August 21st, 2009
The Siege of Past Weeks
Hey people!
These last weeks have been really exciting for me;
A lot of my friends have started moving into town practically filling my spare time with laughter and joy, this also leading into some distractions form what I should be doing, hence animation etc, but I guess I can call my time out throwing Footballs and chasing Torleif on his skateboard motion-study 
I’ve practically finished my IT-tech work over at Qvisten, so there has been some time to do my AM stuff and I think I’m still doing OK. Had a little trip over to meat up with Morten Lund today, and they seem to be having a little setback on people participating on their current project, (Inky/Blekkulf,) their CEO, Ove Heiborg, asked me if I wanted to help out a bit starting Monday next week. Of course I want to, so tomorrow I’m heading over to get a little more briefing on what I’m supposed to do as well as joining some of the guys over to Colosseum theater for a 20 min preview of James Cameron’s Avatar at 1600 hours; really excited to see what that film is all about.
DevilDriver’s newest album, Pray for Villains, is really amazing. The band sounded kind of weird to me at first, but I must say that it is a pretty interesting record, My favorite tracks are Bitter Pill, Another night in London and Pray for Villains.
New software have been added to my tool set as well; after watching Keith Lango’s video-tutorials on YouTube I got inspired to purchase Annotate!Pro. This is indeed not meant for animation, but in these LCD days we animators need a way to draw on screen without breaking them. dry erase pens are nice for CRT displays, but the LCD’s often have more of a matte finish so they are almost impossible to wipe. After testing it out I discovered that one of their features; ability to move notes around on the monitor by clicking and dragging them, kind of ended up as a burden because I kind of want them to stay put and be able to move my animation controls underneath. This lead me to send them a new feature request asking them for sticky notes, and to this they replied quite quickly and confirmed that my suggestion was forwarded to the development department. Getting replies like that really makes me a happy customer, if they include the feature in the future they’ll make me even happier 
A lot of news on Brutal Legend have been popping up during the last weeks as well; trailers, soundtrack list etc. I really can’t wait till I get my hands on that game! Just finished the newest installment in the Tales Monkey Island series, The Siege of Spinner Cay, and I can confirm that I was laughing out loud several times, now I’ll just have to wait for late September for the next episode.
My sister is coming down to Oslo on Sunday, pity that I won’t be able to spend too much time with her during my work at Qvisten, but I figure she will be busy as well. The AnimationMentor community is increasing and recently Vibeke Cleaverley managed to gather a bunch of Norwegian students to meet up in Frognerparken September 1st as the current set date, this is really exciting as I’m not able to attend the official AM gatherings Now I’m off to bed, really need some sleep as I’m going to try to get a lot of work done by tomorrow, as well as the Q&A starting in 6 hours.
