First find an elephant path. Then, dig a round hole big enough for an elephant to stand shoulder high in.

Next, fill the bottom with a light ash. White ash from a campfire works well.

When you are ready to spring your trap, line the edge of the hole with a couple pounds of peas.  Frozen or fresh are best, but as these are hard to come by in elephant territory, canned peas work just fine.  Line the edge carefully, as a sloppy, haphazard arrangement is unlikely to attract a good quality elephant.

Hide somewhere close, behind a rock or tree.

When an elephant comes up to take a pea, run up and kick him in the ash-hole!

So easy!  Elephants are stupid.

After a bit the room starts filling up.  This was supposed to be a hot show… I had heard the show was sold out a day after tickets were available.  People are coming in and sitting around, still this guy lays there.

After a bit more, an usher comes up. “Hey man, can I get you to move?”

Nothing, guy lays there, saying nothing.

Usher leaves all pissed, comes back with the manager. “Sir, please get up and make room, we are expecting a full house”.

The guy just turned his head a bit and coughed.

Manager scowls and heads off. He comes back not even a minute later with a cop in tow.

“Sir, I need you to get up… you can’t be taking up all the seats”, the officer tells him.

The guy looks at the cop and squints.

“Where you from, anyways, mister?” the cop asks him.

The guy painfully bends his wrist, pointing upwards.

“The balcony.”

I cannot stress how cool these pieces are, although I will try right now.  They are MEGA COOL. Understand that the word mega, in all caps, requires a thundering bass voice for emphasis.  Say this out loud right now, full on, and you will then have a tiny, tiny glimmer of how cool they are. Thundering bass voice: MEGA COOL.

See?  Look at the works. Dream a little. Now, contact me so we can make this happen.

The Past

If you reeeeeeealy need to visit the past, you can see the old site here (at least till I inevitably break it during some late night drunken site migration mishap):

http://conceptjewel.com/

Even info on good ol’ Concept Jewel gallery.
R.I.P.
*sniff*
*pours 40oz of Old E on drunkard sleeping in doorway on bed of broken glass and chicken bones in remembrance.*

Took a bit to build it, but eventually got it tobaggon-run ready, iced track and all. Nearly killed myself several times and lost a bit of skin.  It was awesome.

My nephew Tomas and brother Chris ran it, wiped out.  Mom showed up and dominated, running it many times, caught FAR more air than any of us, and never wiped out.  You can tell she grew up here, and you never lose it.

Of course I didn’t have my camera… not sure I want to document getting sled pwned by the moms, but it was priceless.

There was a pair that hung around for a week or so at the old Prater farm house.  They buzzed the place I am staying several times.  These are HUGE birds – hope they come back… was a great thing to see early Christmas morn.

Wolf track near Big Fishdam river

These animals are a true treasure, residents should be proud that these and other high level predators roam our lands and keep them healthy.

Wolves do not attack humans.  Not in Michigan, usually never in the United States. The Eurasian wolf is known to be more aggressive, but none of these animals prefer any contact with humans.  I wish people weren’t such pussies and learned to love them.

I’m still looking for those cougar tracks…

I’ve been wanting to do something like this with WordPress for a while. Fast navigation of content. Fully indexable by the search engines. No images, straight CSS.  Mobile friendly. Sweet ajax-y butteriness.  What might be lame to you, very hot to me.

Typography

I’m sure a work in progress, but I’m really liking where this is going. I keep trying to move away, and gives Times a chance, but am truly in love with Georgia.  It is one of the most beautiful things Microsoft has brought into this world… and one of the many great typefaces created by Matt Carter.

Along with Helvetica (yes, I know) for the navigational elements, I am trying for a concise distinction between navigation and content.

Ajax

All my jQuery and WordPress nerds and nerdettes out there, check out main.js.  It has pretty much all the juice that makes this site go besides the ajax returns server-side. Since I’m too lazy to add a license header to the top of the file I suppose it is under the Steal My Content license so have at it.  Not that it is really doing anything special. If you want to implement similar, read up on add_action(‘wp_ajax_XXX’, xxx), as this is how ajax calls are usually handled by the WordPress action hooks.

The WordPress theme I put together is based on the twentyten WordPress team base theme… a great starting point: very clean, well documented, without jumping through 3 hoops just to get a freakin header changed for a particular page… definitely far preferred over the theme ‘frameworks’ out there (I’m looking at you thematic, thesis and especially carrington, talk about wasted weeks).  Why would you want to complicate the simple beauty of WordPress?  Seriously, just download and install Drupal or Joomla if you need all that.

Some basic features besides the ajax-y bliss: Google Analytics integration with event tracking for dynamic events.  Chartbeat integration for real-time visitor tracking. History and hash parsing (sorry IE users if the history feature is not the most stable, there are known issues if you refresh or type your own domain.  What year is this, anyways?  Try: Chrome, or FireFox).

In Summary

I would love to hear from you if you have any (constructive) comments or critiques.  Yes, I know it is awesome, but does anything confuse you or piss you off?  Have questions about how it was built or suggestions?

No, it’s not a public theme, but if you wanna hire me to build out a site for you…

Gorgeous.

I created Lenticular Image Creator starting in late 2002 after receiving a sample pack of various lenses from Microlens. I have been ramping back up on lenticular and 3D work with the f’n amazing ZBrush lately and have wanted to do some updates to the software for a few years now.  I moved it to it’s own home, pending those updates:

http://lenticularimagecreator.com

Eventually, I would love to get the software ported to native code, most likely on the Qt framework, moving away from the JRE and it’s innate ‘beauty’.  This means smaller, faster, tighter app and far, far less headache on my end.  Maybe even an iPad port? jk.