Tips from down under

Something i picked up from a mate's blog, he's been lookin for something like this for a while and i'm glad (weee) he found it. Just installed it and it looks sweet as. Have a try if you're running Mac OS X.

Menu Shade

Late night compositing

Been trying to figure out a way to get this coffee mug onto the computer and here is what i came up with. If you have any grand ideas please feel free to comment or whatever (and preferably something that doesn't involve ripping the paper off the mug :)



Drew this while on a (moving) train on my way back from Paris, and might i add i'm quite surprised it turned out like it did. Hope the doodles are visible :)

Bah

In an attempt to rectify past financial misteps i might have taken i have decided to put my recently purchased PSP on eBay. I really need the money and i hope i can get a good price for it. Only owned it for abit over a month really and haven't had alot of time to play with it. It's just laying there, £230 worth of equipment and games, reminding me of my poor finance management skills.

On a lighter note(!)...

I'm starting the 3 week long cramming sessions tomorrow and i should be finished, and hopefully still with my sanity in check, sometime early June. Can't say i'm thrilled about the whole idea but it seems it's the only way i can revise. Organisation and pre-planning evidently hasn't worked so well for me (think 4 resits) and it pains me to say that this cramming technique does. I think it's because it appeals to my lazy side. I can't get off my arse to do anything and some days when i know i should really be studying i sit in front of the computer and don't get up until several hours later (6h+ usually) due to pure inertia. And i think it is safe to say that i cannot be trusted to sit in front of a computer and study at the same time (not effectively anyway). Let's just say my room isn't entirely conducive to my learning :)

My solution is thus: get up bright and early, head straight for the library and not leave until it is dark outside, which is normally around 7-8 pm these days. I hope i can stick to this routine for longer than 2 days. And also, on top of the 6 exams i need to revise for i have a 6ooo words dissertation due in on tuesday (9th May) and im still about 4ooo words short :/

Needless to say, i have alot of exciting times to look forward to; after which i will hopefully be able to put it all behind me and rest easy on some desolate beach in Thailand. For now, I'm going to finish an episode of E.R. and then read for a bit, if i can manage to keep my eyes open, before hitting the sack.

Bonne nuit my nooblings

one more thing...

I just read a passage in the book i spoke of earlier, the origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind, that kind of sums up what the author, Julian Jaynes is proposing, however tentatively.

"...man and his early civilizations had a profoundly different mentality from our own, that in fact men and women were not conscious as are we, were not responsible for their actions, and therefore cannot be given credit or blame for anything that was done over these vast millenia of time; that instead each person had a part of his nervous system which was divine, by which he was ordered about like any slave, a voice or voices which indeed where what we call volition and empowered what they commanded and were related to the hallucinated voices of others in a carefully established hierarchy..."

"...The gods were in no sense 'figments of the imagination' of anyone. They were man's volition. They occupied his nervous system, probably his right hemisphere, and from stores of admonitory and preceptive, transmuted this experience into articulated speech which then 'told' the man what to do.."

(Jaynes, J. 1976. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Houghton Mifflin Company: Boston, New York.)

These are just excerpts ofcourse but i find the whole idea he proposes very interesting,

back to reading! :D