pyrosarco

Does anyone know where this photo came from?  I love it a lot and if you know, please comment.  Thanks!

This Memorial Day weekend is something that I will hold in my memory for a long time.  I am coming away from it inspired, excited, confused and terrified.

Friday

• Class in the morning.
• To the store to get meat for Sunday’s dinner.
• Home hanging out with my sister watching Juno.
• Mow the lawn.
• Mom and Dad get home and Mom insists that we all watch Randy’ Pausch’s lecture.
• Text Cory and get invited to watch a movie.
• Fall asleep during 23 and wake up, Mike drives me home.

Saturday

• Wake up around 9.
• Told to go get bagels
• Come home and have breakfast.
• Work on compiling pictures for the most of the morning.
• Work on my car’s wheel alignment with my father to little avail.
• Cut watermelon.
• Waited for someone to call after dinner.
• Resigned myself to playing Counter Strike Source and had a blast.

Sunday

• Church, were always late.
• Tell myself that I need to draw today but didn’t get around to it.
• Make plans to go to the movies with Abbie, Becky, Cory and Mike.
• The family shows up around 5:30 for Memorial Day BBQ.
• Skateboard with my cousin.
• Eat some food and pick up my grandmother.
• Skate some more.
• Eat more food.
• Watch skating videos.
• Say goodbye to family and went to movie, Garrett shows up.
• Decide that we are going to hang out after the movie.
• Go to my house and Abbie, Cory, Mike, Garrett and I go for a walk.
• Ding Dong Ditch.
• Decide to road trip.
• Maple Donuts 3 dozen / $5.
• Giant to get some milk.
• Bet is made that Abbie can’t drink a gallon of milk in an hour.
• Donuts in the dark at Springettsbury  Park around midnight.
• Abbie doesn’t make it.
• Abbie pukes.
• Almost decide to go to the seven gates of hell.
• Back to my house.
• Didn’t want to attend my sisters sleep over.
• All my friends leave except for Mike.
• We go on a 6 mile walk and talk at one am.
• Crash at three am.

Monday

• Wake up to my mother saying “You need to let some air into this room.” before she throws my window open and pulls up the blinds at 9 am.  I got less that six hours of sleep.
• Join the party downstairs.
• Show off my compiled pictures for two hours.
• Draw for two hours.
• Mow the lawn.
• Skateboard.
• Find Abbie’s earring.
• Get harassed about getting a job.  If you have a job for me let me know.
• Shower.
• Call around to see whats up.
• Abbie comes to collect her earring.
• Skateboard.
• Sister runs away.
• TV.
• Sister comes back.
• This post.

Phenomenal weekend.  Yeah.

My mother came home the other day going on and on about how she was going to make everyone listen to this lecture given by some guy dying of pancreatic cancer.  Naturally, I am like why should I care?  What does it matter to me?

Well she made me watch it just the same.  I had to rig the computer up to the TV so we could watch 76 minutes of YouTube video comfortably.  And, I must admit, it was interesting and he did have some good points, so now I am going to tell you about it, and suggest that you watch it.

Randy Pausch is dying of pancreatic cancer.  He doesn’t have long to live, were talking days or weeks.  He is a professor in the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon.  He works with virtual reality and has changed the way the world looks at VR today, through research and student work.  Randy is upbeat and practical about his condition.  He knows his fate and is not trying to deny it.  He was asked to speak in the Last Lecture series; a series about what professors would say during their last lecture.  This, is a little more true for Randy.

I watched his lecture on Achieving Childhood Dreams.  At the beginning he lists his childhood dreams and the lecture is on how he achieved them.  One of the dreams he speaks about was playing in the NFL.  Albeit he didn’t make it–he is really skinny and does computer science–he said as a kid he used to play football.  The defining point was when he was talking about his coach.  One day, he said, the coach was just pushing him harder and harder, not giving him a break.  After practice was over, the assistant coach–or someone–came up to him and said, “Man the coach was really riding you today.”  Randy agreed, and got a response along the lines of, “When people really ride you about something, it shows that they care.  You really have to be concerned when you know your doing something poorly, and nobody is telling you about it.”

