Calling all PHP People!

I revamped the personal section of my site. I'm trying to keep it small and compact, and there is as always stuff to be added. If anyone has a browser other than Internet Explorer 6 or Mozilla Firefox 0.9, could you take a look and make sure the layout isn't totally whacked out? Thanks! There are new photos on there too, of seahorses!

http://www.wertle.com/personal

Also, I need all you people who are good with PHP! My next assignment I've given myself on my art archive is to do two doable but probably very tedious things.

One is, to have my search results display on multiple pages, so 10 results would display on one page and so on.

The other is, when you click on an image and go to the display page, to have Back and Forward buttons that will go through the images in the search results.

Both of these seem like they need to involve some magical global list to store search results in (it would actually only need to store 1 attribute of the results, because I can get all the info I need from the id number), but I do not know enough PHP to figure out a good way to do this.

Any advice?

It's Late, I'm thinking

Tonight on the ride home from Kempo, James (one of my instructors) and I were talking about Carleton, and how we met and started dating, when James broke out in a fit of laughter. When probed upon the reasoning behind his laughing, he told me that I should write a book called "Lisa Brown's Guide to Getting What you Want Exactly when you Want It" and that it would start out with "I, Lisa Brown, who is of sound mind and sound body do swear this is true. One day, I decided that I wanted to get good grades, so I did. One day, I met a boy. Sometime later I decided I wanted to date this boy, so I did." and so on.

We laughed at the jest, but it made me think about my amazing strokes of good luck that I have experienced thus far in my life. I've always had good experiences at school, I was really distracted during high school so I totally missed out on the general hardships that befall most teenagers, my parents made sacrifice after sacrifice to send me to an awesome college where I had a wonderful experience, after several years of searching I acquired a new and wonderful best friend, decided to date him, and thus acquired a wonderfully awesome significant other, got a job after college in a field that I love. Yeah, amazing good luck.

Not to say there haven't been rough times, there have been many. Brendan can attest to many a time comforting me as I lay on his couch in the dead of the night crying for seemingly no reason. Dave, Ken, D Flo, everyone has helped me through some minor tragedy in my life, but I got through them and learned from them and all that. A spoonful of resilience and a default positive outlook go a long way, I guess.

But, on the whole, things have definately been awesome. I have invaluable friends, a wonderful family, the right boyfriend, and for all this stuff I am infinately, infinately grateful. These are things that I never want to take for granted ever, because I know how precious they are and how lucky I have been. I just wish I could share it with everybody.

For the next chapter in my book: "One day, Lisa decided she would go to Japan to visit her friend, Andrew. The next summer, she did." *starts budgeting*

Comicathon

In July, Brendan and Maria are going to Comic-con, and Brendan thought it would be a good fun idea to make a comic compilation with me, Will and Stephen. (phew! lotta links)

Anyway, upon realizing that we are all terrible procrastinators, we realized the only way this could possibly get done was to have an all-day comic-drawing-athon. It was really fun, and productive (in spite of occasional video game and food breaks), as I went in with only one idea--that I wanted to use my old character, Samurai Virus--and came out with new characters, a story idea, and good 5 pages of rough sketchiness. Of course I'll upload it when it has been completed, but I'm warning you right now, A PUPPY DIES ON THE FIRST PAGE.

*ahem* Yes, so, good productive drawing fun. Goals for next week include: cleaning this mess I've made from puppet building, finishing my Fish painting, starting a new small painting of a dragon, and of course working more on this comic.

Buildin a puppet for fun

I have now constructed a dragon puppet head that opens its mouth and blinks. I am in the process of building flapping wings for its body. I would take pictures, but it looks like a mutilated cyborg right now, due to being mostly upholstery foam, wood, fishing wire, coathangers, and electrical tape (don't worry, I'll take a photo once I get his head all prettied up).

It's ended up being a lot bigger than I was planning on, but that's okay. Hopefully I'll have it finished by Conglomeration, so I can carry it about and have it steal baby carrots from the Con Suite. Woo!

