daj

...or at least someone on his graphics team does. Watching yesterday's episode of The Daily Show, I was a bit surprised to see my party balloons clipart show up in one of his segments. You can watch the clip here.

I've seen my clipart used around the web, but this is the first time I've seen it on TV (not to mention one of my favourite shows!). Kinda cool.

I was going to type a big long story about this but it's really not that interesting. Long story short, some chemicals have plastic-melting properties and my brain is incapable of reminding me of that ONLY when I am using such a product. Fortunately, no major damage has been done. Yet.

Months ago, after reading the WikiBook on Lucid Dreaming en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_dr… I decided to start a dream journal as the book suggests. I didn't keep it up for long (only a few nights, actually), but this week I came across the sketchbook I used to keep my dream notes.

My dreams (like most peoples' I'm sure) are quite nonsensical. My final description made me laugh out loud - perhaps it's worth sharing:

Small protest outside of house. Inconsistency: protesting modeling/native rights abuse? Started fighting. I called 911. "My name is Andrew Ashton I live at [my address]..."

Police came 10 maybe
   puppets/robots, white, tall, skinny at first
   started dansing[sic]
   turned into celebs [like] Jim Carrey

Front door had no hinges - came right off. I put it back on upside down.

[My] mom negotiated with rioters & calmed them down. They left.

Police car was dark grey, tinted windows, had rooftop lights, didn't say 'Police', had a radio station ad on the side, had tinsel hanging from the bottom, & turned into 2 cars.

For the record I've never had a lucid dream, though according to my journal I dreamed I had a lucid dream. Huh.

This journal was titled in accordance with the inevitable.

I've been back from France for a few weeks and I am currently working in the art department of a small design & printing company. That's taking up most of my time during the week, but it's loads better than any other summer job.

Recent personal projects:
- Went through my photos from France sorting, labelling, enhancing, and rating any of them that were worth it. of the 1200+ photos I took, less than 400 are worth looking at and about 150 are worth printing (which isn't bad.. I don't need a load of prints anyway). I "lost" at least 3 days worth of photos because the camera accidentally got set to low quality (640x480) and I didn't realize.
- Created my first theme for Rockbox, the Free firmware replacement I'm running on my iPod. Relevent topic at the Rockbox forums is here: forums.rockbox.org/index.php?t…

So, I let my dA subscription expire... I'm going to be away for most of the summer so I figure I'll just deal with small thumbnails for now & renew in a few months.

Inkscape 0.44 should be out soon - I've been playing with development releases along the way and it is looking really sweet. I think I'll be making donations to Inkscape every time they do a stable release, starting with this one. I've had a few chances to play around with Adobe Illustrator at my co-op position, and it seriously can't compare to Inkscape in terms of ease of use. Printing & PDF export are another issue, but Inkscape is rapidly improving in those areas too. (BTW Inkscape.org got redesigned a while back based on a mock-up I created. Josef Vybiral and Dale Harvey did an awesome job coding the html/css - I gave the coding a shot but I just don't have the knack.)

I've been playing around with Gentoo on my iMac, and it's going quite well. I haven't bothered trying to set up my Airport Extreme card yet though; I'll probably wait for Linux 2.6.17 to hit Gentoo-sources first. Once I get that configured and some other kinks worked out I want to use it as my primary system. OS X just isn't doing it for me lately, plus I'm tryin to switch completely to Free Software. (A slow and difficult conversion, especially owning a Mac, but worthwhile in the long run I believe.)

I've got a busy summer ahead of me - canoeing in Algonquin Park, touring around France, getting ready for college, + trying to squeeze some sort of a summer job in there. That's all for now...