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update

2005-10-24T06:24:00.000-07:00

Just posting something real quick so this blog doesn't die. You can check out my real blog by following the link below.

mattrat.BLOG

up and running!

2005-09-14T20:27:00.000-07:00

New blog is up and running at http://mattrat.xnamedia.com! Be sure to update your bookmarks (the few of you that find my blog worth reading) because I will no longer be posting here. I used a template on this one as well, but it was too cool to pass up. Sorry to dissappoint you.

new blog

2005-09-08T20:55:00.000-07:00

I'm currently working on installing Wordpress so I can host my own blog on the XNA Media website. So far, I like it a lot. Don't update your bookmarks just yet, but soon I will be away from this ugly thing.

You can view my progress here.

match of the year...

2005-09-07T22:15:00.000-07:00

Well, the match of the year (possibly of a lifetime) was just played on Arthur Ashe Stadium between Andre Agassi and the wildcard James Blake. If you missed this match, you need to get a copy of it somehow and watch it.

James Blake's story is incredible, and Andre Agassi is a legend. The match started around 9:15pm EST and ended at 1:15am EST. That's not an incredibly long match, but the fact that the stadium was full until it was over at that time of morning, is amazing.

5th set tiebreak (8-6 Agassi) was the deciding factor here. By the way if you haven't figured it out yet, I am a tennis freak.. I am just not able to play at the moment because my ankle is messed up, so all I do is watch tennis and play around on the computer. James Blake is no doubt, one of my favorite players currently on the tour. Agassi, like I said, is a legend.. and in my mind is one of the greatest players of all time. Hopefully, Blake's game will continute to improve and he will capture a good number of titles of his own.

basecamp - ORGANIZATION!

2005-08-28T18:38:00.000-07:00

I've heard of this before, but forgot about it. Josh has implemented a nifty web-based program called "Basecamp." This thing creates a to-do list, allows you to assign jobs to particular people with deadlines, e-mails reminders, will SMS to your cell phone. I could go on all day with the specifics of this program, and how that was one heck of a run-on sentence and a great misuse of hyphens, but the fact is we can efficiently get stuff done now, and in an organized way. Right now, we are just using the free version, but I have a feeling we will be upgrading so we can upload and share projects easier. I recommend this to anyone and everyone.

**edit**
By the way here is a link.

bad design

2005-08-26T22:31:00.000-07:00

I may not be the hottest designer around, but at least I can spell check a design once I am done with it. I see a lot of these "hot shot" designers out there and while I'm looking through their portfolio's I see stupid mistakes everywhere that are not meant to be part of the design. It's cool when it is supposed to be spelled wrong (sometimes), but when you just make a simple mistake (ie: saying, "their" when it's supposed to be "there" and vice versa), it totally ruins the design. Senseless rant.

glass platform

2005-08-26T12:44:00.000-07:00

Seems some tribe is building a walkway over the Grand Canyon with a glass bottom. This is a render of what it will supposedly look like. I think it looks like something out of Star Wars.

MIT

2005-08-17T16:07:00.000-07:00

I was looking at MIT online today basically because I was bored and to see if they offered free courses of any kind (and they do.) But, while I was looking around, I found this. I'm interested to see how their "beta" goes in the smaller countries, maybe I'll do a little more research.

new kp site

2005-08-17T08:44:00.000-07:00

Forgot to let everyone know that the new Keypoint site is up. Check it out, here. Let me know if you find any typo's or dead links...

whoa.

2005-08-13T15:01:00.000-07:00

Don't ever change your computer name on a Mac unless you are ready to re-save all your favorites, reload all your plug-ins, and reload any custom preferences you had set up. I obviously did this earlier today, and all I can say is, oops!

nowhere and nothing

2005-08-11T11:24:00.000-07:00

I had to come down to my family's house and stay with them, due to my recent injuries. I'm out in the middle of nowhere, with probably the worst DSL connection on the face of the planet. I lost 4,000 chips on Texas Hold'Em poker because the connection dropped. No, I don't play for real money or anything, but that's alot of chips for a fake low roller like myself. I can't drive because my foot won't move, and I'm "too far out" for any of my friends to come get me, so I am stuck here, with nowhere to go and nothing to do.

Anyways, I talked Casey into letting me purchase an external hard drive. It's a LaCie d2 160GB triple interface drive. Josh has the 400GB version of it and he seems to like it. I don't need one that big because I don't do videos anymore. In our true geeky uberness, Josh and myself added up how much space we now have between the 2 of us and it eqauls right at 1.3 Terabytes.

