SLoB.org.uk

Well who better to give a definition of slob than the man himself ;)

Across the void of the internet there are so many slobs - great I am not the only one then heheh ;) You see all these links for definitions of slob (and other definitions for pretty much any keyword) at the top of lots of google searches. None of them really sum up the tongue in cheek acronym I have always stuck by.

A while ago I submitted my definition to a few of the online dictionaries, alas my submission was never added nor did I get a reply. Pretty sure they get loads of mails and cannot reply to all of them; it does not help my case though so I thought who better to give you a cool explanation of slob, than the man himself :)

My nickname starts from a long waaaay back (over 10 years now) where it was meant as a bit of a laugh. As I am a cheeky happy go lucky bloke it suited my character. My personal definition of SLoB means - Sad Lazy old Bastard - less emphasis on the old bit heheh, although they say with age comes experience so do not accept counterfeits - I am the real deal ;)

Although I'm not a bastard the nickname is pretty apt in general (especially when it comes to housework, housework is evil, it must be stopped!) but I'm no slob when it comes to anything relating to my pc heheh. It has got worse since I gave myself the name, its in my blood now and in my core heheh and my wife says I am a complete pig, naa only joking - only slightly slovenly and bone idle ;) heheh.
In our house we have some pretty wicked fairies flying around, they do the washing, the ironing, the cooking, hoovering and all manner of things, it is amazing what they get done around the house! ;) hmm, cough, shhh (don't let my wife read this ;) lol ;)
(SLoB gets a quick smack round the head from Mrs SLoB ;) heheh :)

So there you have it, my definitive description of SLoB :)

Just a quick note to say more site optimisations have been made, I last went over the images a few months back with CS1, however, CS3 seems to have made a remarkable difference in file sizes, so the site should load a lot quicker.

Have put some Ads in for the now, not overly keen on putting ads on the site but they might help a little with generating some revenue even if its to buy the odd lunch here and there heheh :)

All downloads have been fixed now, for some reason of late they were getting corrupted so have added 2 fixes which now enable the downloads to be kept intact, thanks to FuzzySpoon over at the SC Forum for letting me know that downloads were not working :)

So no more excuses not to download FREE media player skins and FREE MP3s of some cover and original tracks I have created with friends :)

Although the stuff in my portfolio is free any donations are gratefully accepted too ;) so feel free to give a donation if you like using or listening to the menagarie of portfolio items :) try not to rush all at once ;)

The Xion Competition over at SC forum is almost closing now, next week will see a Poll for the forum users to vote for their favourite skins of the competition, this will affect the overal score of the skins, so your votes do count!

Over at SC shortly we are going to run a couple of community collaboration projects, stay tuned as for what they will be but expect a couple of cool ideas, these will be for use in ALL Modern Winamp skins :)

TTFN :)

Crikey where has the past few months gone?
A few news items for a change I would like to tell you about:-
First is that we are holding a competition over at SkinConsortium for the Xion Audio Player, checkout the competition here:- Xion Skin Challenge 2008
Skinning Xion Audio Player is really easy although that should not take away from spending the time on designing and creating a unique interface!

Secondly SkinConsortium have recently started on a XUI Coverflow (for Winamp) which will display the album art for a playlist, its currently in testing stage atm and is being worked on to use a small subset of immediate covers so that it keeps the GDI Object count and memory usage low. Once this is all working nicely then it will have the feature to benefit of being able to work on multiple devices (using Winamp) and any sized playlist.
Expect to see that coming soon...

Once I have finished working on a couple of SC skins then I will get round to finally finishing off Walpha (if you have not checked Walpha out yet, then there is a screenshot in the portfolio-winamp section of the site).
Its been a long term project really and not seen much action either coding or user based as I kind of used it for experiments, I am sure it will take off really well if it is properly released.

Something I have noticed recently is that people are rating the skins (on the portfolio section) but not even downloading them to check them out, I expected some abuse over the ratings but those who are rating should really checkout Xion, download the skins and then give a rating based on actual usage and features of the skin, you are missing out if you do not do this and the rating you give becomes useless.
So what are you waiting for? Checkout Xion Audio Player and get some of the skins downloaded, it is all free so what more do you want? heheh :) oh btw donations are gratefully accepted ;)

Ciao for now...

With the recent new public build of Xion (build 94) I have updated skins: Amorbous and Siris, they are available on the Xion skins page at the Xion site and also here in the Xion skin section.

Also new is the sidebar panel to the right, this shows initially a random Skin and MP3 from the sections within this site, you can view the skin image or mp3 by clicking on the thumbnail or you can visit the section directly from the link to the section.

The right hand sidebar panel will also host other info at various times, now its in there its easier to add content.

For those going to i33 at Newbury in March, will see you there :), hoping that its a good weekend full of fragging.

Hope to pop in a few smaller updates with some more sidebar content shortly, till then...

After having quite a break from playing my guitar it has been picked up again to do some more covers and originals with my friend Bulldog.
We have a cover and an original track in the works, have missed playing the old axe and also missed the old wah wah expressions, will be nice to get the Morley Bad Horsie 2 wah into some action once again, those wah wah pedals are the dbs of wahs imo :)

Bulldog has his own small studio he built himself and has got his new drum kit sorted, he used to play drums years ago and is glad to be back behind a kit again. It will able us to lift our tracks up a notch and hopefully you will notice this in the final versions :).
Hopefully we can get Johnny Lokke back in on vocals as Johnny just rocks, one of the best singers for metal/rock and we have been glad he has helped us out in the past with other tracks.

