Logging Robby Abaya

Now that the project that I’ve been working so hard on has finally launched, and we’re past the “launch support” phase, I’ve finally got my nights and weekends back. For the past few years, when this has happened, I would generally start taking freelance work. I was always fortunate to have plenty of good work thrown my way. By good work, I don’t necessarily mean high paying (although some of them were), I mean projects that I actually wanted to work on. Sometimes I felt like I would learn something, other times, I felt like it would be a good portfolio piece. In any case, I kept a pretty busy schedule.

That was then. I’m not really looking for freelance now. In fact, I hope to not take any freelance for the duration of my employment at Zynga. So what do I do with all this time? I get bored easily, and I’m not really the type to sit around and just watch TV, play video games, or crawl the web aimlessly. I have no problem partying it up on the weekends, but those weeknights, after dinner, can sure get boring. In this downtime, I feel like I should make something, shoot something, do something. Without a deadline driving a goal though, I’m kind of lost.

There are a lot of things that I miss, however. I definitely miss animating and compositing in After Effects. I definitely miss studio photography. And for some weird, inexplicable reason, I miss writing JavaScript. I was about to write a little JavaScript thing tonight, but my localhost server is borked from when I was trying to install JBoss. So for the next few nights, I think I’ll try cleaning up my computer. After that, I don’t know what I’ll be doing, but I’m sure that I’ll have fun.

I’ve been using this tutorial sample code to do screen recording on my mac for a while. Definitely not as nice as SnapZPro, but $69 cheaper.

OpenGLScreenCapture

Just read about half of the Time article on the astronauts from the Apollo days. There’s a piece in there that really struck accord with me. The article describes some of the traits that NASA was looking for when they were recruiting. These men were all fighter pilots, in great physical shape, smart, etc.. One trait equally important, though, was that they didn’t think about the tasks or challenges they faced too much. They just went for it. It was almost sort of an arrogance. If these men thought about what they were actually doing—flying to the moon—they would have probably gotten scared and not been able to handle it. I think I sometimes operate like this. There have definitely been times that I have accepted a job with an optimistic attitude about being able to get it done. I’ll definitely have an idea of what is going to happen in my head, but I maybe made some incorrect assumptions or maybe didn’t think about this or that. Then, I go to do the job and realize that I’m in way over my head. By that time, it’s too late to pass on the gig, so I just have to put in the extra work to get it done. Do it or die trying. In every case, I came out stronger. Some of the best things that have happened to me came as a result of this, and I owe it all to not thinking about it, just doing it.

A friend of mine asked me how to preload an image in Flash with AS3. Rather than try to explain it to him over aim, I whipped up this quick example.

LoaderExample.fla.zip

I want one! At first I thought, “what could possibly be better about a messenger bag?”. Apparently a lot.

Rickshaw Bag an Inside Look from Adam Jackson on Vimeo.

This couldn’t have come at a better time for me.

http://inessential.com/?comments=1&postid=3564

Along those same lines, here’s an excerpt from Malcolm Gladwell’s new book about success.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/nov/15/malcolm-gladwell-outliers-extract

http://media.fxguide.com/fxguidetv/fxguidetv-ep040.mov

Here’s a nice interview with John Knoll from ILM about his start in the industry and how his hobbies grew into something more.

Why cacheAsBitmap is bad [ by Thibault Imbert ]

Good to know.

Today, Sherwin tells me the story about how the hard drive in his laptop failed. Luckily, he was pretty good about backing stuff up so he didn’t lose a whole lot. It still scared me though, and got me thinking. For one thing, he doesn’t really bring his laptop everywhere, it’s his personal computer and mostly stays home. My laptop is now my _only_ computer. It’s almost always with me. It gets bumped around in my bag during my morning commute on Muni, worked on all day long at work, bounces around on my back for my 1.5 mile speed walk to the gym, crammed into a locker at the gym, bounces around for the trek up the hill back home, and finally, worked on for the rest of the night. Even after all that, I leave it on all night because I use it as my alarm clock. Basically, it’s either in use or in transit. My hard drive is at far greater risk than Sherwin’s was, and his failed. At work, we have SVN set up, and I love it. It makes me feel safe. Not only are my files safely backed up somewhere in the cloud, but I also have a version control system that I can count on. For my personal files however, I was pretty much doing things old school. I’m probably better at backing stuff up and version controlling than most people, but nowhere near where I need to be given some of the mission critical things I have going on. So, I bit the bullet and tried to figure out how I can set up an SVN system for myself. Luckily, my MediaTemple GridServer allows me to set up an SVN repository on my site. In fact, their knowledge base articles on setting up SVN are pretty straightforward for the initial part of it. After following the directions though, it still didn’t work with svnX. Some googling turned up an article, “Subversion on Mediatemple” by Mitchell Hashimoto, which explains the need for an ssh key. I know a little about those keys, and I’ve used them before, but I would never have thought that to be the solution to why it wasn’t working for me. I followed his steps (and re-learned how to set up those keys), and now I’m svn-ing like a champ. Thanks Sherwin for reminding me of the need to keep things safe, and Mitch for sharing your experience and helping me in my hour of need!