So here’s the just of what’s taken place recently…

The book is finally done! I finished it last week really, but was apprehensive to say anything about it for fear that this was yet another false finish line. For the record, the end was the most painful part, and I am greatly relieved it’s over. Because the book will be printing soon (apparently it takes a month or so to setup, then a month or so to print), and I will be credited for layout and illustrations, I needed to secure a domain I could list in case someone feels like recruiting me for more of this type of work in the future. Fortunately for me, my good friend Jon is fast acting and always willing to help me out. He secured cobraconcepts.ca for me, which will soon be directly linked to my CarbonMade.com portfolio you see in the screenshot above.

On top of finishing the book and setting up my portfolio, I’ve been attending multiple job interviews, doing orientation with ManPower and even working a few days at a shitty job. One would think I was a highly motivated go-getter, but that isn’t the case. In fact, Holly is the one to thank for all the opportunities that have come my way. She’s the one who found the jobs, wrote the cover letters and did her best to keep me positive through the whole process. Although I was incredibly stressed last week, I think things are about to change.

I start a new job on Monday, which in all honesty the only thing I’m looking forward to is the paycheque. I will still do my best, and I’m going to try to stay positive, but I really just want to be swinging a hammer all day. That being said, I need to make money so I’m taking what I can get.

If it wasn’t for Holly I’d only be starting my search this week, and still stressing about not knowing when my next paycheque will come. Now, thanks to her kindness and willingness to help others (especially me), I not only have my last cheque from James coming soon who knows when, I will also have regular weekly paycheques to look forward to.

Money? Lack of Sunday night phone calls?

Twilight Zone!

Alright, so I failed at the catching up on the blog thing the other day. I’ll try again tomorrow. Right now, there is more important things to discuss than my lack of sticktoitivness.

Remember back in January I posted some concepts I had modeled of arcade cabinets, inspired by my favourite games? Well, just yesterday I was playing Call of Duty: Black Ops on the new DLC maps and I noticed something. On the map Drive-In, there is an arcade with some cabinets and a few skee-ball lanes. Two of the arcade cabinets are Call of Duty : World at War “Uber Shooter” machines, which I got incredibly excited to see. I can’t help but wonder if I had something to do with inspiring this prop.

Kotaku posted my designs back in January, and these maps just got released at the end of June. Is it wrong to think that someone from Treyarch saw my design and thought it was a good idea? or is this the ramblings of a depressed egomaniac desperate for some form of recognition?

Last night Roan decided to design the kitties a new tower (above). The plan is to build this for them out of the wood we have left from all the recent repairs. Unfortunately, I don’t think Roan took an accurate survey of the materials at our disposal.

Holly and Roan were watching an episode of Top Gear, so I decided to model an appropriately scaled version of his design. I had to turn his 2D drawing into a 3D model (and take into account a few things he neglected, mainly physics), so I may have messed up the design a little. Roan didn’t seem to mind if I did. He just wanted to know how soon we could start building it. I think I’m just as excited as he is to start building, but we’re both going to have to wait until the foreman gives us the go ahead.

I have built a kitty tower in the past, but this one will be much nicer. I’m far more skilled now, and I have access to a lot more tools. With any luck, the finished product will look professionally made and be butt loads of fun for the entire crew of cobra cats.

In case you missed it, a few weeks ago we had a brutal windstorm which managed to throw Holly’s shed through her back fence, destroying both in the process. Clearly we need a new shed, however we’re having a tough time deciding whether or not to buy one, or if I should build one. The sheds we have looked at thus far have been around the $999.99 – $1299.99 range, none of which are as large as the aluminum monster we had up until two weeks ago.

Yesterday I decided to design a shed for Holly, after seeing how poorly constructed most of the kits you buy from Home Depot are (most had zero supporting members in the corners, and relied solely on the strength of a 90° OSB connection, plus trim). None of the sheds they sell use actual 2″ x 4″ lumber. Instead they’ve gone with these 2″ x 3″ (or maybe even 2″ x 2½”) studs, rafters, and plates. This might save a bit of money, but I’d much rather build something more solid. Ideally I’d love to finally build this, but that’s not possible at this time. I wanted to get an idea of costs to build a similar design to what Home Depot offers – except good, so Holly got lumber prices yesterday, and now all I have to do is count up all my bits, measure the roof, and add some hardware and finishes and I’ll have an estimate. With any luck it won’t cost as much for the lumber as it does for one of the kits. I’d so much rather build it myself, than assemble a kit.

*Depending on what browser you’re using, the above image may not load properly. Use firefox.

As I mentioned in a previous post, we recently purchased some Crayola modeling clay for Gage’s school project. When we finished the project we still had a small chunk of the clay left, so I decided to try modeling a robot without the aide of Sketchup. It took me about the same amount of time to model a robot out of clay as it does in Sketchup. There’s quite a lot of differences though, the most obvious being the lack of ability to create perfect symmetry. However, I can put this dude on my desk and he looks cool despite his imperfections.

I hand painted him using Roan’s acrylic paint set. I learned a few things about painting small bits in the process; they are a pain in the ass, patience is important, and it’s best to paint everything separate if possible. I had fun making him, and would like to do a couple more. I asked Holly how much the clay was the other day, and she said “Why, do you want me to buy you some more Play-doh?”, in a voice that implied I was a child. I’m not too proud to admit it. I do.

Please.

My progress on the book continues to be slow going, but I’m nearly finished with the layout for the bulk of the book. I have about 12 more bents images to include, then it’s just the appendixes, glossary, table of contents and index (which sounds like a lot, but since it’s mostly text and few images, the process is fairly quick and painless). James has been making less and less changes, which is great for me. The other day however, he faxed me some drawings he forgot he needed. They were all super simple, taking me about an hour in total.

