What I've been doing

My goals

Last blog we talked about a couple of goals I set for myself. As usual, not all of these have been completed. But instead of focusing on the ones I didn’t complete I’ll focus on the ones I did.

Finish separating my websites

I’m almost done with this goal. The content has been separated but the new portfolio isn’t up yet. I hope to be uploading the new portfolio at the same time as this blog but I can’t be sure of that. I can start uploading the portfolio as soon as I have finished updating a couple of “projects” under the school category. After that the portfolio will be filled with recent work and fully functional. (and quite possibly even pretty).

Clean all my servers (both soft and hardware)

I went above and beyond on this one. I even cleaned my regular pc (soft + hard) and my laptop (soft only). Cleaning my regular (dev) pc wasn’t by choice however. A lightning strike wiped out some electrical stuff and one of the things that got fried was my motherboard. While replacing my motherboard I decided to clean the entire pc since it was open already. After installing a new motherboard I had thought I would have to reinstall Windows. This however was not the case! Windows 8 and Windows 10 both successfully booted after changing my motherboard! This is the first time I have seen any Windows version do that and I was happy to see they’ve improved. I still decided to wipe the system however and replace the ssd Windows was on. A couple of days later I also wiped the linux sdd and replaced that with my old Windows ssd (which was purchased later and thus much faster).

As far as servers go… I have cleaned them too ! Not only have I cleaned all my servers I have also cleaned up both my Dropbox and my Google Drive folders.

Finish my portfolio

I kinda made this goal… kinda. Hear me out on this one ! When I wrote my last blog post I had an idea in mind for the portfolio. There was already a sorting mechanism in place and things didn’t look half bad either. However… I decided to change things around and use a different sorting mechanism (mixitup) and also revamped the look of the portfolio. /images/videos are now the first thing you’ll get to see and they will be as wide as the page itself. (some videos , like app showcases, will have black borders though). Directly beneath the media content is the customer and designer information and below that you’ll find a short detailed summary for each aspect of the project. So I decided to chalk this one up as a success because I’ve done more work than I had originally anticipated :).

The other goals

Only a few of the goals I had set I haven’t reached. I have given up on losing weight and because of the extra portfolio work I didn’t really start LSR either. 5 new tutorials is a detable goal. I haven’t exactly written 5 tutorials but I have done some work on mi-soft.nl (and still wrote 2 tutorials). And 1 blogpost… well I’m trying !

Losing some of my stuff

As I mentioned before I have lost some of my hardware to a lightning strike. I didn’t just lose my motherboard however. I also lost my microphone (blue snowball), my keyboard (razer blackwidow), my xbox controller receiver, 8gb’s of ram and some random usb peripherals. Some of the stuff was insured and thus I have gotten some money for it. However I did not simply want to replace the lost stuff, I wanted to upgrade too.

I upgraded my keyboard to a ducky shine with black cherry mx switches. I have to say I’m still getting used to the linear-ness of the switches but so far so good. The big upgrade however is my recording setup. I went from having a single blue snowball to a blue yeti with shock mount, pop filter and boom arm. Initial tests prove to be very promising and there is a definite upgrade in sound quality. Aside from sounding a bit better it looks A LOT better. It almost look’s pro! Here, have a look:

Youtube channel split + new intros and outros

Mi-Soft.nl and Rick van Lieshout are now 2 separate Youtube channels. Mi-Soft.nl will only be used to host tutorials. Nothing else. My personal channel (Rick van Lieshout) will host all other things.

I have designed a new outro for all of the Mi-Soft.nl video’s. I made the outro with “Camtasia studio” and “Gimp”. The outro can be found here:

I also bought some intro’s from Flixpress. Both of these can be found here: