My current desktop, just because I’m bored. If it seems really wide, thats because I have two 20″ monitors.

Yea, I know, its been awhile. I’ve been really busy trying to keep up with school and comming up with new content is time consuming. I have some other projects I’ve been working on but with school I haven’t really had the time to finish them. With that said. I feel like skiing.

One of the worst times of the semester in my opinion. Some may say otherwise but I think most students would agree. I met with my advisor today to talk about classes. And well, to be honest I’m not to excited for next semester. I have to take a few bullshit classes for the required Gen Eds. I have to take a lab science, which has no relation to ANYTHING that I do. I’ll probably take physics, which si a little more useful, yet not really useful for me at all. Sure I like to work on cars, but I usually like to do electrical. I could wire sound and entertainment systems all day any day without a problem and usually am not afraid to tear into a car. If there is any kind of equation you need you just look it up and I can almost bet any general lab science won’t even touch upon anything thats useful. I told my advisor that I don’t see the point in taking any lab sciences because Its not useful for me and he kind of hesitated for a second than spit out a text book answer saying the college wants us to and its to understand how things work. Great, but Isn’t that what highschool was for? If so then why do I have to waste my time with it in college? Makes alot of sense doesn’t it.

I mean sure, its nice to have an understanding of things but go ask someone in their 50’s what they learned in chemistry 101 in college and most all of them will tell you they don’t remember.  Gee, they really got a grasp of the basics…

Ok now heres another thing. I also have to take some form of population/environmental class shit. Another gen ed that I need to “understand” the basics of. What the hell am I going to do with wildlife ecology?? I’m not going to school for wildlife anything nor anything science at all. I mean what the hell. You spend about half your time at school taking classes that have nothing to do with your major or what you actually want to do. I want to design graphics/art/websites/logos/icons/whatever. Just let me design something on the computer and I’ll have at it. I dont mind coding, in face I enjoy it alot of times so I’m also trying to take some classes that deal with that. I like photography as well and am trying to start taking some classes that deal with the fundamentals of that. But its hard to further yourself at college if you can’t do the things you want. Isn’t that what college is for? To further engage your mind outside of traditional schooling and study something of interest? Or is to explore a broad variety of things and figure out what you want to do so you can come back as a graduate student and use up more of your money? If its to do a broad variety of things then come back as a graduate student count me out. Its not worth wasting money to do a broad variety of things that could easily be explored on my own without wasting thousands of dollars on classes, boarding, etc.. Its just not feesable. I want to  go to school to learn about things I am interested in but can’t spend time to further my own interests and get better at what I do if I have to spend my time writing lab reports or sitting in lecture halls listening to an irrelevant topic be mercilessly rammed down my throat from a 70 year old prof who could give two shits about what hes actually teaching.

At this point in time it seems like I’d get a better education by studying on my own and only taking one or two classes at a time that actually pertain to something I enjoy doing. Unfortunately I don’t think the college will ever come to its senses and let students study what they want to study without bombarding them with random crap. Maybe I should study abroad and attend at a school that has a real art program. Supposedly the new media program here at school is supposed to be one of the best in the country but I think the school is spoon feeding us a large helping of BS. If we have one of the best programs in the country how come no else even knows about it? How come people aren’t talking about it and fighting to get in?

Oh well, someone might read this and be slightly aggravated and I could easily keep on going but I have to head to class. One of those random ones. I should just skip it and work on something that will further my skill set but I’ll be a good student for now and go. Instead of listening I’ll just draw in my notebook. In the “notes” section. Atleast I’m being productive right?

I’ll have a real update later tonight/morning but here are some pictures for now. There are a bunch more in the exploring gallery as well.

Ok, so browsing Digg today I found a link to 25 reasons you might be a hardcore graphic/web designer. And here they are instead of linking you to the add and pop up filled site its from. But just so no one complains, heres the the website cg-files.com

