Carpe PM

Link of the Day Pixar’s Ratatouille Trailer (quicktime)

Well, I’m out of Madison. My summer class has homework due on Tuesday next week. So, I hope to get to some of that tomorrow, as well as on Sunday. I’ll be drumming again, and I haven’t done that in a long while.It’s good to get away from Madison for a few days. Although, I was planning on doing some voice recording for the animated series my friend and I have been planning. Oh well, we’ll get to that next weekend.

I got out of town on Thursday afternoon and headed for my grandparents house. They bought a new Dell computer. So, I spent some time setting it up for them today. So, they have a sweet machine. Yes, I put firefox, thunderbird, and picasa on the machine for them. It’s plenty fast for them although still on a dialup connection.

My grandpa knows the famous artist Chick Peterson. Chick made a birthday card for him of my Aunt driving them from Arizona up to Wisconsin this Spring.

Link of the Day Marlon Brando as cg actor in Superman Returns

The development environment at work is horrendously slow. Yesterday, the server went out of commission twice for at least an hour each time. I’m writing an in browser image editor and nearly have it complete. I just need to add a quantization algorithm, and it’ll be ready for the users to start adding those strange image blobs to our database.

I’ve been working on a cartoon series with a friend and that’s coming along nicely. The script that was originally going to be the pilot episode is now the second episode. I wrote the new pilot script and was planning on beginning dialog recording this weekend, but I’ll be going up to Door County again. We have 80 episode ideas, 40 characters, 20 cameos, and many other plans already laid out for this show. Once we have the pilot complete, we’ll just need to sell it to some studio. So, that’ll be fun.

I’m taking one summer class so I can have less pressure in my final semester of college after next summer’s internship. It’s okay so far. Well, I’m off.

Link of the Day Creative Cow Forums

I spent most of yesterday evening working on a script. I’m nearing the halfway mark to finishing the first draft. It’s a twenty minute episode of a tv series project that I’ve been working on with a friend for the past year. I really want to go see Cars tonight, but I probably won’t. I was messing with Maya’s cloth this afternoon. It’s being unforgiving to me. I hope I can get it working so we can have some sweet cloth theater curtains. I’ll post it once I get it working. Brazil made it through their first game of the World Cup today.

I’m also writing an in browser image editor for the redesign at work. We’re storing the images in the database, in columns that are named “BLOBS.” All right, that’s it! I’m going to see Cars. I should’ve yesterday. My own projects can wait. I like “researching” the art too. Have a good week.

I’ve successfully messed around with the generi rig that most people are using to learn how to animate with maya. So, I’ll hopefully have enough time this month to learn the ins and outs of the rig, as well as animate a 10 second clip from Planes Trains and Automobiles.

Link of the Day 10 Second Club

Well, I tested out the lightscribe dvd burner yesterday. I made labels for some DVDs I’ll be sending to some friends. The labels turned out really nice but take about 20 minutes to create. I’m glad that I have patience for things like that. And, I should have my new software for DVD creation soon too.

So, I now understand what AJAX is all about. Essentially, javascript loads xml files whenever the page is set up to do and any number of times. This is extremely similar to what is done in flash using actionscript to load xml. So, I’m very interested in implementing some stuff using it, but it won’t be for work because they don’t seem interested in having dyanimcally loading pages for some reason.

Link of the Day The Web Cam Border Patrol

A lightscribe DVD burner arrived in the mail yesterday. I got it installed in a few minutes, but now I need to test the sucker out. I may hop over to best buy tonight to get some lightscribe blanks. In any case, it’ll be sweet to make DVDs of my short film that I’m working on this summer.

Our redesign codebase is going to be a three tiered object oriented application. I’m hoping that we can make it small and easy to manage. One thing that sucks is waiting for another person with admin rights to show up and configure this machine to work right. So, in the mean time I’m getting paid to merely write javascript. Oh well. It’ll be cool when the site is finished. I just hate how slow everyone is on this project. I made an entire flash web site by myself here in about three weeks, and we can’t get anywhere with this.