an MP3 player), a speakerphone, it [...]

Over the weekend, I finally joined the legions of Mint zombies users out there. As I’m working on the redesign here, I’m constantly pushing the viewable area out (I think I’m at 850 pixels right now for my main content area). Before I pushed past the 850 mark, I wanted to make sure [...]

Song: Twist of Fate
Artist: Olivia Newton-John
Album: Magic: The Very Best of Olivia Newton-John
Listen: Twist of Fate (MP3)

Why Twist of Fate?
This one goes back to my early childhood. After the global craze of Grease, Americans were foaming at the mouth for another Olivia [...]

Song: Scratch
Artist: Kendall Payne
Album: Grown
Listen: Scratch (MP3)

Why Scratch?
I first heard this song on Grey’s Anatomy. The song’s delicate melody and honest lyrics captured the moment in the show so well, it was stuck in my mind. I had to find out what the song’s name was and who sang it. Being [...]

Being that my opinion is probably the most important opinion you’ve ever heard (grin), I’m going to start a series outlining my 100 favorite songs of all time. I’m not saying that these are the best 100 songs ever recorded, just my favorites.
For 11 through 90, I’m not going to rank the songs. [...]

Chances are you may already know about Matt Hinrichs and his vastly hip website, Scrubbles if you spend any amount of time putzing around the internet. If not, we need to bring you up-to-date with one of the most enjoyable reads in all of the webdom.

Matt actually writes about a wide range of topics [...]

I get a few e-mails now and again asking me different things….and some them aren’t from my mother! :) Here are answers to the more common questions. I’ve included a couple of the funnier ones ’cause they made me laugh (and, yes, I know funnier isn’t a word).
What’s with the RCA [...]

Earlier this year, with the help of some fabulous people, I worked on a website that was aimed at promoting pride in the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community. The site had barely begun to grow and spread it’s wings when, for various serious reasons, we had to close up shop.
When I came out [...]

I tell you, the more I think, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to [...]

One thing you should know about me (if you don’t already): I love the Wizard of OZ. No, not the movie (well, I do the love movie also) but the original L. Frank Baum stories. As a kid, if I wasn’t doodling or sketching, I was probably watching cartoons or reading children’s lit. [...]

If you want to see a beautiful, dynamically simple site, take a look over at Brother Jones. Three brothers with two talents on one site working together.

Veerle’s website makes me want to give up on this website stuff (in a good way). Her work, design and illustration,is completely unreal.

I am completely diggin’ on web.burza’s site design. It’s captivating to me. I had to sit there and mouse over everything to check out all of the animations.

I’m digging the idea of Scooch but I’m not sure it trumps my baby, Flickr.  Still, might be a good alternative to hosted services.  Geterdone!

I wrote a few days ago about my broken cell phone. For those interested, here are some pictures:

She was nothing fancy really, but she was mine. Here’s another shot of her wounded, lifeless body.

The poor little thing. It served me well. Let’s have a moment of silence.

Back around the first of the year, I finally gave into peer pressure and created a profile on Myspace. For those of you who haven’t heard of it (which, you must be living in a cave so you’re probably not reading this), it’s basically a big ole webmmunity.
Before I joined, I had taken some [...]

“Groovy Tile“, originally uploaded by strph.
Recently, I bumped into one of my buds from high school, Stephanie. It’s been awesome because, on top of being amazingly brilliant, she’s also one of those people you feel an instant connection with. In fact, back in the day, Steph was actually a major influence on me [...]

I know I’ve mentioned CSS Remix in a previous entry but I thought it deserved it’s own post. The site is a portal to beautifully designed websites from around the world. I could spend hours on this site daily.

I first stumbled upon Komodo Media after the last CSS Reboot. I am hooked on this site’s design. It’s the perfect balance of simplistic elegance and lush foliage wholesomness. :)  Take a look and let me know what you think.

Most people who keep up with design for the web will already now the Zen Garden. If you do not, take a look. The idea is that designers take the same HTML file and create a completely different web page by writing their own CSS. It’s amazing what they can do.

Another Kitty find and equally as yummy as Tiny Showcase. Thumbtack Press offers wicked prints from some of the coolest up and comers for not much moola. I am really digging this one over here.

I found out about this site through the divalicious Kitty. Tiny Showcase is a website which offers limited edition prints of beautiful artwork.  A portion of the sales go to the artist’s choice of charities.  I really wanted this’un but it’s sold out.  :(

I, like most habitual bloggers, try to spend as much time reading as I do writing every day (an idea elaborated on more eloquently by Stephen King in 2002’s “On Writing”). In short, it’s important to know what’s going on outside of our own little macro-world. On a personal level, I tend to get wrapped up in the every day events of my life: work, entertainment, family events and so on. And, really, that’s fine. I’m not saying that my general blog topics are off the mark for me; I think what I put down on paper (or screen, as the case may be) is representative of who I am. But I also think it’s important to be aware of the world around you and what the community is buzzing about.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reading articles from people I genuinely respect about how unimportant the average blogger is. Or about how the average blog’s content challenges the legitimacy of “real” blogs. Several have been concerned about how the layman is taking away the prestige of being a blogger or their own work is being obscured in a sea of average content.

