While I’m trying to finish off a website for a friend of mine, John Hill, and that still is taking top priority in my spare time, those of you who know me, know I teach part time over at ITT. Far from the most glamorous teaching position in the world, but I enjoy it. Free time seems to be more and more of a luxury these days.

Either way, I got into a discussion with my class the other night, and they were talking about how it was suggested before they started school that the college either had on site, or had access to, a mocap facility. After a long discussion about how a mocap studio wont make you better animator, which I firmly believe, I remembered an idea I had several months earlier.

The idea was to try to construct a primitive yet functional motion capture system using mostly off the shelf products. The Wii Remote is little more than a simplified IR 1024×768 camera. The best part is that the Wii Remote does most of the heavy lifting and can keep track of 4 distinct IR light sources. Using multiple Wii Remotes, and a custom build IR suit rig, you should be able to toggle just 4 points on the suit each frame and still get a decent sampling rate across the entire suit.

Last night in class, I started working on a prototype. I’ll post some photos as work progresses.

I went out last night with with Mr. Adam Ford and Mr. Declan, A.K.A. D-CLAN, to Karaoke Night at Chaplins in Roswell. It was hilarious. I’m going to see if I can get some of the many pictures taken from the night, mostly of Ford acting like an idiot, in the medieval sense of the word, and dancing around the bar.

On a side note, its obvious that I’m out of place at social events such as this. I’m just not one-of-the-guys. Everyone at the table was enjoying a nice tall beer, with the exception of me. And what did I have you ask? Well, a myriad of severely overpriced mixed drinks. I always feel like I’m pulling a James Bond or something. Although, I prefer vodka martinis, stirred. I’m such a pretentious bastard.

BOOYAH!

I mean seriously, what happens to the time. It’s been what two months since my last post. Apparently. Damn! So much changes, in such a short time. I went up to see John a few weekends ago, and hoping to head back up there the first weekend of April. That was a blast. It had been way too long since I’ve seen him and his wife. It was good to catch up.

Both of my jobs are kicking my ass. And I think what really takes up the most of my time is preparing for teaching. I remember back when I was TA at AIA, I would just show up and help out a few students and maybe have a lecture or two every once in a while. But this is a whole new ball game. Its rough, but a hell of a lot of fun. I’m teaching with Mr. Ford and Mr. Rabun in the Game Design department and the department chair is Mr. Manning so its kind of like mini AIA reunion. I dunno, its taking some getting used to. The days are long, sleep is elusive, and there seems little time for my own personal projects beyond work… But its better than working at the bookstore and having absolutely no money like 3 months ago. Like I said, it’s weird how much things can change in such a little time, and how much ones perspective of the world can shift.

I’ve been trying to get out of the city on the weekends to go back up to the Smokys and get some hiking and camping done. I was supposed to go last week, but the girlfriend put up the nix on that. Thats alright, though. I needed the sleep and it was good to have a weekend where I wasn’t doing something. But I’m really excited about the new Magellan GPS Triton units, the most expensive one has a built in digital camera. I think that it would be really impressive to geocode the images taken with the camera with the current GPS location, and match that to google maps. It could make for a really dynamic website prototype. I’m going to try one out at REI next time I’m out there. If it as good as they make it sound, I hope to have it out on the trail this summer.

Well, my class is almost over and I’m headed out for some sushi with Mr. Ford. So I’ll try to update this a little more often… (I know what you are thinking, but we’ll see!)

I’ve been busy, really busy. And as usual I haven’t had a lot of time to keep this up to date, but I’m going to try harder.

I’ve got three websites I’m currently working on: Awesometania.com for my friend Mr. John Hill, SaveThatLincoln.com for Adam Ford and myself, and thefamousadventurer.com which is more or less for me. I’ve been putting off awesometania.com way too long for John, so its been first on my list of things to do, and I’ve been plugging away at it for a week now and got a pretty substantial bit done. It’s finally starting to function, and I’m refining the look and usability of it. It’s my first real effort with Ruby on Rails 2.0. I used Rails back with 1.0 and 1.2, and really enjoyed the framework, but then took a bit of a hiatus from web development and didn’t keep up with the 2.0 update. I have to say that I like the changes that they made moving from 1.2 to 2.0. The framework seems a lot more focused and concise, which is impressive to me, because I didn’t find all that much fault with 1.0/1.2, but since using Rails 2.0 I can seriously tell the difference.

SaveThatLincoln.com is going to be built on top of the site/blog that awesometania will run on, so it should be a lot quicker for me to get that up. For those of you who are reading who don’t know Save That Lincoln is a independent cartoon that Adam Ford, John Hill, and myself have been toying with for the past 3 years. It can be quite a daunting task to try to develop a entire series, especially when you are a perfectionist like me and don’t want to let anyone see anything until either its perfect or you give up and stop caring and consider it a ginormus piece of crap. I’m trying to break that cycle for me, and set up SaveThatLincoln.com to be a repository of information, sketches, and shorts based on the Ford’s initial idea. A kind of behind the scenes/a look inside the minds/blog of our process of developing a cartoon.

The last site, thefamousadventurer.com, is an idea for an adventure game that I’ve been toying with for years now, and much like SaveThatLicoln.com, it will serve primarily as a place for me to get things out of my head and down on “paper” if you will.

I hope to have all three up before the end of the month. So check back soon…

Another year come and gone, and this has been an especially busy one for me. Looking back, seems like the year between August of 2006 to August of 2007 was probably one of the most volatile periods in my life to date. So much has changed that it seems almost outrageous to reflect on it now. I have changed seemingly everything during that period of time; I changed apartments, quit jobs, lost a girlfriend, made new friends, lost touch with old friends, got a new girlfriend, fried a computer, got a new laptop, lost a cat, adopted a new cat, left the country, reluctantly returned to the country. The person I was two years ago seems almost like a complete stranger to me and I can’t help but wishing that I could communicate with my past-self and warn him of the changes ahead.

Things tend to get a little too intense and screwed up at times for me, but I guess that is just life. I’ve learned a lot over the past year, but to be honest, I’m glad that its over. With all the change swirling around me, there have remained percious few constants; Friends, family and small static comforts, and for them and the solidity to my life that they bring I am truly thankful.

So now on the eve of yet another year, I can’t help but wonder, “What else can change?” I have high hopes that things will be changing for the better this year, I feel that I’m finally back in a place where I can move forward with some positive energy and positive motivation.

So here is to the new year… I think I’m ready for this one.