Saturday, February 19th, 2005

Well, last week was kind of hectic but over­all a really good week. I had my FWD final and lab prac­ti­cal, and I feel pretty good about both. Unless I missed some­thing I didn’t catch, I got an A on both.

I wrapped up my final project for FWD as well Thurs­day night, and I’m going to tweak the look of it this week­end, and I actu­ally think I may make a 2nd CSS layout and see if I can turn in an improved ver­sion rather than the one I sub­mit­ted in my pre­pro­duc­tion (one of the stick­ing points of this project is that your final web site must match the pre­pro­duc­tion layout you sub­mit­ted a while back). I know I’m capa­ble of so much more than what my cur­rent site looks like … but it still should pull a solid grade. If I can re-​do it with some minor changes, I think i can get an A.

Other than that, all I have to worry about is get­ting some extra credit work done by Friday, and fin­ish­ing my i3d final project that’s due Thurs­day (and, the won­der­ful Final exam that is also on Thursday).

Next month should be inter­est­ing, I’m finally going to get to learn some Flash. I hon­estly despise flash con­tent when mis­used (as it is on a good 90% of the web), but when used prop­erly, flash is a quite amaz­ing tech­nol­ogy. I already have some ideas for improve­ments to my site to be done in flash - just a few UI tweaks and such, noth­ing major - and I’ve been wait­ing till I got some more expe­ri­ence to make the changes.

It’s crazy that I have already been here for half of a year.

Wel­come! If you're new here, you may want to sub­scribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Posted on February 19th, 2005 | No Comments »

Wednesday, February 16th, 2005

First, a little back­ground. My car bat­tery has offi­cially died on me. I guess it can be attrib­uted to the fact that I rarely drive any­where nowa­days. If I can walk, I walk. That’s a good thing, but it means my poor car is neglected from time to time, and that can lead to the bat­tery losing it’s charge over time.

Anywho, last week my Passat would not start, and I had to have it jumped off. I thought noth­ing of it really - I fig­ured I just should drive more often. Well, it died again, so I had my brother jump me off and I took it over to my local Wal-​Mart, the loca­tion where my bat­tery was pur­chased.

Wal-​Mart Employee (WME): Hello sir, may I help you?
Me: Hey … my bat­tery has been dying lately if I leave it for more than 12 hours or so. I had my receipt and it’s under war­ranty for 5 years, so how do I go about exchang­ing it?
WME: Oh, okay - hold on one second and let me go get a hold of Mike (other employee).
Mike: What can I do for you sir?
Me: Hey, I was just explain­ing to this guy that my bat­tery has been dying lately if I leave it more than a few hours. I would just like to go ahead and switch it out if pos­si­ble, as the bat­tery is under war­ranty.
Mike: Oh okay, let me go get my tools.

Mike brings back a volt­meter and has me start my car, turn it off, rev it up and some other excit­ing tasks to check the alter­na­tor and the charge of the bat­tery in my car.

Mike: Well, every­thing checks out. You have a full charge in your bat­tery.
Me: Yes, I know. I was jumped off an hour or so ago, and I have been dri­ving ever since - so I’m sure it’ll show it’s close to full right now.
Mike: Right, so there’s no prob­lem.
Me: No, you don’t seem to under­stand. If I turn the car off for more than a few hours, the bat­tery dies. It’s been get­ting worse and worse over time, and I’d like to just switch it out for another.
Mike: I under­stand that sir, but maybe it’s your alter­na­tor? Your bat­tery has a full charge.
Me: You just checked my alter­na­tor. Didn’t you say it was send­ing a charge to the bat­tery?
Mike: Yes sir, but the bat­tery has a full charge now.
Me: Of course it does! I’ve been dri­ving around all after­noon!
Mike: Well, there’s noth­ing I can do sir.
Me: Okay - so the bat­tery is under war­ranty, and every time I leave my car unat­tended, the bat­tery dies - my key­less entry won’t work, my clock is dead, and my car doesn’t even TRY to turn over. But the bat­tery is fine.
Mike: Maybe it’s the alter­na­tor, sir.
Me: Are you seri­ous? We just estab­lished the alter­na­tor is fine - and even if it was, the two don’t have any­thing to do with each other in this situation….
Mike: Well the bat­tery is fine, I can’t switch it out for you.
Me: Why are we still talk­ing? I know noth­ing about cars, but this is the eas­i­est pos­si­ble mys­tery to solve… the ONLY thing it could be is the bat­tery.
Mike: Sorry, there’s noth­ing I can do.
Me: Well thank you so much for your help. Who is your man­ager?
Mike: I am the man­ager on duty, sir.
Me: Well keep up the great work.

