Caught In The Whirlwind
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New Toy: Palm Pre Plus
Aug 16th 2010
I’ve been thinking about getting back to long form blogging more as something about twitter isn’t nearly as satisfying. So I figured I’d post up some thoughts about my new phone, a Palm Pre Plus.
The first question I get usually is “why didn’t you get an iPhone or an Android phone?” I’ve gotta say that both platforms were tempting for various reasons (mostly because they have a gazillion apps available for them). I have 2 major problems with iPhone, one practical and one philosophical. The practical issue is that it would require me to get a voice plan that’s $10 more per month than the old one that I’m clinging to for dear life. The philosophical issue is that I’m really not happy with the way Apple handles application approvals. It’s very black-box-y and they’re just not open enough for my tastes. As somebody who’s looking to maybe get into the app development game a little down the line it’s not a very attractive ecosystem.
Android has the apps and the open development philosophy but after playing around with some Android phones I found the way the OS operated to be pretty clunky. Seemed way more complicated to do things than it should be. And honestly, AT&T’s android offerings right now are a little lackluster. Getting better, sure, but not as good as Verizon.
Card View
After something a month or so ago made me check out the pre again after largely ignoring it for so long, I found I REALLY liked what I saw. And so after agonizing a bit on if I was going to go Android or not, I settled on the path less chosen and went with the pre.
One week in, I’m not regretting my purchase one bit. WebOS is my favorite mobile operating system hands down. I don’t know if I can describe it any other way aside from intuitive. I pretty much didn’t have to spend any time figuring out how to work it as everything worked exactly like I had expected it to. The multi-tasking is just natural. You do a single swipe up from the gesture area at the bottom of the screen and the app you’re in shrinks to what looks like a playing card. All the running apps are displayed and you can swipe through them and pick which one you want which then gets zoomed in to full screen again.
The built in apps are nice as well. The web browser works well and supports a lot of the same gestures as the iPhone has standardized as far as things like pinch to zoom. It’s nice being able to support full websites but it also handles the mobile versions of sites that were designed with touch screen interfaces in mind.
Speaking of the web, Universal Search rocks as well. Any time you’re in the card view or there’s no app open you can just start typing and it’ll search through contacts and such on your phone, or you can chose to send your search query to google, wikipedia, twitter or google maps.
Speaking of typing…a word about the keyboard. It’s a slide out keyboard that I’m enjoying a lot. Good feel to it and I’m getting pretty quick. I dislike virtual on screen keyboards because I find my accuracy is really awful with them, so I’m happy with the inclusion of a full keyboard.
WebOS Notifications
Also, the way WebOS handles notifications is awesome. Almost nothing will interrupt you if you’re using the phone. When you get a new e-mail or new tweets come in or whatever, an alert pops up at the bottom of the screen which then quickly minimizes into a little notification area displaying a queue of all notifications that you can scroll through. It’s very slick (as you can see from my shamelessly stolen image on the right)
Aside from the built in apps, there is actually a surprising amount of activity going on in the WebOS app development landscape. I think people tend to assume that it’s rep for not having apps (because the SDK was really late in coming to be fair) is the same as it was a year ago when the phone was released. And they’ve just ignored it since…but the apps are there for pretty much anything you’d like to do. The signal to noise ratio is also a lot better. Less fart apps and sound boards and more apps that actually do stuff.
The development process is actually really easy as well. The phone is extremely open. No need to jailbrake or root the device. All you basically need to do is flip a switch in the OS to put it into developer mode, hook it up to your computer and using WebOS Quick Install, put an app called Preware on there and off you go (flipping the switch back off for security purposes). There’s a vibrant homebrew community which not only does applications (many of which end up in the official app store as time goes on) but there’s also a ton of patches for various OS components. You can tweak out the OS and how the built in apps function and even replace the OS kernal with one that can overclock if you desire (I haven’t quite gone that far).
