General Life Update
The house that my roommates put in an offer for that I mentioned in my christmas post was accepted and they’ve gone all the way through the entire process to where they’re waiting for the closing date. The deadline in the contract is March 16th, so there will be a house by that date assuming all goes well. Just need to wait for the relevant people to get together to actually close. I’ve been spending time packing and such the past couple of weeks so that’s been fun. We’re moving out of this hell-hole of an apartment at the end of the month.

As it turns out, so is everybody else. Our downstairs neighbor moved out over the weekend and the people across the hall are looking to move too. Must be because of our neighbors from hell. Ugh. Anyway, it’ll soon be over with.

School Stuff
We’re in the middle of another school semester and as I think I may have mentioned here, I’m taking General Drawing this time out. It’s going about as well as expected considering I don’t really have any drawing skills to speak of. Half the class is perspective drawing and the other half is still life. The perspective stuff is a lot of fun for me since it’s all creating a composition, measuring and then drawing it out. I can do that sort of thing. Still life is…touch and go. Some weeks are better than others.

In other news, two of my photographs from last semester ended up being shown in the MVCC Faculty Select student art show.

I was hopeful that I could get something in but the deadline had unknowingly passed and the show was coming up. I spoke with my instructor and she managed to sneak these two into the show. If you’re local and want to swing by, it’s in the Information Technology and Theather building on the Utica Campus on the second floor. Tuesday-Friday 1pm to 6pm until April 7th. My roommate has a lot of stuff in there this year as well.

New Toy
And last, but not least, I have a new technological toy to play with! If you’ve seen my facebook status updates at all, you’ll probably know this already, but I’ve purchased a brand new Apple Macbook Pro.

My old laptop was the original Macbook Pro from 2006, bought a week or so after they first came out. It was still performing all right, especially in non game tasks but it was starting to fall apart and the wireless was REALLY spotty (aka, works fine one minute, next needs to be within 3 feet of the router in order to pick up a signal). It was time to put it out to pasture, as good of a laptop as it had been for me over the years. With Apple being rumored to update their laptop lineup relatively soon, I hunkered down and waited.

Finally the day came and I pounced on the store as soon as it came up and came away with an order for a new laptop. The spec bumps in the 15″ MacBook Pros were…incredibly impressive. I came away with a 15″ MacBook Pro with a 2.2ghz quad core sandy bridge i7, 4GB of RAM, an AMD Radeon 6750m with 1GB of memory, the 500GB 7200 RPM hard drive option and the high res (1680×1050) anti-glare display.

It was delivered on Wendsday and all I have to say is, OMG this thing is FAST. I haven’t been able to find anything I do that really taxes it yet and when I boot into windows for games…wow. I’m playing Half Life 2 with everything enabled at over 100+ FPS at 1680×1050. City of Heroes with ultra mode enabled for almost everything works silky smooth. I’m REALLY impressed by the graphics card they put into these as historically apple tends to skimp on graphics.

I’m VERY happy with my purchase. This thing should last me another 5 years. Sure they’re expensive laptops, but if I’m only getting a new one every 4-5 years, it works out pretty well.

Related posts:

1. Thinking Outside The Box
2. Battery Woes
3. OS X Leopard Screenshots

Like I said, I’ve been feeling a bit blargh recently, for a variety of reasons. Some of which would be uninteresting to people who aren’t me, so I won’t get into it. But I want to go into some of the stuff.

A lot of it probably has to do with the situation at work. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that one of my bosses and myself just don’t see eye to eye on stuff and that conflict is gradually increasing over time. Not going to turn this into a big complaint session post or anything, but just in a nutshell, I’m in a situation where he’s given me some fairly complex projects to work on  without understanding that they’re as complex as they are and expecting me to finish them faster than I can. So he either gets pissed at me for getting it done on time and not working like it should because the timeframe was unreasonable, or he gets pissed at me when I do it the right way and it takes longer than he thought it would.  Or the fun part, when he gets pissed at me when it doesn’t work how he thinks it should work, even though he never told me he wanted it to work like that to begin with.

I’m just detecting over the past several weeks that conversations have started to become more adversarial. Even when I attempted to bring up my concerns with him it got turned around on me somehow. The situation is heading towards some sort of breaking point. I just don’t know when.

So yeah, that’s weighing on my mind. And it’s not like I particularly enjoy working here or anything. What I just mentioned is part of the reason why, plus other things. I’ve been trying to find another job that would either present me a new opportunity in my existing career or let me go back to school on a more full time basis and work towards a graphic design degree. But so far there’s nothing in this area that looks like it might work out. And I’ve been looking.

