Carpe PM

So much for the Apple TV. I give you the Mvix HD media player. This thing does everything Apple TV provides and it also can play full HD. The best news, it plays DVIX XVID and DVD files out of the box. Now, if this thing has a hackable user interface, I’d skin it with black glass or something similar to what Apple TV uses. If it has an intro video, I found the Apple TV one too. So, I could have a Mvix player that looks like Apple TV. It runs a version of linux, and I bet there is a community out there that supports modding it.

I am back from another relaxing Spring Break. Just to let you know, I’m nearly finished with a new version of my web site. It will have some pretty cool javascript and flash work added. I have a flash video player that can remember the volume you’ve set it at and whether you want subtitles on or off. I’m also adding photo galleries of my favorite photos. I have been getting into cartooning. So, I’ll have a page for that too.

Here is a small sampling of the many photos I took on the trip to Arizona. I had a very relaxing time golfing, watching movies, reading, and hanging out with the cousins, grandparents, and uncle. I hope I can do it again next winter, but I’ll probably be getting settled with a job since I’m graduating from college then. Hope all is well with whoever reads this. I haven’t bothered tracking stats on the site for ages now. Enjoy. I’ll be working on projects before the next semester begins, and I’ll share them as they come together.

After 26 hours of straight driving, we are in Gallup, New Mexico. I got back two of my grades so far, and if things come out right, I might be hitting the dean’s list this semester! I didn’t imagine that would happen this Fall because I was consumed with all the work the classes were throwing at me.

I’ll be in Arizona tomorrow afternoon. It is so nice to be able to relax once again. I took a class last summer. So, I really haven’t had much of a break since the last Spring Break. I love how most motels on the road have high speed internet now.

Link of the Day UWBadgers.com

I’ve been very busy with a graphics class this fall. I turned in my project last Tuesday. It is basically Photoshop 1.0. I wrote image resizing, warping, painting, and even a black and white filter (meaning use only black and only white as the two colors). I hope I get an A on the project because I spent a large number of hours on it. I’m also in an operating systems class that I find very interesting. We’ve been writing multi-threaded programs in that class. Synchronizing shared objects is a very fun problem.

I have three midterms next week. So, I’ll primarily be studying for those this week.

How awkward would you feel if you had millions of dollars and rode down an elevator with just a college student. Well, that’s what happened today to Barry Alvarez. I was heading out of work around this morning from Camp Randall and rode down with Barry. Yeah, that’s about it. But, it made me wonder what it would be like to be on the flip side, with wealth and fame. Could you ever walk on skid row in LA and feel unnoticed?

I’m super busy with classes. We’re writing programs that do everything from multithreaded programs that have a form of intercommunication to programs that manipulate images. So, I have lots to do. I’m also applying for internships for this coming summer. Yeah, the jobs are already posted. I hope I can get in.

As for the comic I’ve posted about, I would be doing it if I didn’t have a graphics class. I guess I naturally like being busy. I have my fingers in a lot of stuff at the moment. I hope to find peace even with all I have to do. Tip: Always intermix some fun throughout a week, or else you may go crazy.

You may have noticed that I have links on this site pointing to a comic that doesn’t exist. Here’s the new layout that will be used for this comic. The project originally evolved as a tv cartoon series. We also decided to make comics and first develop a target audience via the internet. So far, we haven’t revelaed anything. Hence, nobody knows about the project or the story. So, if I find this fabled thing called time. We should have web comics coming out once a week in the near future.

Here are some mockups of the future site:

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 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.