After reading today's FoxTrot, me and Jeremiah decided that we needed to take a break from our....studies, yeah.

So we fixed Jason's animation for him. Here it is (silly boys):

hehehehe

Check out the new coolness.

Silly Image

This kind of "abstract art" has always interested me. Turns out producing it is actually relatively simple once you tweak some setting in a 3d program.

First off, a Happy Thanksgiving to all! I want to say that I am thankful for the basics - my health, food to eat, drink to....drink, and a place to stay. In addition, I am thankful for a great family - two very, very understanding parents, a wonderful girlfriend, and my awesome friends.

Yay!

Also, the site move is pretty much done. There have been a few issues (email, some scripts, etc) that have still to be worked out, but they are minor issues now.

The site is getting moved!

If you are seeing this news, then the site has already moved. I'm getting on a new server which has better features and is gonna be fantastic. Yay!

To commemorate the event, I have redesigned the entire site (as you can probably see). The site is now 30% smaller and XHTML1.0/CSS2 compliant! Wooo. If you have a browser like mozilla/firebird, click on the icon in the lower left and change the style sheet and watch as the entire site simply "reorganizes" itself.

Very cool.

I could not have done all this update without several VERY handy sites and tools:

A List Apart

Jeffrey Zeldman

W3C Vaildator(html)

W3C Vaildator(css)

In other news, I have begun work on my flight simulator. Also, i put together a basic collision engine as well. It works pretty well - has some quirks, but they shouldn't be too hard to work out. :D

"Look ma!"

- and -

Never Ending Story

While reading througha forum I came arcoss a Never Ending Story thread and thought, "wow, this would be really cool to actually be able to have and use nicely in some kind of better suited format."

So about 4 hours later (I had to take a break and go to the store) the Never Ending Story php script was done.

I would definately appreciate it if you would head over to the link and add to the story. Thanks!

The Few... The Proud...

Because it's just too funny. (We all love Marco ;D )

My animation for multimedia class has hit "final project" time. Yeah, right after mid-terms we start planning and producing the final project.

Since it has to be a interactive 3d *thing* I decieded (tenatively) on a flight simulator.

I don't mean anything fancy by this. As you could see from the class examples I have been making, the class isn't terribly advanced. However, I believe the teacher to be very competent and I think I can pull a nice game out of this.

I expect it to be pretty simple. You fly around, enemies spawn and attack you, you shoot back. There will be levels of difficulty and a few planes to fly. Of course, weapons to shoot :D. I will keep score of "birds down" and be able to keep track of scores like in my ninja game. It'll do the display ingame though so you don't have to refresh the page.

I have recently become very interested in open source programs. I have begun switching to all free and open software. For example:

Microsoft Office >> OpenOffice

AOL IM >> Miranda IM

Internet Explorer >> Mozilla Firebird

After having made these switches I am quite happy with the end results I am getting. OpenOffice works just as well as MSOffice - not that I think anyone would really notice a difference since they are, for the most part, identical. Miranda is a fantastic IM program offering more features (and protocols) than AIMClient, and it takes up less processor/memory and has no ads. Mozilla Firebird is hands down a better browser for your computer. It is updated at least once a week, has better standards compilance, runs just as fast, works with all websites i use, blocks pop-ups, ads and other annoying IE technologies, and has a killer plugin section.

The applications I am waiting on to switch to:

MS Outlook >> Mozilla Thunder

I am waiting to switch to this program till it has the ONE feature its missing for me. Palm sync support - at least for the address book. I dont want to keep two copies of a single thing.

The programs I dont think I will ever be able to get rid of:

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Illustrator

Macromedia Dreamweaver

Macromedia Flash

There is TheGimp which can sub for PS, but nothing else open source even comes close to the other applications as far as I know. Hrmpf - too bad.

One of the reasons I feel good about this switch is it supports an opensource movement - which i think is important. OS programs are better supported and updated faster and more often. I just generally find them to be a better product all over. The second reason is that its a good chunk of illegal files I am no longer stealing. Office is a several hundered dollar application suite - which there is no way in hell i could afford (being as I barely have $20 a week anyway. :-/)

Testing a new feature for hiding quotes " ' inside my posts. (MySQL doesn't like me making queries with ' and " in it). But obviously, you need these things.

So i am using urlencode() to see if I can cheat my way around it.

My bad - when i cleaned out the site, i deleted the comment posting ability. Guess I should have checked that. Anyway, its fixed now....

The site now has categories....you'll see the posts have little extras here and there. I won't do much with it now, but later on I will put it too good work.

For example: one of the reasons I don't write too much in this is because I don't really think too many people care (honestly) about my day to day misgivings and discoveries. The categories will allow me to write "dailies" and have them filtered out from the main page. This is just better.

Anyway, i'm a total geek - ok bye now.

it's so interesting. i love this feature that shows up posts from a year past when you make a post of the same day&month. The site now dates back two years...TWO WHOLE YEARS of my life can be (partially) tracked through this thing.

- That - is cool.

i had something else to write here...and now i can't remember. but i'll figure it out later :D

I remember what i wanted to say now!

You can see all the latest postings here: all postings!

Ok then.

I joined deviantart.com last week or so.

In short, deviant is an artist community. It's really big (thousands of users) and very collaborative, supportive, and interactive. I'm really liking it. So far I have made several things for it - and people are liking them. It's a great feeling :D

You can go check out my user page and see what I have been up to.

I see good things coming out of this ^.^

I just went though my site and cleaned out a few hundred megs of things that I should have dumped a long time ago.

In addition, I moved all my old journal postings into my new system (this one.) and I you can now see that the site is nearing it's 2 year old mark. Kinda cool. Well, I have more cleanup to do, but i'll get to it later :D