Just received a new character icon from kresblain. He is offering them as a commission to raise some funds. It's "name your own price" for that reason.

Check out the details at: http://kresblain.deviantart.com/journal/29647653/

In memory of family and friends who have lost the battle with cancer; and in support of the ones who continue to conquer it! Post this on your LJ if you know someone who has or had cancer.

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Personal note: I don't see that as the typical chain letter... But I'd be surprised if there are people out there who haven't had a case of cancer in their family or among their friends.
And no names shall be mentioned of course!

Happy New Year everybody out there!

And be careful what you hold on to if you had too much to drink!

I didn't make any new years resolutions becuase I think I don't need an excuse to make a resolution... I make them throughout the year.

Plans for 2010... much the same as for 2009: make a decent living, put aside some money, come up with some funny skits for pawpet videos. The only "new" plan is to keep practicing and to improve my drawing skills. Because I really, really would like to do something in the field of video (editing) professionally once (i.e. for money) and I feel it's a plus to be able to sketch out something with a pencil.

So again: A happy new year 2010 to all of you and my it be better than 2009, no matter how 2009 has been to you!

Well all things considered: 2009 wasn't that bad... but it wasn't that good either. It was a "meh" kind of year. Business was a constant up and down as was (is) my health.
I made a couple of videos - some better than expected some not quite as good.

Business wise I had the chance of teaching several courses in Cyprus this year, resulting in most flights a year ever... probably even including future years :3

The biggest decision I made in 2009 was to seriously take up drawing as another hobby. So far I think I'm doing rather well but there is still way too much room for improvement. At least I managed to somehow stick to my resolution to draw or ink or color at least one piece of "art" per day on average. Let's see how this hods up in the new year.

Pawpet ideas come harder with every finished project... Maybe I'm limiting myself too much but I do have some pride and won't sink to certain levels of humor just to crank out another one. At least I managed to keep my goal of one video per month on average - i.e. 12 per year - and am now up to 25 videos. Thanks to all of you out there for watching and commenting!

People all around have been posting that 2010 can not possibly be worse than 2009... but I don't want to take that bet. It could easily be worse from my point of view but I sure hope that it's better.

Right now I'm getting ready to ring in the new year with a private firework around the corner - new years is sort of a family tradition in my family and I still don't want to break with that so I'm at home tonight. There will be other occasions (and reasons/excuses) for parties thrughout the year so I'm sure I'm not missing too much.



I'm still a bit sick and hope that the "outdoor activity" doesn't cause too much of a fall back but I don't want to set any of those things off inside...

And just barely in time, I finished my Christmas video for you - it's not very long but I hope it's funny enough:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7MhYF9f2w8

Seasons Greetings from Austria,
Atkelar

...but not with presents this time. Got all of thoes done. No. The Christmas Video is running l-a-t-e :(

And I had such a nice idea for it. Weird and funny (I hope - well, the funny part because I know that it's weird)

busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy!!!!

I haven't posted in quite some time now. Busy, busy, busy. Anyhow for everybody who's interested: I'm planning to do a "christmas" video again but real live keeps interfering. Also a larger project that I would like to continue working on keeps getting pushed forward. All I'm going to say is that it's also pawpet related ;)

Right now I have converted about two thirds of my not-so-large CD collection to MP3 and it looks almost like I drew here: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/3143837

I also managed to try out a little camera-rig I fabricated during the summer months. It allows me to mount my two camcorders side-by-side on a tripod. Here's a still image of the captured (and edited) video: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/3141120/
Note that it is far too cumbersome to do a lengthy piece in that way: think of more than double the efford :(

As I was heading home from my most recent business trip, I read the headline "Der Grüne Pilz will Hahn stürzen" in the austrian newspaper "Die Krone". Literally that reads: "The green mushroom wants to overthrow (trip) rooster"... Of course "green" is a political party and both rooster and mushroom (Hahn and Pilz) are names in this case. But I just HAD to draw it:


Tripped by ~Atkelar on deviantART

So, I did send in this littl video here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbqcZPGY-xA

But the voices had a huuuuge echo on them that isn't there in the YouTube version... and that is exactly the same file that I submitted to FPS... Strange.

Anyhow: there's 21 pawpets durig the "Thank You" video, some of the voices done by yamavu, the others by me.

I was also trying out some arm-rods I built on John D. Mouser this time. What do you guys think about that addition?

The little intro "music" was just about as far as I probably get into doing my own music ever... Took me 90 minutes of tinkering and trial/error to hit those few notes, but I was late with the idea again, so I didn't want to bother my usual source for music blujz6 with it.

...and boy...did that return flight suck!!

Here's the rundown of what causes me to say so:

1.: Larnaca airport is building a new terminal. By November the 10th (last Tuesday) all flights by Cyprus Air are leaving there, by November 17th (next week) all others will. So right now there's the "old" one (where I had to go to) and the "new" one (where 90% of all the businesses on the airport went). I thought I can sit down for a nice comfy cup of coffee at the airport's restaurant, but it was literally boarded up.

2.: Metal detector buzzed again (damn shoes!)

