Carpe PM

Amidst the rumors and Snopes denounced stories of Mars coming so close to earth that it would be the equivalent size of the moon, Sydney was hit with a massive red dust storm. The girlfriend of my brother in law took this picture from her flat in Sydney when it hit. I am starting to wonder if I am really on the same planet anymore. Maybe the flight over the Pacific also consisted of some sleeping gas halfway. Perhaps we made a short jump to light speed to take us home to our red planet? Nah… In any case, it is pretty cool that something that affects Sydney would not get us as bad in the Western regions.

Apparently, I have a world audience now. The above image is a color concentration map from Google Analytics of countries that people are visiting this blog from. How strange that something I just did for fun would get so many hits. I look at about 10,000 page views per month. A lot of this stems from Google indexing some things on my site in high ranks. But, some of it is repeat visitors. I do not pay a lot of attention to this thing lately, but I suppose I will continue to use it as a venue to show personal works in progress. I definitely need to make time to record more footage with my camera. However, I actually have some other web related projects in the works at the moment during my weekends.

You always get interesting stuff when it come time to work on an advertisement. Who would’ve thought that I’d be animating eyeballs, crashing people into cars, and everything else I can find time for in a few short days. Well, I better get back to it.

Lets just say that credit card companies haven’t figured out how to handle international addresses in a very clean way. I just changed my mailing address for my American Credit Card to send replacement cards over here, and the above is pretty much what you can expect from the big names. How lame can it get. Seriously, all it takes is a tiny little db table we call countries. Or maybe just some, get it right the first time you bogens. I’m guessing the code that runs the site was written so poorly that changing it would be a nightmare. That’s the typical conundrum these days. I’m pretty amused at the zip code though. Apparently, it’s not used in the mailing address label when it has that value. So all the people living in Wood-Tikchik State Park, Alaska are out.

How crazy cool can a day get? I went with my fiance down to Sydney yesterday and we met with our wedding photographer for the first time. We then headed over to Myer’s and added more items to the gift registry that we had forgotten. Finally, the day was finished with a night of Chris Tomlin, David Crowder and Louie Giglio at a free event called Passion World Tour. Only downer was that it was extremely raging loud. It was nice to finally see the Passion bands and hear Louie speak.

Last weekend was pretty different from any other weekend I’ve ever had. Gift registries and music festivals… even a birthday party. The image above is of my fiance’s band playing at the gig. The lights were great and the sound was bleeding. It was all around perfect. Probably one of the best sets the band has had since I’ve been around. Well, other than the weekend it’s a steady flow of work for me.

I have not posted here since I was last in Australia in May. Life was much too busy, and my current job takes great precedence over my life. However, I’m engaged and getting married next year. Crazy hey? It’s probably the best time of my life right now. I’m guessing it’ll just continue to improve. Work is busy and I have gigs on the weekend for my fiance’s band all the time right now, but I feel blessed to be here. Where is here, you ask? Australia is where it’s at. That’s right I moved from America to live in Australia on a permanent basis. I love it here.

I’m now sold on using blender for a long time. I have many reasons now, including the following:

1. subdivision surfaces
2. ambient occlusion
3. subsurface scattering
4. toon shading
5. fur
6. cloth
7. it’s totally free

The only complaint many people have is the interface. After going through a brief number of tutorials, I’m used to the interface and am sold on how it works. Everybody really did something right.

Good news! I bought myself a new black Martin Acoustic guitar. It sounds amazing and I’m thoroughly enjoying the lighter strings. I hope I can play it here in front of my friends here before, well you know. If you don’t know, then you don’t know me that well. I know, mysterious. Nonetheless, the Martin is replacing my Gibson Les Paul Special that I’ve had for about 4 years now. It served me well.

I haven’t had the chance to shoot anything since the trip because I’ve been working full time since I got back. Long story. I lined up a sweet job and got a car. So, life is moving fast and swimmingly all at once. So, the image in this post is again from my last week in New Zealand before I came back. I’m working on getting a bit of the footage together this weekend so I can send it off to various places. I hope someone is interested. If not, I will call it practice work and will store it in an archive until I desire to use it for my own personal projects.

I’ve been back in the US for over a week now, and I feel like I’m in a foreign land. I guess I never imagined that staying in Oz and NZ for only a few months would have this effect on me. It’s kinda cool too. Mind you, I’m doing well here. I lined up a contractor position and have steady job in less than a week. Crazy eh? I even got a used car in three days. Day One: find car. Day Two: buy car. Day Three: register car. I feel super blessed. I’m putting together a DVD today of samples of footage from the trip to entice companies to purchase it all. How cool would that be if I could earn money for those three months away? That would rock my face off!

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Now playing: Playjerise – Safe To Say
via FoxyTunes