News from Florida!

Before I delve into the juicy, gory details I will warn anybody who's unfortunate enough to be on dial-up: there's going to be pictures. Lots of them. Be patient.

I guess I'll start with the beginning. I was born around 10ish on June 8th, 1986. Life was pretty good until they cut my umbilical cord. You see I... Okay, too far back.

Last Monday, Sept. 17th, was a crazy, hectic day because I really hadn't packed much up to that point. About the only things I had packed were my books and DVDs. That left this:


(be sure to follow the link. I've got region thingies set up on the flickr page)

As you can see it was quite a hellish nightmare. But, I got everything packed and by that evening it looked more like this:


Evening came and morning followed the first day.

The next day, Tuesday, began the first leg of our near thirteen hundred mile trip. After I said goodbye to my family we started off. Then we promptly returned because I'd forgotten some things (that's not to say I got everything I'd forgotten, though). That day we drove about seven hundred some odd miles, well over half the trip, passing through five states (Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama). We stayed in a little town past Birmingham called Oxford. Evening came and morning followed the second day.

There's really not a whole lot to say about the second day of driving. We passed through Atlanta (uneventfully I might add) and drove from there on down to Florida. One thing I will say about Atlanta, though, is that there's an assload of cars on the road. Twelve lanes and all of them packed. Once in Winter Park it took about an hour and a half to find our lodging for the night. Luckily we did find it and it was an easy drive to the apartments. We ate at Boston Market that night. It was pretty good (though the service was... weird). I'll forgo the Genesis reference this time.

So, it was finally the big day (or at least one of them). We made our way over to the apartments and got there without any trouble. However, we did circle the whole complex nearly three times before we found the leasing office which was tucked away discreetly behind some trees. It was there that I met up with my roommate and signed my life away to the dark cabal that controls everything. However, we did get a sweet apartment in return:











As you can see in that last picture we have a sweet TV setup (or I do. It's all my stuff). The gibberish on the screen is our (at the time) messed up cable. Dragging everything up and in wasn't to big of a deal and really didn't take too long. Getting setup, that was another story all together. My room isn't completely unpacked yet though it's functioning at one hundred percent capacity.

That evening we went and bought some furniture.





The next day we didn't do much aside from pull in some of the more minor items we needed. I spent a good chunk of the day working on the mess that was my room. I think I did anyways... By this time it was Saturday and I had to see my Dad off as he prepared to redrive the roads we had just been on. We (my roommate and I) didn't do much over the weekend. Bought some stuff, played some games, watched some TV, drew some pictures. Just kept low. Then came yesterday (Monday).

We were both getting kind of tired of not having much to do so we packed up and went to the beach. Daytona Beach, that is. Up to that point the closest I had ever been to the beach was watching LOST so it was something completely new for me. It was a hell of a lot of fun.



We tossed a Nerf football around, we rode some waves, we walked up the beach (probably a mile or more not including the trip back). Being the off season there weren't too many people there and at that most of them were seniors. With the exception of the little kids we were the youngest people there. While it was fun and all there was a price to be paid. I had purchased some sunscreen before we'd gotten there, but was unable to get my back. My roommate, who I will refer to as E, didn't put any on at all. So by the time we got home he was completely red and my back felt like it was on fire. That evening we laid low and watched all the new offerings on NBC and headlines on Jay.

Tonight we're going to be going to a little meeting thing at the school and tomorrow is registration and the getting of our Mac Book Pros. It'll be sweet to be sure. I'll be back a full update including pics. Until then, stay cool.

Musings of moving

It is currently September 16th, 5:30AM CDT. Temperature is in the mid-sixties with some cloud cover. I'm sitting here asking myself what the hell am I doing up at five in the morning? There's a myriad of ways I could answer that question but the one that seems to fit the bill the most is anxiety... and heartburn (one too many sausage calizones) . Today marks only two days left until I set out on my cross-country trip to begin my new life.

I've only been waiting for this moment for twenty-one years but when the time is actually upon you it feels different. Everybody and everything I've ever known will all be left behind; thirteen hundred miles behind. I've known this for some time but it didn't really hit me until it was brought up that I'll never live in this house again. Never again will I call it my home. From here on out I'll be fending for myself. Alone.

Another thing on my mind is the actual trip itself. The longest car trip I've ever taken is up to Morrison, Missouri a six hour trip that was generally broken down into two days on familiar roads. This trip to Florida, however, is more than three times the length over the same amount of time on roads completely unfamiliar. Luckily there's Google Maps to help with that, but twenty hours is still a long time to be cooped up in a car.

