The Personal Blog of Shawn Hooghkirk

Author Archive

It’s Growing [Hop] Season

Saturday, April 3rd, 2010

Hopzilla (Coming Soon)

It’s that time of year again. Last year I dove into brewing beer, putting together a few batches that actually weren’t as bad as I anticipated. During studying and learning what I could, a friend gave me two small hop plants (both Centennial) . Since the hops were transplanted in September (and they were a seedling) they needed a year to become more mature. Last year I was surprised since both plants produced an ounce or two (although not very full) but still were vacuum sealed (basically for showcasing my first crop ). In January that same friend was moving from his house and didn’t have room for some of his hops (more…)

Posted in Brewing Beer | No Comments »

How To Take Over The World, Now

Friday, February 12th, 2010

You want to – but how? (Photo: axiepics)

As of Monday, I am now officially a Board Member for the Friends of the Ridgefield Wildlife Refuge. After thinking about this for sometime, I wanted to retrace my steps on how just one year ago I moved here, not knowing a soul other than family, and now knowing just about my entire community around me.

When I first moved to Ridgefield, I had just graduated college days before and was full of ambition, but also full of a “I’m gonna relax for a little while and then conquer the world” attitude. After helping out (more…)

Posted in Biography, Self Development | No Comments »

I’m Gonna Have to Say No

Saturday, February 6th, 2010

Think you can do this? (Photo: Telekommunist)

So recently my phone died and I was forced to purchase a new one. So immediately I started checking out the best phones out there. After browsing for about one hour time intervals for a few days I looked at the situation from outside the box, coming to my senses and purchasing a pay-as-you-go phone. Now I’m sure some of you would disagree with this decision (more…)

Posted in Buying Behaviors, Time | 1 Comment »

Designing Visually Appealing Artwork

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

Making It or Breaking It with Design

In this post I am going to explain how to create visually appealing elements in your graphic and web design. I will do this by dissecting an the image above from a current project of mine and explain how and why I did what I did.

This project’s goal is to reflect a modern image of the company, while also make is very for users to navigate the company website. While this may sound generic, the design is certainty not. (more…)

Posted in Design, Graphic Design, Web Development | No Comments »

The Real Equation We Should Be Using When Buying

Friday, January 22nd, 2010

(Photo: GorillaSushi)

This post is about myself finding a solution to backing up files online. It is not about buying Sugarsync and is certainty not an affiliate blog post with affiliate links. Simply, a story of how I went from thinking in just a monetary sense, into thinking time saving and ease of use. Enjoy.

—

Lately I’ve decided rather than burning DVD’s to backup my files, to go with an online backup provider, specifically SugarSync. Now I can’t believe I didn’t do this sooner. (more…)

Posted in Backing Up, Buying Behaviors | No Comments »

Custom Fields in Wordpress

Saturday, January 16th, 2010

Stevenson, Washington and the Columbia River

Yesterday I came across a method to update your webpage or blog posts through the Wordpress interface, rather than going into the code. For example, you have a jQuery slider on your homepage, but in order to update it you have to go into the template (or page / post) and edit it there. After staying on that road for sometime, I knew there had to be an easier way to do this through the Wordpress interface, rather than diving into the code (and defeating the purpose of using Wordpress altogether).

So I stumbled onto Custom Fields. Custom Fields are those little boxes below the area where you update your post, that I’m assuming most people glance over once and never look back. After searching for a method to update the slider for a project, I found a method for doing this via Custom Fields. (more…)

Posted in Web Development, Wordpress | No Comments »

Three Note Coil Ascending Picking Patterns [Guitar]

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

So lately I have been freeing up some time to practice playing the guitar. Over the last ten years, I have averaged about an hour a day playing, but keeping it more of a fun thing to do with the occasional creation of a song. Now, I’ve started putting myself to the grindstone and doing all of the exercises I used to do when I first started, by going through The Exercise Book. So yes, scales galore (as you can see above). This time it’s actually a lot more fun (more…)

Posted in Guitar, Scales | No Comments »

New Blog

Monday, January 11th, 2010

The Columbia River

After putting a lot of sweat into Graticle and another side project (I’ll be announcing soon), I’ve decided to create my own homepage. There are a few reasons for this, which I’ll explain.