Hum-dee-dum

Whoops, I kind of lost track of time for a while. :) Let's see, what's happened in the past week? First, I decided that with all the other projects I'm working on, particularly at school and at work, my novel (Doubletake) is going to have to sit for a while on the back burner. So no, I won't be finishing it by the end of the month. I would like to, of course, but I really have to give the other projects higher priority.

For my print publishing class at school we have to create a book, which BYU Press will publish for us at the end of the semester. Originally I was going to do a beautiful hardcover children's illustrated book with glossy paper, but I found out that it would cost me $72. I sensibly decided to take a different route. (I thought about doing softcover instead, but it was still $36.) Instead I'm going to take my Adventures in Thailand posts and bookify them.

At work I'm busy building the new content management system that will soon supercede the existing websites. The tentative deadline is the end of Thanksgiving break (I guess that's Saturday the 26th), so I'll have to work fast. Once that settles down a bit, I'm going to start working on a few of the many Mac applications I have ideas for (primarily because they're apps that I need and they don't exist yet).

On the non-required side, I've been playing around with Blender lately. Project Orange is creating a movie entirely with open source tools (like Blender and The GIMP) and it's looking pretty good so far. They posted an animatic up the other day and already the animation -- even though it's just a rough blocked-out animatic -- is convincing. And the new features that are getting put into Blender, like realistic hair simulation, are simply amazing.