Steven Southard

Midwest Bike Polo Championships 8

2010-06-10T01:28:45Z

Facing off against Como’s A-team.

My first time in Minneapolis, Minnesota. What a cool city! The streets were truly alive at night which being from Oklahoma kind of shocked me. The Tournament was great too. I played with the “Polo Furries” from Florida, we got 7th out of 48. I really enjoyed playing with Jerret and Jason and learned a lot in the process. It was also my best finish yet.

PHXated.com

2010-06-09T18:31:34Z

PHXated was started by Bill Wyman to focus on commentary and news about the Phoenix arts and media scene and since launch as amassed over 400 blog articles.

Article written by Yuri one of PHXated’s three new contributors

There is still an equally large part of this site covering events and happenings in Phoenix that is preparing to launch.

See the latest about the news in Phoenix at PHXated.com.

Split-Lever Polo Brake

2010-02-26T23:09:53Z

Idea from Chris Bottles on
League of Bike Polo

This kind of dual-brake setup would rule the court if it existed. The key is that the outer back brake could pull independently allowing you to skid and the inner front brake could pull together with the outer for immediate stop.

I’m pretty sure no one has ever made a split-lever brake before. In hardcourt bike pole we ride with one hand so this seems like a natural evolution. I can’t take credit for the idea but maybe drawing it out is enough to warrant me co-inventor status.

If anyone out there makes this part please send me a sample to test.

Bubble Worlds

2009-12-02T18:36:36Z

In Tulsa there are only about 12 polo players. We’ve met twice a week for the past year and had a great time. The style of play that developed was fun and challenging.

Photo by Pdillo at Tracy Park, Tulsa

Mainly one person played goalie and two took on two looked for openings and took nice close shots on goal. It wasn’t especially fast-passed. People didn’t exactly pull out in front of you to “stop short”. There wasn’t a huge amount of hard hacking or aggressive play. In short, we lived in a bubble.

A few months ago we went to a bike polo tournament in Columbia, MO. It was the first time our club had gotten out of our city to play other teams. Our insular circle collided with an other larger circle and things changed.

Our game is now about speed. Now everything is about fast-breaks and pushing the ball up. The goalie is obsolete. The intensity is over the top. We’re like Piranha circling and nipping at the ball and anything within our reach.

Early look at the new PHXated.com

2009-12-01T12:53:47Z

PHXated is part blog and part events listing. The blog will launch later this week and the events listing will be following over the next few weeks.

A challenge was the DRY concept of not restating the dates for multiple posts on the same date.

Promise Acres Arena

2009-10-25T05:27:00Z

Promise Acres Arena started July 27th, completion August 11th. Launch Date: August 12th.

Promise Acres Arena has a nice CMS to handle updates, events, and sales. Design, content, plus business logic delivered in two and a half weeks.

It’s still a work in progress but go ahead and take a look: PromiseAcresArena.com

Midwest Polo Champeenships

2009-08-31T18:25:07Z

It’s totally on!

Tulsa has been playing bike polo for almost a year and this will be our debut tournament. We’re all totally stoked to try out our skills against some real competition.

If you’ve got a team, you want to be on a team, or just want to go please let me know in the comments. We could easily take three teams. There is plenty of housing so no worries there. We’re going down the night before.

Practice as much as possible. You can also hit me or phillip up for organized practice times.

Top Sales Agent Job

2009-07-24T20:44:18Z

Oh yes! I will take that.

I’ve been the chief web developer, designer, project manager, and sales agent for years. Although I like the independence of it, I now see the usefulness of a team. I’ve got the web development and design part nailed down but I think I could use help in the sales department and maybe project management area.

If you have experience in web sales and have ready clients I’d like to welcome you to my team. If you think we could work together I encourage you to let me know who you are and the type of connections you have.

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Up With Trees T-Shirt

2009-07-13T19:03:48Z

Enjoy Forest Living!

Update: This contest was reopened and I was able to enter this shirt design. No news back if I won but if I do I’ll be pretty stoked to see these on the streets.

A friend of mine had this contest for Up With Trees. I didn’t quite read the time right so I didn’t get to enter this shirt. Oh well, there were some good designs anyway and I had fun designing it. It was a simple urban meets trees concept and I got to try out my new poster font which

New Poster Fontset

2009-07-06T19:10:58Z

After years of hand-drawing letters I thought maybe I’d just go ahead and complete the set.

Making my own fontset was a bit more work then I initially realized. I knew about the twenty-six letters of course but then there’s upper and lower case. On top of that, there’re the numbers and twenty plus special symbols.

Image Intensive Headers

2009-06-22T17:29:39Z

Blue boxes are drawn around the individual assets

Creating a layered header by cutting small transparent .gifs and weaving them together with html and css delivers smooth sharp loading even on slow internet connections. This approach is a lot of extra work and most people may not notice much difference but to me it’s totally worth it.

