Things By Mike

So I just finished playing Modern Warfare 2 on the Xbox 360 and I can say it absolutely lived up to the hype, without a doubt. I did my first run of the campaign in normal mode and it was nothing short of epic. For only being on normal, it was pretty damn challenging. I can only image how much more of a challenge it will be when I attempt it on more difficult settings.

The story was excellent, well acted by the voice talent and actually threw in a bit of an unexpected twist. I won’t say what it is, or course. You’ll just have to play it for yourself and see.

I literally played from about 2:30 this afternoon until about 9:30 this evening. I took a couple munchie breaks but for the most part, I couldn’t put it down. Each mission kept getting more epic than the last and I just had to see how it all turned out. Next will be a venture into the multiplayer and Special Ops modes which I’m expecting will be just as fantastic as the campaign.

If you’ve been on the fence about picking up the game, seriously, get it. It’ll be game of the year for sure.

So over the last few weeks I’ve been working on the website for the hard rock band Second Impulse from Baltimore. In a previous entry I posted an image to a layout for the site which we used. It was basically a temp layout. The band wanted to have a site online quickly before a Halloween gig. So we did just that – got the site online quickly. While it was functional, it was very static. Everything required manual editing of individual pages. Obviously in the long run I wanted the band and their manager to be able to update the site with content as simply as possible. The answer of course was WordPress. So I set out to create a custom theme based on the layout we already had.

After a hefty amount of sleep deprivation, swearing, trial and error and more swearing, I finished the theme in about a week and a half. I found some great tutorials along the way which I will make a separate post about. While there are still some things that needed to be tweaked – the Internet Explore 7 stylesheet (ugh), I am for the most part happy with how it turned out. I’ve yet to widgetize the site, though it doesn’t really need it right now. In all there are seven page templates and five different sidebars used in the theme. A pretty complex first theme, I suppose.

As I mentioned in my previous post, thanks to a friend of mine who manages them, I’ve been granted the webmaster/designer roll for the band Second Impulse of Baltimore. The layout of the site has changed, but now it’s near completion. We hope to launch tomorrow. So far the band is thrilled with the work I’ve done, which makes me very happy face.

SI is a great band who has actually been around since 2005. Sadly they’ve never really taken very good advantage of all the internet has to offer. My friend and I aim to change that. Aside from creating the website, I’ve been helping with creating artist profiles for Second Impulse on as many indie music sites as I can find, like Purevolume, Unsigned.com, etc. I also have a few other tricks up my sleeve yet.

Here’s a screenshot of the latest layout. Still keeping it simple, but widening things about it.