It can be argued that Nintendo has somewhat ripped off Apple when it comes to design and asthetics. Everything is very simple and clean almost to the point of being sterile (as in the hospital, not the inability to bear children). However, one disturbing trend seems to be their boxes. Not the fronts, mind you, but rather the backs. Join me as I go through a box design from every generation of Nintendo console (save N64) and grade them on design.
This is how I want to die. To be murdered by my favorite villain from my favorite game would totally make my day... as long as I'm already old or something. Be sure to check out Square Headed. It updates on Thursdays, but is currently updated three days a week while in story arc mode.
On an interesting note, my last name is actually supposed to be pronouced "Hawk-mann".
For the past month I've been tinkering with Flex and my little Linux server. One of the projects that grew out of this was a web media player with which I could listen to all my tunes wherever there happened to be some scraps of internet. This has been one of the coolest projects I've worked on in some time. It successfully blends nearly all of my programming skills: PHP/MySQL, Javascript, XML, Flex/Actionscript 3.0, and some C++. I'm going to write a series of tutorials walking through what I've done in hopes of bringing this coolness to the masses. I'm going to be fairly verbose covering subjects that any seasoned programmer can pretty much skip over. In the first installment I'm going to cover creating the database and getting song information from the MP3s.
After a month of crazy coding and hard work, I unveil to the world dxprog media! dxprog media is, for all intents and purposes, just a front for myself and my work.
Speaking of my work, be sure to check out the brand new portfolio section. It's a little sparse now, but I will be filling it out with all my best work over the next few days. I encourage you to re-check out my motion graphics projects there as they are encoded in much higher quality than the YouTube versions (and it's the only place you'll be able to see the corrected Crayola Commercial) . Also, you get to use my snazzy new video player (written entirely in Flex).
Of course, the blog got a couple needed updates as well. Down at the bottom of the page you'll notice page navigation. This is across the board for general viewing, viewing tags, and the archives. Another thing to get the page treatment was the entry comments. There's only really one entry that can benefit from this update right now, but I hope to gain some more viewers by shifting my posts more towards industry related topics and some tutorials. Originally I was going to intersperse tweets between the posts but decided ultimately against it.
So, there it is. The site looks more awesome than ever and I'm hoping to bring some new sweet, juicy content to everybody. So, bookmark the site or add the feed to your favorite RSS reader and prepare for a new era of dxprog!
Yesterday, we (Ryan, Tyler, and I) had the pleasure of finally attending my very first convention (outside of the local county fair). Sadly, it wasn't a sci-fi convention as I would have liked, but an anime convention. I don't consider myself to be an anime nerd, and even border on disliking the genre entirely, but I did have a pretty good time none the less. The convention itself was fairly small in comparison to others, but there was still a goodly amount of things going on and plenty of dealers peddling their anime related wares.
The atmosphere or the con was... nerdy. Even so, I felt strangely out of place as I was one of the few attendees that wasn't cosplaying. Most of the costumes I didn't recognize, but there were the likes of Phoenix Wright, Yuna, Link and, surprisingly, several Snakes from Metal Gear:
It still surprised me just how many girls were there. In fact, I'd say the males were outnumbered by quite a bit which, for me, is an unusual situation to be in seeing as I go to school overflowing with testosterone. Just being around all these people was probably the most entertaining part of the day.
One of the areas we spent the most time in was the dealers floor. Just about anything anime related was being sold. Mangas, DVDs, T-shirts, action figures, plushies, costumes, weapons. And that's barely scratching the surface. As you can see in the picture above, I broke down and bought a Godot shirt. I wubs it!
There were some video games, including an NES championship tournament, but it was a side to everything else going on. There were rooms showing animes, people talking about how to improve your AMV/drawings, all sorts of crazy stuff. We wound up the night by sitting in on the "Weakest Geek" game show. It was kind of like Double Dare (sans the mess) and a quiz show with the Who Wants to be a Millionaire music playing in the background the entire time. The biggest part of this game was the "Box" game wherein a picture of an action figure would be shown and the player would then proceed to try to find said action figure in a fish tank filled with more action figures and packing peanuts. It was all rather entertaining to watch and the crew running the show was pretty cool.
I'm going to wrap this post up with a video I took while I was there (and later added music to).