This site can be seen at DaddyHinkles.com. If you visit them please leave them a comment and let them know how much you like their new website.

Web Audit

2009-06-10T05:18:32Z

You need some accurate information on where you are today.

A web audit can show you how people are using your site, evaluate competitive opportunities in your market, and examine your technical and logistical situation. Understanding your website’s environment will let you target your advertising spend, and in doing so, increase conversions and market share.

seo

Following the ‘Click’ Steam

Analytical software is used to compile a complete analysis of the click stream and behavior of the website’s traffic including: number of visitors, how long they stay, what pages they visit, if they’re repeat visitors, and how they got to your site. It will identify what keywords attract your most desirable prospects, what advertising copy pulled the most responses, and what pages and content make the most money for you. Analyzing this data for a month will give us a snap-shot of the kind of traffic your site currently receives. This basic data will reveal your site’s strengths, weaknesses, and give us a foundation to explore strategies to draw visitors to your site.

Competitive Advantage

Actionable metrics help you rethink your internet initiatives and drive more leads to agents at a lower cost.

Your web audit will include a comprehensive search term and competitive analysis usable for search engine optimization. It’ll study the current top-ranked cites and reverse-engineer them to your advantage, match the demographics and psychographics of your desired audience with online advertisement options, and consider: Pay Per Click campaigns making yield curves and ad testing matrices to project results over time.

An audit identifies best practices and seeks out industry-leading trends giving you the opportunity to be innovative in your brand marketing. Spotting trends and creating fresh editorial content that attracts an ever expanding readership will increasing traffic and ROI. The research will help stakeholder hone online business objectives so you can develop protocols for testing and establish success factors.

Is your environment holding you back?

Websites are made so many different ways that it is important to examine the technical aspects of your site from top to bottom and see how it’s working or failing. The audit will explore details your domain registry, the servers that host your site, and the technologies that create the functionality of your applications. Are these aspects secure, robust, and appropriate to your situation? We’ll determine if there are ways to save you money while at the same time improving access, quality, and security.

Increase Traffic and ROI

The web audit is one of the best investments you can make to give you the research to move forward confidently while taking advantage of your present development. It will help decide how to improve online ROI. With this new understanding you can select the best solutions to accomplish your corporate goals from an array of highly successful tactics.

All Terrain Scout Transport (AT-ST)

2009-05-30T16:45:45Z

Made by Asa age 5 April 26

After watching Return of the Jedi, Asa sat down and made this AT-ST. Jango Fett may have never actually driven one of these he just happens to be one of Asa’s favorite Star Wars characters.

Banana Republic Backpack

2009-05-29T13:04:28Z

Rebecca had this bag when we got married and I’ve used it as my fall back bag every since. It is an extraordinarily simple canvas bag. There is really not much to it. Two side pockets and an inside slip pocket and two straps that hold it mostly closed.

Moderately used canvas backpack at least 8 years old

My wife probably used this bag for massage linens and the pocket to carry oil because I can see what appear to be a few oil stains. Canvas really soaks up the oil and over all the bag appears a bit dingy. To my knowledge the bag has never been washed but I bet it would take a washing well.

Most of the time I never messed with the straps at all because the soft canvas material gapped open enough at the opening I could get just about anything I wanted in an out without ever touching the straps. This bag doesn’t really offer any secure way to carry your stuff but on the other hand it is light and a lot of stuff doesn’t really need to be secured.

It’s very hard to get the straps thru the loops

When I use it I put my 15" Mac Book Pro in it and maybe my power cord in one of the side pockets. As you can see the bottom has ripped a little where my computer sticks through a bit. This rip doesn’t really worry me much and if I ever get around to repairing it it will add to the overall ascetics.

This rip could be sewn up and easily made to last a few more year

Rating

This bag has had a good run and it’s light-weight and care-free style has made it a bag I will regularly pack up and ride off with for the day.

Square Cooking Fire

2009-05-28T14:10:41Z

Stick fires have become my favorite fires for cooking. They’re plenty hot for cooking a beautiful steak. They last about an hour then burn themselves out which is nice.

In a few minutes this fire will be just right for cooking.

They’re easy to start and arrange in a nice square shape for even cooking. I always stick four sticks into the ground at the corners and then build inside of those post so everything stays put. After you put a couple down one way, fill in the center with paper, or whatever you’re going to use to light it, and then stack the rest the other way.

Unexpired Swag

2009-04-26T03:02:02Z

organic cotton thin tshirt

This conference is a long time in coming. Back in 2004 when Rails really hit hard for me it wasn’t so big in Tulsa. It’s just one of those things that has to have years to build.

