It’s official.   I’m a professional:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm3180157/

Courtesy of my coworker, Geordie:

Some mention of the film I’m working on, A Christmas Carol, here.

I’ve been finding my creativity again.  Here’s a shot of a character I’ve been working on.  He has no texture, hair, or tongue at the moment so he kind of looks like that freaky guy from Powder.

The past couple of months have been pretty crazy and exciting.  My brother decided he wanted two bachelor parties.  In the first one, we went river rafting down the American River.  Rafting was a lot of fun and it was nice to just get out into nature and away from the computer.  The second bachelor party was in Las Vegas.  Vegas was fun but I don’t think I could stay there longer than a few days.  It’s pretty draining staying up late all the time, drinking, and spending lots of money.  I came back a poorer man.  After my brother’s two bachelor parties of river rafting and Las Vegas, he got married and decided to give me a new sister-in-law.

My niece turned one year old last week.  She’s just about the cutest thing on two legs…except when she poops.  Speaking of poop, I stepped in some the other day with my bare feet. Stepping in poop isn’t exactly my ideal way of starting a day.

Work has been pretty challenging and exciting.  I get to do something new everyday and it’s really neat seeing the work that is being made.  We definitely have our work cut out for us over the next year.

After work and the gym, I usually have about 2 hours of free time before going to bed.  A lot of this time is spent trying to work on personal cg projects.  Progress is slow but at least I’m getting work done.  I also spend a good chunk of my free time trying to answer all the emails I get about about advice on school, getting a job, complements on my work, questions and feature requests for cvxporter, etc.  Speaking of feature requests, I get a few of those a month. I implemented the first few feature requests but I had to stop after that.  I made that exporter in my free time, which is not a lot these days. Looking at the download count, I see that it’s been downloaded over 9000 times.  Do you know how many donations I’ve received?  One.  That doesn’t really inspire me to spend my free time updating the exporter.  Only Jody was nice enough to click that bright orange “Donate” button.  Thanks, Jody!

I’ve been having a hard time working on personal projects the past few days.  This is how I feel:

This is my Spore creature, Frank.  As you can see, he has a very large suctoped to help him get around.  Watch him dance here.

I read this article here the other day about future technology as predicted by Ray Kurzweil. It had some really interesting items to discuss.  Highlights include:

1. Within 10 years, Dr. Kurzweil explained, there will be a drug that lets you eat whatever you want without gaining weight.
2. Solar power will be cost-competitive with fossil fuels in just five years, and that within 20 years all our energy will come from clean sources.
3. In 15 years, your life expectancy will keep rising every year faster than you’re aging. And then, before the century is even half over, you can be around for the Singularity, that revolutionary transition when humans and/or machines start evolving into immortal beings with ever-improving software.

While some of these seem far-fetched, he does have a really good track record for predicting future technology.  Number 1 will result in the bacon market exploding.  Number 2 will result in not having to go broke every time you fill up your tank.  And number 3 basically says that as long as we don’t get hit by a bus in the next 15 years, we’re all going to live forever.  Sounds fantastic.

Lately, I’ve being wondering through the lands of Hyboria in Age of Conan.  It’s been pretty fun hacking and slashing with Jigglybits, my Dark Templar.  On my latest adventure, I ran into a soldier with no pants:

Poor Balthas, he has no pants! I’ve been playing for a about a week now and it’s pretty fun.  If anyone picks up this game, I’m on the Stormrage pvp server.