Thought Outflux | Anirudh Sanjeev

…I’ve been listening to it. Honestly I have been finding it difficult to find something I liked because I’ve pretty much tried most of the metal out there and know what I like.

Decided to take a small weeklong break from metal. No metal except when I’m running, or when I need a sudden bit of inspiration.

I got a collection of the top 100 techno songs, and so far they’ve been great. I discovered techno because of this tiny and free independent game: Synaesthete which is an amazing little game. It’s more of an experiment rather than a game, with art, color, techno, music, rythym and lighting in careful interplay.

I found this from the indie game festival, which has some absolutely amazing games, including some really cool physics centered games. This has inspired me to consider working on a game over the course of the next eight months or so. I’ve got a couple of great concepts of physics based games in my head which I want to make sometime.

you can see the IGF website at http://www.igf.com/

Visualscope LLC is a Seattle based design and development company, who seem to be a great company with promising designs, and have requested a review, and here it is:

The company:

Visualscope are Seattle web designers with experience with over 1000 designs, who seem to be well versed with design, development, hosting and marketing your website. With lot of experience with web design and SEO, e-commerce, and writing content, and they clearly know what they’re doing.

The main website:

The best way to tell a great web design company is by their website itself, and clearly Visualscope knows what it’s doing. The front page gives a clear picture to a user what they do, along with details, and all their designs are clear, fresh, inspiring and professionals. Click the thumbnail for a few comments on the website.

General design quality and aesthetics:

You can view their portfolio, or click on some of the samples I’ve provided to see the design in whole.

The design quality is quite professional, and it is unlike the regular “web2.0″ gradient and contrasting colors which tends to annoy quite a few people. Repeated use of stock images, and simple and easy to use design elements appeals to most users, particularly to the general market of customers of their clients. The websites are neatly organized and easy to read and use. They use bright designs, colorful and happy photographs, which has been proven to reinforce customer trust, and bits of flash to add a little extra to every website. They have a lot of clients over a thousand, I counted nearly thirty or something in their portfolio, which is well divided into categories.

Services:

They appear to mainly specialize in white hat Search Engine Optimization. But from the portfolio, they also offer hosting, PHP, Flash, CMS design and maintenance, ASP, Javascript, mash ups, and of course, CSS and HTML. The focus also seems however for marketing and SEO, and this company knows what they’re doing. Focusing on keywords, and adding good content to rank rather than other black hat methods. They are standards compliant and rules compliant and from the testimonials, it’s clear that this company is known for keeping on schedule and being easy to communicate and work with, essential for this kind of thing.

Also, they have written quite a few articles, and have made available plenty of website resources, I particularly like this one about ranking well, or rather how there’s no quick fix to doing so.

Overall, they seem to be a great company with lots of experience in designing quality websites and optimizing them, and more. They’re designs are clean, professional, and colorful, and from the reviews online, they’re clearly a great company to work with if you’re looking for designers.

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I decided it’s long overdue that I change my handwriting. My ridiculously untidy, but surprisingly readable handwriting had the characteristic splitting of individual characters, thereby the sizes of the characters were inconsistent and it was about time I changed it.

I spent an hour practicing cursive again, and plan to do it for a few more days because I’ve been writing with split letters for the past seven years, and it will be hard to change it.

I realized that even though it might be difficult, conciously rebooting my handwriting will give me a second chance not only to redefine how I write, but the finer characteristics. For instance, I’d always wished that I made the tops of the ‘t’, ‘l’, ‘h’, etc and the bottom of ‘g’, ‘y’, etc longer. Also I wanted to make the characters more round, so the ‘e’ won’t look like an ‘i’ because the loop is merged into a single line.

Also rethinking my handwriting gave me some startling insight into how amazing certain things are. For instance, when you write a word like “institutional”, you don’t look for the ‘i’ and the ‘t’ to dot and cross over respectively, you just do it. It just comes. In fact, I noticed there’s almost like a little buffer memory, and you remember to dot the character after finishing writing the word. Odd but true.

So I decided to change my writing style and my good friend, the internet, told me to start of doing simpler exercises first. I spent two pages drawing small straight lines and small circles to merely get stability of writing. Then I spent some time writing a single line over and over again on six pages of paper (for the curious, the line is “With Oden on our side, we are victorious.”)

At the end, I noticed my notes were looking nicer and I’m sure with a little more practice my writing will actually be bearable to look at, and I’m sure most of yours’ ain’t better. I’m actually thinking of uploading a “before” and “after”, but I really don’t think too many people are reading this right now.

But still, writing a little sentence over and over on a piece of paper kindof looks nice, especially the back of the sheet, and is almost beautiful and symmetric in a twisted kind of way.

There have been lots of changes around here, mainly I fixed the faulty wordpress install and things seem to be back to normal.

Changelog:

Basically, a lot of housekeeping is finished up, and things look fine and bug free now. I’ll try to customize the theme sometime.

Also, the site looks absolutely gorgeous in safari, and everything seems to hold together on internet explorer which I am very thankful for. Yes, things look like rat turd on IE6. Also, the paracetamol hasn’t kicked in yet

Current music: Radiohead, "Paranoid Android"