There are a couple downsides though…first of all, yes. The hardware is over a year old at this point and it shows. The processor is a smidge slow (but not too bad), the camera is only 3 megapixels which also isn’t a huge deal for me because, MP doesn’t equal quality in any way. Also the game selection is a little hairy until AT&T gets around to approving the 1.4.5 update which will unlock a ton of game possibilities including ports from the iPhone. I am also having a smidgen of trouble getting the mail application to sync read item status with my work exchange account if I read something on my work laptop in outlook. But that’s mostly just annoying and not a huge problem.
But I think, these days, hardware is way overvalued. Sure it doesn’t stand up to the Verizon Droid phones in the specs department, but as a full package, the Pre, to me, is much more complete and unified.
So yeah. I’m happy.
Book 21: World War Z
Jul 20th 2010
Title: World War Z
Author: Max Brooks
Genre: Zombie fiction
Pages: 352
Summary
Stolen from Amazon:
Brooks tells the story of the world’s desperate battle against the zombie threat with a series of first-person accounts “as told to the author” by various characters around the world. A Chinese doctor encounters one of the earliest zombie cases at a time when the Chinese government is ruthlessly suppressing any information about the outbreak that will soon spread across the globe. The tale then follows the outbreak via testimony of smugglers, intelligence officials, military personnel and many others who struggle to defeat the zombie menace.
Notes
So I’m not really one for Zombie books. I do appreciate the mythos of the Zombie Apocalypse but I’m not really a rabid zombie kind of guy. But this book was good.
Brooks sets up a plausible modern zombie holocaust situation without actually revealing the root cause of the zombies. Through first person interviews of various fictional characters he conveys a sense of confusion as the world slowly beings to recognize the threat and organize to deal with it. The perspectives of doctors, military officers, and just random survivors help to paint a pictures of events as they unfold.
The way the events play out in the book, once you get a sense of what’s going on, seem extremely plausible. I don’t recall thinking even once as I was reading “Now hold on there, that would never happen.”
I think the best part about this book is that it’s not so much a book about Zombies. It’s a book about how the people of the world react to a major global threat. Comparatively, the zombies shambling around moaning get relatively little screen time. Most of the book is devoted to what people are doing to ensure that they survive.
An engrossing read, very quick and if you’re even the slightest bit interested in Zombie type books, or even disaster books in general, you should check this one out.
Next Book
I’ve had a long enough vacation from the Wheel of Time, so my next book up is Lord of Chaos by Robert Jordan, Wheel of Time Book 6.
Friends and Dream Theater in Massachusetts
Jul 12th 2010
Probably should have mentioned this around here sooner, but I’m now back from Worcester, MA where Wassy and I went to catch a Dream Theater headlining show during their tour with Iron Maiden.
The weekend was, in a word, awesome.
Earlier in the week we had started to get worried because it was looking like pretty heavy rain for saturday, the day of the show, and we were going to have to wait for about 2ish hours outdoors in line to get in and get the spot that we wanted. And right on schedule, a cold front moved slowly into the area, bringing with it a ton of rain. So we left Saturday morning with umbrellas and the expectation we were going to get soaked, an expectation that was further backed up by the fact that we drove through torrential downpours pretty much as soon as we got out of Albany. We outran the rain just as we got to Worcester and checked into the hotel.
The awesome started earlier than the show since after we checked into the hotel, we headed next door to the Starbucks where we were to meet up with a couple of friends who live on the outskirts of Boston. Kris and Marcy (Bayani and Planet Girl from City of Heroes respectively) arrived a little late (had some issues finding the starbucks we were in, but it was an unfamiliar area for both parties so it was no big deal), bearing lunch from Domenic’s (which was AWESOME) and we proceeded to spend the next 2-2.5 hours talking and hanging out. It was super fun and felt really natural, despite only having met them over the internet.
Sadly, we had to part ways eventually so we could finish prepping and head over to the venue to wait. During our meeting the cold front rumbled on through, but by the time we had finished it was mostly rained out so that worked out really nicely. We walked over to the Palladium and got in line, but as soon as we got there Wassy realized she forgot her earplugs and walked back to the hotel while I held our place. And as soon as she got back, I realized I had pulled the tickets out of my pocket when checking if I had the room key and left them on the bed (!!) So thankfully I noticed before the doors opened and I ran back to the hotel to grab them and return.
All the comings and goings sorted out, we began the 2 hour wait. We got to hear a little bit of Dream Theater’s sound check as we were standing outside, but eventually we were squished up towards the front of the line to make room for more people and lost our stage door location. Thankfully, we had a step to sit on, so we weren’t standing around for 2 hours. Eventually we got into the venue and headed to find a spot. We were aiming for standing somewhere on the tiered seating area, near the bar, but we ended up sitting much closer, on the wall at the back of the pit. Great sight line to the stage, and best of all we could rock while still sitting down.
First thing I’d like to mention is that it got HOT in there. The cooling system of The Palladium consists of opening the venue doors and hoping some of the heat escapes which is only marginally successful. I would have to guess the place was sold out or close to it. The floor was packed in front of us by the time Dream Theater came on and the heat just kept getting more and more oppressive. But it was hard not to get into it with the crowd that was there. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The opener was Charred Walls of The Damned who were very 80s metal inspired. They started out by having a comedian(?) come out and tell some jokes. He was ok… parts of his bit were really hilarious and other parts not so much. The opener was all right. 80s metal isn’t my thing really so it felt a little dated. The sound quality for them was pretty awful until they actually turned up the lead guitarist’s guitar so we could hear him. Not much more to say about them really.
The wait for Dream Theater to set up is always longer than you think it’s going to be, but eventually they came on and it was GLORIOUS. Dream Theater usually plays the theme to the movie Psycho over the PA before they come on and you could tell it was going to be a good show even during this part as the crowd revealed itself to be energetic and totally into it.
It was just the fans and the band, no massive light shows or video screens, just an old fashioned club kind of concert. It was pretty cool for me too, since this is the place where I saw my first concert ever, also Dream Theater in a similar situation (1 off headlining show during a tour where they were opening) and it was neat coming back to the same place again.
The crowd was rowdy, the band had fun and the setlist was awesome. The highlights to me were Home, The Mirror, Lie and the Warped version of Pull Me Under where they sped the middle section waaaaay up. The rest of the set was awesome too, but those were the standouts. I had been bad and looked at what they were playing before the show, so I knew they were going to do Home and The Mirror. It was a very difficult thing for me to not mention this to Wassy who had just told me that Home, The Mirror and Lie were on top of her “songs I want to hear live” list. After they finished playing Home she turned to me and said “That’s it…I can die happy now”. And I told her “Not yet you can’t.” to which she replied “Seriously???”. And a couple songs later they played The Mirror.
The band seemed to be feeding off the energy of the crowd and Mike Portnoy didn’t need to prod us into getting into it very often, if at all since we were already clapping and fist pumping. A mosh pit opened up right in front of where we were sitting which was weird(so far back from the sage) and a bit annoying (I think moshing is stupid) but we were in a spot where we didn’t really need to worry about getting injured.
After the show I was dehydrated and tired with a budding headache, but Wassy convinced me to wait for a bit by the tour busses and see if any of the members of Dream Theater came out. After a guy walked by offering to sell us crack and we heard a sound that was either a car backfiring twice or somebody firing a gun (We’re going to assume it was a car) James LaBrie (the vocalist for those unfamiliar) came out much more quickly than I had thought he would and signed a bunch of stuff. I got my ticket stub signed and Wassy got to tell him how awesome the show was.
We walked back to the hotel and chugged some of the bottles of water that I had brought with us because I knew we would need them, relaxed for a bit and then eventually went to sleep.
