Seph Lietz

This is the complement to the Light Study. That is, the goal here was to create an interesting image composed entirely of shadows, instead of light, while using a single or multiple light sources, a single primitive object for casting, and a simple object for catching the shadow’s.

I can distinctly remember not being pleased with the result here. Now that I look back I don’t think it’s too bad, even if it might seem a little boring and predictable. What do you think?

This was (I believe) my first attempt at computer graphics back in Fall 2004 at Parkland College under the instruction of Professor David Bock. Actually, now I remember this was my second project. The primary goal was to create an interesting image using only white light, and the lack thereof. That meant no objects except for a single plane to catch the light, no shadows and no color.

It really served as an introduction into Maya, as well as to the basics of lighting principles and lighting terminology. It was also probably my first attempt at art of any kind, let alone computer art, which I did and still do know nothing about.I can remember spending a lot of time (10 hours or so, over a couple days) on what now seems like such a simple image, playing and tweaking the lighting properties, positions and *insert some other word that begins with ‘p’ here*. It’s quite amazing, and I’m sure this is the real point of the project, that so many uniquely interesting images can come out of such a simple idea. I’m sure there is an analogous exercise in traditional painting, and I’m just as sure that if I tried it, it would end up here.

I was pleased with the final product, although now it makes me feel like I’m about to be run over by a semi-truck. I suppose that makes this artistic.

And I for one welcome our new social bookmarking service overlords.

There’s a nice WordPress Plugin out there being developed by Alex King (original WordPress contributor) called Share This.

The Plugin is itself part of a larger goal which is detailed on the Share Icon Project page. Long story short, the Share Icon Project aims to replace (at least) 30-some social bookmarking icons with one unifying icon, and in turn do its part to alleviate “icon overload”, as it has been termed. As Mr. King himself puts it, the goal is

An icon to represent the generic action of sharing a web page. This could mean adding the page to a social bookmarking site or memetracker, e-mailing the page to someone, etc.

The current icon follows the design theme of the popular RSS and OPML icons.

You can see version 1.3 of Share This in action on this site. Click on the Share This link at the bottom of any post to do just that. Check out Share Icon Project to find out how you can contribute.

My ISP is notoriously slow to fix almost every outage, with down-times ranging from a few hours to a couple of days. It’s not as though I live in the middle of nowhere, thus I have a hard time understanding why it takes so long to get fixed. Sigh.

So, I decided to write a little application that would automatically track my down-time, since I’m never exactly sure when I lose and gain access. I’m still in the early stages, but I’ve got a working version.

It’s really simple to use. Just open it up in a web browser (IE and FF work, at least) and let it sit there. Every five minutes your browser will, effectively, ping my server, requesting the server’s current time and your IP address.

A little bit of JavaScript and PHP run the thing, and it’s very lightweight, so it shouldn’t effect performance much even if left running all the time, which I intend to do. I want some evidence next time my connection goes down. Not that it will matter, but at least I’ll feel better about it.

Here is how its done, as of now at least.

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This is a picture of our Christmas Tree (well, one of our trees anyway) that I’m using as a wallpaper on my PC for now. A little bit of editing in Photoshop gives it a unique look, I think.

Happy Holidays!!!