Tuesday night and I’m writing here listening to the Church’s “Under the Milky Way” and paying attention to the neglected blog before me.
I haven’t had very much to say in the past few months. I’ve been working around the clock and doing a lot of things out of sorts for myself.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time on Facebook, met a lot of good people, had a lot of great times there… but, those who know me from this blog know that I’m ever changing and I tend to move on. It’s a bad trait to have because sometimes I leave things and miss opportunities when, had I stuck it out, I’d be in a much better place.
Today I felt stupid.
No, seriously, I WAS stupid. I’ll forever admit that I’m the “Tim the Toolman Taylor” of computers. This weekend I decided to reformat my main computer because I had downloaded a virus. It hadn’t been activated yet, but it gave me an excuse to do the yearly reformat of this computer.
This machine is an odd mix. I built it as technology was changing. While it does have a PCI-e graphics slot, it’s got a lot of legacy pieces on the inside. When I first built it, I went with the old style IDE drives because they were what I had on hand. Two years later, I decided to swap out the last of the IDEs for SATAs and that’s where the problems began.
For those that don’t know computers, just think of the power supply as the actual engine that powers the computer. I was trying to power a big heavy suv with an engine built for a mini-cooper. There just wasn’t enough power to run 3 hard drives, a dvd burner, a sound card and a high end graphics card plus half a dozen USB devices.
My computer was doing INSANE things because of it. Ten minutes to reboot… stuck at the Windows loading screen… typing characters took 30 seconds to register… random graphics card crashes when it DID run. It was a nightmare and the whole time I KNEW what was wrong but decided to ignore it because I thought a little faith and a little elbow grease would get the job done.
Well, duh, eventually I had to give up the ghost and come to my senses. 1 hard drive, 1 burner, 1 graphics card and 1 sound card. For now, anyway, or until I can get a new power supply for MORE POWER! ARF! ARF! ARF! ARF!
In the middle of all of this, I’m learning several new programs. I couldn’t get my old copy of Adobe Fireworks to load so I’m on the Gimp now (with the windows installer). Fireworks was Macromedia’s web-friendly graphics development program before they got bought out by Adobe, btw, one of these days I’ll need to get it running again if I want to design my old style websites, but for now, I’m happy with the gimp.
I’m also learning an animation program called iclone 2. I’ve already upgraded to the professional package. I’m learning the basics of rag doll animation. I’m kind of getting addicted to it. It’s kind of cool that I can design a motion in the motion editor then carry it over to the graphics editor and see it apply to an avatar. Then export the avatar to an AVI file to use over in Pinnacle Studio (video editing). From there I can splice it together with other scenes and tell a story.
The next program I want to invest in is something called CrazyTalk. To be honest, it was probably the package I was looking for when I bought the more expensive iclone. But hey, anything to get me off my butt and doing something new was worth the money spent.
Crazytalk lets you animate nearly any picture and make it talk. The more advanced features let you actually produce an animated talking head who can essentially say anything you want them to say. Originally I wanted to just make a news broadcast to help enhance a game I’ve been playing with friends. But now, seeing the possibilities, wow. We’ll see where I go with it.
I need a new job, btw, someone hire me.
On that note, I’m heading off to another shift…
Jim