September 21st, 2009 | Posted in News, Technology
Microsoft Windows 7
Microsoft is offering Windows 7: Home Premium operating system to college students for just $30. The OS usually sells for $119! No joke!
Microsoft has formed a partnership with distributor Digital River giving anyone with an active .EDU e-mail address access to purchase Windows 7 for only $30. This even beats Microsoft’s promotion of offering upgrades for only $50 back in June, 2009!
Microsoft reported that they may require proof of enrollment, but they have not stated how strictly they will be following this guideline. Interesting enough, many are not sure if college institutions will be supporting Windows 7 upon release, especially those who specialize in IT departments due to application compatibility.
Windows 7 has been getting rave reviews, however. It seems like time will only tell when Microsoft releases it’s latest operating system in October. Oh yeah — I already registered and bought my copy! I’m just waiting for the release date!
September 18th, 2009 | Posted in News, Updates
Quick update from behind closed doors — I never said we would be a constant machine of new content, did I? If I did, I’m sorry! The brains behind the operation had a family emergency to attend to the past few days. However, the brains behind the operation are back and expect some new content starting either Saturday or Monday!
September 14th, 2009 | Posted in News, World
Kanye West (left), Taylor Swift (right)
Woah! Did anyone catch the MTV VMA’s last night?! I couldn’t believe what happened! Poor Taylor Swift was rudely interrupted by Kanye West during her acceptance speech for Best Female Video. Upon arriving on stage Swift, stunned, respons, “Thank you so much!” The entire audience is cheering her on. “I always dreamed of what it would be like to win one of these but I never thought it would actually happen!” She continued on, “I sing country music so thank you so much for giving me the chance to win a VMA award.”
Taylor soon finds Kanye West coming up from out of no where to rip the mic out of her hand, “Yo, Taylor. I’m happy for you I’m going to let you finish…” Kanye walks towards the edge of the stage and points at Beyonce and says, “But Beyonce had one of the best music videos of all time! One of the best videos of all time!” and immediately shrugs and hands the mic back to Taylor Swift.
Swift was speechless. You could clearly see how uncomfortable she was standing on that stage. She tried to finish her acceptance speech, but MTV cut her off and went onto the next ‘act.’
Luckily, Beyonce is one awesome person. Later on in the VMA’s, Beyonce won best music video of the year. Instead of having a long acceptance speech, she invited Taylor Swift on stage to have her time to shine. Beyonce stated that she remembered when she won her first VMA when she was 17.
West was reportedly removed from the venue for the rest of the duration of the awards show. I hope Kanye is no longer admitted into the VMA’s or any award show for that matter.
Personally, I think Taylor Swift deserved to win.
September 12th, 2009 | Posted in Animation & VFX, News
Pixar's Cars 2
September 11, 2009 – Empire reports from Disney’s Leicester Square presentation that John Lasseter has given plot details to CARS 2. The world trotting adventure will see Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) and his pit crew, now led by Mater (Larry the Cable Guy), traveling to five different countries competing in various styles of racing from Formula One to rally driving. Mater will become the focus of the story where the tall-tale telling tow-truck gets mixed up in a Hitchcockian case of mistaken identity in which he saves British secret agent Finn McMissile (an Aston Martin).
RATATOUILLE producer Brad Lewis is directing CARS 2, which is set for release in summer 2011.
September 10th, 2009 | Posted in Updates
Tutorials are coming soon! I have many tutorials that I know I want to create and some of them I have already started. Because of my time limits, however, I can only crank them out so fast. My first set of tutorials will be for Adobe Photoshop CS4 and will be geared towards some basic learning. In the long run I would like to create a tutorial library that slowly progresses from very easy beginner content to more advanced techniques you would see used by professionals.
If you have any ideas for tutorials for any software, please leave a comment on this post or even contact me. However, I would prefer to get the requests in the form of a comment on this post. Thank you for your patience!
September 10th, 2009 | Posted in News, Technology
Sprint Cellular Service
September 10, 2009 – I got the notice today in my paperwork this morning from Sprint. The 49 million subscriber network is now offering unlimited Mobile to Mobile minutes to their everything Data plans starting at $69.99. Calling it the “Any Mobile, Anytime” feature, all customers who have a unlimited data on their plan will start to experience the unlimited mobile to mobile minutes to any carrier nation wide. Yet another great reason to switch to Sprint!
