I have really appreciated and enjoyed having these small projects to focus on during the last week.  Although I try to make the best of, contribute towards, and enjoy the paid work I have, I do not find that it inspires or challenges me.  This has been frustrating.  Having these projects to work on has lifted my spirits and made life more interesting again.

My week is up, and as you can see from my previous posts I did not manage to achieve everything I’d wanted to do.  Sure I enjoyed it, but my purpose is to cultivate an ability to focus and work hard on tasks, to not be lazy, and be able to see things through to completion based entirely on my own determination and will power.

The goals I set myself where not unreasonable, however, I found myself wanting to do other things.  Heavy Rain came out on Tuesday, a games development I’ve been keeping an eye for a couple of years now.  I also started watching Prince of Tennis, an anime I can’t quite believe is good.  I also wanted to socialize, and not having my own space to work in also proved to be a challenge.

When someone asks me to do a job, I usually get it done.  When I ask myself to do a job, its a thousand times harder.  I enjoy playing computer games and watching anime/movies etc.  These are a great way to wind down and peace out, and can be extremely inspirational too.  During the next week I’m going to pay close attention my self discipline, and stop myself staying up all night when I have tasks to complete the next day.  I enjoy staying up all night, and I enjoy the following day too, provided I can just relax and moosh around for the 12 hours that follow after.  So I’ll get my tasks done earlier in the week, and save the late night gaming sessions for after projects are complete.

So what’s the plan for the next week?

1) Produce a Zbrush sculpt of last weeks cheshire cat
2) I still want to read and summarize that essay
3) another 4 chineseclass lessons
4) study another go lecture and apply what I learn in games throughout the week.
5) finish ripping all of Eva’s cd’s

Go! Go! Go!

Filed under: freelance thinking, life musings, personal review by kiamo
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Before I reflect on how things went this last week, theres still 2 projects I’ve yet to report on.  First of all I’d planned to read and summarize an essay from Emergence:  Dimensions of a new world order.  I did not manage to get this done so I get a….

I also planned to study a Go lecture and apply what I learned in games I played throughout the week.  I watched an excellent lecture by Guo Juan, a 5dan level player from China.  The subject of the lecture was on efficiency.  For this I get a…

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A week go I’d aimed to study 4 chineseclass101 lessons.  I managed to get through 3 of them.  I’ll list the vocab studied below.

Lesson 2 : How are you?

hello - hai – 嗨
how are you – nihao ma – 你好吗
question particle – ma - 吗
very – hen - 很
no; not – bu - 不
busy – mang - 忙
okay - hao de – 好的
good bye – zaijian -  再见

Lesson 3 : Where is the washroom?

may I ask – qing wen – 请问
washroom – xishoujian - 洗手间
to be at – zai - 在
where – nar - 那儿
there – nar – 那儿
to be unable to see – kanbujian - 看不见
oh – o - 哦
thank you – xiexie - 谢谢
you are welcome – bu keqi -不客气

Lesson 4 : Taking a Taxi

hello (more polite) – ninhao – 您好
to go – qu - 去
please – qing - 请
slow – man - 慢
to want; to think – xiang - 想
hotel – binguang - 宾馆
to say – shuo – 说
a bit – yidianr - 一点儿
fast – kuai - 快
airport – jichang - 机场
you (formal) –  nin - 您

3 out of 4 lessons studied so…

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A week ago I decided to model the Cheshire Cat from American McGee’s Alice.  I aimed to both model and texture it by today.

I’d actually like to take it into Zbrush to remodel the low poly version (screens below) and produce a high poly sculpt; which, in order to avoid redoing work, I will need to do before the texturing phase.

Here are the finished images.

As I only achieved half of the projects undertaking, I’ll award myself…

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Back in 2000, American McGee’s Alice came out; a fantastic disturbing reinterpretation of Alice in Wonderland.  I decided to focus on the cheshire cat from the game.  I did some scribbling and gathered some excellent reference from various websites, including this old concept image of the cheshire cat from the first game which is being used to model of for the games sequel, which is in production in Shanghai.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/americanmcgee/3802824278/

It’s a really fantastic sketch, and idea for modelling from, so I scrapped my far inferior sketches and decided to follow in the lucky footsteps of the 3d artist working for Spicy Horse, and model from this concept.

It’s been about 3 quarters of a year since I did any 3d modelling, so I’m pretty rusty and slow.  However I’m enjoying the process, although considering this weeks schedule, I wonder if I will have it finished before Sunday.  Sunday was the goal, so I’ll just have to work hard to achieve it as best I can.  I’d like to do a Zbrush sculpt too, maybe next week.  I’m really looking forward to that part.

Without further ado, here’s my progress:

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There’s a great many things I want to do in life, always has been, always probably will be. I can’t help but feel incredibly lucky, I have loving family, find amazing friends wherever I go, have plenty of opportunity, I’m healthy, and I never had to do any/much work in school to achieve average plus grades. However, I don’t feel I’ve really excelled at, well, anything.

I don’t tend to talk about myself on my blog because I feel there’s much more interesting things available to discuss, and starting a discussion where the initiator is the subject material seems a bit conceited. But this isn’t a discussion. It’s a reflection, and hopefully the beginning of an important change in my life.

There’s been many people I’ve met in various places that I’ll never forget for many reasons but one in particular; their incredible ability to work hard.

