My Late Thanksgiving Post

Shh. Silence is broken only by the frigid winter breeze as I steady my hand.
Watching. Waiting. Gently I reach for the button, revealing the red. I'm ready. I hear them coming. The first flies by me faster than I antisipated, I shoot. The second follows as I shoot again. Both targets go down.

I would have been a proud storyteller of an actual animal hunt, however my thanksgiving morn involved skeet. Which I think is better. Less waiting, more shooting! My dad, brother, granddad, uncles, and some friends have been skeet shooting every thanksgiving morning since I can remember. We always do horrible but it's a lot of fun nonetheless. Being married over the holidays can be fun, you just have to enjoy travel and be capable eat twice as much (especially over this holiday)!

I also got invited to a party my buddy Danny was having at his place that involved a bunch of people I'd never met. I haven't seen Danny or my brother Nick in a while so i decided to go so I could spend a little time with them. We played poker, ate a delicious meal, way too many deserts, and then capped it off with a lil' Halo 2.
I even got to play (and kill a few times) the #2 Halo-er on Xbox live. wow.

Family, friends, guns, poker, darts, Halo, yeah it was a good one.

Tutorial: How To Mess With Coworkers (Mac)

Ha! Dan and I just got done making custom eject overlays for our unsuspecting coworkers. We are going to install them on their computers the next time they step away. What's an eject overlay? Why is this awesome? Well, lets Tarantino this bad boy.

About an hour ago Dan came in here to test an interactive CD that made his computer crash. We tested it and it seemed to work fine on my computer. Once we were done testing it I hit F12 (eject on the EZ Keyboard) and the CD came out. Now for those of you not familiar to the mac interface, when you eject a CD it overlays the universal "eject" symbol on your screen. Well we made some comments to the effect of how it'd be funny if it came on and said, "No, I like this one" and kept the CD from us. Then we got to thinking. If we were able to find and edit the quicktime player interface buttons images to say " H I J O N", could we in the same manner edit this overlay?

The search began and in about 2 minutes I found it: "eject.png". For those of you also wanting to experiment with this here's the path:

System > Library > CoreServices > BezelUI > Images > eject.png

You have to change the permissions to allow you to access both the file and the folder it's in. To do so, perform a "get info" on the item. Then under "Ownerships & Permissions" drop down the "Details" twirly and click the locked lock to unlock the locked lock. Now that it's unlocked change the "Owner" drop-down to show the name of your computer instead of "System". Once that's taken care of on both items, have at it! Be sure to save a copy before you edit! The image is set to the specific size of 211 x 206 but can be full color. I've made two versions so far, both of which Dan already posted on his blog so I told him I'd post his here on mine. haha! He also put up a copy of the original overlay just in case.




So anyways, go check mine out and try to imagine the look on my coworkers faces next time they eject their drive and see Mickey flippin' em the bird!

THAT's why it's awesome.

Lucky 7 Tour

This past Monday the Triscari producers, my wife and I got to sit in on an Alias users group meeting held in Rockville, MD that was hosting the Lucky 7 tour. Not being much of a 3D artist myself, I still was able to piece together enough to know what they were talking about thanks to Dan's random rants about Maya. Some of the coolest products technology has ever dished out (in my opinion) were demoed before our very eyes. The Sensable Phantom haptic device as well as the newest Wacom Cintiq tablet.

Dan and I actually got to use the Sensable Phantom. Oooh man. This thing looked like a pen attached to a robotic arm that sits on your physical desktop next to your monitors. You open up Maya or their custom 3D modeling software "Clay Tools" and sculpt your model with this pen. You move it around in 3 dimensions (X, Y & Z) at the same time and when you hit the surface of the model your pen stops giving you the illusion that your actually touching the model! I ran the pen over the models teeth and it was bumpy I could even go around the back of the head and feel what I couldn't see! It was amazing.

The Cintiq was in another world of amazing all of it's own. We've all seen these tablets before where you can draw on it's monitor and it shows up in Photoshop or whatever. But this one was huge, pressure sensitive and check this out: a guy in the audience raised his hand and asked if it could sense through paper. The host said "What's that you have there in your hand?" (It was a notepad) "..Let me see that" This guy took the notepad, (probably half an inch thick) placed it on the Cintiq and drew over top of the notebook and it showed up on the projected image we were watching! That impressed me.

All in all it was a great time for everyone even Lindsey! I will definitely try to attend more of these events in the future.

The File Goblet

Today i was copying files from a DVD onto my desktop. What warrents this a post you say? Well, the way they landed. I thought it looked like a goblet with and straw in it or maybe a slurpee. What do you see?

I Look At Them First Too

Every individual reacts a different way under pressure. Mine is the "freak out a lot and work your butt off until the situation gets better" approach, which has also been my theme at work for the past two days.

Wednesday, due to the low budget, I needed to crank out a nice logo for the Community Christian Academy school opening up in Perry County in an eight hour period. Yesterday, I was forced to designed a website in 3 hours. Both days resulted in pretty cool pieces, which you've already looked at because you, blog reader, don't view the page in order! :-)

Anywho, here's what I've to show from the past two work days. Say, these would go nicely with my portfolio. Click to enlarge.

Halloween Recap

I have this theory, that time will either prove or disprove, that all these years that I've turned another year older and not felt it will hit all at once, when the baby is born.
Despite not feeling it, my birthday weekend did in fact turn out to be a good one. The costume party was a lot of fun. Our pimp/hooker costumes were a hit and I still don't have a camera to capture the memories. I should be getting some pics from people that were able to take them and once I do I'll be sure to post them.

On a separate note, my website / email is down because I failed to renew the domain! Since I own joshsammons.com I've been using the email I set up there. Of course, I didn't have that email when I registered the domain so naturally the 'renewal reminder emails that were sent to me went to my old email account...which I haven't check in God knows how long. Needless to say, I checked it once my joshsammons account went down and there the domain was just waiting for me to renew it...poor domain. My apologies to everyone who had tried emailing me within the past two days. Another 48 hours and it should be back up.