Amazing Stop Motion Graffiti is a post from: Chris Stormer

The Grocery List is a post from: Chris Stormer

The Athabasca Oil Sands, Alberta, Canada. These oil deposits make up the largest reservoir of crude bitumen in the world, and as recently as 2006, produced over 1 million barrels of crude oil per day.

Confluence of the Rio Uruguay and a tributary, Misiones province, Argentina. Drastically cleared to make way for farming, the tropical rainforest of Argentina is now in some areas a less effective defense against erosion than it was in the past. The heavy rains in the province of Misiones (79 inches, per year) wash the soil and carry off significant quantities of iron-rich earth into the Rio Uruguay, turning the waters a dark, reddish color. Carried by the river, this sediment is dumped in the estuary of the Rio de la Plata – the largest on Earth – and accumulates in the access channels to the port of Buenos Aires.

Waste from the copper mine at Chuquicamata, Chile. This giant scallop shell is made of earth. A crane deposits the earth in successive, slightly curved lines giving the appearance of sheets of sand lined up side by side. This earth is extracted with the copper, but it is separated from the ore by sieving. The metal is refined in the Chuquicamata foundry that, thanks to newly installed equipment, can now filter out 95 percent of the sulfur dioxide (SO 2 ) and 97 percent of the arsenic that the process releases.

Worker resting on bales of cotton, Thonakaha, Korhogo, Ivory Coast. Cotton crops occupy approximately 335,000 square klilometers worldwide, and use nearly one quarter of all pesticides sold.

Sand dune in the heart of vegetation on Fraser island, Queensland, Australia. Fraser Island, named after Eliza Fraser, who was shipwrecked on the island in 1836, is the world’s largest sand island. On top of this rather infertile substratum, a humid tropical forest has developed in the midst of which wide dunes intrude, moving with the wind. Fraser Island has important water resources, including nearly 200 freshwater dune lakes, and has varied fauna such as marsupials, birds, and reptiles. Welcoming 200,000 visitors a year without damaging the local fauna and flora is a real challenge to sustainable development on the island, which was declared a World Heritage site by Unesco in 1992.

Looking Down at Earth is a post from: Chris Stormer

Killer Business Card Designs is a post from: Chris Stormer

Creative Advertising Part I is a post from: Chris Stormer

Asian Barcodes is a post from: Chris Stormer

A completely new backend database, rewrote from scratch, why is this important? A year ago when I originally designed the original database the needs were different it was strictly a shopping system and quite honestly it had been 4 years since I had worked heavily in database design so I just didn’t do a few things as well as I should. The backend has started to really fold over the last few months because of the extensive modifications we have made to the original shopping system, it now is a shopping, quoting, shipping, note, email system. To say it has been heavily hacked is an understatement. So that is the biggest and most important improvement because without that nothing else really matters. Results? 200% improvement in query speed which of course increases the front end speeds as well.

This is not say there is nothing for the end user….

We have also rewrote EVERY page on the site to be 100% css / html valid code.. yes it is transitionally valid.. maybe next time it will be strict. So that was a very large job especially considering the number of pages (500). While I was making the site better I also decided to try and improve the page structure in terms of making the page flow better for both search engines and text readers.

There was one more huge change that we made… we decided to add sub domains for images, scripts and styles, this effectively boosted the pipes our website could load from 2 (default) to 8. This really comes shinning through on image heavy pages.. we feel it is an important change for the future. The reason this works is because a browser can load information two pipes on each domain and a subdomain counts as a new domain. Nifty huh? Result? Generally about a 33% increase in browsing speed for our customers Today is just the first day of upgrades… (well it actually started yesterday with me working with the Rackspace Technicians to get the subdomains setup perfect on our production server.

Today I will be updating all non-product pages with the new css valid code. Enjoy.

The Careful Upgrade is a post from: Chris Stormer

Fantastic Russian Architecture is a post from: Chris Stormer

European Truck Art is a post from: Chris Stormer

The product should be launching on 11/14/06 so stay tuned!

There is also a variety of Multimedia Resources found in their company blog.

Audio Video Development Center is a post from: Chris Stormer