On another note, I am going to Los Angeles on Monday morning to help my sister move. I'm flying and will be by myself with my gimp ankle, that should be quite interesting hauling the luggage around and running to catch flights. That's all for now, pictures from the trip will most definately be posted while I'm there.

foot pics

2005-08-07T21:06:00.000-07:00

Here are the nasty pictures of my foot that I promised in the post below. Feet gross me out.

There is another picture of it on my flickr page, a few days later. It has since gotten a little worse. I'll be off of it for quite a while.

finally

2005-08-05T20:44:00.000-07:00

Haven't had anything to really blog about lately so I've just been reading others blogs. I guess the only thing "blog worthy" tonight is that I screwed up my ankle really bad playing football in sandals. I would have posted about it, but it's useless without the pictures, can't seem to locate a USB cable for the camera though. Basically, I tore a ligament in half on my foot (no, not just pulled or tore a little, tore in h-a-l-f.) It hurts some kind of bad. I will find cable and post pictures soon. I'm gimp right now and can't really run around digging through boxes looking for one.

Anyways, the new Keypoint website is done, but is not up yet as I am having a few minor problems with the people that are hosting our audio for us. As soon as that gets taken care of, we will be rockin' and rollin'. I'll post when it is finally up though. I will need all you folks to help me find the dead links, as I'm sure there will be some.

Thats it for now. Be blessed, be safe.

busy week

2005-07-30T14:21:00.000-07:00

Had a very productive week. Got the new Keypoint website layed out so now all we have to do is create the subpages. Josh and myself also are updating the XNA Media website, its gonna be really cool when we are finished. Hopefully, we will have both up and running by Friday.

I watched Kill Bill vol.2 last night, I love Quentin Tarantino's movies and this one was no exception. The part where she gets buried alive makes you feel like you are really there, in a non freakish way I really liked it.

desktop

2005-07-27T11:14:00.000-07:00

I tried my hand at creating a desktop from scratch, let me know what you think.

Josh and myself got alot of work done on the new Keypoint site yesterday, it's looking pretty good, hopefully we'll have it finished by later next week.

vacation

2005-07-24T13:55:00.000-07:00

I've been gone since Tuesday and got back yesterday morning. Went to Orlando and hung out with some old friends I haven't seen for years. Got some much needed R & R.

Anyways, had kind of a crazy day because my sister is in Thailand right now and they just had another earthquake in the same area that caused the last tsunami. We have yet to hear from them after frantically trying to get in touch with them. The tsunami warning was lifted a little while ago but it would be comforting to hear from them.

I decided not to use the header from my last post, I forgot to save the PSD file and when I started to re-create it I just decided the colors were too dull for me to have to look at every day.

new header

2005-07-13T21:46:00.000-07:00

Possible new header for when I re-design my blog. I'm not a fan of templates.

Let me know what you think.

more desktops

2005-07-10T21:36:00.000-07:00

Well, here are a few more desktops. Let me know what you think, and if you want more, just drop me a line, I have a ton that I have made while I was bored. These particular ones are at different resolutions, so yea, the minimum is 1024x768 though.

hhb BurnIt!

2005-07-10T21:11:00.000-07:00

Never, ever, ever buy one of these things. Its a direct-to-disk cd burner for live audio and studio production. It's a piece of crap manufactured by HHB. I have now lost a total of 3 of the most important sermons Casey has preached on, and it sucks. I am bitter towards HHB, forgive me.

On another note, Josh returns tomorrow from his 2 week trip, so I can stop trying to be the graphic designer that I am not.

cheap plug

2005-07-07T07:38:00.000-07:00

Check out our new XNA Media website. We do everything from graphic and web design to video production and vinyl banners of any size. We are officially open for business.

Also, I don't know why I haven't posted about this yet, but there is this awesome program called Artmatic that I have been playing with alot. It's great for creating desktops/backgrounds and stuff like that. Listed below are some examples of a few that I have made. If you really want you can create jumpbacks with it also, but I have yet to figure out how to make them loopable. You can create these images at any resolution that you want, I have a few that are 3048 x 3048 (took forever to render.) These may/may not appear at a little lower quality because I had to save them as JPEG to get them to show up.

On another note, I'm headed to Conway today and will return tomorrow afternoon. My stupid Jeep needs fixin'. Pray for a safe trip and that my Jeep holds together.

radio blog

2005-07-06T09:32:00.000-07:00

I will most definately be adding this to my blog and may find a way to incorporate it into the Keypoint website, but I don't know yet.

start over?

2005-06-19T18:49:00.000-07:00

Do you ever feel like you should just start life all over again? For example: move to a different country and just cut all ties with the life you've known for so long. I was in a low spot today and that's how I felt. I must admit, it's not a fun place, although it is interesting thinking of all the things you could do. That love for my family and true friends is what really keeps me from doing something like this. Reminds me mildly of that movie "Under the Tuscan Sun."

