Wherein the Author Imparts Upon His Audience the Ongoings of His Life

January 23, 2008

It's been some time since I have updated this blog. So I take leave of my busy life, if only for a moment, to fill you, the reader, in on the various happenings and goings on. (Okay, that's enough eighteen hundreds talk).

So, Christmas has come and gone (as it always does) and I am now back into the thick of school. Luckily, I don't have all sucky courses this month. No, I only have one. However, let's put the good news before the bad, shall we?

ADG
Advanced Computer Graphics, or ADG, is probably the second best course I've had thus far (NOS being number one). ADG is, more or less, a Photoshop/Illustrator class. DCG was also this to a slight degree, but more emphasis was placed on the actual design as opposed to technical issues. Now, however, we're in the thick of opacity masks, and layer styles, and blah, blah, blah. Actually, believe it or not, I've become more comfortable in Illustrator than I am in Photoshop. The pen tool, simply put, is the most brilliant thing since aged cheese. But don't take my word for it, take my art:

It should be duly noted that the NES is not, in fact, a photograph. Nor was it some fancy job I did in Photoshop. No, it was done completely in Illustrator and, vector graphics being what they are, is infinitely scalable. The advertisement, however, is not. Oh, and speaking of which, I realize that the NES is pushing twenty-three.

My other course is geometry and I will leave you simply with this: proofs can burn in Hell.

One thing I'd like to say real quick: iPod Touch is the best PDA ever created. I know. I own one. Damn you Apple, damn you.

My site is still riding on a wave of hits from the Rock Band drums thing way back when, but I've had another surge in popularity thanks to this guy. He's created one nicely polished drum kit app and has kindly linked back to my page. It'd be wrong for me not to return the favor.

Finally, while I'm throwing out links, be sure to check out the newly revamped Game Boyz. While you're at it, why don't you sign up on the forums and tell my bro how awesome the comic is.

Well, that should appease the masses for the well being. I write these posts in hope that somebody is reading them, however, even if it just serves as a chronicle of my life for me to read later, then so be it. It's deep tomes of history have already provided me with hours of cringing agony. May it continue to do so in this grand a glorious new year.

Tags: school art design comic apple

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Apple keeps getting me...

September 29, 2007

I do not consider myself an Apple zealot, but I'll have to admit that they make very nice hardware. I'm completely loving my Mac Book Pro. It's doubley more awesome that my Mac mini in almost every respect. Clock speed, RAM, hard drive space, video, you name it this thing is better. And it's portable. And it gets blazing hot when it's doing heavy processing, hotter than the surface of the sun I'd say.

Yesterday I picked up my books and softwares, those being Final Cut Studio 2 and Adobe Creative Suite 3 (adds up to a grand total of $3000+). I loaded up CS3 immediately and had fun doing stupid Photoshop jobs all day.

My Roommate and Jessica Alba

I tried screwing around with FCS2 last night but didn't really get anywhere. Final Cut Pro itself seems fairly straight forward so far but I couldn't figure out Color (color grading app) which is a bummer because one thing that my videos need are to be color graded.

School doesn't start until Tuesday and I'm beginning to get a little bored. E and I have been playing Halo 2 and we watched all the Back to te Future movies, but I'm ready for school. I do have my copy of Eternal Sonata now so maybe that'll ease the pai of waiting even if just by a little bit. I could always draw, I suppose. But I don't know if I'll be able to top this:

It's the Master Chief

Tags: apple florida pictures sketches halo eternal sonata

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A Word on the State of Apple

March 3, 2007

As you may or may not know I am currently the owner of a new Mac Mini (Core Duo FTW!). Despite the fact that Windows is easily installed thanks to the magic of Boot Camp, I've been working in OS X mostly. I feel I've been using it long enough to give my opinion:

Pros
- Easy to use. Once I figured out the basics I pretty much got it.
- Stability (for the most part). A few minutes ago Safari died an ugly death on me dragging the rest of the system down with it and I've been in a must reboot situation twice (not including the system updates)
- Pretty looking. Hey, what can I say? I'm a sucker for the genie effect.

