It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

Webhostinggeeks.com has a variety of charts that compare hosting services for various needs, including low price hosting, Linux hosting and more.  There are a few sites on the internet that also have star ratings and reviews for hosting services, but others are clearly affiliate sites where only hosts that the webmaster has affiliate deals with are highlighted.  Since this is not one of those sites, the playing field is a bit more even. Of course, the more people who opine, the more reliable the rating percentages will be, so rate away. Some hosts have many reviews, but some do not have a big enough cross section of ratings, yet, but the trends mentioned are helpful.

I do caution you to take a deep breath, or refrain from reviewing the host in the midst of an outage or a problem, as the site is not designed to solve technical problems with your host.  Who knows…you could also end up changing your mind based on the customer service of the complete experience.

Do you believe it?

Remember spam’s “greatest hits?” Every day it seems that you are winning the lottery in a foreign country, or are the last known relative of an oil tycoon.  It morphed from the version that was going around about a dozen years ago now that you were in Princess Diana’s will.  I have been named as Frederic Chopin’s long lost heir through my mother’s side before as well.  I have learned to hit “spam” on many of these messages, but sometimes they sneak by my spam filters.  Now, they are getting more creative.   Some of these similar love notes are being left as comments on my blog!

The spam filters don’t catch them as they appear to be real messages, not just a spattering of links to various unrelated sites.  (By the way, my favorite spam comment of all started out with, “Stop Oval Haired Woman.”  Was this referring to a gal with an assymetrical 80s hairdo, a bad Toni home perm or is she a newscaster with helmut head? Oh. And who could forget the comment on my Targus review post that asked me what I thought about baby acne. Just the right plausible/odd ratio to get me to click. Ha-ha. I didn’t. )

The story remains the same.  Someone is in trouble and somehow, I am the only one who can save the day if I would only send a certified check, accept a certified check, or give out my banking details.  My response remains the same, in not responding.

However, sometimes I receive them with phone numbers and addresses from some out of the way island.  Perhaps I should forward their information to missionaries in the area to check to see if they really exist or are really in trouble?  Maybe I will go onto a forum and ask someone from that country to look up who their next door neighbor is, alert them to the situation, and have them knock on their door, unraveling the whole scam….and of course helping them with that heart condition they are having which caused them to reach out to me as the last traceable heir of their family in case they die. Oh well.

Moviestorm is enabling a new generation of amateur film-makers to realize their visions. It offers easy, affordable animation tools that can produce sophisticated high-quality films on practically no budget. After several years in development, Moviestorm has demonstrated that home movie-making needn’t be limited to cheap hand-held cameras and clips of the kids goofing around. Its virtual movie studio allows users to break free of the limitations of the real world, and allows them to direct, film, edit and distribute 3D animated movies without any knowledge of animation techniques or 3D modelling. And best of all, it’s free, and comes without any copyright restrictions.

Iain Friar, known as IceAxe, is one of Moviestorm’s many successful film-makers. His short film, Clockwork, a dystopian vision of a totalitarian Britain after a Soviet invasion in the 1980s, is winning accolades and awards around the world, most recently the audience prize at the Atopic Festival in France and the Grand Prize at the Machinima Expo. Clearly influenced by both 1984 and A Clockwork Orange, with a visual style that evokes both Communist era propaganda posters and more recent animated movies such as A Scanner Darkly, it is a stark, powerful film that belies its modest origins.

Iain, who’s 42, works in marketing, and started making movies just 18 months ago. “I’ve always been a hands-on person, in music, sport, and everything else,” he says. “I thought it would be fun to shoot a music video, but I’m not the most technical of people, and it seemed extraordinarily hard. I remember when computer games started using in-game animation to tell the story instead of video clips, and this interested me, especially now that game technology has become so sophisticated. So I bought a book, Machinima for Dummies, which had Moviestorm on the CD, and I was hooked. I liked Moviestorm because it did what I was looking for, even though I didn’t really know what I was looking for at the time, and the Moviestorm community was very supportive. I initially made comedies, but I could see that the movies people respected were more dramatic, so it seemed that was the direction to go in.”

