53 minutes ago
Angry Robot BooksThe Dixie Derby Girls
While I am a recent recruit to the Dixie Derby Girls fans, it is quickly becoming a favorite way to spend an evening with some friends. I had seen mention of the DDG’s here and there, but the final straw was an invite to go to the VBCC last month and watch a game from a former coworker. He is a regular since his wife skates. I’m not going to spend a lot of time trying to fill you in on the rules, their website has the details. Since my thing is photography, I’ll stick to that. These shots were all taken at the August 27th games against the the Little City Roller Girls from Evansville, IN.
The evening was titled “The School of Hard Blocks” and I am sure many a lady went home with plenty of bruises.
By the way, if you can’t tell from these shots, this is not my strongest form of photography. Action shots is a whole different best to setting up macro shots and it shows here. You can get a feel for what came right after the shutter clicked though. It is also worth mentioning here that this derby league is flat track, not those high speed inclined tracks you might remember from your youth. Don’t worry it is still fast and fun to watch.
They have fun, but do mean business.
There are a few derbies left in this season. The remaining home bouts are at Roller Time , check the schedule here.
That last shot might have been the best capture of the overall action, but nothing beats seeing it for yourself. Give them a watch one of these weekends, they work hard, are all volunteers and really enjoy what they do.
Project 365 – Day 55
Reading with a friend. Stumbled on this guy and his dog hanging out in the window of a local bookstore enjoying one of our first sunny days this year. They both seemed to be intent in their respective tasks.
Photo I posted over on Tumblr
Like the way this came out, wishing I would have posted it here, but brain was not fully engaged.
First attempt at organic modeling
This was modeled for school using Blender 2.5 (and some 2.49 here and there). I took a couple of passes at UV texturing and can not take credit for the image I finally used. Our instructor provided a great image to work from , but once he demo’d the creation of it I am confident I can replicate that process. There are some obvious flaws in this, (OMG the ears) but over all I am quite happy with it being a first attempt at Organic modeling of any kind. Props to our instructor for getting me out of my comfort zone.
Parking Fail
This person parks in the same spot every day. They also fail to get more than the trunk in the parking spot every day. Of course I could not resist tiltshifting it.
Firefox Plugins, My Must Haves
Firefox has a boatload of plugins. As with most open programs that support plugins, some rock and some are a complete waste of time. I’ve got a few that have stayed the test of time, getting installed on all my machines and are missed when I realize they are not there.
Delicious Bookmarks This is usually the first thing that gets installed, not much to say about it. Either you use Delicious or you don’t.
StumbleUpon I don’t do a lot of browsing (stumbling) with StumbleUpon, but I do use it to save things I would rather not clutter up Delicious with. Usually it is just an image or a site that I know I want to hang on to but do not want to be bothered with tagging the link when I save it. The other really nice feature is the thumbnail view of your saved sites. Great for a visual reminder without having to click through to see what the site is.
Shareaholic This is a fairly new addition to my Firefox toolbox. Joani turned me on to this and it comes in quite handy. Basically a super url sharing pluggin, the thing that gets the most traffic from me in it is bitly, but also facebook and twitter once in a while.
Firebug This one adds a whole suite of programming tools into Firefox, pretty much letting you edit or view code live in any web page. There are several addons to the plugin for specific situations like Drupal or additional resources like CodeBurner
ColorZilla An eyedropper plugin, it also adds some bonus features like page zooming.
Aviary I use this just for screen captures which i save locally, however there is a web based component to this as well. When right clicking in a web page you are given an option to capture the visible portion, a region, or the entire page.
Adblock Plus It is a fairly customizable add blocker. Nuff said.
Not so much anymore – BookBurro I used to really like this plugin, when browsing books on Amazon, it pops a little floater you can expand listing a bunch of other online book sellers and their price on the book you are looking at. This used to be a lot handier, however most of the sellers now already offer books through Amazon. So the lowest price on a used copy of the book is right there. I still check it from time to time, but it just isn’t as useful.
TwitSketch
My first post to the #twitsketch hash tag on twitter. Glen Southern came up with an idea on twitter to post an idea as inspiration for a daily doodle to twitter. Then folks who like to doodle run with the idea, post a scan or photo of their sketch to someplace like twitpic use the #twitsketch hash tag and everyone else gets a chance to see what came of it. He also popped up some forums for the “project” or group, whatever you wanna call it . TwitSketch
I loved the idea as a way to work on getting my creative juices flowing and finally doodled something that fit :)
Optimum Wound Comics
This is one of the things I really like about twitter. Today I gained a new follower, I am sure he found be from some tweet I made or from one of the other comics related people I follow. However he found me, new follower and now I am following him. Jumped over to his website and find out he is part of a small independent comics publisher. They have a new book coming out soon, a black and white anthology, looks like it will be fairly strong in content which may turn some off, but I wish them all the luck. It looks like Diamond has opted out of distributing them so they will be selling it themselves and it will be available on Amazon.
Not sure if I have the funds for it right now, but it will be on my list of possibilities for sure. Thanks for the follow on twitter and good luck with the book! They also have a few web comics on their site. Check them out.
Studio Voyuerism
I am fairly sure most artists and wanna be artists are into this. Taking a look at other artists studios is just interesting. You often get a glimpse of the tools they have laying about. The toys and books on their shelves. Works in progress on their desk or drawing surface of choice. Here is an example, Glenn Southern has posted some pics tagged Studio on his flickr feed. On his info page he actually goes into the construction of the room he had built for his studio. If you are not already into checking them out that will get you started.
ImagineFX has a feature (not sure if it is regular) they spend a page on with a shot of an artists studio, some notes and a short bit by the artist on their process (or just a rambling, depending on said artists temperament). Many artists books like Mechanika: Creating the Art of Science Fiction with Doug Chiang
Finally, Studio Space