Cons
- Apple's interface guidlines tend to make apps overly simplistic. Toolbars are almost non-existant, everything seems to revolve around a drag and drop interface. This is an area where Windows apps can really shine given a developer who knows what they are doing.
- Keyboard craziness. I don't know about you, but I use the Home and End keys to navigate through text boxes all the time. Albiet, it's still there (Cmd-Left and Right respectively), but pressing two keys (or three if I want to make a selection) is a lot harder. Also, they seemed to ignore the delete key as well. I'm not a mouse person and I don't want to drag my effin' files to the trash. I want to press delete (and Enter to close the resulting dialog box).
- Unix directory structure. Windows can be incredibly clean in directory structure if done right. Unix is much, much more difficult and half the folders you can't see anyways. Also, mountpoints drive me nuts (although, OS X seems to keep track of all that fairly well).
- Finally, hardware support. They tell you "it just works" but that's a lie. There are no drivers for my scanner (forcing me to use a piece of shareware), minimal support for my printer, NO support for my flash drive just to name a few. Driver support is something people complain about in Windows, but I have never, EVER had a problem with hardware in XP.

So, now that I'm through with that I'll deliver my verdict: Windows XP SP2 is the best OS ever (and I've used Vista so I can rule that one out). That said, OS X is definitely the best flavor of Unix I've ever seen and I can get along with it nicely.

Tags: apple. os x windows

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Comics and Updates

February 6, 2007

I haven't been posting here very much lately. Why? Well... I dunno :-P. Firstly, though, I'll get the comic liunks up to speed:

Plan 4 World Peace (filler)
The Fruit Saga, Parts 1, 2, and 3.

The fruit saga is more or less based on real life. I did purchase a Mac mini with my tax refund and, despite my years of rampant Mac hatred, I must admit that it is a nifty piece of hardware. I do have a copy of Vista installed (thanks to bootcamp), but I haven't booted out of OS X in several days. I haven't done much more than piddle around with stuff, but I'm going to start learning the APIs and maybe write a game.

Full Sail, my college of choice, has been "pestering" me lately and I guess I need to call them back and start getting things setup to sail away in the fall. I'm not sure what kind of course I want to take. Back when I heard about them it was game programming hands down, but I do enjoy drawing and would like to do more film projects. It's a real toss up. I may go with game programming yet because, of those three options, it's probably my strongest area. We'll see, though...

As far as work goes, it's pretty much usual. I'm cashier mostly, but since I recieved my CSM powers I've been doing that some too. Just yesterday, in fact, they pulled me off a register to cover for somebody whilst they went on break. I'm sitting in a pretty sweet position in that I can do almost anything in the store from CSMing, to cashiering, to cart pushing, to unloading trucks, etc.

Well, I'll close this blog post with a little piece of my art featuring Basch, my favorite character from FFXII:

Tags: art comic digital double apple full sail college final fantasy work csm

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The internet will never be the same again

April 7, 2006

I am proud to announce something that will change the face of the internet as we know it.... or not so much. Anyhoo, I bring you "T3h L33ts", the official dxprog/linkman2004 podcast! Whoooo! It hasn't been listed on iTunes yet, but it will. Iiitt wiilllll. Here's the topics we discussed in Episode I (excluding off-topic stuff):

Apple's Boot Camp
Pilotwings Revolution
2005 Nintendo Profits
Bob Ross Painting on Revolution
The Revolution's Final Secret
The Reggie-man

Go ahead and take a listen, spread the word and such. Pretty soon I'll an official site up (instead of just a directory listing). We'll try to update every week so pay attention to the feed. Enjoy :-)

UPDATE: We're on iTunes! Whooo!

Tags: podcast. teh leets wii apple

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