1. You’ve almost rear-ended the car in front of you because you were analyzing a font on a billboard.
2. You get pissed when a free photoshop brush you download is less than 1000px in size.
3. You’d rather study the paisley pattern on your boyfriend/girlfriend’s shirt than listen to what he/she has to say.
4. You can use keyboard shortcuts at light speed, blindfolded, but you can’t type a paragraph of text without staring at the keyboard.
5. You’ve had “Software Nightmares,” when you’ve been working way too much.
6. You consider meals interruptions.
7. You’ve learned your lesson and stopped using the word “final” in any file name when saving.
8. You clean your keyboard more often than you wash your car.
9. You’ve intentionally given up trying to explain your projects to non-designers.
10. You see CMYK and RGB like Neo sees the Matrix.
11. You’d rather organize your desktop than your sock drawer.
12. When you heard that Adobe was acquiring Macromedia, you had a Design Orgasm.
13. When you look at Album art all you see are grunge Photoshop Brushes. (Then you see the album art a couple minutes later)
14. You’ve Photoshopped out a watermark for a comp or mock-up.
15. You’ve actually $paid for a font.
16. You’ve totally slaughtered a great design concept because the client thinks he/she knows best. (everyone thinks they are a designer)
17. The amount of words you’ve written with a sharpie labeling burned discs total more than the amount of words you’ve read in novels.
18. You’ve had to explain to a client that a layered file wasn’t part of the deal.
19. You’ve kept a ragged concert ticket just so you could scan it.
20. You’ve nicknamed the OSX spinning wheel. (and not affectionately)
21. You bookmark a resource more often than you have a fun night out on the town.
22. You’ve intentionally overbid a project because you can sniff out a bad client from a mile away.
23. You can’t go to a restaurant without secretly critiquing the menu design.
24. You have an amazingly huge font collection, and an amazingly short temper.
25. If you had a penny for every mouse click, you would have been a trillionaire 3 years ago.

Can’t wait. It should be a good time.

The well known Pirate Bay torrent tracking site is trying to buy an island. They updated everyone yesterday on their progress. Heres the info from Torrent Freak

Back in January when The Pirate Bay announced they wanted to buy the micronation of Sealand, they caused quite a stir. Sealand and its native hosting company HavenCo have no copyright regulations making it an attractive target location for the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker.

A site set up to take donations for the cause (buysealand.com, currently moving servers) announced: “With the help of all the kopimists on Internets, we want to buy Sealand. Donate money and you will become a citizen and nobleman. It should be a great place for everybody, with high-speed Internets access, no copyright laws and vip accounts to The Pirate Bay”

Sadly, His Royal Highness Prince Michael of Sealand said in a ‘CBC The Hour’ interview that he would not be allowing The Pirate Bay to buy Sealand.

During a Computer Sweden ‘Hot Seat’ interview, Anton put it to brokep: You will probably not be able to buy the “country” Sealand. What will you do with all the money you have received in donations? Will you keep them now?” brokep replied: “No. We will buy an island with them if we can’t buy Sealand.” So, it turns out that The Pirate Bay has to find an other “micronation” to set up their headquarters.

But what happened to all the donations so far? We spoke to The Pirate Bay’s brokep to find out, and he told us: “Well, we’re going to do something, lately has just been so stressed out and we have had no time. The Sealand project took all of our time and we couldn’t do anything else basically.” However, brokep assured us: “The money will be spent on an island, but first of all we need to focus on the upcoming court cases we have.”

Indeed, The Pirate Bay guys still have an on-going dispute with the Swedish police who despite over 1 year of investigations, still can’t find anything against them, however the great LAN parties the police could be having with the servers could encourage them to hold them for years to come. In the meantime TPB will be pursuing legal action of their own as they take on 10 major media companies, holding them to account for their part in the attempted sabotage of Pirate Bay’s trackers.

brokep adds: “We still love the idea and so on, but being this small team has a price in what we have to prioritise, which right now is the court cases. But be assured, the project WILL reappear as soon as we’re on top of things time-wise.”

I don’t know about you  but I think thats effin badass. Who wouldn’t want an island all to themselves where there is no laws of copy write and ridiculous lawsuits from overzealous media companies who realize there stuff isn’t good enough for people to purchase so they sue instead.

Oh and I have tomorrow/today (idk what to call it, its 2:30am friday morning) off from class and am working on posting pictures from the NH grass drags and working on some vector art. Oh and there may also be a few subtle layout changes.

“ Only a person in Maine could think of this.

“I doubt it,” said the truly proud Redneck. “Tonight I’m the designated decoy.” “

Ok, so tonights post is going to have a lot of mixed ramblings in it. I have a couple updates to do and then I’ll get to the interesting stuff and jot down whatever is on my mind. H’ok, so to start off. I have an image update that I had to do for school.

I had to make a photo montage of some political issue that I feel strongly about, which, in my opinion is one of the most absurd things to ask someone to do because its such a broad topic and usually leads to no good and most people don’t fully understand the issue it is that they feel is *important* and can’t clearly express their thoughts. I did mine on the war going on Iraq. If someone asked me what side I was on, I couldn’t honestly tell you because I don’t know enough to make an educated decision. I can’t blame the Bush Administration (awesome, the governments stalking system just flagged my website) and I can’t blame the Iraqi’s. But I do know that things are so messed up that we can’t just pull out and leave because of the complete and utter mayhem that will result and I do think that is one of the things people can’t get a grasp of and we can’t just Bomb the damn thing because that would most probably cause all out world wide nuclear chaos. As long as someone doesn’t try to tell me what I was feeling when I made the image or what I think of things I’ll be alright. But then again, the only reason I made the image is to see what kind of rise I can get out of the people in my class. I’m curios as to who is going to get extremely irate over it or who is going to love it.