Which brings me to my second reason for blargh-ness. I’ve got several design related projects I’ve been working on, chiefly a book layout for a friend of mine that’s pretty extensive, and a redesign for my friend Wassy’s website. Lately I’ve been slacking a bit on this stuff due to mostly, City of Heroes Going Rogue expansion. I’ve been trying to get back on top of things though. Trying to would be the operative word. It’s kinda like there’s some sort of disconnect and I just can’t come up with anything that works. It’s getting to be incredibly frustrating at this point.

So those are the big things weighing on me right now. It’ll pass at some point, I know, but right now things are just kinda blargh.

On the bright side though, the photos I posted up earlier this week seem to have gone over well with the professor of the course. Well, the first one anyway. She’s working on commenting on the rest. So it’s not all bad!

Related posts:

1. Workplace Aggrivation
2. Long Week…
3. Post Cold Update

The subject was Light and Shadow, capturing how shadows and reflections can create interesting images. So here we go (Click on each image to get to flickr where you can see a larger version)

First up my favorite one I took:

I happened upon this early in the morning at one of the local parks. The shadows from the railing on the gazebo were just awesome. One of the shots I took here that I was praying a morning jogger wasn’t going to run by though. You look a little weird at 8 in the morning, laying flat on your stomach over the steps of a gazebo taking pictures.

Here’s another one from the same park. The assignment also dealt with reflections of light, and I came across this setup with the sun refelcting in the water of the little pond thingy they have, with the hard light shadows on the rocks.

Different park this time (and a different day). This particular town park has a big network of nature trails. This was taken morning as well. The sun at this time shines directly into the entrance of this path making the foliage on the trees kinda glow which looked pretty neat.

This one I didn’t end up submitting, but I kinda liked how it turned out anyway. We’re back at the second park, along the sandy “beach” area. This was another one of those “Please nobody come by” type photos due to how I had to situate myself to get it right.

Related posts:

1. Lost In The Park
2. Adirondack Journey
3. Class

I’ve been excited to take this course for a while now because, if you remember, I went off and got myself a Nikon D3000 earlier this year and, while I’ve played around with it some, I haven’t really gotten used to all of the manual mode settings and such how I wanted to. So now I’ll get to learn about proper technique and how to meter properly and all that good stuff.

Expect to see some more photographic output from me in the near future as I go through the class. The first assignment is light and shadow.

Related posts:

1. Shadow Photography
2. Signs
3. Back From Class

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.

Related posts:

1. Post Cold Update
2. Random Happenings
3. Latest Goings On

I was dreading the first few weeks of this course since I’ve gotten fairly familiar with the basics of Photoshop in the past 6 months of me fiddling around with it. So taking a course explaining what all the selection tools and stuff do…ugh. Not exactly an interesting time in the classroom. The actual instruction has been about what I was dreading when I went in, but I have picked up a few little things that I didn’t know about previously. The teacher is good, thankfully. He’s very knowledgeable and actually excited about photography and image manipulation. And he knows how to teach. He’s a bit of a sticker for rules (no music while working during lab time?? What’s up with that??) but I can live with it.

Our first project is to do a composite image. Basically, we take one photo (the host image) and take elements from other photographs and add them into the first one to create an entirely new image. I was really stuck on an idea for something cool to do (I really didn’t want to just do a boring “take a random image and toss stuff into it” sort of project). Wassy, who was originally taking the course with me but has since dropped due to the demands of the rest of her schedule, mentioned an idea involving a chess board with pictures of monuments that I had from Washington DC. But all of the pictures that I had were from below looking up which wouldn’t work on a chess board at all, so I had to scratch that idea.

I was kinda floundering around again until, the day of class I woke up at roughly 5:30am before my alarm went off but with a cool idea: Two pawns playing chess with a board full of little people. I had to scramble around to get the pictures I needed (and I need to retake my host image because I threw it together fast and didn’t have quite what I was looking for), but I got enough to get the project improved by the instructor.

This course is another reason why I’m considering picking up my own DSLR. It seems like it’s going to require a lot of original photography (especially for the final two projects) and even though I can borrow Wassy’s camera, it’d be really nice to have my own. Especially since some of my shots might require me to travel around a bit and I don’t feel comfortable doing that with her camera (I’m deathly afraid I might break it or something). I’m going to need to take basic photography next semester too…

Whoops, there I go, rationalizing again. Anyway, I’ll post up the finished piece (if it’s not crap anyway) once it gets done.

