Tools and rhythms

I've been operating in a low production but high efficiency mode lately. Yay!

I bought a student license of Maya for MacOSX and it's on its way to me inna mail along with a lotta freebies and goodies to go with it. (Maya backpack, tee-shirt, and an additional book on using Maya, which happens to be the one that will be used to teach my class this fall) So that's very exciting.

I also talked to the people at Maxon about student pricing. It would run me about $300 for cinema 4D plus another $400 for Shave and Haircut (which is a 3rd party product distrubuted by them and does not have a student price) Ooof. What's worse is I'm actually thinking about it. The sales person was really nice. No hard sell or anything. She put some free demos in the mail for me.

Its also pretty tempting because I plan to have my computer at FC and available for use for FCTV and probably also for the animation panel since I have a frame grabber, all the Adobe stuff and Maya and a tablet and a gig of ram and a huge harddrive, it's a perfect machine to use for the presentation. Especially if I can save up for a LCD display by then. (Yay overtime pay!)

To the best of my research, it looks like new versions of Illustrator and Photoshop will be out in mid October so I'm going to wait until then to purchase my updated dynamic media collection for Mac. Looking forward to that one tho. Native OSX mode is lots faster than OS9 mode.

Last bit of money crazed geekery, I'd like to say I TOTALLY LOVE my new Wacom tablet. It's so much more response than my old one or the graphires. It really keeps up with the way I work. The old one was good but there were times it couldn't keep up with the speed of my strokes (I draw really fast) Also, the old one was too big for me. This one is just the perfect size so it fits really well. So worth it! I've been working like mad in Illustrator, Flash, and Photoshop with it. I especially like its sensativity to tilt in the pen. My computer strokes are coming out much more like my actual strokes now.

Besides the mad purchasing craze, I've been on a kick of varied study which is kinda nice.

Every day at lunch I'm studying classic anatomy with a 6B pencil and Burne Hoggarth's books. Every evening before bed I read a chapter or two of Illustrator books. The later (In addition to probing Peganthyrus and Spark for information) has been giving me a LOT of new data and generating a lot of new ideas. I have been using like maybe 10% of Illustrator's full potential.
I'm still experimenting with blend objects and gradient meshes but some time soon I hope to apply what I've learned and actually make something with it.

Not tonight though. Tonight I'm working on a felt puppet for the YARF! commercial. Hee. Ya'know? Who says being hyperactive is bad? If you just learn to timeslice properly its a benefit, not a handicap.

Ouch

TO-DO-LIST: You mainly use your LJ to keep track of
things you have to do, which, trust me, is NOT
what people normally use journals for. The
brutal truth is that nobody really cares that
you have to go pick up your laundry on 6th
Avenue at 4:00 and that you need to remember to
pick up peanut butter from the grocery store.
Try writing about something interesting (and
personal) for a change.


What's the purpose behind your LiveJournal? (with pictures!)
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That must be why no one comments on most of my posts except the deviant sexual ones. I'm... dull.

Poster Child

Oooh. That's what? 5 or 6 posts today? I'm set for a month!

Just a random babble about how great Macs are.

Today I installed a 120G HD in my G4. This consisted of pulling on the handle which opens the cover, unscrewing two screws to release the drive bay, 4 screws to put the drive in the bay, then putting the bay back on and plugging in the cables. On powerup my machine saw the new drive and went into Disk Utility. I named the drive and said 'OK' and it went off an did its thing int he backgroun and let me work while it was testing, formatting, partitioning, and configuring the drive. Total impact to my work time: About 15 minutes.

Don't even get me started on how this compares with my last PC drive installation.

So... Now my Mac is up to 1/4 terrabyte of disk space! Yay! I can animate and video edit like a diseased maniac! :)

On a related note, I found out how to change the pictures for the harddrives from the stupid/ugly default 'looks like a harddrive' icon to whatever I want.. Gotta come up with some good ideas for what to make them look lke. I'm thinking still drive-like but with some reference to their use.

Also, what should I name my drives? My machine is somewhat eclecticly named at the moment. The uname is 'Geepers', the main drive is 'Sammi', the second drive is 'GIR' and the new one got named 'KidVideo'.

Eesh. Maybe I should name them after obscure 80's cartoons. Skip down to 'Saturday Mornings' and there's a wealth of imaes to choose from I think I'd like something a little less geeky and more 'me' tho. Haveta think about it some more. Past bedtime now tho.