One of the movie’s I’m looking forward to most this summer is Sony’s Monster House. It looks pretty friggin’ awesome and it’s going to be in 3-D on the Imax, the overlord of all movie screens.

The movie opens this Friday, july 21, 2006 and Brian and I plan to see it Friday or Saturday. I’ll let you know what I think of it. So far, I’ve only read positive reviews. Critics are pegging it as a favorite for the animation Oscar (which’ll piss off those silly Cars).

Once in a great while, I read a website that actually makes me laugh out loud. And then I look like a pretty big idiot to those around me. Dooce is one of those sites.  Heather is one of the funniest and most brutally honest bloggers I have ever had the pleasure [...]

No, I don’t mean dead as in the battery is low.

Last Monday, I had a rare opportunity to leave the office a little bit early. I have been working 72 hours a week for the past month-and-a-half so cutting out early was a dream (a dream I tell ya)! There was a storm blowing in so I figured, if I was gonna go, this was my window.

It’s 4PM and I leave the office. As I step out on the street, it begins to sprinkle. The walk from my office to my car is 5 blocks (or a half-mile). Before I even made it a block, it began pouring like you wouldn’t believe. I was instantly soaked to the bone. I thought about going back in and waiting it out but I figured I was already wet. What’s going to happen? I get a bit more wet? If I get home, I can change and be dry. So, I keep walking. [...]

Could it be any hotter out there? It was 104 degrees here yesterday and should remain close to that the rest of this week. Yuck.

We had a good weekend. I worked some on Saturday and then Brian’s best friend, Andy, came into town for a visit. He was on his way to Kansas for a business trip and decided to stop in for a short stay. We went and saw Little Man with Marlon and Shawn Wayans. I have to say, I thought it was going to be pretty silly but I was pleasantly surprised — it was really funny. You should see it if you have a chance.

We also got a couple new Xbox 360 games: Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Conflict Desert Storm. Andy and I played Deser Storm together for a few hours. It’s a lot of fun but I’m glad he had played it before. It requires a lot of strategic positioning of troops that would have taken me a few pointless deaths to figure out. We actually got so wrapped up in the game that he was late leaving for Kansas. Damn those Iraqi millitants!

Ever since I began blogging, I thought that it was important to keep my photos within my own domain. I thought it would break the flow linking to different, external sites for my content. So, I went the usual route and installed Gallery. I wasn’t terribly impressed by how it worked or terribly disappointed in it’s performance. Honestly, I was luke warm about the app but it did the job I wanted it to do.

Rewind. Before I ever installed Gallery, I signed up for a free Flickr account (this was back when Flickr was in early beta testing). I liked the flash based interface but the limitations they imposed on free accounts weren’t realistic. I have a 5 megapixel camera: the pictures are about 1MB each unless I process them via Photoshop. I wanted an on line solution that would allow me permanent archiving of my photos so I didn’t have to keep them on my hard drive or burn them to a disc so lessening the images quality wasn’t ideal. So on the basic account, I’d eat up the upload bandwidth with a few pictures easily. I also found it hard to justify spending $24.95 for additional bandwidth (on Flickr’s Pro account) when I had already paid for more storage space than I could ever use on my domain.

So, I kept trucking along with Gallery and everything was fine. [...]

After months of frustration with Dreamhost, I’ve just signed up with Media Temple for web hosting. With Dreamhost, I was having about 3-5 outages a week and the only answer I ever got from them was that the “server needed rebooting”. Well, that’s great — how about a permanent fix? Since they could not offer me one, I am leaving. I can’t express the level of frustration I have with Dreamhost. To sum it up: don’t use them, you’ll regret it after about the 10th unanswered support request.

So if you try the site today and get see some errors, know I am working behind the scenes.

I’m about as tired of seeing this site design change as you are so this time, I’m really looking at what I’ll need to sustain this site over the next year or so. As I wrote awhile back, there are certain things my current one-column design just can’t offer. I thought initially that I wanted a 3-column design because it’s so flexible and capable of displaying so much data and meta. After working on a mock up of this site in 3-columns, I realized it was too much space. I was working to fill up 3-columns without duplicating content or making the site seem redundant.

So, I went back to the drawing board. The one-column didn’t allow me enough flexibility but 3-columns created a site that, at least for me, looked messy and over packed. I met in the middle and decided on a wide 2-column scheme.

I am back — and in one piece.
I was in Cedar Rapids for work. I have to say, it was a pretty nice town. One thing I don’t get though….why is there corn everywhere? No, I am not an idiot. I know it’s one of their biggest cash crops so I [...]