My kid's list of Funkey's

As of 2008-12-29


Online Spreadsheet of Jade's Funkey's

U.B. Funkeys!

My daughter's birthday is coming up and my brother got her a small pile of these UB Funkey things. It's a PC game system and you get a USB Hub-type character who is bigger than the little funkey guys and you slap the little funkeys into his back and go and play in a persistant online world. Depending on which little Funkeys you have, more online content is opened up (what a concept! GO BUY $$ GO BUY $$ GO BUY!).

We picked her up some more. This is a list of what she has I started for grandparents, freinds and relatives(sorta like a wedding registry eh?) . Any of you with kids out there, it's great for 7-8 year olds but I'd wager a bright 5-6 year old would have fun too. My almost 4-something enjoys it as well. They sell for about $6 and change (usually 0.99 cents of it).

To further confusing things they are classified as Normal, Rare and Very Rare. They don't release as many Very Rare ones, the Normals are common place and the Rare are in between. I try to pick up the Very Rare when I can.

UPDATE: My brother says: "the characters can earn coins in the games to buy things for your "crib". The rare Characters supposedly earn coins at double what the regular ones do, the very rare earn them at triple. Also, the rare and very rare are able to buy additional items in the shops to spruce up your crib, but I'm not sure of the details on that..."

These are the ones she has already

As of 2008-12-29


Online Spreadsheet of Jade's Funkey's

Jade's list of Funkeys she's looking for

Fallout





Stitch




Glub




Lucky(dream state)




Waggs(dream state)




Rewind (dream state)

Ipod Touch - Spyware and Garbage cats

My refurb 30GB Ipod Classic got stolen two days ago outta my truck. I had left the window open and it was parked in my driveway. It's the first thing I've had stolen from my property since I've moved there in 1996, a pretty good record I'd say! I think it might be my paper delivery guy who would have had to walk up between my two cars to put my paper in the mailbox. He could have seen the window open and the Ipod sitting there. Then again, who am I to toss around accusations. They did not take the cigarette lighter adapter. So who knows, maybe it was a kid.

The one semi good thing is that it was a refurb I got free on the extended warranty last year when my original one died. This one had started to freeze too, stopping when you tried to advance the song. I'd generally slam it on the dashboard 2 or 3 times on the way to and from work to get it to unfreeze. (they are pretty tough devices!). So I was thinking about upgrading in any event.

So, I bought an ipod touch last night. They are the coolest! Buying stuff with the kids in tow is always a challenge. Near the end I basically gave the girl my credit card and chased after my kids. "Get yourself a little something nice "Tonya"" (her nametag). When I got home from futureshop I spotted a black cat squeezing out from under my garage door. I gotta fix that. It appeared to be a new cat and not the one I scared the shit out of last year with my bullwhip. I haven't seen that one since.

So I plugged in the Itouch, ate supper, did family stuff, played with the kids, put them to bed, unplugged the itouch and played with it for awhile, put a movie on and played guitar until 11:30. I was going to go to bed when I thought, "Hey, let's put some videos on this thing so I can show the guys tomorrow!" So I went on the net to some unreputable sites and downloaded some software that says it can convert .AVI to IPOD format. I picked about 4. First one sucked (install/delete) 2nd one sucked (install/delete) but the 3rd one! That one gave me some fireworks when I started to install it.

At the outset of the install my patrol software gave me a popup "Warning, this thing is trying to install an application at system start up Confirm /Deny!" I pressed "OK". Whatever, it's probably a system tray icon. Then I got another one, and I clicked in it without looking(I was playing with the Ipod Itouch). Probably an auto update checker. I'll turn that off afterward. Then another… then I looked. It was some DLL it was trying to cram into some delicate part of the system and I clicked "No". Something' fishy..

Then the light show started. I got 3 different popups saying my system was at risk of infection. I closed them. One was actually real saying that Symantec AntiVirus was not running any longer. I checked, sure enough, my little shield was gone. WTF!!! Then my browser got hijacked and a splash screen of some ANTIVIRUS 2008 software popped up. Click here to install it!!!