I was too busy to spend any more time there hag­gling over the ins and outs of how bat­ter­ies lose their charge, but I can’t wait to go have a word with the store man­ager after class tomor­row. I’m absolutely blown away by this guy. Let’s assume I’m totally wrong and I’m an idiot (pretty easy to do, I know). Even if I AM wrong, you just smile and switch out the bat­tery. It’s WAL MART - that’s what they do.

I kept look­ing around for tv cam­eras - I fig­ured I had to be on one of those “candid camera” shows. Nope.

Posted on February 16th, 2005 | 4 Comments »

Tuesday, February 15th, 2005

I’ve been debat­ing lately what to do with my “online pres­ence”, so to speak. For a long time, I would leave my IM client, Adium, on all of the time – making myself always avail­able to chat with friends, or if noth­ing else, as a way to be reached even when I wasn’t around. It was, and is, a great way to have that “always on” pres­ence. Whether through AIM (wtm­cgee) or MSN (daniel@ipsmusic.com), I was always reach­able in one form or another.

Lately though, I have gotten tired of being has­sled all the time by people every time I come back from being idle, or simply being talked to always at the worst times. I know that sounds mean, and I don’t intend to sound that way. I basi­cally decided to only log on when I really wanted to chat, and let email serve it’s pur­pose as a slightly time-​delayed and more con­ve­nient means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. I assumed people IMing me with annoy­ing ques­tions and triv­ial con­ver­sa­tion would decline. Again, not trying to sound rude -I’m sure every­one expe­ri­ences this type of non­sense from time to time.

How­ever, once my great exper­i­ment started, I have noticed my influx of IMs has actu­ally increased since I only log on when I’m around to chat. People see my name log on, and I am imme­di­ately bom­barded with 10+ IMs from dif­fer­ent people, regard­ing a wide range of topics – some triv­ial, some more impor­tant. I then have to put aside all other activ­i­ties in an attempt to pri­or­i­tize the new mes­sages, and decide in what order to respond to my friends, family, etc. While I did load up Adium to chat with friends, it becomes an over­whelm­ing process that I ulti­mately don’t enjoy as much as if I were “always on”, as it spreads out the influx of IM traf­fic. I assume it’s a normal reac­tion on their part how­ever. By only log­ging on at cer­tain times during the day, I am adver­tis­ing that I am only “online” to social­ize, there­fore invit­ing anyone else with the same goals to con­tact me the second my client logs me on. I was actu­ally only making the prob­lem worse.

It’s funny how I never put much thought into the whole process – appear­ing online always actu­ally will decrease the like­li­hood of a bom­bard­ment of IMs, and my little “exper­i­ment” failed. I know this is triv­ial, but I thought I would share my thoughts on the sub­ject, and a link to a related post I stum­bled across this after­noon. He makes a lot of points that I never really con­sid­ered, and some that are fairly obvi­ous. When in the “always-​on” state, one is adver­tis­ing a sig­nif­i­cantly dif­fer­ent posi­tion than one who logs on simply to chat. Just because you are ON your com­puter does not mean you are there to social­ize, but those who log on just to chat many times assume this. There­fore, it’s a “cultural divides” as the author of the linked page points out. A pretty good read, as he takes my triv­ial sit­u­a­tion and puts a soci­ol­ogy spin on it.