I woke up at 6:00ish, feeling warm and noticing that the AC had turned off during the night in the hotel room. I tried getting it to come back on but I couldn’t figure out what the problem was until I went down to the front desk and asked. They then informed me that there was a sensor above the door and one on the AC and if there was anything in the room blocking line of sight between them the AC wouldn’t work. Like the desk chair they put right in that area. Move the chair and all was well. Sigh.
We got up and moving (in some degree of pain) and decided we were well enough to make the 30 minute drive over to the edge of Boston to meet up with Kris and Marcy again at their apartment. We hung out some more and talked about all sorts of stuff, grabbing lunch at this really great mexican place. It was quite awesome. Then on the way back to their place we swung by the local comic store which was very, very good. I ended up buying the first volume of Atomic Robo (thumbs up on Atomic Robo by the way) Sadly, again, we had part ways since we wanted to get home at a decent hour. I’m looking forward to going back over there in October for the weekend to hang out some more and go to the Roger Waters concert in Boston. We definitely need to meet up again.
The drive home was long and uneventful, basically taking I-90 back all the way, stopping at a couple of rest stops for various things but a ton of I-90. We arrived home around 5pm and collapsed from there.
So, in conclusion good friends + awesome show = amazing weekend.
New Arts!
Jun 1st 2010
I mentioned this on Facebook, but I wanted to mention it here as well. Wassy is working up a brand new bit of character artwork for my City of Heroes character, Frost.
Check it out:
The final piece is going to be digitally colored but she decided to work up a detailed pencil piece for the heck of it, so I get bonus artwork. The basic premise is that as a part of as story arc, her evil counterpart (which is an alternate dimension version of her) has begun a plot to control her mind and bring her down to evil. This piece is going to show the transition, where she’s fighting the good guys but still realizing that she’s not truly in control of her own actions.
It’s very cool watching her skills grow so quickly. I’ve got a piece of this character that she’s done at pretty much every stage of her growth as an artist. It makes for an interesting timeline.
There’s going to be some other elements added digitally to cement the idea, but I think she nailed the emotional context with just the pencils. Everything else is going to be sweet, sweet icing. I’m really looking forward to seeing what she does with the colors, as her skills have greatly improved in that area too since her last digitally colored piece (Quite a while ago)
Keeping Busy
May 27th 2010
I figured I’d come out of hibernation to post up a couple of projects that I’ve been working on this month.
First up is a couple of things I did for my friend Wassy’s website. She wanted a place to showcase the children’s book she did up for a course she took this semester, as well as a place to show her digital portfolio (NOTE: Not safe for work viewing. There’s some nude figure drawing studies in there) for view. Just a note on those though, if you want the full experience, don’t use Internet Explorer. There’s still a few bugs to work out with the animations and things generally work better on Firefox/Chrome/Safari/anything else.
Secondly, is this month’s entry into the City of Heroes forum art competition. The theme was the 7 deadly sins. I wanted to do something heavy on the manipulation of typography this month because it’s something I haven’t done much of. After much deliberation and false starts, I hit upon the idea of doing some kind of old style propaganda poster type thing, which eventually morphed into my final entry, a recruitment poster for the in-game villain organization of Arachnos:
I did the actual typography and design in Adobe Illustrator, popped it into Photoshop to add the distressing, the peeled corner and the wall texture.
I’m really pleased with how it ended up looking. Probably one of my favorite things I’ve done.
And finally, another City of Heroes-ish project for my friend Bayani who’s working up a couple of actual comic type books for his original character…well…Bayani. He needed to make a couple of pages to hold biographical and power information for the two characters highlighted in the book which I finished last night (Click on this to get the full page view from my DeviantArt page). This is a 2 page spread, by the way. The page layout is mine, content provided by him.
