Ok,
It's been a while since my last post(again), almost a year now.
Sooo, what shall I start with ? Things change on a day to day basis, later in this post
I will list some stuff that happened and I didn't mention on the blog.
But first, I haven't been present online much, well, no blog posts, before last year I had a twitter account with 2 or 3 twitts in a full year, etc.
I somehow managed to get caught in this whole web 2.0 thing a bit.
I started to tweet more. Less than normal people but a lot more according to my 'low' standards. I got caught by a hash tag,
#songsincode namely. First I had a few simple simple but somewhat lame attemptsjavascript:void(0):
"roll(4);roll(9);this.find(this) = Location.PARADISE; "(BabyShambles),
"var i=this;i.want(somethingGood(i.die(4))).makeItBeautifulToLive();i.want(new Mistake());lose > hesitate;"(Queens Of The Stone Age),
"var i=this;i.ahead=true;i.man=true;i.mammalToWearPantsID=1;trace('yeah')with(i.lust){i.atPeace=true}if(i.trustGod)i.canKill=true"(Pearl Jam),
"!we.areScaremongering; this.isReallyHappening;"(Radiohead).
Some worked better ( Life.kill(self) TypeONegative ) than others
( new HeadAches();new HeartBreaks();(this.age > this.capacity) && this.affection = Math.sin(angle%360*Math.PI/180);angle++; The Killers ) , but later I decided to go for a full song.
"for(var i=0 ; i < 12*12 ; i++) trace("Around The World"); "
Daft Punk - Around The World :)
Ok that might not count so I actually tweeted the first that came to mind involving creation of new objects, Buttons and what not. I've used
Mathue's awesome time traveling technique to do this.
Here goes(drum rolls) The White Stripes - Hardest Button To Button in 21 #songsincode twitts.
Aside this I try answer questions often enough on
stackoverflow. In case you don't know what stackoverflow is, just take a quick peek. It's a website where geeks(mainly) exchange questions/answers.
As you might have noticed, I'm posting pretty geeky stuff lately. There is a reason for that. As I said at the top of this post things changed.
I no longer live or study in Canterbury. I had a great time because there are a lot of great students out there I had a great time with. I've done a few interesting
projects there, but since I stayed there for about a year and I couldn't find a job, although I am an Adobe Certified Professional with Flash ( Design and Development ) and have been working for a while, I still couldn't find a job, so I left.
I was lucky to meet Euan Millar, a very interesting guy I met at my first
Flash On Beach in
2007. It turns out that now he is one of my employers and for the last year I have been working at
disturb media. We've done quite a few interesting thing here, although most of them are secret!(Shhhh!!!)
We (at disturb) got featured in
Web Designer Magazine issue 157 and again in the current issue(160)
There's a cute extension I wrote on the CD of the magazine, an also available on the blog post
online.
We like playing with APIs like Papervision3D, Away3D, Box2D, GoogleMaps(go Alex!), FLARToolkit, etc. So far anything goes. If we come up with an idea, there's not much stopping us, a thing I missed while working back home. I am constantly attracted by new technologies and I'm glad I have the change to play with most of them.
Recently Iulia Nastasoiu, a brilliant Java Developer will join our team starting tomorrow. I had the pleasure of working with her previously and we wrote the Dithering class posted here last year. Alse we used to study at the same university back in Canterbury. Welcome to our team!
About Dithering and all that. Many of my older posts are broken as the server where the files used to live is asleep right now for an unknown period of time. Big thanks to Bogdan Ciocoiu who hosted my all that time free of charge and helped me when I really needed. I still have the files on my hdd and hopefully I will fix those posts as I have a new
domain I don't use much nowadays.
I still study, only now I don't study Fine Arts and Digital Media anymore. Which means I have been drawing less, but still haven't given up drawing, mainly thanks to
Ayue.
I've played a bit with opensource 3d tools. I got used to 3dsmax and that doesn't work on mac osx. I tried
wings 3d which I love for sub division modeling, and
blender which crashes pretty often because of the crappy GPU macbooks have these days. Modeling is fine, rendering, not so fine. I've tried a few ray tracers and POVRay keeps crashing, RenderMan works, but it's commercial,
yafaray is cool, but it was
tough to setup. I haven't tried
Pixie yet, but it looks promising.
Here are a few abstract models I did in spring using wings 3d.
I don't study Fine Arts anymore and don't have any class on drawing (sigh!), and I know I'm pretty lazy by default. I've been pretty geeky lately as I now study
Creative Computing at
Goldsmiths, University of London.
One of the main reasons I chose this programs was pretty random. I've won an Arduino board at one of the London Flash Platform User Group meetings which I try to attend as often as possible and wanted to learn how to use that toy.
So far this program is the best combination of Geeky/Artsy education you can get around here. Well I wish there was more to study related to color theory/layout/typography/etc...but can't have everything at once can I ? Speaking of Arduino boards we are studying Physical Computing starting September with
Dr. Tim Blackwell as far as I know. More Max/MSP/Jitter on its way with
Dr. Mick Grierson, OpenGL and Java with
Dr. Marco Gilles, and my first lecture with a Romanian Lecturer in London, involving Interactive and Narrative Media with
Dr. Marian Ursu.
I like it so far, I've learned a lot of things I wouldn't imagine learning by myself, I feel a lot more confident with code and stopped believing Flash is the greatest thing ever. Yup, that is what I used to believe, not matter what anyone said. I've been using it for a few good years now, got over 5320 hours of commercial work done and surely am heading for the 10000. I will not give it up, but I have to spend time to learn all this new things that these people teach me at Goldsmiths.
Yet again I don't know what to do, but it's fine now...it means I have more choices. Some things will need to change and there is a lot of work to be done.
I will try to post things I've done this year that were pretty interesting and hopefully useful to others. As usual I hope to blog more, and maybe the posts won't be as long as this one. There are a lot of things unsaid, but they'll all come in good time. Ideally I will be able to keep a balance on personal stuff/geeky(flash and others) and artsy stuff.
Big thanks, you know why!
P.S. Now that I've managed to blog about most things that were on my mind, so apologies to the people that ended up on this page because of #songsincode :)