Long story short? I’ll just use my away mes­sage more often.

Posted on February 15th, 2005 | 10 Comments »

Monday, February 14th, 2005

Well, I’m about halfway through with this great exper­i­ment known as Full Sail. Over­all, I’m quite pleased with what I’ve been learn­ing, and I’m really excited to just get school done with for good, and hope­fully get out there and work in a field that chal­lenges me and teaches me a lot along the way. Right now, I’m start­ing to focus on where that field is going to be located at.

I had been con­sid­er­ing about 5 poten­tial places: Tampa FL, Atlanta GA, New York City, South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, and Seattle.

Out West
While I would love to live out west, I’m not sure if I would want to live in the douchebag utopia that is SoCal (although I do have some friends out there right now, which would be nice …), but Seat­tle or Port­land would be nearly per­fect. The weather is pretty nice (a bit rainy, but I can deal), but the the tem­per­a­tures are mod­er­ate, and I love how both cities seem to be planned with people in mind - not cars. At this point I have all but elim­i­nated the west coast cities, and have decided to focus on the east­ern cities. So, let’s break down the 3 east coast locations.

New York City
I have wanted to live in New York since the first time I saw the place. The huge­ness of the city, yet it’s inti­mate warmth, draw me in every time, and I’ve fallen in love all over again each visit. To be able to live, work and play in such an amaz­ing town, filled to the brim with such a huge diverse pop­u­la­tion would make me such a happy person. On top of all of that, I know for a fact that NYC is one of the design meccas in Amer­ica, and easily the biggest in the east.

Tampa, Florida
Let’s face it - I’m a warm weather crea­ture. I can’t func­tion for long peri­ods with­out nice, warm, sunny weather. Tampa is one of the biggest cities in Florida, and last time I checked, it’s Feb­ru­ary and I’ve been wear­ing san­dals for all but 3 or so weeks since I moved here. The weather is nice enough here in Orlando, and it would be that much nicer in Tampa. More impor­tantly, I’d be closer than 45 min­utes away from the beach (my cur­rent dis­tance) and would be located in a much nicer town than Orlando. As an added bonus, my favorite foot­ball team is located in Tampa. That’d be kind of cool to have season tick­ets to the Bucs. I promise that’s not my main moti­vat­ing factor. Since I’m already in Orlando, it’d be much easier to move just 2 hours down the road rather than 8 to Atlanta or 20 to NYC.

Atlanta
As much as I hate Atlanta’s traf­fic, swel­ter­ing heat with no relief, sprawl­ing sub­ur­ban land­scape and com­plete hatred for 99% of anyone born or raised in that town…. it’s my home. No matter where I go, or how far I try to run away from that city, it’s my home. I guess noth­ing can ever change that, and every­one I care about lives there. Why run away from that? Just to live some­where with nicer weather? Just to live in a big city, but alone? I’m not quite sure if that’s worth the trade­off. My friends, and more impor­tantly, my family, live in GA and that won’t be chang­ing any­time soon. Can I leave that? I’m not quite sure.

I want to take a chance while I’m young, I want to live some­where new, some­where exciting… but is it all just some ill-​fated desire to find some­thing that isn’t even real? I guess I’ll have to make up my mind by September.

Posted on February 14th, 2005 | 4 Comments »

Saturday, February 12th, 2005

I have a folder on my com­puter called “inspiration”. When­ever I stum­ble across any type of media that I think would give me some great ideas in the future, or hon­estly any­thing I just think is cool, I throw it in this folder for future use. I have tons of scanned print ads, web ban­ners, quick­time movies, and much more for my con­sump­tion. Pretty neat stuff.

Anywho, I fig­ured I’d share 3 of my favorites with you, my loyal reader(s) (I hope at least 2 people read my site).

Viral iPod video: This video is great because it was done by a guy (George Mas­ters), not some ad agency or design firm. Obvi­ously the guy has talent, but it’s always cool to see some­thing done by ‘regular’ people.

