DigitalDuckling

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.

No Comments | In: AnimationMentor.com, Games, Job, Life, Movies, Software | | #

Hey there people!
I got a little bummed out by my computer today, and want to share with you readers out there just to release some of my frustration:

Well it is summer! Yay! Sunny days and what not. This is all great, but it is not a great season for computers! I am currently on the end of the first term of AM and I decided to play a game on my computer for once. Based on what I have seen from E3 this year, (the new Splinter Cell game in this case,) I decided to just start playing the series. Starting with the first game that came out for quite a while ago. This didn’t turn out great, not only because of the horrible gameplay, but my frickin’ “CPU Alarm” went off.

I decided it was about time to clock down my CPU for the summer so that it wouldn’t overheat. Setting my system back to auto settings actually didn’t help me much; Windows constantly started freezing over. Which is strange, as that ment that I technically have clocked it down like 880MHz, but then I started thinking: “What if my CPU gets over loaded now that it is a whole lot slower?” So I set it back  and my system is as stable as always. Now I think the big problem I have goten to is tat SC maxed out my load; making my CPU overheat.

This had me run the ol’Google for quite some hours, and what do I have to show for it? ThreadMaster GUI

Supposedly it is supposed to not set the priority, but limit applications CPU load. This won’t make your software run faster, but you can prevent the system from crashing or overheating; at least theoretically.

Or if these things doesn’t consern you, how about limiting the CPU laod of your antivirus scan, or while extracting files with WinRAR etc.? Making you able to use your system even though it is runing a CPU heavy process.

No Comments | In: Hardware, Software | | #

Hey all! Long time no post. Getting irritated while working in Maya, I started to Google around for information on why the Sidebar needs more RAM reserved than Maya, even though I am using Maya and not the sidebar. Well, all the posts I came over always talk about the same thing; Vista reserves my memory so that apps have play-room or what ever. I WANT TO BE ABLE TO CONTROL THIS! But I can’t find a single way to do so, (that seems to work anyway.) So the sidebar reserves 250MB of RAM for no reason, and I have to restart the app to free it; ironically the Sidebar only uses 30MB once its restarted. What does Microsoft prepare it for?

My results weren’t only disappointing as I stumbled over a tool on Microsoft TechNet; Process Explorer. Why hasn’t this been included in Windows before? You can get detailed task manager information without even installing the app. You can see the apps, how they are running in threes etc. and you can right-click-Google stuff! I’ve been wanting this since Windows 2000.

technet.microsoft.com

2 Comments | In: Software | | #

Yes sir, I spent a whole day watching past Webinars on AnimationMentor.com and doing my first 16 frame walk cycle in PhotoShop, and now its already too late to read more in The Illusion of Life; I’m a slow reader and the book is to heavy to read on my bead. Anyway going to the Doctors Office tomorrow still seem to get unbelievably sleepy around noon so hopefully the doctor can find something out.

No Comments | In: Animation, Life, Random, Software | | #

Once more it has been a long time since I have posted anything.
I have discovered some nifty tools as of late; The Snipping Tool, this one came with my Vista Ultimate some how or I did not realize it before now. Really nice if you just want to print screen a tiny piece of your screen. Too bad there is no way, (that I know of at least,) you can make a hot-key for it. Thats the only flaw I can see now. There an alternative I have been using thought, (Gadwin PrintScreen,) and it lets you add hot-keys, sure there are others but I express the ones I have tried.

I have also come to like Google Chrome a lot, until now, as it is impossible to compose any type of e-mail in Hotmail with it. It also has issues with the 11 second club frame counter and always start loading pages on a white background. But it is quite nice to avoid the whole browser set crashing.

Last but not least. Ever heard of Oscars File Renamer? It is a free and nifty tool that lets you rename file names in any folder as if it was writing in note pad! This is great for organizing, say your mp3s or pictures? You do not need to rename them one by one you just type all the filenames and hit a button and thats it!

As for me, well I am doing okay, if you should care. Really want a job thought. I feel like an idiot for not having a job while I was younger, really. But I guess standing up for my friends seemed to be worth it then and there, I believe it will be the right choice in the long run thought.
I’m currently trying to get a job with a car rental service, I know it seems way out of my orientation, but I am a guy and I love cars so I think I can enjoy myself there, at least for a while.

Hope I remember to post

Edit 02.05.09:  
There is a temporary way to make Chrome working with hotmail etc. (QuickTime still an issue) add this to your shortcut:
–user-agent=”Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1 Safari/525.19″ 
 Example:

C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe –user-agent=”Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1 Safari/525.19″

Remember that you have to have all instances of chrome closed before running the shortcut; if you don’t it won’t work!

No Comments | In: Life, Software | | #

Finally I got use for my SQL server this is now my blog… ain’t it nice?

Hopefully I will use this and make it grow over time.

No Comments | In: Random, Software | | #