Ah, well it seems I have stuff to talk about again. First of all I've got an idea for a simple short film which I will probably be filming as soon as I finish the script. But until I can get a trailer up, you'll have to live with this poster: I should be able to finish the script this week and start shooting next week. So keep coming back for updates.

Also, and this is the big news, but it looks like I may have a job pretty soon (as in an actual job). Last night I applied at Wal-Mart and I'm already setup for an interview tomorrow. Now for the moment I may just have a temp job for the holidays (in the lawaway dept. of course :-P), but if I do my job well enough and with enough SpongeBob-like enthusiasm I probably have a chance of becoming a normal employee. We'll see, though. The good thing is is that I'll be making my own money pretty soon (can you spell laptop? :-D).

Well, it was nice to have something to post for a change (and good news at that). Just remember to keep your RSS reader up-to-date or check back for more information on... Ramboella!

And I isn't ejucaded either :-P. Not much new going on over here. I'm still doing the Clear Creek site (sparked an idea for an ASP.NET wiki :-D). Also, did a bunch of work for the Schindler's again. Made a profitable $50 off of it which I've promptly used to buy myself a 120GB hard drive. Oh, and I got a free $20 Amazon.com gift certificate for taking a [http://www.gametap.com]GameTap[/link] survey. I'll probably buy Episode III with that (totally free :-D).

Jeff bought Jedi Academy last week. Awesome, awesome game that one is. Never thought I could get into an FPS, but I did. It's $10 software so if you see it I recommend picking it up.

That seems to be all. I know, short entry for such a long reprieve. Until next time :-P

Well, after a hellish last week we are all moved into our new house (when I say "all moved in" that means we live here, that doesn't necessarily mean we're all unpacked :-P). It's wonderful. Our room is almost double the size of what we had and the backyard is superb (we've been out at least twice everyday since we moved last Wednesday). Of course, there's been a few problems but all have now been worked out.

Last night I e-mail Phil Vischer, creator of the popular kids show VeggieTales, inquiring about how he rigged the veggies. To my surprise, waiting in my inbox this afternoon was a personal reply:

Hey Matt,

When we produced the shows in Softimage, it was all lattice deformation. Each eye was in a lattice, and then the entire character was in a lattice. We just animated lattices. The mouths were simple texture maps created by a separate animation and applied in rendering, and then reapplied slightly blurred as a bump map. Very simple stuff. (All developed in 1991 when I built Larry for the first time.)

Virtually nothing changed until we moved to Maya in 2000. By then I was no longer animating, so I'm not sure what they changed. Now everything is done in Canada, and I'm clueless.

Hope that helps.

Phil Talk about cool :-D. With that knowledge I can now finish my models for MeatStories (R) ;-).

Also this afternoon I became the webmaster for a bunch of monks. Tomorrow I'm going to call their "outside guy" to get a list of everything I need to do. I poked around their server a bit and it looks like I'm going to have to do some ASP[.NET] work (which I'd actually been tinkering with shortly before we moved), so that'll be fun (and bring back some memories).

Well, that's enough for tonight. Now that my computer is setup again (with internet) I'll be making my usual every other day entry.

It was certainly an exciting weekend for those of us paying attention to TGS (Tokyo Game Show). The new Nintendo Revolution controller was finally unveiled. At first I was kind of skeptical, I mean the thing is a freakin' remote: Part of me kind of died because I've grown up holding a controller in two hands using super quick thumb reflexes to get myself around. However, the more I thought about the possibilities of the tilt sensors, the more I began to like it. One thing that I would love to see is a Star Wars lightsaber game. I was still kind of leery, but then I heard that there's a conventional controller that you can plug the remote into. Besides, I'll be able to play Tetris Attack, so I have to buy one whether I like the controller or note. Needless to say I really can't wait to get my hands on one of these and see how it works.

On the house front: A good 75-80% of the house is packed now. Mainly just the big things (furniture, appliances, computers, etc.) are left. Sometime tomorrow we'll be getting a dumpster and emptying the garage and packing the U-Haul. It's going to be a long, tiring week but it'll be well worth it.

As an interesting closer I post some things I've unearthed (either through packing or cleaning up my computer): 19 years later

And finally: Jack and Jill (flash)

We went through our grand tour of the house today (second for me) and I was able to snap some pictures. So, here they are:

[gallery=The New House][/gallery]

I seem to be missing pictures of the master bedroom as well as Steve and Joe's room, but that's the gist of it.

Most of our stuff (and when I say our I'm usually refferring to Jeff, Chris and myself since we are roomies) is all packed and ready to go.

Well, we're getting down to the wire on this but it looks like we're gonna make it! Part of me is kind of sad that we're going to leave this house (I mean, I've lived here 18 out of 19 years of my life), but it'll be nice to move on.