Related posts:

1. Man On A Horse
2. Latest Goings On
3. Class

So, time to catch up. First up, I got my bonus money on Thursday and it ended up being a bit more than I was anticipating it would be. So I went out searching for a new desk chair for my office. At Staples, after selecting the chair I wanted, purchasing it and getting it home…it ended up not being the chair I picked. However, after sitting it it…it ended up being more comfy than the chair I was interested in to begin with, so…a happy accident. I ended up with the Tillman Leather Executive Chair. It’s very comfy.

Friday was the official last day of the semester, so my friends and I celebrated by heading out to Tom Cavallo’s for their excellent chicken wings and the fact that they have Newcastle on tap for a bit of a celebratory dinner. Their wings are…out of this world. Their pizza is pretty bad, but they totally make up for it with the wings.

This weekend, aside from getting myself a haircut, I spent the time mostly relaxing due to the stressful work week that I had last week. Urgh. Basically if something could have gone wrong, it did.

I’m getting more interested in playing City of Heroes again after a discussion with Wassy where we figured out really neat story arc idea involving 2 of my characters and one of hers. We need to wait for the expansion pack to come out (sometime next year hopefully) in order to fully explore it, but it’s gotten me back interested in the characters again. I’m currently compiling a sort of story bible on my main characters in an attempt to define them better and work on some backstory stuff that I might be able to turn into in game story arcs.

Related posts:

1. Yet Another Weekend Update
2. A Long Overdue Update
3. End of Semester Crush: An Update

It’s kinda weird, as usually at this point in the year, I’m relieved to be done with classes but I was actually enjoying this one. So there’s a lot of bittersweet feelings at the moment. I’ll be glad to not have to rush around so much on thursday’s in any case.

All in all I think it was the right decision to try to go back to school. I got to learn a bunch, work on some interesting things and focus my energy on something that I find actually enjoyable. Hopefully I can figure out some way to keep doing it…

Related posts:

1. Long Week…
2. School Stuffs
3. It's Friday! Yay?

So lets see here. School…I spent some time over my vacation working on my final project for Digital Typography. I got it most of the way done, but I need to do some more tweaking and proofreading to make sure everything is all set. I also have 2 images I need to add that I somehow forgot to spec out when I was doing all the measuring stuff. I’ll probably get around to doing that tonight.

Speaking of school, I can’t remember if I mentioned registering for next semester’s courses, but I’m going to be taking a photoshop class which has the potential to be really, really boring. At least the first bit is, considering I generally know the basics of Photoshop so it’s not exactly going to be anything ground breaking to start. Could get interesting towards the end though.

After that I’m not sure what I’m going to be doing. There’s a digital photography course that tends to run when I can take it but, as I mentioned earlier all of the core graphic design courses (the one’s I’m really interested in) only run during the day, when I’m at work. And I’m not in a position where I can really reduce my hours or quit my job or whatever to go after that realistically. So I’m not really sure what to do from this point onward…

On the brighter side of things, Wassy mentioned last night about having an idea for a new piece of Frost artwork (a christmas-y themed piece, which would fit the character perfectly) once she gets some time which I’m quite excited about. She’s really improved her abilities over the course of this semester, so I’m looking forward to seeing what she can do with the character now. Added to the fact that I love getting new gift arts and it’s a definite “win” situation.

I’m also simultaneously looking forward to and saddened by the return of the TV show Dollhouse this week. Happy to see it come back because I enjoy it (and Summer Glau is joining the cast) but saddened because it’s being canceled. It’s not a great show, and not up to the standards of , say, Firefly…but it was solid and had so much potential which seemed to be tossed away. I blame the network for  imposing a bunch of 1 off stand alone episodes when the series screamed for a story arc and the creators of the show for continuing that line of thinking into season 2. Hopefully it ends well, considering they were given enough notice to wrap things up nicely. And hopefully some of the actors (especially the guy that played Victor) get work elsewhere. Because there was a lot of really great talent there.

Related posts:

1. New Arts!
2. An Update On Happenings
3. Lots Of Waiting

Couple of updates on the posts from yesterday. My first Gyro was really, really good. I’m kinda glad that I don’t work near this place (the place that made the gyro) as I would have to resist getting lunch there every single day…

Also an update: We just got through with our mandatory health care meeting at work here since we got new plans and, as it turns out, the plans aren’t as sucky as I thought. While the deductibles are higher, less stuff touches the deductible than our current plan so it makes less of a difference. The only issue comes in if I have to go to the ER for something. It also has the Healthy Rewards thingy so I can earn some extra cash doing that stuff.

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1. Rant: Charitable Giving
2. Out To Syracuse And Back
3. All Studied Up