Caught In The Whirlwind
Apr 26th 2010
So…Transatlantic was this weekend and if you’ve been watching my twitter feed at all, you’ll have noticed that the show was absolutely awesome. I just really don’t have the words to describe what a magical show it was and it’s going to be VERY, VERY hard to top. Such a special evening…
Just a small intro to Transatlantic. They’re a progressive rock super group made up of Mike Portnoy from Dream Theater on drums, Neal Morse (ex- Spock’s Beard) on keyboards and guitar, Roine Stolt (The Flower Kings) on guitar and Pete Trewavas (Marillion) on bass. They play progressive rock music, influenced by the old school 70s prog rock days, along with a heaping spoonful of Beatles influence (all 4 guys are beatles fans). They were joined on stage by Daniel Gildenlow (Pain of Salvation) to fill out their sound. He did everything from percussion to guitar to keyboards to singing. Sometimes all at once.
I began the drive up at 8am, stopping to grab some breakfast at a McDonalds on the way and lunch along the Pennsylvania turnpike. On the drive down, I was baffled by some guy randomly honking his horn at me (confusion which would be cleared up later). I arrived at the hotel in Philadelphia around 1pm and hung out for a couple hours before heading out to locate parking.
The parking situation was the most anxiety causing part of the deal for me as the parking in the area of the Theater of Living Arts on South Street is…horrific. I ended up grabbing a spot at a lot on the end of South Street near the waterfront and walking 3-4 blocks down south street to get to the theater. I grabbed myself a Philly cheesesteak (of the chicken variety) and hopped in the already forming line.
Soon after I stopped in line, Pete Trewavas (the bass player for Transatlantic (and Marillion)) wandered out to take pictures of the line. I knew he was short, but man…I didn’t realize how short he was until he was standing right next to me. So that was really cool. That was the first indication I had though, that the showtime had changed from 8pm to 9pm (as I found out later, due to a ticket printing screwup that had some tickets listed as a 9pm start time). It was around 4:30 at this point and the doors would not open until 8.
To make the 3.5 hour wait bearable, I ended up striking up a conversation with two guys who were waiting in line in front of me. I never actually caught their names, but they were really nice and we were joking back and forth about stuff. It was a fun experience. So if you’re out there guys, thanks for letting me join in! We talked about the likelihood of the streets resident pigeons supplying us with an unexpected aerial present as well as random prog bands. They were from the DC area so we chatted about that as well. Eventually as the hours went on we ran out of topics and resorted to critiquing the parallel parking skills of drivers trying to get parking spots on South Street in front of the theater.
Finally, around 7:45ish the doors opened and we went into the theater. I headed up to the bar upstairs to briefly grab a seat and then, once the floor started filling up, I wandered down that way to get a good spot. I ended up about 7 rows back.
9:00 came and went and still no band. At 9:10 or so though, the house lights went out, the intro tape to The Whirlwind started playing, the band stepped out onto the stage and the show had begun.
And what a show it was. The Whirlwind is an aweesome track live. They played all 78 minutes of it, straight through with no stopping. I was blown away by the emotion that Neal Morse (on keyboards mostly but he also played guitar too) plays and sings with. Amazed with his voice that sounded just like it did on the albums, and amused by his goofy antics on stage. You can tell that he’s genuinely happy to be there, making live music on stage with his friends. That went for the rest of the bad as well. They were all smiles all night, and not fake smiles either. You could tell they wanted to be there and were having as much fun as the audience was.
After a near perfect rendition of the Whirlwind (Oh my god…the ending of The Whirlwind was so freaking powerful. Neal absolutely sold it), they took a 15 minute intermission. By this time I had move back closer to the rear of the theater because the sound where I was at was kinda iffy. But I had a great position with great sound for the rest of the set.
The intro music to All Of The Above started played and the crowd went wild. From here on out the crowd was singing along with every word. The atmosphere was totally amazing. The band having a blast, feeding off the crowd…the crowd so into it. It was like what all good live music should be, a communal experience being uniquely created right there in front of you. The best way I’ve been able to explain what it felt like was like the musical equivalent of a religious experience. I’ll never forget it.