He spent four months working on Clockwork, and then the same again on his next short, Cloud Angel, a steampunk thriller set on board an airship. Apart from the voice acting, he made the entire film himself at his home in Basingstoke, England. “I’m lucky that my friends are so willing to step up to the mike and read my silly scripts!” he laughs. His next film is Gridlock, a science fiction comedy which he is co-producing with another successful Moviestorm director, James Thorpe. For this, they’ve stepped up the production costs a notch: they hired a recording studio and got the local amateur dramatic group to do the voice acting.

Iain is realistic about his future, though. “Am I ambitious? Yes. Do I want to keep it as just a hobby? Well, probably yes, because I imagine that if it became a full time activity, the fun might go out of it. I make movies as escapism. That said, I think that this industry would be really interesting to work in, because it’s embryonic; I’m not sure what direction it will go in. It’s exciting!”

Moviestorm’s CEO, Jeff Zie, is hugely enthusiastic and supportive. “Iain and the many other Moviestorm users are an inspiration to us all,” he says. “We’re really proud that we’re giving talented people like this the tools they need to unleash the creative potential they never knew they had, and to produce these wonderful films.”

Try it and see!

You can download Moviestorm for free: Windows and Mac versions are available. If you want, you can expand your virtual film studio and buy extra costumes, sets, props, and sounds in their marketplace. If you’ve ever wondered whether you might be the next Tarantino, Ang Lee, or J J Abrams, now’s the time to find out!

]]> http://backtoamac.com/2009/11/short-animation/feed/ 2 http://backtoamac.com/2009/11/retro-dialup-internet-service/ http://backtoamac.com/2009/11/retro-dialup-internet-service/#comments Wed, 18 Nov 2009 04:15:16 +0000 chris http://backtoamac.com/?p=134 A friend wrote me about my Geocities post.  The one thing she missed about the internet of the 1990s was the price of service.  Whatever happened to those cheap ISPs?  Well, firstly, they were all on very slow dial up, but there just seemed to be more options out there than there are now.  Perhaps since broadband technology costs more to maintain, there are no longer as many local ISPs.

I stumbled across BasicIsp.Net. They offer old fashioned $6.95 a month internet service. Granted, you may not get all the bells and whistles, but if you are looking for the basics, its definitely “retro.” The website design looks like they madeit in 1997 and haven’t changed the feel of it as well.  There are a multitude of access numbers, so it leads me to believe the service is all dial up. That may be okay, considering the price. There is an accelarated package that you can also opt for.

The service is Mac compatible. You just need to be running OS 8 or later. In other words, if your Mac was made in 1997 or later, it is most likely compatible. Those G3s and original IMacs would be just as capable of handling the load as the new models that are running Snow Leopard as an operating system.

If you are just looking for a cheap ISP to use to check your email, it may do just fine. Have you tried Basic ISP? If so, what do you think?

What I most worry about is credit card theft. Not all sites take Paypal, and Paypal sometimes comes with its own headaches. I found that ShopShield.net is a new Secure Payment Agent that really is the answer to all of my concerns.

Shop Shield anonymizes your email address and the payment is processed without the places you shop having your actual credit card number. Shop Shield creates a temporary credit card number for the transaction that expires when the transaction is complete. The temporary credit card number can only be used for the amount of the transaction, so if the number is stolen, it cannot be charged on. The original funds are still debited from your credit card balance, but the temporary number is not traceable and does not recharge your card.

To protect against spam, Shop Shield creates a proxy email address. Pertinent communication is forwarded to your actual email address, but a company never has your real one. There is a Shop Shield companion that you can download for your web browser. Right now, it works with Firefox on both Mac and Windows.

Have you tried Shop Shield?  Let me know what you think!

Everyone had a “neighborhood.”  Depending on the theme, you could have your site on “RodeoDrive,” in “Hollywood,” or in the Colosseum.  Honestly, I think it was on the honor system and no one really checked. It was later scrapped, but sometimes you could still stumble across sites with a “city” in their url.

Oddly enough, Geocities is still around.  Well, they were until today.  Geocities is going offline, and joining the big Angelweb in the sky. Registrations ceased in April, and today was the end.  Farewell, Geocities, and Godspeed. May the flash animated websites of sparkly dancing aliens and Gilligan’s Island Fan Sites give thee rest.