A spyware sell job.. Wonderfull. This will really make me want to buy your crap software. More likely it will make me want to track them down and rip the developer's lungs out.

Closed that. More popups. More patrol messages of something trying to install all kinds of dll's and startup exe's. "NO" NO" "NO" Click click click. (many bad words were said, some for the first tme in years)..

Then my wallpaper changed to this red nuclear symbol background and all my icons flashed and became unclickable. It seemed to have taken a screen shot of my desktop icons, wisked my real icons away and then used a picture of my icons as my walpaper so now they were all unclickable because they were just pictures. Nasty.. I had about 3 or 4 FREE porn icons added which weren't there before (or were they? Hmmmm I forget)..

This thing was nasty!! So I turned the damned PC off, booted up in safe mode.. Wouldn't you know it. I go to hit the Windows Key + "E" to launch file explorer to launch spybot search and destroy and I get a message. Due to security settings, you can't access this program. Please see your system administrator(I AM the sysadmin you stupid OS!!!!).

Lovely. I clicked "My Computer" and my C drive was not showing. I know it's there and working this crappy spywared virused OS is running off of it but man. How annoying!.

Can you say re-install Windows to a new folder no format? I can..

CRAP!

So I started the install at 12:30am and went to bed. But the night was not over. It was garbage day the next day! I had forgotten to take out the frickin' garbage or do the %$&?*% rycycling!! It's not something I can leave until the next day because they sometimes whip by at 8:00am, so out to the garage I went. Remember that cat?

Well the cat had a friggin garbge orgy in my garage. He sliced open the two full gabage bags I had in there and there was maggoty food everywhere. If I see the cat again I am going to scare the shit out of it like the last one. Why people let their cats out to shit in my garden and kid's sandbox and rip my garbage open IN MY FRICKIN GARAGE! Is beyond me.

I got to bed at 1:00am..

This morning I got up and checked on my install. It was asking for some confirmation and I went to click on OK and nothing happened.. No mouse and No keyboard. WTF! I have a USB KVM (keyboard video mouse - used to share a single input device with multiple PC's) switch.. The install program did not recognize it. Always install with the keyboard and mouse attached directly people.. I'll restart the install when I get home.

This was a semi bad day..

Oh yeah, at some point in the day I found out that some guy I used to work with is now a convicted child molester. They appear to be letting him keep his job. I don't know what I'm gonna do if I happen to see him again around the complex..

Trailerpark geocachers meet Bigfoot 2 SPX work

Work continues (sigh) by my editing team of one (ME!! AHAHAHAHAHAHA) as we add smoke, fire, explosions and other particle effects to the shots that require them. We have Tripper running around with a Bazooka in this one and it's great fun to animate the various firings and shells whipping by and exploding into things etc. It's all 2D effects and in some cases I try to make them look 3D by growing them as they appear to get closer to the camera POV.

The great thing about doing them on this type of movie is if they look great, then that is fantastic! And if they look cheesy - THAT WORKS TOO! I can say i did it on purpose. In fact, I'm saying it now!

Take a peek! These are two 16 second clips, not cut right, but they show some of the particle effects as they blend into the real environment. It should be obvious enough but none of that smoke or stuff is real. The effects were done in Particle Illusion and composited in Adobe After Effects. I had to match move and offset each effect by hand in all cases because I'm a sucker for handheld footage (I'm a masochist). You can use AE to stabilize footage but there wasn't a need here.

In some cases the raw footage extends beyond the special effect which ceases to become active but that is just a timing thing. You give yourself some slack room to work with in case you want to speed up or slow down that bazooka shell, etc. These clips are silent but sound will be a big improvement to the overall effect. These clips show me, Bazooka Tripper and Kirok as Bigfoot. The scenes were filmed by Kenmore, Gwiliker and myself.