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Author: admin-blog
When I was a little kid, I lived (for a while) on a boat on the River Hamble with my sister, my parents, and my uncle. They restored the boat, and as they didn’t like the local primary school, my sister and I were home schooled (boat schooled?) while there. Happy memories: playing in the leaky dinghy, throwing a tethered watering can repeatedly over the side, going on trips up-river (and to the Isle of Wight); rowing to the shore through the huge wake of speedboats.
Here’s the magic part.
This is Risga, the boat I used to live on.
I Love The Internet.
Back from Sydney’s client installation: success. Here, Hazel has been sick and is now on antibiotics. She says: “Doctor Fisher says, what’s in there?”. If you ask her the name of a dinosaur, she’ll say “stegosaurus” or “diplodocus”. Also: “Could it be… a helicopter?”, “I need a fork”, and “I don’t want to.”
Not enough pictures of Hazel recently? Here you go, from Picasa Web Albums and Flickr, for comparison purposes. She’s cute either way.
Playing around with Kinemac, from the MacHeist bundle. Live 3D animation with some very useful tools. The SVG import/extrude is probably the most useful, since it’s not a modeller. Some high quality results with a tiny amount of effort — if you’re happy to learn a few shortcuts. A perfect complement to Motion for when you need a truly 3D object, and Quartz Compositions as textures make me very happy indeed.
Anyway, there are many other apps in the bundle (World of Goo, PhoneView, Acorn, LIttleSnapper, Wiretap Pro) and several more I likely won’t use. I’ll be happy to see Espresso unlocked, though it’s possible they’ve set the bar too high.
(They are referral links above, but if you use my link I get no cash, only some *more* software that *might* be useful. No stress. It genuinely is a useful collection of software at a very small price, 25% goes to charity, and I didn’t buy either of the previous MacHeist bundles.)
Hazel, on being asked to pick me up: “A bit too big, Daddy”.
Hazel, on handing over the last of her food, unwanted: “take away”.
Little Red Riding Hood told through infographics. Enjoy.
In Hazel-related news, she now regularly says short sentences like “Hazel sit here” or “those books there”. The longest string of words she’s managed is “Shoo shoo you monster you” which is the Queen’s line from “Bertie and the Bear” which she’d read all day if she could. Smiling, happy, gorgeous.
It’s amazing how much better a dip in the ocean can make you feel. Yesterday, walking around Noosa’s headland and seeing a dirty great oil slick approaching gave us pause, but all was well today at Little Cove, where the water was clear and calm.
For new visitors, I should probably spruik my new motion graphics lower-thirds template site, motionally.com, which should be of interest if you have anything to do with Final Cut Pro. Oh, and I should also say that if you need training in Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Dreamweaver, Flash, Final Cut Pro, Motion, or Aperture, then you should come to one of my training courses at Next Byte in Brisbane.
Phew. Back to normal proceedings. Aren’t storms great?
If you’ve taken one of my classes at some point over the last couple of years, you may have seen me use a spotlight to highlight an area of the screen. Well, that tool, Omnidazzle, is now free. Grab it, and make every presentation or teaching session sing. Lots more than just spotlighting too — how about live drawing on top of your screen? Slick stuff. Don’t miss OmniDiskSweeper and OmniWeb while you’re there.
Things Hazel has said in the last day or two: “Hazel broke it” in relation to the clothes dryer knob (she did) and “One bucket. Two buckets. Green. Yellow.” to accurately describe buckets hanging outside the kitchen window. Sentences and plurals, woohoo!