In other news, the squirrels have realized that my cats can't get them through the window, so they have taken to running right up to the window sill and teasing my cats on the other side, saying things like "Oh oh, lookit me! You could totally swipe me if that glass weren't there, but it IS, and you CAN'T. HAHAHAHAHAHHA!" Silly squirrels.

yesterday i scrounged trash bins until i found an old plug, which i used to make an adaptor for charging my ipod and camera battery

Nate () is my hero.

General Update

The summer has been going exquisitely, in spite of some sleeping problems I had after Carleton left on his trip, but I think I've gotten a handle on that now.

It is wonderful, I have so much inspiration to do art! I'm working steadily on that painting of Fish, as well as a commission I am doing for Scott. I also finished up some gift art that I started for Flamestryke two years ago, but stopped when we lost communication. I decided to start over and finish it up, after I regained contact with him this spring. It was another vector-coloring experiment, to counter balance the oil painting and watercolor/colored pencil pieces I'm working on.

I also have an inkling to try batiking (or to make a batik...is it a noun or a verb?) I tried it once in high school with so-so results, but I had an idea of a door hanging that I would love to make, I just need to go buy supplies for it.

Last night I went to a tapas bar in town with Jaime, Becca, and Laura, and it was reeeeeeeeeally yummy! I had always wanted to try a Spanish tortilla, I'm glad I got a chance. Tapas are tasty!

I keep having dreams about the Science Center, which I am taking as a sign that I need to go there. I need to visit it at least once before I leave Kentucky for the year.

Other tidbits: I've picked Kempo back up full swing (it's great to see everybody again), I've been making regular trips to the library, I am secretly writing a story...in secret, Dave () still owes me pie.

Crazy LJness

Hey guys, I've seen some of you on my friends list post the Russian Meme, and I thought I'd give you the heads up. It's a potential security problem. More info here:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/gregoire77/120830.html

and

http://www.livejournal.com/users/rosenho/274752.html

Crafty Ideas

So today, I was preparing a list of things I plan to sell at Conglomeration this summer, thinking about my boyfriend as he flies to Russia, and noticing my small collection of matryoshka, you know, those Russian nested wooden dolls?. I suddenly thought, "How awesome would it be to make a set of those!" and visualized a dragon-themed set.

Unfortunately, I am far from a master woodworker, or even an amateur woodworker, or even a woodworker at all, so fashioning my own set of dolls is out of the question. Making dolls out of some other material wouldn't feel right.

I'm still feeling awfully inspired, though, and perhaps I'd be able to hunt down a set of "blank" dolls to paint, if only to have a set just for myself.

Website update

Sorry for the two brief updates in one day, but if anyone has been to my website recently, they will notice some renovations have occurred.

The biggest of which is that I got my spring databases course final project, my online portfolio and image archive, up and semi-running:

http://www.wertle.com/portfolio

This is especially for all you guys who have asked me "Hey, do you still have that picture of that thing you drew two years ago?" and those of you who have prodded to see all those Life Anthropomorphized comics again.

There are still some large images that escaped my uploads, and not all my old images have been uploaded yet, so there's a large gap between like 2002 and now, and the Search features in the archive will probably get expanded in the future, but for now, I hope you enjoy it!

Unusual Observation

Today I went to see Shrek 2 with my parents, and there was a fire alarm during the movie. After everyone was let back into the theater, we all went and sat in the exact same seats as before. Is that a little odd to anyone else?

Artsy stuff

Thanks for the replies on my last post everybody, there were many an insightful theory presented.

In other news, my sudden gain in free time has unleashed the floodgates as far as artistic inspiration. One of my current projects is an oil painting of my betta, it's going along really well. I've been taking advantage of the good help available on the Yerf critique forums while working on it.

I posted some process images in my DevArt Scrapbook...

http://www.deviantart.com/view/7801969/