So my site has been down for about 24 hours. Did you miss me? (Sometimes I’d love to see the expressions on my reader’s faces, I bet there is more than one person out there rolling their eyes right now)
The problem is that I had exceeded my bandwidth. Not that it was a big surprise, I had been monitoring the traffic to my site almost on a daily basis, hoping it wouldn’t go over. In fact, I had just increased the bandwidth a couple weeks back. It’s up to 17GB of bandwidth a month right now.
Frankly, I have no allusions of grandeur…I know for a fact all 17GB of traffic coming to my site aren’t individual people looking for my divine insight. I’m grateful if even just a handful of people out there find it worthwhile to even read this regularly.
In actuality, there’s a reasonable percentage of real traffic. I get maybe anywhere from 150 – 200 unique visitors a day to this site. (hello!) Not bad considering I really haven’t made any effort to market this.
What really is giving me a pain in the rear end is the bandwidth being eaten up by bad bots and search engines. You know I don’t mind of search engines like Bing, Google, and Yahoo come and archive the content on my site, but they say there’s a lot of random bots out there doing not much else but farming content from websites for no good reason at all. Summammabeetch. If I’m reading my report right I have like 9GB of traffic just on random bots alone.
I gotta find a way to ban these bastards. So far the information found online to combat these bots aren’t very specific. I’ll report back if I find a way. I seem to notice any of my clients with photography websites seem to be encountering problems like this lately.
BackOffice Solutions Hawaii is a business designed to help support other new businesses and non-profit organizations. Say you need help with alternate financing, accounting, payroll, taxes, marketing, branding, etc, they’ll act as the backbone for you. I kind of wish I had access to support like this 5 years ago when I started Lowe Studio Inc! The stress of getting it all started was painful.
Anyway, about the logo…we went through a series of pretty unusual ideas. When I have the chance I’ll put up the other concept drafts in the portfolio section. Ultimately we ended up with this concept. The idea where part of the logo text falling “behind” or “in back” of the other part of the text.
I particularly liked using this fontface because of the sharp quality of the letter “K” allowed me to split that letter up, leaving me with this “<” shape that might further suggest looking back.
I kind of liked having the shadow effect on just that one part of the logo. It feels to me like there’s a depth to the form, and yet the rest of it remains flat. So I like leaving a little bit of that eye-trickery thing.
In the end, I’m happy with it. As usual, I’m left wondering if I can do more to this, but a part of me likes the fact it’s a simple concept.
My wife complains of being bored in Hawaii every once in a while. I have to admit sometimes it’s rather limiting to be on an island…granted, it’s a big island and a good sized city here in Honolulu, but there’s only so much to you can do.
Every weekend we usually go walk around the Mall. Yes, the same one week after week, Ala Moana. Yes, we have other malls here in Hawaii but they all really suck. You can walk around for about 30 minutes and then you’ve seen everything. Plus my wife’s not your typical woman shopper, so we don’t stick around very long.
I digress…
This past week at Ala Moana they’re celebrating their 50 year anniversary. A couple of things caught my eye at least…
It’s been too hot to think lately. A couple of near storms around the Hawaiian islands this season has come by and blocked our tradewinds. If you’ve never been to Hawaii….basically all year round we have weather that is near ideallic.
But the one-time you don’t want to come here is when we don’t have our tradewinds. The humidity rises and it’s just to sticky and hot outside to do anything. I couldn’t even think yesterday, I had to drive down to work at a Starbucks for the air conditioning.
The day is better today. The winds are back and it’s feeling a lot more comfortable. I figured it be a good day to just collect my thoughts. Read on if you’re so bored to death with your day you want to know more about mine!
Last week I grabbed my two best buds and my dad up for a climb up KokoHead. We had heard rumors of how much of a bitch this hike would be — athletic guys who run all the time and yet cry at the thought of this hike.
We had to try. The view at the top is fantastic. But be prepared to have a med-evac at the top if you can’t climb steps. All 1048 of them.
I stumbled across this little bookcover concept today (via Book Design Review). My first reaction was positive – you know, it caught my eye & it got me thinking a little bit. It also brings me back to find memories of the old King’s Quest 1 game oh so many years ago. (geeky I know)
I digress…
What I enjoyed reading was the critique about the cover design and the explanation behind it. You get a glimpse of the thought process behind the artist.
To be filed under the “Cool stuff we never see here in Hawaii” category. These LEDs will react to movement from Passerbys. Looks like we’re getting to the point where those billboards from Blade Runner and Minority Report are entirely possible.
You know because of Hawaii’s budget shortage they’re cutting the arts again, I doubt anybody would have the fundage or the permission to install anything cool like this here anytime soon. (Urban Prankster via Gizmodo)
I’m going to tell you a little personal story today, one that I told to my business networking group today.
Some of you may know I play music on the side every now and again. I’ve been in a billion bands. Started playing bass right around my Junior year of high school (What is that, 5 years ago now?). Right around the time I was 20 or 21 I was in this punk band called Freshly Squeezed.
We were young and dumb. BUT we were pretty lucky. Lucky enough to stumble across the right connections that got us into a lot of concerts with VIP passes, and we managed to eek out a couple opportunities opening for some major acts of the time like Public Enemy & the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
I really like this website done by web-designer, Orman Clark over in the Mainland. Really creative illustration work and nice technical expertise done on his site in particular. I’m jealous! I just have a brain-freeze with doing projects for myself, I wish I had the patience to do something like this. Check it out, it’s worth a peek.
The only problem I can fixate on is that I keep seeing that Remax logo when I look at that floating balloon. (MyNameIsOrman)
Owner of Honolulu Burger Co stuck to his word. Comped our whole meal even. That's a super nice gesture. Count me as a permanent fan.11:15:35 PM September 06, 2010from TweetDeck