3.: My seat was at the very back of the plane, where the seats are so close together that I didn't even fit in between them... had to stick my knees between the seats in front and pray that the guy in front didn't put his seat back :(

4.: Why does the air conditoning on a plane always feel like the pilot has the window down? I mean cool air is all fine but hey: this isn't a giant freezer! Now my almost healed sniffles is back with a vengence!

5.: To top it off, the guy behind me took out his laptop bag from the overhead compartment and dropped it square on my head. Ouch. Well, he did at least say sorry... :(

6.: Missed the train (connecting the airport to Vienna on a 30-minute interval) by about 5 seconds. So I had to wait half an hour to go to Vienna, which takes 16 minutes, head for my parke car which took about 7 minutes and head home for 55 minutes...

Needless to say, I'm totally done for the day.

I'm currently on Cyprus in my hotel. It's nice, even though it's not summer anymore. But one thing drives me mad: the internet is only available in the lobby here. ARGH! Won't be able to join FPS live - at least not for the entire show.

I'll have a look at the replay on Friday, when I'm home again. At least I can launch the download from here, so the show will await me at home.

I'll also update the wiki later during the week in case nobody else does. Pretty annoying. Last course was set from Tuesday to Thursday so I could travel Monday and was at home during FPS but this time it's from Monday to Wednesday... Bummer. This is going to be the first show I'll miss live in a looong time. Just check the roll calls :)

A bit more research showed this:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/youtube/thread?tid=3fddcf6fe7dcc9e0&hl=en

But that kind of sh** makes me question YouTube's system (note: I make my living in writing computer programs and teaching others to do so)

1a.: how cluttered and bloated must that code be to even allow for such a mix up?

1b.: Where's the guy who wrote it hiding in shame now?

2.: how bad are the update policies at YouTube for a fix to take days to be applied?

3.: Why is it possible at all to have a "0.5" rating? It clearly isn't intended to be ever possible so I wuldn't even bother implemeting it at all (i.e. only have images/css content for 1-5 defined)

*grrr*

I know that some people out there don't like pawpet stuff and some others dispise furry stuff... and many of them are trolling around too. It's why I set comments to be screened (not that I ever hid one :)

Imagine my shock as the "my videos" page of YouTube showed all my videos rated at a half star... The video page however displayed the four or five stars the videos currently should hold. After the initial shock I realized that since it's not possible to rate the videos at zero stars there should not be only half a star average ever. Sometimes the video pages and my video page don't quite sync up so I'm almost but not quite calm again. Somebody might mass-rate videos at zero through an application anyway...

Here it is: How To: Trick or Treat

But where to begin...? It's boring to start at the beginning, so let's go back even further :)

( Making of... )

( And some belated feedback to the IRC )

...and tomorrow:



I hope that I get it done by tomorrow's FPS... keeping claws crossed here - that is whenever they aren't used to puppet :)

Ahh... they call that "winter" already - with close to 30°C weather during the day. I bet it'll get cooler eventually but until then, I'm happy with the warm weather here on Cyprus.

All those air-conditioning is giving me a headache though and having slept only 2 hours before departure doesn't help either.

OK, I'm officially "very annoyed" now...

I have done several videos in HDV format now but it's the first time I'm trying to encode the result in MP4 as HDV (i.e. H.264 HDV HQ preset in Adobe Premiere CS4) and it has the format set to the right parameters: 25fps (PAL) 1440*1080i with aspect ratio of 1.333 (i.e. anamorph).

The file opens fine in QuickTime - the so called (as in "self proclaimed") "standard" for MP4 files. But WTF? QuickTime player opens the file and as always the colors appear way too bright - I'm used to that by now. But it completely ignores the aspect ratio, resulting in a nice 4:3 video that is totally distorted. AND the interlaced lines are clearly visble. AND it stutters and jumps around playing at most 10 frames per second...

Now I recently read that Windows Media Player 12 (comes with Windows 7) can play MP4, so I give it a try... And behold! All the glory that is my video! Crisp colors, no visible interlacing, smooth playback (maybe it is 25fps maybe not but there aren't any jumps at least)

To me this is another fine example of incompetence - I don't want to turn this into a flame war about operating systems or video standards but I can already see some very pissed iFans are going to bash M$ again for doing a better job... and THAT is what's bugging me.

In case you think I'm too picky, here's the two screenshots (SAME VIDEO FILE, NO TWEAKED SETTINGS ON EITHER PLAYER!)

...now and then. This time, I did a little birthday picture for bigbluefox but it had to wait for my second blue marker...

It's BBC for BBF - a BigBurningCake for BigBlueFox ;)

I was looking for an English article during my research of the "gun accident" in the Austrian military and couldn't find any by yesterday. Today the article here is the only English version I could find. Although they call it a "missile" - I'm not that familiar with military chargon but to me a missile is a "guided projectile" that either is remote controlled or self steering... Austrian armed forces to my knowledge only have one device that warrants the term "missile" and it is for ground/air purposes. What hit the town was a shell fired from an M-109 howitzer however... an artillary gun... clearly such a projectile can not be controlled after it leaves the muzzle of the gun.

On a side-note: I'm not the only one to wonder about our military here... a reader's letter in an Austrian newspaper said something along the lines of "It must be clear to potential enemies how to overcome the Austrian military: let it train long enough" ;)

This Pawpet Newsflash is based on true facts - i.e. the report is true, the "speculation" about what transpired is made up by me...