After the 30 minute All Of The Above, Mike remarked that it’s already been over 2 hours and they’ve only played 2 songs which got a huge cheer from the audience. Then Roine and Neal did a special version of their shorter song We All Need Some Light where Roine took over lead vocals from Neal who did the song in studio. It was a very cool rendition.
And after that the opening to Duel With The Devil started playing and the crowd went wild again. The highlight of this song to me was the new Roine guitar solo in the quiet part in the middle. It was jaw droppingly amazing. So much emotiveness and improv packed into one solo spot. It needs to be recorded because it was just…perfect. After the end of that song they had the standard fake ending. At this point it was closing in on midnight.
After a quick break they came back on stage for a very powerful version of the ballad Bridge Across Forever with Neal and Roine again, Neal singing this time and Roine adding some very cool guitar harmonies to the song.
And immediately after that Mike started playing the iconic opening to Stranger In Your Soul on drums and we were off for the most amazing ride of the night. Stranger In Your Soul is another 30 minute song, but probably their best recorded work (in my opinion) And it didn’t disappoint one bit. The coolest part was, somewhere in the middle of the song Neal ran over to where Mike was on drums and actually took over the drumming for him. Pete headed over to Neals keyboards (with his bass still on) and started playing the keyboard part of the song. Daniel Gildenlow came over, reached around Pete and started playing the bass line. Meanwhile Mike took off and stage dived. After that was over Mike came back and seamlessly took over the drums again and they all rotated to their normal positions.
The ending of Stranger In Your Soul was no less amazing. When it was happening I realized something. That I had sung along so many times with Neal to this song and now I was actually doing it when he was singing it live. It was one of those moments at a concert where you remember “Wait a minute…these guys are actually making the music right here in front of me!”
The show was over with at 12:40ish and I headed out of the theater, down South Street (a walk I would never like to do again at 12:40am, by the way. It’s not a BAD area of town but it’s slightly scary that late at night….) to my car and headed back to hotel. I eventually managed to get to sleep around 2am, and woke up around 5:30-6 and decided I wasn’t going to get any more sleep, so I made preparations to leave.
After a quick stop at the Dublin Bakery in Willow Grove, PA for a buttercake, I wound my way home. Fairly uneventful drive. I got home, had a piece of butter cake and basically took a 2 hour nap to help clear my headache.
Sadly, it wasn’t all fun and games. Saturday, while driving there, I heard a sound like a small rock or something hit my windshield. Low and behold, a couple days later, I notice a crack forming, and me without full glass coverage on my insurance (a situation that has since been corrected). But it means yet another costly car repair. Sigh.
The show was still worth it.
Looooong Time.
Apr 20th 2010
Ok, It’s been absolutely forever since I posted anything up here. Like I mentioned before, I’m trying to keep the small random stuff more on Twitter/Facebook than trying to write about everything that’s happening in my life. But some stuff has happened that deserves a longer form entry.
First off, an opportunity has come up to work on a real live design project. We’ve got a local, smallish brewery in town, FX Matt, maker of the semi-known line of craft beers, Saranac. They run this event every summer called Saranac Thursday’s where they host bands in the parking lot of the brewery and, obviously, provide beer. They’re looking for a logo and they offered it up as a competition to the students at MVCC of which I am one. Over the past month I’ve been going through the process of creating a logo, from thumbnail sketches all the way now to working it up for real and it’s been a very fun and educational process.
I’m sorta sitting in on the class of the instructor that’s been responsible for the project and working through it with them. It’s been a great opportunity and I’ve learned a lot.
Today specifically, we were talking after class and we got to talking. I know I’ve been told this by other people but he mentioned that I had a good design sense and that he hoped I could continue going to classes to refine it. Which, to me, really made my day. Like I said, I know others have mentioned it, but hearing an instructor that’s been doing this sort of thing for a while say it makes it seem more…real.