Honda ‘Cog’ video: I posted a link to this a while ago, and the link has since died. I had to search far and wide to find a decent .mov of this, but you must check this out. No cuts, no spe­cial effects. 60 sec­onds of pure domino magic.

Golf GTI video: this is a really cool ad for a ton of rea­sons - if noth­ing else, I just can’t believe how far CG have come over the years. A break­danc­ing ’singing in the rain’ remix… check it out.

In case any legal depart­ments want to come after me, I take no credit for these ads. Each ad belongs to their cre­ators - George Mas­ters, Honda, and VW, respectively.

Posted on February 12th, 2005 | 2 Comments »

Friday, February 11th, 2005

I splurged and got a new mon­i­tor this week, and I must say I’m impressed. Sadly, it’s a Dell, which means it’s not exactly the most attrac­tive mon­i­tor on the block, aes­thet­i­cally. But, appar­ently it uses the same exact screen as a lot of other major brands, and the qual­ity is top notch. It’s a very com­pact form factor as well, so I’m very pleased from that angle as well. It’s got a 4 port USB hub and DVI and VGA inputs, so I should be good with this guy for a long time. My ulti­mate goal is to find another one of these on sale in the near future (I found this one for a bit less than $550 shipped). A dual mon­i­tor setup like this would be very nice indeed.

I can’t even put into words how happy I am that it’s the week­end. I plan on play­ing bas­ket­ball tonight with some friends, then spend­ing the rest of the week­end just hang­ing out and doing some shop­ping. I want to try to remove myself from any­thing related to school, as next week is going to be very VERY busy. We’ll see how that turns out.

Posted on February 11th, 2005 | 1 Comment »

Thursday, February 10th, 2005

A few months ago, I had an idea. I was going to make a sec­ondary blog to this one, and make it a satir­i­cal type site, basi­cally trying to make it the most boring weblog you’ve ever read. Every day, post about the most mun­dane pos­si­ble event (yes, even more mun­dane than my normal site). You knkow, stuff like:

“I noticed that one of my shoes was untied. I bent down, tied the shoe and then kept walking.”

Sounds stupid, but I thought it’d be funny.

Anywho, it appears some­one has beat me to it. This site is basi­cally what I was going to do, but I found the link to this over on Zeldman’s site, and now my dreams are dashed.

Even though it’s not “original” any­more (what is?), I may still start some­thing like that up. It’d make me laugh at least.

That’s 2 days in a row of updates!

Posted on February 10th, 2005 | 2 Comments »

Wednesday, February 9th, 2005

I fig­ured it was time to update, even though I don’t feel I have a lot going on that’s really blog­wor­thy. I’ve been real busy with school, which is a good and a bad thing. I hate being tired so much, but I do like being busy and work­ing on things that I find inter­est­ing. This month is another 4 weeks of 3d, which I hon­estly know I’ll never want to work in, but do find mildly inter­est­ing. I’m work­ing on a 3d model of the Arc de Tri­om­phe and the sur­round­ing area in Paris, and I hope it turns out really nicely. When I get done, I’ll be sure to post it here for all my ador­ing fans.

The other class is part of a 3 month block of one of my favorite things in the galaxy - the won­der­ful (and at times con­fus­ing) world of html/css. Our teacher is easily the finest teacher we’ve had since I started here. I con­sider my self an “intermediate” coder and I’ve already picked up a lot of things that made me say “OHHH!” I knew HOW to do some­thing, but I had no idea WHY. Now I know both. Speak­ing of css, I spent some time hack­ing away at my navbar - by far the weak­est part of my page (other than the still to be fin­ished photo section).

The weather has been really nice down here lately, and I really think the next few months should be nice, until summer arrives. At least the beach is a short drive away. I’m look­ing for­ward to spend­ing time @ the beach in the coming months….