Dan Hesse, CEO of Sprint, stated at the official announcement, “We don’t think our customers want to have to keep track of or only talk to friends, colleagues or family members who make the same choices as they do.”
Sprint offers a comprehensive range of wireless and wireline communications services bringing the freedom of mobility to consumers, businesses and government users.
September 10th, 2009 | Posted in Internet, News
Google Search Engine
September 10, 2009 — Apparently Google enlarged itself. Go ahead and go look at Google’s home page and see if you can notice the enlargement. Go ahead, I’ll wait! Did you see it? No? Look Closer… Yep! That’s right — they enlarged the search box. Google nearly doubled the width of the search box and made it even bigger in height.
Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products & User Experience at Google, posted on the company’s official blog about this ground breaking change to Google’s home page. “Although this is a very simple idea and an even simpler change, we’re excited about it — because it symbolizes our focus on search and because it makes our clean, minimalist homepage even easier and more fun to use.”
What will they think of next?! Maybe we will see the actual search buttons get enlarged too!
September 9th, 2009 | Posted in Animation & VFX, News
King of the Hill
King of the Hill is a long standing animated comedy that has been airing on the FOX network for 13 seasons. Sunday, September 13th, 2009 marks the end of the 14th season which will close the chapters of the southern Texas family. The finale will feature guest stars Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt, Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, Jennifer Aniston, Matthew McConaughey, Meryl Streep, Bernie Mac, Reese Witherspoon, Pamela Anderson, Willie Nelson, Sally Field, Jason Bateman, Renée Zellweger, Johnny Knoxville, No Doubt and the Dixie Chicks.
King of the Hill has been canceled by FOX as a result of low ratings. The Cleveland Show, a spin-off series of Family Guy, will be replacing King of the Hill’s time slot. FOX plans to debut The Cleveland Show on Sunday, September 24, 2009. With King of the Hill now eliminated from FOX’s “Animation Domination” sunday night lineup, this makes the only non-Seth MacFarlane series The Simpsons.
On a personal note, I really enjoyed watching King of the Hill. It’s sad to see it get canceled, but we will always have our copies of King of the Hill on DVD! With that said, I’m excited to see what new animated comedies FOX will bring us on “Animation Domination” sunday night lineups.
September 7th, 2009 | Posted in News, Technology
Windows XP Logo
The biggest danger to Windows 7 and Windows Vista isn’t Mac OS X or Linux — it’s Windows XP, whose hard-core fans refuse to give up the aging operating system. But it looks as if XP may finally be on the way out, which is good news for Microsoft.
Computeworld reports that according to the Web measurement company Net Applications
Windows XP’s share of the OS usage market fell 1.1 percentage points during August, tying its November 2008 record drop.
At the same time, Vista and Windows 7 use was up, Vista by 0.9 percent, and Windows 7 by 0.3 percent. Windows XP is still dominant, though, with 71.8 percent use, compared to 18.8 percent for Vista, and 1.2 percent for Windows 7. Mac OS X use has stalled, with 4.9 percent share.
As I’ve written before, in Microsoft’s biggest enemies: Windows XP and IE 6, XP’s continuing dominance presents a serious problem for Microsoft. Enterprises staying with XP means they’re not paying for upgrades to Vista or Windows 7. As for consumers who opt to stay with XP, the problem isn’t really upgrade revenue, because consumer upgrades are a drop in the bucket. The real problem is that XP users don’t buy new PCs, and so Microsoft is losing out on new sales.
I think that Windows 7 will go a long way towards solving the problem for Microsoft. It’s gotten a far batter reception than Windows Vista did, so enterprises won’t shy away from it. And XP PCs are starting to look long in the tooth, so consumers will most likely be ready to get new hardware — and new versions of Windows.
September 7th, 2009 | Posted in Animation & VFX, News
Shawn Kelly, Senior Animator at ILM and Animation Mentor Co-Founder, got a few questions from aspiring artists asking how to successfully animate eye-movement and eye-brows. According to Kelly, people generally see the movement of the body, then the eyes, then the rest of the animation. I thought this was a great resource for anyone who is in the animation industry or working towards getting into the animation industry. There truly is an art form to animating eyes. If you make them dart too much they will seem unreal and if you don’t make them dart enough they’ll seem unreal yet again. Take a read through this interesting article.