The most complex of the bunch was the logo above. No, it’s not a masonic symbol, nor does it have anything at all to do with masonry. I say that because it seems any time I wear my ISBA shirt I have to explain to some mason why their logo has nearly no relevance to their organization, and why someone who uses a square and scribe (the two main components of any masonic symbol) on a daily basis, should have the right to using similar symbols for their logos. This logo shows a round log with a perfect timber inside, a square and scribe, and the all important center line(s).

The other images I had to create are for the new “Perspective” sections in the book. They were mostly images of different post and beam and bents styles. The two above are German post and beam styles. The one on the left is called Geschossbau, and from what I can tell from this image is it’s basically the balloon framing equivalent for post and beam. The one on the right is called Stockwerksbau, and is more platform style. Most of this probably isn’t interesting at all to the average blog reader, but I dig it.

There was also a few images of different bent configurations. Surprisingly I was already familiar with each design, even before I took any timber framing course. It’s the one thing I found out on my own back when I did my first research into post and beam for a project I had to do at Niagara College. Speaking of which, I just recently discovered I still have that project… perhaps I’ll post it here sometime. It’s probably on par with the excitement level of the majority of my posts about building stuff.

My shirt design was rejected. Apparently I should have submitted it for criticism before submitting it for voting. I kind of thought voting was, in a sense, criticism, but no. I then decided to submit a few other designs for criticism, and so far I haven’t gotten much feedback. One person told me to colour a button red, another told me to add the words “miss you” to my Atari 2600 controller. That’s it. I’m not really sure what they are looking for I guess, but I’m going to try one more time with the image above. I messed around with it this afternoon when I took a break from the book. I’m guessing it will get little or no feedback as well, but I might as well try.

Holly helped me decide on the image above for my criticism. If anyone reading this wants to help me get one step closer to getting my designs selected for print, then please take a minute and critique my designs. Simply clicking the ‘Awesome, submit this!‘ button will help a great deal. The image is a stock photo threadless.com provides people who are submitting designs. I still doubt I’m going to get any feedback, but I thought I’d use  picture with a person this time and see if I got any more attention.

I kind of think I would have gotten more attention with this moustache guy, but I don’t know what is cool apparently. I’ll leave this and my other designs up for a week or two, and if there is no more interest in them I’ll give up.

My brother has been telling me for a long time to submit some of my doodles to threadless.com and see what happens. If you’re not familiar with the site, it’s a place where users submit t-shirt designs which are then voted on by the community. If your design gets enough votes you get some money and the community gets the ability to purchase your design. It’s a pretty cool idea; if it works. It was also sort of a pain in the ass though.

I have to wait a day or two for my design to be approved. Once that happens I have 7 days to get some votes. However, if there is a low amount of votes in the first 24 hours, my design will get pulled. So I’m posting here (and everywhere else I can think of) and hoping people will help me out even if they hate my design. I know it’s a pain in the ass to go join a site and then fill out a poll, but it would keep me from bitching about money all the time both here and in ‘real life’. I’m sure everyone else is just as tired of it as I am. Let’s work together to shut me up!

I wrote a little description to go along with it, but since it’s pending approval you can’t see it, and since I just smoked a joint (something I’ve been doing very little of recently) I can’t really remember it. Something like “Buy this shirt or robots will kill you when they become self aware.”, only more eloquent longer. I’ll post about this again once I get the email telling me I’ve been approved or not.

Remember to vote or robots will calculate your face off.

I was looking through some of my renderings this morning and realized I had forgotten to post this. When I originally posted my arcade cabinet concepts I made the mistake of claiming it would be impossible to render the machine and include the screen shot and other imported images that appear in the model. I figured it all out the day after I posted the cabinets, then spent a day avoiding my machine while it struggled to pump out a few low-res images which would hopefully look real. They aren’t as good as I’d hoped, but they still look okay.

I avoided posting them right away because there was an abundance of arcade cabinet images on the front page of this blog already, and although these look much cooler than the previous ones, they’re essentially the same thing. Then I forgot all about it.

The way I fixed the problem was actually incredibly simple and gave me a bunch of ideas for fun things to make in the future. Basically I have to turn the images into textures, then do a little fiddling and adjusting until everything looks right. If I wasn’t so busy with the book right now, or if I had another machine, I would do some sweet renderings of the other cabinets I designed. For now, they’ll have to wait.

In case you forgot about my love for all things video game, I will reiterate it now; I love video games! I especially love online games I can play with my friends. This seems to be getting ever more difficult to arrange however, and I find myself getting frustrated. The problem is that not all my friends game and of the ones who do, not all play what I play or when I play. The other day I gave Jon shit for not putting his project on hold so we could kill some zombies, and I told him I was working on a flier to help me recruit some new cool gaming friends that game more games than him (borrowing an idea I saw on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia). Above is my idea for a graphic for said flier. I didn’t spend much time on it (maybe half an hour), but I really like it.

This morning I pitched an idea to Jon for a gamer networking site that connects online players with people who share similar interests and online ethics that would otherwise never find each other. He agreed that it’s a decent idea, but he’s got far too many things on the go to take on another project. If I didn’t feel the same I’d consider taking it upon myself to learn the necessary programing to create such a site, but who knows how long that would actually take. I have no idea what is involved in turning my concepts into reality (but I hear it helps to have a moustache). Jon suggested he first create a site that connects programmers with knobs like myself who are full of ideas, but lack technical knowledge. I think that’s his passive aggressive attempt at telling me to find some other programming friends while I’m out canvassing for gamers.