Slight change of topic ;)
Well no new skins yet, have been formulating some ideas for stuff but no actual progress in digital format, it is a busy time atm.

Another topic change heh ;)
Have now got the FPS buzz back again, COD4 is the game of the moment, after not playing COD2 since Feb last year I picked up COD4 when it came out end of last year and not put it down since, the Multiplayer aspect is one of the best out there imo, it is just what I have been waiting for multiplayer wise, the Singleplayer was also superb!

Hopefully the soon to be released custom maps will also be kicked up a notch both playability and cosmetic wise too, playability is a preference though as if the map/level has some thought put into it, it does not matter too much what it looks like, the most important thing is to have some kind of playability with multiple route access, vertical play so some tactical flank type approach to it can be had by the teams.

It is a real shame that it takes so long to actually make a map, believe me I've been there ;), it is worth the effort but often goes unappreciated by some players.
I wonder if a few of the old COD2 maps will be coming back to COD4 in a different style?
I think even with the difference in style and themes between the two games some of the maps could easily be converted and with additional parts added to the maps would enhance them, there is a fine line though with adding new content to an existing map.

Enough blurb for this time, until next time then ;)

Got round to finishing off the install of Photoshop CS3 Extended version early this morning after having spent about 6 hours trying to install the damn thing, when the shiny box arrived I was like a big kid with a new toy and a big grin on my face, Yes! it had arrived!
I had read some of the blogs regarding installation issues and it was not long before I realised that this was going to be my fate too. :(

Companies that have products in boxes really should have the whole customer experience nailed down from the box packaging, to opening the box, looking at the contents, installing and eventually using the product.

Well I can get back to business now and sometimes getting little sleep is not uncommon. ;)
Will try and get some of the new things that CS3 Ext brings into some of the new skins I have planned and also seeing what is different from CS1!

Expect to see some slightly different things in some of those skins once they are ready for release. :)

Finally got round to getting the site moving a bit quicker, a control and refresh might be needed, the images have been reduced by half and some coding changes to help speed things up.
Still some way to go yet but this is enough of a change to keep things ticking along, I often forget that other Internet users might not have as good connections but then again this site does not cater for 56k modems at all and never will in this day and age ;)
I was also looking at the browser log and will get a stats page going at some point, not many IE6 users and to be honest I pretty much doubt its worth the effort for a personal site, even the lesser used browsers are better, I did checkout some of the screenshots from some of the site checkers out there with IE6, it looked okish, not great but it looks like it works, will get round to putting in a VXP vsoon as the dodgy workaround is to use that for testing IE6 stuff alongside IE7, scollob ;)
( Edit: went the standalone route, much easier ;) )

You might have also noticed the news pane is smaller now, this is to make space for the side bar coming soon and also keep roughly within the golden rule of characters per line, hopefully it should be more readable (well as readable as my copy goes lol), some of the latest works will be visible in that section which should hopefully entice people to visit the portfolio and mp3 sections, will also be putting some other info stuff in there too.

It's been a busy month and no new skins to show, got to get back into designing some more skins, I have some cool ideas for some new skins, but also want to finish off the coding on Ebonite for Mike so it can be released in all its RGB colour glory.

If you have not been to the skin consortium site then check it out, things can go slow at some points with all of us working on other things but we are trying to get some more XUI object ideas going for objects that can be virtually dropped into Winamp skins, this should help to cut down on skin development time and also give a consistent and high standard approach to coding.
If you have any cool ideas for some XUI objects for Winamp skins then head on over and sign up to the forum, its free :)

Until next time no doubt ;)

Not as bad as I thought it was going to be, heh, Opera seems to be looking ok now, slight alignment issues on the portfolio items which also kicked in Safari and now IE7, looks fine in FF2 which is still my main browser of choice, still also yet to look at FF and IE6, oh the joys lol :)

The main thing that will need to be altered slightly is the WMP object for Opera and Safari, I have a flash mp3 player that should work ok in place of the WMP player, which, should keep all main browsers happy, I remember the good old Nutscrape days where anything you did for it also worked in IE, having been almost locked up doing IE only stuff for so long its kind of refreshing to get back into all this cross browser nonsense, must be sadistic/twisted lol.

Just listening to a radio station where they are playing an old favourite song which is absolutely superb - Building the Church by the one and only Mr Steve Vai, great stuff and certainly makes doing this cross browser css malarky a bit more palatable, well lets see what IE7 is doing with this css that works ok in the other newer browsers, IE7 seems to be borked with the portfolio items after it working during testing, also flash object not working in either Safari or Opera, needs more work.

For those that are using Opera I still need to check into the CSS selectors, no doubt there is some non compliance going on, if that is the case then use FF2, IE7 or Safari, with so many browser choices nowadays all differing in compliance there is only so much I will keep going with, Safari seems to render the text in a more bold fashion (hmm nice).

For those that are visiting the site, hope you enjoy some of the skins, more content will be going up shortly, this site is mainly to put some of the works I have done onto the net and available for you to use if you wish to download them and try them out.

Rambling over until next time ;)