I really, really hope I can figure out a way to keep going with this. I want to do it more than I’ve wanted to do anything else. It just feels…right. Which is frustrating when I come off of a fun, challenging and engaging morning and into work doing the same ol’ same ol’ as usual. Blargh.
In other news, the week has finally arrived. I’m headed off to Philadelphia on Saturday to go see Transatlantic perform live. I’ve been waiting for today since I first discovered the band and now it’s finally arriving. I’m EXTREMELY excited to have the chance to see this show. I had the setlist spoiled for me, unfortunately , but at least now I know that the show is going to be epicly awesome.
I’m sure I’ll be back with a full review on monday. And later next week I’ll post up my Saranac Thursday Logos once they get all finished.
Beethoven’s Last Night – Live
Mar 30th 2010
So, I finally get a chance to actually write up my experiences with going to see Trans-Siberian Orchestra on their first ever non-winter tour. My parents and I went out to Syracuse on Sunday to catch the show at the Landmark Theater.
After a quick pit stop at Tully’s for dinner, we headed to the venue and began the search for parking, which we found in this little tiny lot with a guy who was walking car to car as they parked getting their money and handing out parking stubs which we were informed were to be placed “on your dash. Or else…” We were a bit worried if our car would still be in one piece when we returned from the venue, but he was offering reasonable rates so we left the car in his care and headed in.
Our seats ended up being a little more to the left of the theater than I was anticipating when I bought them, but still pretty darn good.
As for the show itself, they performed the entire Beethoven’s Last Night album from start to finish, including newly written passages of narration between almost every song, helping to explain the story as it went. The performances of the vocalists and the band were top notch. When I was at the show it sounded like the same vocalists from the album, but as it turns out, they were all different people, but they did an incredible job. Particularly the guy who played Beethoven and Jeff Scott Soto who did Mephistopheles as evily as one possibly could. They also played 3-4 more songs off of their new album, Nightcastle which was fine with me, as they hit the songs I liked and skipped a lot of the ungood ones that were on that particular album.
The production was very cool. They had 3 arches set up that they could project various things on, along with transparent LED screens inside each arch that they had various videos playing on through the show. The stage was stuffed with as many lights as one could possibly fit on a theater stage, and there were lasers galore. Sadly, no pyro, however this was expected as smaller theaters rarely allow it.
This video wasn’t from the show we went to but it’s the best video/sound I could find so far:
All in all, a very fun evening. My parents enjoyed it, as did I. TSO doesn’t disappoint!
A Realization
Mar 19th 2010
I know it’s been quite a while since I’ve updated, but I haven’t really felt like writing a full on blog post in a while.
I’ve come to the realization that I tend to use my twitter/facebook status updates to report on the small random stuff while leaving blog posts for bigger news/things that have images. I’ll probably keep using this split for the time being as it feels the most natural way of doing things.
Just wanted to make a quick post about why it’s been so quiet around here recently.
An Update On Happenings
Mar 5th 2010
Just an update-y sort of post today.
First off, school. The latest project in my Digital Imaging course was to recolor a black and white photograph and make it look like it was always color. I went over to my grandmother’s to look at some of our old family photos and she showed me the wedding picture of my great great great grandparents (maybe another great on there…not sure exactly). It was definitely old, but it was in really good shape, so I ended up doing that. Finished it this week in class, although I think it could have turned out better if I had more time to tweak it (only got two class periods to work on it and he doesn’t want us working on stuff outside of class). Turned out all right though. I’ll post it up here when I get my flash drive back.
Along those same lines, I decided it’s probably going to be a little bit before I manage to take some of the more theory oriented design courses, so I’ve got myself a textbook on design theory that I’m starting to get into. Not quite as good as taking a course, but the book is good and I’m learning a lot of interesting stuff (well, interesting to me anyway).
Moving away from learning and school stuff, I’ll be meeting up with my sister Saturday afternoon to hang out a bit and watch the Syracuse game. Looking forward to it, after the realization that we only really see each other on holidays anymore.
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