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Posted by Admiral on 2010-03-09 23:58:16

HOLY CRAP! DINOSAURS ALL UP IN MY HOUSE!!!!
No, seriously! I'm not kidding! Dinosaurs happened! Two of them! A Red one and a Green one! In my own front room! On my birthday! I had no idea this would happen! I was just so excited that I just kept yelling 'WOOOOAAAAAAAHHHH!' over and over again for about 30 minutes! I didn't even know that they MADE a red one!

About a year or two ago when I first saw Spike the Ultra Dinosaur, I almost couldn't believe that such an awesome toy was on the market yet! That same night, I went home and updated my Amazon Wish List thusly:

"It would ROCK so hard to have one of these. It would rock even more if I could have 2 of these. One to keep original, the other to control with my own Arduino Programming; Just imagine, I could program my own dance moves for it!"

Yeah. That's right. Adruino. Robot Dinosaur. Dance moves. When I finally have the time to sit down and start hacking one of these two, there will be very few boundaries to just how much awesome I'm going to be able to derive from this toy. I plan on programming my own whole collection of behaviors in on one of these guys, and from that point... well, let's just say that I'm hoping that this will not be my only bout of experimentation with robotics.

Boy, when Shelley, my love, my sweetheart, told me that she had a big surprise waiting for me at home when I got off of work today, she wasn't kidding! I had no idea she had gone so far out of her way to make this day so special for me! I mean, one would have been FANTASTIC, but two Dinosaurs? My goodness! She sure knows how to spoil a kid. I MEAN, A MAN. I just got another year older. A man. Yeah. (Tee hee... Dinosaurs!)

Shelley had also contacted some of my friends, and invited them over for the event. Adam Heath, Dmitri Carapezza (NSFW!) and Influx were able to show up and experience some of this dinosaur-y awesomeness. Everyone had a turn at making the dinosaurs stomp and tromp around my front room, eat miscellaneous odds and ends on the floor (like playstation controllers), then finally, get themselves stuck in corners(sadly, these dinosaurs have no reverse arrows on their controllers). It was the most prehistoric fun I'd had in ages!

The rest of the celebration was very nice and relaxing. Everyone ate food until everyone agreed that everyone had eaten far too much food. Except me. I was still so super stoked to have two new dinosaurs that I had little to no interest in eating. Which is okay, because my Boss had been really nice and taken everyone in the office out to a buffet for lunch to celebrate my birthday, so I wasn't at a loss for calories at all. Man, talk about great days!

After everyone else took off and Shelley went to bed, Adam and I stayed up a bit later and took some photos of my awesome new toys/pets.

In other news

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I have updated Picture-Rama 2 once more. Head on over to the "Photos / PR2" page and download a copy to see some of the other recent activities I've been participating in.

Now, usually, with each significant update to Picture-Rama 2 that I make, I like to pick a recent photo that I've taken to represent the collection. I even mentally had a runner-up for that photo, BEFORE TONIGHT HAPPENED! OH YEAH! Anyway, I thought I'd just share that photo with you now, as it won't likely be seen any other way. This photo happens to be of two particularly great Fortune Cookie fortunes that a friend and I got at lunch recently. The first fortune reads:

"We don't know who we are until we see what we can do."

I don't know about you, but I find that piece particularly inspiring. The second fortune read:

"Every one has a photographic memory. Some just don't have film."

Every time I look at that one, I end up having quite a few laughs. I hope it gives you a case of the LOLs as well.

Anyway... it seems I'm overdue on heading off to bed. Adios for now!

Tags: dinosaurs | personal | picture-rama 2 update

Posted by Admiral on 2010-02-21 17:21:32

About 5 months ago, I started work on a collaborative work with an artist friend of mine, Trent Call. This model did not take me 5 months worth of work; it took more along the lines of 16.5 hours to create start to finish, but due to unusual amounts of chaos in my life over the last little while, I've only been able to sit down and complete it as the dust from recent explosions is starting to settle.

I had a great deal of fun working on the model, from it's Candy-Corn nose, all the way down to it's Mickey Mouse style gloves. The Shoelaces were a pain in the butt though. Trent's Devil Guy is a recurring 1920s style cartoon character that shows up in Trent's works from time to time. If you're lucky, you might see this chatacter in some of Trent's mural pieces, painted on various walls and truck sides around the city. You may even have caught him in passing at several gallery strolls, if you have been to any downtown showings over the last few years.

Below is a series of "Work in Progress" screenshots I took as I worked on this model. Click on each of the thumbnail images to see the full resolution screenshot.

Tags: 3d model | beta | blender | trent call