Comic Life

I got an unexpected surprise with my new MacBook. The software bundle included a cool little program called Comic Life. It allows you to take your digital photos and create a comic strip affect. You cut-n-paste photos into cells, add ballons and text, you can even include the "Pow!" type of words. Perhaps the funniest feature is the sound effects that come with each action while you're running it. Usually I find sounds like this annoying, but in this case they add to the fun of the package.

I put together this holiday card version for fun.

Bagel Man the Movie Star

Found out that my semester project from my 3D animation class was chosen for display on the video wall in the new ATLAS center at CU. Sorta cool. Here it is posted on YouTube.

Hard Times in the Arctic

It's a hard time to live in the arctic.

Ancient ice shelves the size of Manhattan are falling off into the sea. And if you are a polar bear, you are now a candidate for listing as a threatened species due to shrinking habitat (sea ice).

Do you suppose this has something to do with that global climate thing Al Gore has been talking about?

iBook Repair

I just did my own repair of my old iBook G3. I used this site, ifixit.com. I got my parts (hard drive and battery) from them and used their incredible Fixit Guide. Including a wonderfully useful screw guide that you print and use to keep track of the 20-30 screws you will have to remove to get to the hard drive. For those geeky enough to want to take apart their own laptop, it's highly recommended.

Colorado, Hawaii and Water

Learned from an interview with outgoing governor Bill Owens that Colorado and Hawaii are the only two states that are independent in terms of meeting their water needs. Every other state has to share water from elsewhere outside their state. I didn't listen to the whole interview, but I really thought that was an interesting fact. Hawaii, the issue is obvious. They have to be independent because there is no pipeline. Colorado has an abundance due to the Rocky Mountain snow and the associated rivers.

Bagel Man

Earlier I had mentioned my 3D animation class. I have not posted much of my work in progress throughout the semester. Perhaps, I'll go back and post some of my more interesting stuff. But the main thing was my "final project" for the class. It's Bagel Man. He is based on silly notes I put in my daughter's lunch (when I'm packing a bagel). Here you can see him in all his 3D glory. I used Maya's tooning effects to render him as a cartoon with purple shading. His eyes come from Muppets characters like Cookie Monster (bulgy eyeballs on top of the head). And he's got arms and legs to give him full action. I used the biped skeleton built into Maya to give him life-like movements. Ray-tracing was added to give a reflection on the floor and shadows. Finally, I added music from Dave Brubeck, "Take Five", for the dancing fun.

dotMac crashing Finder

I got tired of problems with Finder crashing when connected to the .Mac (dotMac) iDisk. iDisk is actually just a WebDAV server and there are a number of options for connecting besides iDisk:

• Goliath - this is an old OS9 app (available on OSX too) that acts like an FTP client app would except for WebDAV.
• Transmit - in addition to FTP, WebDAV is supported.
• cadaver - for command-line fans.
• most web-site tools (GoLive, Dreamweaver) come with fairly robust WebDAV browsers.

Your WebDAV address for your .Mac iDisk is http://idisk.mac.com/username and authenticate with your .Mac userid/password.

Also, if you're tired of paying for for .Mac, check out notMac Challenge and Joyent.

Lightbox for displaying art photos

Ever since I heard about the Lightbox script a while back, I thought it would be cool to use for my father-in-law's artist website. Lightbox displays a modal dialog of images (or other content) overlayed on top of the current web page. I explored Lightbox Gone Wild, which uses prototype for asynch rendering (AJAX) of any type of content in the lightbox. In the end, I settled on Lightbox v2.0. This version is from the original group that coined the term. It uses prototype for the AJAX as well, but what really sold me was the "fancy pants transitions" from script.aculo.us. Check out that bling! :)

To see how it works, check out the beautiful art at Michael Wagner's Paintings and click on any of the art work to zoom in.