Friday, August 26, 2005

Things are starting to approach stability here. My schedule is free of conflicts and I think I know my weekly routine for work, class, and school work. Computer animation will be just as time-consuming as I remember it from USF. Visual Storytelling, it turns out, is a documentary film-making class. I don't know what I'm going to do for that project yet but I get to work with a friend who collects tech like my old roomie Todd. Digital production seems to be a good excuse to learn a new program and make something with it.

My severe allergic reaction to good weather has kicked in, so I'm on claratin bender this week until a good morning frost or two comes in to kill the pollen. I'm no botanist, but it is my opinion that plants suck. Just give me my oxygen and leave me alone.

Gerry and I were watching the tsunami coverage on TV the other night. The news stations are so in love with the disaster and the spectacle of people displaced by the thousands that after about an hour even we two media crazed twenty-somethings couldn't take any more. To pick our spirits up, Gerry opened up a pack of big-league chew bubble gum and we split the whole thing. It's quite impossible to be somber when you have a speech impairing mouth full of sickeningly sweet bubble gum.

Monday, August 22, 2005

After much running around, I believe I have a workable schedule:
Grad-level Computer Animation (art)
Digital Story Design (icom)
Visual Storytelling (journalism)
My work hours are mostly in the mornings, and my classes are in the afternoon/evenings.
I really hope this works. I got used to drawing up my own schedules in undergrad, where my advisor would sign anything I put in front of him. Now I'm off to see about getting a meal plan, and then I'm going home to read the New Yorker and watch an episode of Dead Like Me.

Wednesday, August 17, 2005













Let me be clear: cookies and I go back a long time. Despite my slight build, I love cookies in a very deep and meaningful way. When I saw a new kind of soft cookie for sale, the "soft baked Chips Ahoy," I naturally wanted to try them. The competing (and far superior) "soft batch" cookies from keebler are a favorite of mine, and they always remind me of one of my old roommates. This new kind? Not so much. They aren't baked so much as they're shaped out of dough and grease, which leaves a strange aftertaste. To underscore my desire to warn the world, I took the trouble of making a picture of Yoda admonishing the world against these. Ignore me if you will at your own peril, but who among you would ignore Yoda?

Friday, August 12, 2005

Yesterday:
At a quarter after 7:00, I awoke to the sound of trees being pruned and the wood being shredded in the parking lot outside my window. As I was leaving for work, I discovered that all of the music on my iPod was gone after some technical difficulties I had the previous night. I was digging in my bag and got a paper cut. I got to work and was told that because the icom grant dried up, my graduate stipend for the coming year will be about $1600 less than last year. I'm still having difficulty with my fall schedule, which is partially not my fault. After work, I walked home and got stuck in a torrential downpour halfway. I needed to go to the store, but I couldn't because I needed to make sure my rent check would clear and my last paycheck would be deposited properly. This particular area on the north end of shit creek is starting to look familiar.

So far, today has been better.

Friday, August 05, 2005

I've been messing around with the beta version of M$'s new "Acrylic" vector graphic program. I like what I see thus far. Hopefully this is free like windows paint. It's quite useful if you know Adobe Illustrator well. One thing that I love about it is the tracing option. Illustrator has the option of tracing vector lines over raster graphics, but it's just point, click, hope for the best. Acrylic allows the tracing to be fine-tuned. The image below was created in such a manner. It made a zillion points and lines, so editing the image is near-impossible due to the time it takes to change anything. Still, I like what it does. The beta's free of you can find it on the microsoft site.

The next version of Firefox will support vector graphics. I can't wait to see what will be possible. I imagine a mix of vector shapes and javascript could create some really interesting embedded menus- window interfaces in web pages, scalable graphics, even (dare I suggest it?) zooming interfaces! It's almost too much.

Thursday, August 04, 2005

I thought about sending this link only to my brother, but this is the sort of thing that must be shared with as much of the world as possible: Conan O'Brien vs Bear.

Monday, August 01, 2005

Hypothetical situation:
If you ran a big expensive web server, would you delegate the responsibility of fixing a mid-grade but oft-recurring security issue to a sleep-deprived student worker making minimum wage? How many other state-funded institutions could get away with this, or do get away with this? Just a hypothetical, mind you.