Tomorrow I'm going finish packing all my stuff, taking apart all my furniture, and trying to mentally prepare myself for the day after when I have to say goodbye to my family. How do you say goodbye to those that you've been around all your life? To the siblings that you grew up with and are your best pals? I'm really bad at goodbyes and I can tell you now that Tuesday morning is going to suck.

Assorted Small Animals

Today marks the beginning of the new bowling season. Even though I'll only be able to bowl twice I'm still excited. I've been bowling twice in the last couple of weeks and did really well, all games over average and two over two hundred. I could even have some beers if I wanted. T'will be an awesome time to be sure.

Today also marks the two week mark until I leave for Florida. I'm not sure if I've said it before but I currently bored out of my skull. I got most of my packing done last week so that's done. I really don't have much to pack, really. What packing is left to do is of the stuff I use regularly... wait. I have said this before :-/. Granted, I haven't packed the kitchen stuffs yet so there is something left to do. I also need to get my haircut at some point.

That isn't to say I've been completely idle. I did do that little YPN thingy. I've been playing some games that I never finished *ahem* Thousand Year Door *ahem*. I was going to make another short movie, but lack of wardrobe kind of puts a damper on that. You'd think it'd be a simple matter finding a white wig, but no. Not in Bartlesville.

Whilst I was out on one of these wig finding missions I ran across something at a local craft store. It was a cheap glue gun (packaged and distributed in my good state of Oklahoma). It looks fairly standard to the casual observer but reading the fine print reveals, well see for yourself:



Needless to say I'm sending it in to Jay and hopefully it'll make headlines some night. If it does I'll be sure to have a YouTube clip up here the next day.

Crap aplenty!

I've said it before and I will say it again: Titles are not my strong point. Especially when I know I'm just going to ramble about random stuff.

Today marks the three week mark until move out day. Excited? Yes. Packed? Partially. I started packing last week and have pretty much gotten to the point where's there's nothing left to pack save what I'm currently using (Xbox, computer, TV, that stuff). I suppose I could pack up my pots and pans and malarky, but eh...

I did wind up trading Pokemon (and a myriad of other games) in and picked up a copy of Puzzle League. It's good, but it definitely is NOT Tetris Attack. Ranked matches... well there really aren't ranked matches. The closest thing is the "Birthday Mode" which ranks you against people with the same birthday. I'm number one... and the only person on the list. Not many people play PPL online. Another thing that cheeses me off is the difficulty level; it's too easy. There's really slow, slow and about what would equate to normal in TA. Nothing in between. The music sucks too. It's just standard ambient/techno type music like you'd find in Lumines or any recent (non-DS) Tetris game. The music from Tetris Attack was awesome. Every single piece. I've got the Blargg music on my iPod for heaven's sake! That's how awesome it is. But otherwise, it is Tetris Attack and I can play online but they've screwed up the best puzzle game of all time.

I took a little Lord of the Rings quiz thingy on Facebook (which is definitely better than MySpace) and I'm a true LOTR fan. The questions were rediculously easy like "What race is Legolas?" Some information I suppose probably can't be gleaned from the movies. But at that even a casual reader of the books could get all the questions right. Either that or I'm a bigger nerd that I thought. Meh.

Well, like a said, general ramblings of random stuff.

All moved in

Well, after a hellish last week we are all moved into our new house (when I say "all moved in" that means we live here, that doesn't necessarily mean we're all unpacked :-P). It's wonderful. Our room is almost double the size of what we had and the backyard is superb (we've been out at least twice everyday since we moved last Wednesday). Of course, there's been a few problems but all have now been worked out.

Last night I e-mail Phil Vischer, creator of the popular kids show VeggieTales, inquiring about how he rigged the veggies. To my surprise, waiting in my inbox this afternoon was a personal reply:

Hey Matt, When we produced the shows in Softimage, it was all lattice deformation. Each eye was in a lattice, and then the entire character was in a lattice. We just animated lattices. The mouths were simple texture maps created by a separate animation and applied in rendering, and then reapplied slightly blurred as a bump map. Very simple stuff. (All developed in 1991 when I built Larry for the first time.) Virtually nothing changed until we moved to Maya in 2000. By then I was no longer animating, so I'm not sure what they changed. Now everything is done in Canada, and I'm clueless. Hope that helps. Phil

Talk about cool :-D. With that knowledge I can now finish my models for MeatStories (R) ;-).

Also this afternoon I became the webmaster for a bunch of monks. Tomorrow I'm going to call their "outside guy" to get a list of everything I need to do. I poked around their server a bit and it looks like I'm going to have to do some ASP[.NET] work (which I'd actually been tinkering with shortly before we moved), so that'll be fun (and bring back some memories).

Well, that's enough for tonight. Now that my computer is setup again (with internet) I'll be making my usual every other day entry.