This past weekend was my birthday, I got a Wacom Table. Its amazing. I’ve been doing a lot of doodling in photoshop and alot of work in illustrator and am currently working on a couple images in illustrator and a piece in photoshop. Its just hard to really work on things with school work. According to my roommate I “never” have homework. But hes an also an engineering major and actually has to open a book to study. Being a Digital Art major I get to play on my computer the whole time and no one knows that I’m actually doing work. Its pretty sweet I guess. I just can’t wait to get through my basic classes. Even my 270 digital art class is really boring. All we’ve done so far is photo retouching and photo montages. Those are things I learned way back when and aren’t really amused with anymore unless it has a real purpose. But hey, whatever, its easy work for me. Ok, back on topic. Tablets are real fun to sketch with.

I did this in about 10-ish minutes for one of my friends. She new I was up to some design work and asked me to draw her something so this is what I came up with. I found the table has opened up a whole new level of design for me because I can just sit down and sketch like I would in a class taking “notes” and things just seem to come more naturally instead of, kind of awkward with a mouse. You get a more lifelike feel on the computer, where everything is usually expected to look perfect and usually lacks that sort of hands on touch. I’ve also found coloring to be more fun because it feels like your actually doing something.

Oh, and another thing I want to talk about that I have noticed in college classes. There is always that one ass who masses up the god damn seating in the lecture hall. Usually by the third class or so everyone usually has their usual seat even though seating isn’t designated by the teacher, it just kind of happens and people know that they have a specific seat. But, then you always get that one person who has to be a real jerk and eff things up for everyone else, displacing about 8 people just because the thought they would “switch it up” that day. And yes, I’m only complaining because this happened the other day in my philosophy class. I walk in, right before the teacher did only to find my seat is taken by someone else, because there usual seat is taken by someone else because the person who took their seat was taken by the asshat who fucked up the seating. Oh, and I just thought I would mention how the Umaine campus smelt like marijuana tonight.

Family Guy Article

Read that article. Its the most RIDICULOUS things I have read in a long time. I mean honestly, does Ned Washington really have nothing better to do? Just in case you don’t feel like reading the article I will recap. Family Guy made a parody of the song “When You Wish Upon a Star” in which the main character, Peter sings a song called “I need a Jew”. Basically he needs help managing has finances and is in search of a person of good money management. Though the song is vaguely similar, it isn’t really that close to the original. The notes are off, the key is off, just the overall pattern of the lyrics gives it that feel of the song. Basically, I think Ned Washington and the other originator of the song is, well, a jew. There are numerous parodies of the song floating around and none of them have ever been challenged so why challenge this one? Heres the clip from family guy in question.

Well, its 3:13 am. Yep, thats right. But hey, I have no classes today so whatever. I’ll be on my way home sometime after I wake up and what not. This weekend should be pretty damn sweet. I’m going to snowmobile grass drags and freestyle demos this weekend in New Hampshire. I’m sure I’ll have tons of pictures to post when I get back from my short fall break this weekend. Hopefully I can get the jeep muddy this weekend. My friends and I want to turn up the old mud pit we made one summer and get it nice and dirty again. It should be a good time. It will be nice to have the extended weekend. A nice short break from school. Then in another month I’ll be skiing so thats where I’ll be on the weekends. A nice escape from school work which is somewhat over whelming at times. Oh well, it will pay off I think. Maybe not so much the actual piece of paper but I think the networking is whats going to be worth it.

Oh and I almost forgot to mention that I’m starting to dable with desktop widgets. Right now I am working on a widget which I think people are going to like as long as it will be ok to distribute it. I don’t thin it will be to much of an issue, I’ll just have to ask the right people before I do. I’m not going to tell anyone what it is yet so you will have to wait and see. Also, I’ll be changing the feel of Bagels Inc soon to a more winter-ish theme. It should be pretty sweet. I think people will enjoy it. Well I’m done typing for now.

Well, I’m waiting for NyQuil to kick in and I though people might want to see what my workspace has been like this week. The picture is crappy quality because Bumped up the exposure in photoshop and not on the camera because well, its 2 in the morning and I don’t have a steady hand right now.

Basically, I’ve been living off of DayQuil/NyQuil/Advil/Excedrin/Green Tea/Cough Drops the past few days trying to shak the cold that I have. I’ve also been working on a few different personal art projects and lame-o school work. I’m currently reading bits and pieces from Plato’s Republic for Philosophy which is next to my keyboard and well, surprisingly, is actually an interesting class. Is it weird that I analyze the teacher who is probably analyzing the students? Probably not. NyQuil is kicking in, I’m going to sleep.