Today Bozeman had the biggest hail storm I've ever seen. Hail the size of golf balls. My wife was out driving when it happened. Somehow our car avoided any serious damage (and my wife). It was a bit worse on the south side of town.

There were a lot of broken windows around the south side of town and main street.

Here's some of my favorite pics.

If you live in Bozeman, expect to see this playing on NBC during the news and a few other times a day. I wish I had more time to work on it, but all in all it turned out pretty for the limited time I put into it.

This style is called "Kinetic Typography." I'm a big fan of using Kinetic Typography for a commercial, its simple and really catches the eye. Plus you can't help but read the text, which makes it like saying everything twice. We'll see how effective it is, but I have a hunch its going to better than most local commercials.

This was all done in Adobe After Effects, and if I get enough time I might do a Kinetic Typography Tutorial.

Also, if you encode something like this into a mov with Sorensen 3 as the codec, it ends up looking great on YouTube (because its the same codec flash uses). Just a little tip.

Having lived in DC for a few years I realized that big city life isn't for me. DC is a great place to visit, don't get me wrong, but once I moved my stress level dropped by about 2/3rds. Maybe some people can get used to constantly being stuck in traffic, or everyone being unfriendly, but that's just not my style.

Bozeman was a great compromise from between big city and middle of nowhere. While I would consider DC to have a really good tech scene, Bozeman has quite a few tech related events believe it or not, and the development community is surprisingly large (somewhat thanks to Montana State and RightNow technologies). It gives you the chance to really get to know others in your area. For someone who doesn't like working for a large company, this is great. It gives me most of the benefits of a larger tech community, but without the stress of the city. I find myself going to a lot more events here because getting around is so much easier. (This one can be chalked up to DC's unique traffic situation, aka all bad - all the time).

When I moved I was worried that I would be left out of the global tech scene, and while a lot of my friends told me this would happen, I find that really little has changed. Most of my industry related information still comes through blogs and friends. All of which I communicate just as much as I used to. Some more in fact because I have more free time.

In DC I would have an hour commute each way (on a good day) to get to work. If you add that up, it equates to 500 hours of commuting a year. If you think of a day as 16 waking hours, that's 31 days of commuting a year.

Working from home in Bozeman means that my commute is about 30 seconds. So what am I going to do with my extra 30 days a year? For one take a vacation.

^ photo of Montana State University campus in Bozeman

Tonight I went to the montana programmers meetup at RightNow tech. Since I quit working at freewebs.com three years ago, I've been kind of doing my own thing in isolation, with the occasional conference to get my nerd out for a week a year. Its neat to see the other projects people have going on in Bozeman.

Tonight's session was "design for programmers", its an interesting topic since it seems like now days the developer/designer line seems to be blurred. I know I have been doing my own design for quite a while now.

I think one thing that all of the web development crowd is excited about is HTML5 and some of the new CSS features, typekit.com was brought up. From what I've read it seems that they have worked with google and open sourced some of their infrastructure (which seems like a strange business choice). So their scripts and backend front processing lets you use the @font-face css tag in all of the browsers. This even works in IE5 and up, and degrades gracefully for any previous browsers, though it sounds it will work for most everyone.

Someone also mentioned fontsquirrel.com which seemed to be similar to typekit, but free. I will definitely be checking it out over the next few days.

Phillip also talked about the specifics of their interactions with clients, which was interesting to hear.

All in all the meetup went well and was informative. The more meetings we have the more I realize that Bozeman has a lot of programmers and designers, it just needs more opportunities for us to get together.