Just a burnt out thought I guess.

road trip

2005-06-08T18:59:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I decided that I had gone long enough without my iBook, so I decided I would drive to Conway (which is over 2 hours away) to get it. A 2 hour drive isn't that bad when you have company, so i invited Josh to come along for the ride. Seeing as how niether of us really have nothing better to do right now, around 12:15am, we loaded into my Jeep, hooked up the iPod, and off we went. We probably had the most constructive creative meeting we have had yet on the way down there, thinking of crazy and not so crazy idea's for Father's Day and Pastor Casey's next sermon series which will be entitled Dangerous Church.

We decided to go with sort of a "cautionary/construction theme" and decided to try and get our hands on some of the signs with blinky lights on them with some yellow caution tape for random places throughout the stage. Then we came up with the idea of getting some kid's toy construction helmets and sticking the KPC logo on them so people could have something that would remind them of what Keypoint is all about laying around their house. Simply because Dangerous Church is all about the vision of Keypoint and how we are different from other churches in the area. We also tossed around some idea's for the Keypoint Church website redesign. We finally came to conclusion that we like to use other people's stuff, so we are going to hit up something along the lines of this.

Anyways, I was going to type up the details of our road trip and why it ended up taking us close to 10 hours to drive 4 and a half hours, but I'm tired of typing. Maybe Josh will post on his blog about it, he is linked in this post and on the right if you want to check for yourself. Anyways, peace out for now.

moving sucks

2005-06-06T17:02:00.000-07:00

Well over the course of the last 2 weeks, I have helped 3 people move. I also moved myself from a 1 bedroom apartment to a 2 bedroom apartment - I guess I should change the name of the blog to "apartment 206." Anyways, I've come to the conclusion that moving sucks and it in no way makes me a pleasant person to be around.

On another note, I had a job interview at Mi Casa Real Estate on Friday. It went really good and is definately something I am interested in. They want me to be their LAN/Desktop support as well as be a courier when they need me to. And yes, it's true.. I am somewhat of a geek.

Also, I am in the market for a digital camera. I dont want just something that is point and shoot. I want one that I can actually play with because like I said, I am somewhat of a geek. I have read reviews on about 1,000 cameras and I have yet to find "the one" that I want. If I had the money, I would just get a Canon EOS Digital Rebel, but that's too much money. Any input is appreciated.

baton rouge, lousiana

2005-05-23T20:36:00.000-07:00

Well I'm in Lousiana at the moment sitting at a place called CC's Coffee because we have no internet at the guest apartment that we are staying in. Josh and myself got stuck together in this place and our air conditioner went out today. I must add that it was 93 degrees outside and with the humidity here it was ridiculous. Finally, though, the air came back on and we stopped sweating profusely. We are down here for an ARC Conference, which stands for "Association of Related Churches." Tonight was just kind of a meet and greet, and tomorrow there are lots of people that will be speaking as well as free food. Anyways, people are talking to me and I can't concentrate. Will post some tomorrow if I get a chance.

star wars: episode III

2005-05-19T16:37:00.000-07:00

Well, I got the chance to see Star Wars: Episode III today and I must admit, it was a great movie. It was two and a half hours long but thats okay... I mean after all, it IS the last Star Wars movie that will ever be made according to George Lucas. Great fight scenes, excellent special effects, and decent acting made for an all around good movie. Now that I have seen 1-3 I will have to rewatch the old ones to refresh my memory. That's all I have for now. 2 thumbs up from me.

interesting

2005-05-17T20:51:00.000-07:00

Well my whole life I have gone by the nickname "Matt Rat" and while messing around with my profile it occured to me that my Zodiac Year (whatever that is, right?) is the Year of the Rat. Yea, so whatever. Anyways my blog is pretty much gonna stay like this for a while until I figure out how to use Photoshop effectively enough to be able to express myself.

I got my taxes back this week and let me tell you, it was a huge blessing.. so now I will be able to able to school Josh and all of his friends on how to play paintball now that I got some extra cash. For those of you that don't know me IRL, I used to play semi-pro paintball and its one of the few sports I can actually talk trash in and then back it up with my uber num-chuck and bowstaff skills.

By the way if any of you can tell me how to change the "About Me" title on the right, please post. I can't seem to locate that part of the code.

finally

2005-05-13T12:06:00.000-07:00

Well, I finally took the time to create my own blog. I will hopefully have it set up the way I want by the end of next week. Gonna play with a few things in Photoshop while I'm at it. Even though there is probably no one viewing this yet, bare with me if you do.