Somehow I’ve managed to make it through life thus far without really putting in much effort at all. I’d like to develop the skills these aforementioned friends have, and enable myself to excel at whatever I choose to apply myself too.
This probably seems pretty pathetic, as most anyone coming across this and bothering to read it will likely possess more ability than I to focus on tasks and see them through to their completion. However for all my faults there’s at least one quality that I can be proud of, and that’s my desire to weed out and improve on my weaker areas, of which, this is perhaps the biggest.

What I intend to do, is set some goals for myself to achieve this week outside of work and social activities. This I will do publicly in this post, so they are out, rather than inside my head where I can push them to the back of my mind. Throughout the week I will set aside time to get them done. I may or may not do this again next Sunday but right now, I’m just going to focus on the coming week.

1) I will study a minimum of 4 Chinese classes from chineseclass101.com

2) I will produce concept sketches and final textured 3d model of a small character or object.

3) I will read and summarise one of the essays in Emergence, Dimensions of a New World Order

4) Study a Go lecture on KGS

I will post my progress on what I achieve as I go. For now however, its 1.20am, so I’m going to chill out, watch a film, sleep, and starting tomorrow, I will become more focused and productive.

Filed under: freelance thinking, life musings by kiamo
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While perusing the web this morning I ran across something that made me very happy; the playstation 3 has finally been hacked!  Hacked by Geohot, the same guy that first hacked the iphone no less.  This guys a legend!

Currently this doesn’t mean anything other than a glimmer of hope for us frustrated owners of the PS3, but Geohots released an exploit, tutorial, and encouraged hardcore console hacking enthusiasts to document research on the psDevWiki.  This means that hackers can start building software to enhance the playstations capabilities.

Sony built a console with tons of potential as media centre, and marketed it as such.  Sadly however, they failed to deliver anything more than something rather mediocre.  I’d love to make my PS3 my media centre, but it just isn’t good enough.

In case Sony (who are no doubt depressed right about now) come across my blog heres a few features I desperately want in my playstation.

1) Last fm scrobbling.  I’ve been scrobbling music to last.fm since 26th March 2004.  Building up statistics of music I listen to.  I’m not going to play music primarily through my ps3 until it can scrobble my plays.

2) Media Server Capabilities.  If you want me to put all my media on my ps3, then I’d damn well better be able to share it with my other devices.  Why cant I sync it to an mp3 player?  Stream it to my laptop or other computers?

3) I bought a PSP because provided my ps3 is on standby, I can travel, and providing I have access to the internet, use my psp to turn on my ps3 and browse the media on it.  I’d presumed my psp would be able to DOWNLOAD the media from my ps3, not simply stream it…  Seriously, I mean, if its streaming the media anyway, then all the psp needs to do is SAVE the media for playback when my psp is no longer connected to the internet.  How is this not an obvious idea?  I have since sold my psp.

Now that the ps3 has been hacked, and hope renewed for hackers hardcore or not, maybe we can let ourselves dream about ps3 features we would love to see.

What would you like to see enabled on the playstation 3?  Leave your comments below.

Thanks once again to Geohot for improving my iphone, and making this leap of progress for my ps3.

Filed under: Games, Recreation, geek, music, security by kiamo
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I love storms.  Being outside at the mercy of violent storms have to be among the best experiences I’ve enjoyed.  It’s good to be painting again.  Got the ball rolling with this one.  Crit welcome, as usual.

Filed under: Art by kiamo
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And the world gets more awesome.

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Over on Bahaiperspectives.com, something interesting was posted on the topic of constructive criticism.  The author challenges the idea that constructive criticism is any better than regular criticism.

Having recently graduated from an Art/Design course which encouraged a culture of constructive criticism and witnessing its success, my initial response was that, if people have bad experiences with constructive criticism, then either its not being delivered well, or not being received well.  Both of which are skills anyone can learn.

Certain things I feel are important to keep in mind when critiquing are to make sure that the person you’re offering it too is prepared to receive it, and to offer lots of praise.  To take an honest look at the persons work or character, and focus on how they or their work can become even greater.

As for the receiver, the main thing is to not take offence unnecessarily, and to remain detached.

As I read through the article, the author then mentioned a friend who, rather than picking up on all the faults of her children, reviews where they are, and then tells them where they can go.  This model is very similar to the model of “praise-review-visualize” which is the form of criticism that many of us started to employ on our Art/Design course.  A model which worked quite successfully.

However, upon reflection, while this model has proven constructive, is it really criticism?  Would it not be more accurate to call it encouragement?  Its just more useful encouragement than the shallower “go on, you can do it!”

The more I think about it, the better the form of criticism I can think of, the more it seems to look like encouragement.

Reading through the various definitions of criticism reveal an orientation around fault finding.  Picking out the faults of others doesn’t seem like a healthy way to live my life, and “constructive” criticism just seems like putting nice icing on a bad cake.

Definitions of encourage on the Web:

• promote: contribute to the progress or growth of
• inspire with confidence; give hope or courage to

These definitions of encourage seem to be what I would intend constructive criticism to be.  So if this is encouragement, what’s constructive criticism, and why do we need it?

What are your views on criticism and encouragement?  Leave your comments below, or for any readers via facebook, head over to Coffee Stains and Ink Spills and comment there.

Filed under: Baha'i, freelance thinking, life musings by kiamo
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