Now our Rails community may still be small but we’re stylish. These are hand printed in my garage one at a time. Hit me up for one of these vintage threads early and let me know you’ll be there.

Moiré

2009-04-26T01:47:09Z

Working with line-art on the screen you can sometimes see a moiré develop. It has to do with the angles in which lines intersect one another. Below I’ve drawn a perfectly square set of gridded lines and over-laid another with just a few degrees of rotation.

When even straight lines intersect at angles it creates a disturbance

'79 Astro Daimler Polo Bike

2009-04-21T11:07:54Z

The needs are strong, fast, stable, and can turn on a dime. The Astro Daimler is a real quick frame and the 28 to 18 gear ratio gives it a real jump and snap.

’79 Austro Dainler [fixed-converted] 27" back, 650 front

Why did I change my website?

2009-04-07T01:07:08Z

There are lots of reasons really but it comes down to the simple fact it wasn't working for me. Like any person I have a lot of different interests. My last website only allowed for my portfolio and a web related aspects of who I am. That turned out more confining than helpful.

Old Site
vs.
New Site

In the book Daniel Quinn wrote about the writing of his earlier book Ishmael, he said he had written and rewritten the book many time. In his early attempts he had captured maybe the tail of the tiger. So he started again and wrote maybe a thousand pages and only capture the tail and hind quarters. Again and again he restarted until he finally came up with his succinct retailing of maybe Plato’s Republic.

I’d like to think of my website can be a bit like that. This is maybe the 5th or sixth site I’ve made for myself. These days I’m really into aggregating and and archive inheritance. I do hope you all add in your thoughts and enjoy some of what this new formate will allow me to explore.

BikePolo Mallets

2009-04-07T01:07:08Z

My mallets are the ones that are off-center, the green-taped ski pole with the flesh head is mine. Our club has about 15 mallets all in. Most were made by phillipd. I’ve made 9, of which four are used regularly and two are in use this game. I also made that orange-headed one with the carbon-fiber shaft.

Mallets are thrown in and divided up randomly for 3 on 3 pickup games

I think the off-set ones are lighter and give you more options in actual play. I strike it with either side and I feel like it lets me make nice shots both ways.

When I use the short-side it feels like there’s the whole weight of the back-side right there for striking. Also the point of contact is closer to the shaft so more in line with where I think it should be.

Since my first mallet, every one of them have been off-center. I just don’t think it feels right to have both sides the same. People that play with it evenly balanced wouldn’t think of switching. For me; if I use one of their’s, the backside gets in the way while dribbling. Also the lack of choices just seems dumb.

One thing about this sport is it’s still evolving. It’s still so new that people don’t have it all worked out yet. There are techniques that people are using that any one of these mallet or other mallet concepts could help them be better at it. As I have ideas I make a mallet to try it out, after all, the heads are easily replaceable.

Each of these heads are meant to explore different advantages

We play on a tennis court and it’s pretty rough. The orange head is 2 and 1/4 inch tubing that comes on a roll. I think it’s for putting fiber optics through. It’s light-weight and strong while being slightly flexible material. One thing, heads made from this can be a little tacky when passing. On our old slick court at the Hub this material was perfect. It was lighter and had a great feel on that surface.

I’ve started experimenting with angled heads and I’ve found that with the subtle slant the attack on the club isn’t as straight so it actually glides along the rough surface better, making passes much more controlled and snappier. The down side is that all my shots are about thirty degrees to the right. Maybe I’ll cut the angle of the head to help with that or just give it up.

The flesh colored pipe is high-density plastic and I think may have been used in an outdoor child’s toy. It’s very straight and the inside diamater is larger and helps with ball jointing.

The snub-nosed one has a cap in the snubbed-end giving the user a sharp flat surface to strike the ball. The short front-end with no back-end allows for this wicked ball slinging. To my knowledge it’s a legal shot but it feels kind of wrong. The downside for this mallet is that it’s crap for dribbling and catching.

The flesh colored head on the black carbon-fiber golf club shaft is light quick and delivers and unbelievable wallop on the ball. It feels so incredible to use because it’s just so snappy and just pop the ball fires off. It’s also very light in the hand so even after a full day of playing my wrist doesn’t hurt at all.

The white shaft with the full-sized flesh colored head is probably what I would choose if I only had one mallet. It’s so balanced and strong that I know it’s going to play really well. A six inch head catches the ball well. With the holes it’s not that heavy. It’s a great mallet for beginner to exert. If I was going to be in a tournament tomorrow this is the club I’d use. I’d be torn between the golf club mallet or this one but because of it’s durability I think I’d take this one.

These are the tools I use to make mallets.

I think the off-set ones are lighter and give you more options in actual play. I strike it with either side and I feel like it lets me make nice shots both ways. When I use the back side It feels like there is the whole power of the back side right there for striking.