And last but not least, I installed MT-​Blacklist not too ter­ri­bly long ago, and kind of forgot about it. Today, I noticed I haven’t seen much spam on my site lately, so I checked the log for the MT-​Blacklist plugin. To my sur­prise, it has blocked 57 com­ments in the past 4 weeks, with not ONE get­ting through. So, with that said, I give my seal of approval. If you use MT and you get spammed as much as I did/do, down­load this puppy. It even auto-​updates itself with the latest black­list every week.

I promise I’ll try to update more often. Doubt I will, but I promise I’ll try.

Update: as you may see, I’ve put the new menus up, but they’re not done yet. God bless.

Posted on February 9th, 2005 | 3 Comments »

Wednesday, February 2nd, 2005

Well, the elec­tions in Iraq came and went with a rel­a­tive lack of blood­shed and loss of life. Any death is a bad thing, but read­ing about the upcom­ing elec­tions led most every­one to believe we were going to see hun­dreds, if not thou­sands of Iraqi, Amer­i­can, and British dead. The latest death count from the day, across the entire coun­try, is around 50. Again, any blood­shed is a bad thing … but given the threats from cer­tain indi­vid­u­als and orga­ni­za­tions around the middle east, that is an insanely low figure.

There are many pos­si­ble rea­sons for this - the insane lock-​down of all road traf­fic lead­ing up to the elec­tions, recent infight­ing between fac­tions vying for con­trol of the “insur­gency”, or the simple fact that those who don’t want to be part of the demo­c­ra­tic process are just losing steam - and I’m sure there are even more that I haven’t listed. Hon­estly, WHY there was min­i­mal blood­shed isn’t as impor­tant than the fact that there simply wasn’t much bloodshed.

Per­sonal pol­i­tics aside, it’s rather heart­warm­ing to see over 60% of an entire nation voting for the first time in their lives. These people have been threat­ened and intim­i­dated all of their lives, but they finally have a chance to stand up for them­selves, and are making the most of it. Even after warn­ings went out that anyone who took part in the elec­tion process would be at risk of being killed, mil­lions lined up to vote all over the nation. Was it per­fect? No. Mil­lions boy­cotted the elec­tion, and in turn will make legit­i­macy more dif­fi­cult for the newly elected lead­ers. People still DID die, and that’s a ter­ri­ble thing. But all in all, it’s a huge step in the right direc­tion. I hon­estly didn’t think this democ­racy thing would catch on in Iraq - I felt that free­dom is some­thing some­one has to fight for, that they have to attain on their own, not have it (basi­cally) handed to them.

Jan. 30 was their chance to fight, and fight they did.

Posted on February 2nd, 2005 | 1 Comment »

Tuesday, February 1st, 2005

I bought iLife 05 when it came out, and recently decided to give the ‘book feature’ a try. Basi­cally, you can assem­ble a photo album, lay it out, and pick a theme for it, and they’ll print you a hard bound book for 29 bucks. Not a bad idea if you think about ship­ping costs, print­ing costs, etc. Each page after the orig­i­nal 20 they give you are a dollar each. So, you could end up spend­ing a ton of cash on one of these things, but I decided to go with a con­ser­v­a­tive approach the first time around, to see if it was worth the money.

I recieved the book in the mail yes­ter­day, and I’m very pleased with how it tuned out. There are just about 50 or so photos I took while in Europe last year that I wanted in tan­gi­ble form, so I fig­ured this was as good of an oppro­tu­nity as ever. There’s some­thing to be said for having photos you can actu­ally touch and feel and look at some­where that’s not a com­puter or TV screen. Below are some quick shots I took in my room (sorry, my room is rather dim, so they didn’t turn out that great…):

Cover
Inside pages
Another page

iLife as a whole is a pretty solid upgrade this year. I dab­bled in iMovie HD, but have spent most of my time mess­ing around with the iDVD and iPhoto pro­grams and I’m very pleased. For only $59 (stu­dent), you can’t go wrong with all of the new fea­tures in all of the programs.

Posted on February 1st, 2005 | 2 Comments »