There are things my house mates are addicted to that I JUST DO NOT UNDERSTAND! These addictions don’t annoy me (well, except maybe Nazi Zombies), I just don’t understand WHY they find them so exciting/interesting!

• All four of them are addicted to Call of Duty. More specifically, Nazi Zombies.
• T & K are addicted to Naruto.
• The boy is addicted to that Farmville game on Facebook.
• The boy and D are addicted to South Park. They once watched 9 seasons. One after the other. Ugh.

Then again, I suppose I can’t really talk. I’m addicted to really loud crappy music. One Hit Wonders anyone?

Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea, Mr. Creedy, and ideas are bulletproof. – V, V for Vendetta

There are so many different PC application packages available for free. Below I’ve listed a few I find especially useful for streamlining my workflow when designing for the web.

• Notepad ++ is my source code editor of choice. It’s very handy ‘notepad’ replacement software. I find the tabbed interface and syntax highlighting particularly useful.
• XAMPP is by far the easiest way I’ve come accross to run PHP, MySQL, apache, etc. on my computer. I’m far too lazy to compile them all myself. I like XAMPP better than phpdev and EasyPHP which are what I’ve used in the past. I have WordPress and a few other scripts installed and I do all my design and coding development on my machine locally rather than directly onto a live server. I do this mainly because I’m really really good at breaking things! :)
• FastStone Photo Resizer is an image converter / resizer which is free for home users. It allows you to manipulate images in so many different ways. I’m constantly using it to create thumbnails and/or to quickly convert batches of images from one format to another.
• NexusFont is a very nifty free font manager. As well as your ‘typical’ font manager type features (grouping fonts, uninstalling fonts etc) I think the thing I like about it the most is that it allows you to easily view, preview and compare your fonts.
• ThumbView Lite is awesome. It allows you to view PSD files, PNG files (and a heap of other ones too) as thumbnails in Explorer.
• Taskbar Shuffle is very simple. It allows you to drag and drop the buttons in your Windows task bar, allowing you to rearrange them to whatever you like. I’ts very useful when you tend to have 43573485734 things open at any one time like I do.
• Filezilla is my FTP client of choice. It’s free, and does absolutley everything one could reasonably expect from an FTP program. :)
• Pixus is just a very simple Adobe Air based application I use to measure screen objects in pixels.
• Snippely is another Adobe Air based application. I use this one to organise code snippets I find myself using over and over again. Before using this I was using Notepad files, and organising them was annoying. Snippely is good because it allows you to define and group your code snippets. I also really like that you can add notes explaining what the code snippet actually does.
• Firebug for Firefox and Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar intergrate with their respective browsers and both allow you to debug CSS and HTML live on any website. I find these both really useful when making sure websites are cross browser compatible.

Are there any freeware/open source tools you use that you think I’d find handy? Please let me know!

You’re going to come across people in your life who will say all the right words at all the right times. But in the end, it’s always their actions you should judge them by. It’s actions, not words, that matter. – Nicholas Sparks

Looking back, I can’t believe its September already. That said… August was incredibly busy. Time just seems to be disappearing these days! I’m back at Uni and currently slaving away at my final year group project. We’re developing games targeted at autistic children with the aim of helping them develop their life skills. Autism is something I’ve never really come across on a personal level before and I’m finding it’s a really interesting topic to be addressing. I’m actually rather excited about the fact we’re designing our games in conjunction with a school that specialises in teaching Autistic kids and I think it’s fantastic our games will have a very worthy real world application. You can read a little more at the Swinburne Design Autism Games website if you’re interested.

With both work and uni at the moment…. I don’t really have the busiest of social lives. I haven’t been out too much over the last month or so, although I did make it to my cousin’s roaring 20’s themed 21st a few weekends ago and to pub trivia with a few friends last night.

These days I’m finding I don’t really have enough time to do anything! I even miss finding time to go to the gym and as a rule I hate exerting energy. Talking about energy (or lack thereof), I’ve been at Uni all day presenting project documentations. I’m absolutely stuffed! It’s 4pm and I think it’s time for an afternoon nap…