It was things like that, that I took away from Randy’s lecture; along with the need to have goals and chase them.  I also drew a comparison with the Chase credit card commercial and their tagline “Chase what matters.”  You have to do what you like in life.  So the question for you is, Do you care enough to watch this video and open your mind to some new ideas?  A new thought process?  Don’t do it because he’s dying, don’t do it because I told you to.  Do it because you’re interested and want to learn.

Here are links to the:

YouTube Video - Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

Randy Pausch’s Website

Two months ago I went on leave of absence from school to figure out what I wanted to do with my life and work on getting there.

In the past two months I have:

1. Learned how to pay bills online.
2. Enrolled myself in a drawing class.
3. Set up a website with Host Gator.
4. Went through part of a web tutorial on NETTUT’s.
5. Went through several photoshop tutorials on Abduzeedo and PSDTUT’s.
6. Updated WordPress.
7. Written many post.
8. Replaced the exhaust pipe, spark plugs, adjusted intake and exhaust valve variances, and replaced an air filter on my car (with some help from my dad).
9. Did tons of paper work to try and get into schools and keep myself their when I get back from LOA.
10. Read two books: Sabriel and Rich Dad’s Guide to Investing.
11. Applied for 15 jobs that have yielded no jobs. And inquired about 10 more.
12. Taken my grandmothers shopping and ran errands for them.
13. Mowed my lawn 5 times or so.
14. Been on countless trips to the grocery store.

That’s what I have been doing.  Here are my goals for the next two months:

1. Make a portfolio of art that will get me accepeted into another college.
2. Read three more books about investing/business.  Read as many books as I want for pleasure.
3. Put another 30 hours into drawing to improve my skills.
4. Do another 10 photoshop tutorials.
5. Read more about / do more web layout.
6. Design a new layout for my site.
7. Get a job???  If it is possible — but honestly I am learning so much with out one right now.
8. Do more work on my car in order to learn more.
9. Take a trip to Philadelphia and Baltimore.  Not on the same weekend like last week.
10. Cook dinner for my parents once a week to help out.
11. Run errand with my grandmothers.
12. Go to the grocery store countless times.

That seems like a list that I can accomplish realistically.  Any suggestions?

I think this ad speaks for itself.  We should probably stop bottling water and put up more water fountains.

I was just going through some blogs and I believe I was on Computer Love when I found out about The Subtype Foundry.  Anyway its cool because they are giving away free fonts.  Get them while they are hot!  Below is a quick picture I made with the font called Quart.

I was looking at several popular design sites in the past few days and I suddenly drew a comparison.  I found it interesting that Lucy McRae and Bart Hess do to humans what TruthTag does to buildings: mutates them in the name of art.  Take a look at some of the pictures, draw your own comparisons.  If nothing else, both projects are really, really cool.

Above is the Lucy McRace and Bart Hess mutation and below is the TruthTag building graffiti.

A little perusing through a Moto Q forum the other day found a Candlelight replacement application.  In case you don’t know, Candlelight is an application for smart phones that allows for quick backlight increasing or decreasing.  It saves you a lot of battery power.

This new application, Candlelight Replacement, can be found here, and allows for one to adust the brightness of the screen in increments and even fade between different levels.  Yes, you can do most of this through the phone menus, but that is tedious.  With the replacement program, one can just click on the desktop icon for it, and then proceed to change the brightness.

The forum post also says that you can make the phone’s backlight much brighter than normal, at loss of battery power of course, but perhaps you want a bright phone.  Hope this is found useful, enjoy.

I saw this on Design You Trust and I had to share it here.  It is so true however; if you don’t have an iPhone and someone you know does, your their.  I mean really.  You’re like BAM! “Can I hold your iPhone? Can I play with it? That things awesome. Isn’t it crazy expensive?” are just a few of the things that are coming out of your mouth.  So if you are like that, because I know I am.  This comic is for you.  Enjoy!

I have stumbled across this several times on the web.  I thought that it was worth sharing because it was a novel concept.  I bet you it gets great gas mileage, but I don’t know how it would corner…