I just finished the last of the illustrations for the thermodynamics textbook I’ve been working on. Hopefully everything comes through okay, and my part is finished. I can finally focus more time on my own book and other things. I’ve also been looking at getting an iPad to use as an inexpensive drawing tablet. I currently have a very serviceable seven year old Wacom Intuos tablet, but I still have some trouble drawing strait lines and shaping objects on it. And I’m still in the market for a new camera as well. Oh, and I hope to install the latest…
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I just setup a Twitter account, as you can see by the icon on the right side of this page. I don’t know how aggressive I will be in actually using it, but I figured I may as well join the club. The wallpaper used on my Twitter page is an image strait from my next book. Also, I’ve nearly completed all the illustrations for the Thermodynamics textbook. But barring that, I don’t have anything else to really talk about right now.
Illustrating another textbook
Spring is finally here! I hope to pick up a new camera soon, and get back to photography. Over the last month, I’ve been compiling the hundreds of illustrations for the second edition of the thermodynamics textbook my dad wrote in the late 80′s. It’s been a pretty grueling process going through each drawing. Also, the second edition of Exploring Engineering is now on Amazon.com. It contains most of my original illustrations with a few changes.
Lord of Ultima
Just today I discovered Lord of Ultima, a web browser based game. Besides the fact that it has really nothing to do with the original Ultima game series (other than it’s namesake), but it’s still kind of a neat game concept. It plays a bit like a simplified version of Age of Empires with players building cities across a large singular continent (I can see this becoming a problem in the future) and fighting with one another or creating alliances. What surprises me is that it doesn’t seem to use Adobe Flash or require any kind of proprietary plug-ins, it…
Personalized calendars
I really like having a personalized wall calendar. Normally, I have been using the freebe calendars provided by a realtor, which isn’t all bad, because they’re peppered with virtually all the local events. But, I personally prefer to display my own artwork on my walls, even if it’s not the best. A couple of years ago, I made a calendar based on my illustrations from Mistletoe’s Night. I used iPhoto on my Mom’s Mac to assemble the calendar and add holidays and personalized dates on it. I was really happy with the final product, even though it was a tad…
Cartoons of the 80′s
I just finished watching the G.I Joe: Resolute mini-series that aired on Cartoon Network last year. As someone who grew up in the 80′s with the animated series and corresponding toy line, I was amazed that they geared this particular incarnation to my generation, far better than the recent live action movie. It was really fun to see the characters from the 80′s series faithfully carried into the 21st century, costumes and all, but with a more adult target demographic and story telling. I hope they continue producing more full length episodes. I also watched recently, for the first time…
Theme change… again
Happy new year! As you can see I changed the theme again. I just wasn’t happy with the previous attempt. I for the life of me could not make the background work with the text in the foreground. Hopefully, I’ll be happy with this theme for a while at least.
REMLAB Update
The latest update I put on SourceForge fixes a bunch of calculation bugs that I had come across plus some other tweaks. I also added preliminary structure/building construction to REMLAB as well. FASA never really flushed out the rules for designing building and installations. The orignal Compendium had rules for it but they just seemed to have too many unnecessary features. So I ultimately went off the “guidelines” from the Maximum Tech source book. Because of the way REMLAB is written there are just a few minor limitations with weapons allocation on multi-hex buildings, but nothing really serious. For the…
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