Last night was eventful. exciting. stressful too.

The last week I have pretty much been waiting for the dock count on my mail icon to arrive. Just as I was about to give up hope for the night and drag my extremely tired butt to bed, I saw this.

So I tore into my inbox like a rabid wombat and found what I had been looking for: an email about a guy asking me if i can do some work.

Well actually all it said was “call me and lets discuss a project”.

If you know me, you know I hate phones. I hate talking to people. I’m a total spaz about this crap. But money needs to be made, so I manned up and grabbed the phone.

2.5 hours later and I’ve seemingly secured a fantastic project. I can’t divulge too much info about it now ( I was asked to keep it hush-hush ) but if we* get the job, life will be great! Life is already pretty much good so far this year because I’ve already completed 2 small projects plus 1 pending discussion and its not even February.

This guy also seems pretty confident that he’ll be contracting me out in the future. So I’m happy today.

On other note, waking up at 2am – going to bed at 11:30pm waking up at 3am – going to bed at 1am – waking up at 8:30am all in a row like that, makes me stupid tired.

Why is it if I stay up for 12 hours, I sleep 12 hours, but if I stay up for 18 hours, i sleep for 4 hours?

Next order of business! I found neat software for blogging that I don’t lose in my tab-fest in safari. Its a mac program called Blogo and it is really cool. Only irks I have so far is the lack of syntax coloring in HTML view, and the inability to pick what fonts are displayed under the 2 editors. I have hunted high and low for a great monospace font for my code editor of choice but I can’t use it with this program (yet?).

Well, it’s not really one of those ‘take a photo every day’ ones, but i’m going to try to blog as much as possible in 2009 so I can look back in 2010 and actually remember what happened.

Over at TAC, ROz started a thread about the Good, the Bad, the F9cked up things of 2008. As I read through the first few posts, I came to the realization that I don’t remember jack shit about 2008.

I worked a total of 5 months. I brought home diddly squat for income. That has to change this year. I’m gung ho on buying a house. I can’t slide by anymore, only making money when I have a computer to upgrade.

As for 2008 in review, this is about as much as I could remember:

Bad

• Yet another year of depression
• Only worked 5 months of it because of said depression
• Still living in Memphis
• Became an absolute nutjob with social anxiety disorder

Good

• Ironman
• Wanted
• The Dark Knight
• Upgrading my laptop
• … not sure what else.

Fucked UP

• Don’t remember much of anything that happened this year
• Lived off Easymac and Grilled Cheeses for a month
• We went to Gencon and spent like $150 on a hotel room – per night – at the “Omni Severin Hotel” in downtown indianapolis. Ok so Gencon is like fun an shit. but this hotel, was H E L L. it was our last choice but it was still within moderate walking distance to the convention center.

  the motherfuckin sheets were made of paper. have you ever tried to sleep covered in paper? what about having a tossing-turning significant other who likes to rub all over the paper?
  Not sure what paper sounds like? grab a couple pieces, and rub them together. rub them on your body. now try to sleep.

  Gencon is a 4-day event. after the 2nd night, i was up and screaming bloody murder for a refund. The lady asked me how my stay was. Good thing I don’t have Superman’s laser eye beams.

• the fucked-up highlight of my year is the paper sheets i had to sleep on for 2 nights.

Let’s hope 2009 is a lot more pleasant memories.

Well I would love to help people learn these great programs but really, I have no idea what you want to know. So if you’ve got any questions, please leave them in the comments and I’ll do my best to help out.

I’ve looked everywhere. The only BT mice i’ve found are micro sized, or of questionable quality.

Logitech has -1- BT mouse. Razer has a micro notebook BT mouse, but the Amazon reviews are rather disheartening. I use 2 other Razer brand mice and I love them, but I can’t see switching to a micro mouse when I don’t need one.

I’ve taken my simple shader settings from this post and turned it into a shader preset. I’ve included a basic light set as well. These settings do not require any plugins.

Unzip to~
Windows: “C:\DAZ\Studio\” ( or whichever drive you have it installed )
OS X: “Applications\DAZStudio\”

Skin Shader

The skin shader can be found under “content\Shader Presets\VexSkin\”.

To apply the shader, make sure you have your skin texture applied to your model. Open the surfaces window and select all of the “Skin” parts ( lips, face, torso, limbs, etc ) and then go to your Shader Presets library and SHIFT + DOUBLE CLICK the “VexSkinShader” preset. This should apply the shader settings without changing your texture.

Light Set

The lights can be found under “content\Lights\VexLights\”

Preview

Preview of Shader and light set on Elite texture Lana from DAZ3D . Click for larger view.