Notebook

this was my horoscope from the first Shepherd Express of the year (and the first horoscope i have looked at in a year or more):

Aries (March 21-April 19): I urge you to spend 2008 turning all of your pretty-good-but-half-developed notions into a few brilliant, fully formed ideas. While you're at it, melt down your hundreds of wishy-washy wishes and recast them into three driving desires. This is the Year of Pinpoint Aim, Aries, also known as the Year of Lasering Your Focus and the Year of Seeing with Fierce Clarity. Psych yourself up for a major campaign to cut the crap so the essence can shine.

You heard it hear first. Watch out for my Fierce Clarity, suckas!

Posted by at 10:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The girls and i have been having a lot of fun with iStopMotion this weekend. I picked it up as part of the MacHeist bundle.

First we discovered a sleepy snake wandering through the attic.

Next, Juliana tried to make friends with the snake, but it had other ideas:

Then this afternoon, Ava and I worked on a short tale of some hungry little pets.

The best thing about the snake attack video is that Ava worked as the director of photography while juliana directed and acted in the piece. They put this together by themselves while i was downstairs having some coffee!

Next up i think we are going to try either some whiteboard drawing or some pencil sketch and eraser animations. Juliana may even like to time lapse some of her watercolor paintings.

Posted by at 4:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

MacHeist is a sale that is running right now (the deal ends on january 23rd) that packages up a bunch of great independent mac software for a bundle price of $49. Now, this is a deal in and of itself (some of the software goes for more than 50 dollars by itself), but you can elect to send 25% of your purchase prices to one or all of a set of charities listed on the site. As of right now, they have raised $75,000 for charity and if they hit $100,000, they will also add PixelMator, the really lovely looking, layer-based image editing application, to the mix.

I purchased my bundle today after a friend from work pointed me to it and i am pretty excited. Snapz Pro and iStopMotion are the standouts to me and i can't wait to start making some animated shorts with my girls. :)

So if you are reading this and have a mac, what are you waiting for??? If you want to give this deal a shot, you can use my referral link.

Posted by at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)