Well, I finally did it. I completed the BFA Illustration program at San Jose State. I'm so happy to finally be done with school.

Reflecting back on my time in college, I often beat myself up inside for spending so much time on the computer working on PaperDemon.com rather than on my art homework. Had I been more dedicated to art, I think I could have become one of the top artists in the class. But my heart was elsewhere, with web development and design. But now I think it was actually a good thing I spent so much time on PaperDemon. Had I not been spending my time there, I would not have gotten the experience and skills necessary to work at Google.

A couple years ago I had a feeling I might go in the web dev direction but I kept telling myself that if I did go that route it would be like I was selling out. Like I gave up art and took the easier route. I know pursuing the illustration direction would have been much harder for me but I no longer feel like I gave up. I feel more like my animation projects are something I can work on in my spare time, rather than doing it as a career. But who knows where I'll end up in the future.

So what am I going to do to celebrate my graduation? I'm going to Disneyland!

One thing that's been a bit depressing lately is the traffic flow to PaperDemon. At about this time last year, PD was receiving roughly 30,000 unique hits a month. Now it's HALF that! A few friends suggested the decline in traffic was due to the fact that no new episodes have been released for Zarbon's Masterpiece Theater lately. So with that in mind, I've decided that I'll get the next episode done by the end of next week.

Since my last blog post, I have released the new site design for PaperDemon.com. It has been well received. I think I probably put more time into this site design than into previous designs for PD. Another big change was that I changed the format from a fixed width of 770 pixels to a liquid/adjustable layout. This makes browsing much more enjoyable for those with wider monitors, while still being usable for those with 800x600 resolution monitors.

Now that I'm done with school, I can focus more on my personal projects. I'll probably flip back and forth between animation projects and PD.

First off, a couple updates
New music in the music section:
:music: 18 Minute Zelda - Zelda: A Link to the Past
:music: En Route To Evil - Final Fantasy 7, 8

And that new PaperDemon illustration is complete but I'm not going to publish it until the new PD template debuts.

Onto my blog post...
I'll warn you first, I'm about to tell you a very ridiculous story.

Back in the days of AOL 3.1 when I was like 13 and had AOL as my internet service provider, AOL had recently introduced their Hometown AOL service where members had a couple megs of storage for a personal website. There was this one person, can't remember his alias but we'll call him Craig for now, who had a Vegeta shrine web page that I thought was pretty snazzy. His web page was auto-playing a midi file of a song I had never heard of but I assumed it was a Dragon Ball Z song. I thought the song was really cool and I forever associated it with Vegeta because of the context I had first heard it in. I loved the song so much that I decided to email Craig and ask him to email me the MIDI. He was quite rude about it and refused to send it to me. Being the smart ass annoying person that I was on the Internet at age 13, I replied and said that he should just give it to me because he didn't compose it anyway. The rights to it belong to the creators of Dragon Ball Z. He replied saying that it wasn't from DBZ but is instead from a Mega Man game.

I was just starting to learn some HTML at the time and decided to see if I could figure out a way to extract the MIDI file from the webpage. Sure enough, I viewed the source, found the file name, and typed the direct location of the file in my browser and was able to save the midi to my computer. I saved the file name as hahaha.mid. :P

Some years later I wanted to try and get an MP3 file of the song since MIDIs tend to sound so crappy. I could not for the life of me find any Megaman song that sounded anything like hahaha.mid and eventually gave up on ever finding it. Then one day as I was flipping through channels on the television, I heard hahaha.mid playing on Dancing with the Stars as two contestants were leaving the stage. I realized the song must not have been a Megaman song. More recently I had heard it in a football commercial. If I could only figure out the title of the song I could track down the MP3.

And then it finally happened.

Yesterday I was searching around YouTube and came across an AMV (Anime Music Video) of Dragon Ball Z that was playing hahaha.mid and credited the song as The Final Countdown by Europe. FINALLY I had the answers I was looking for for YEARS! And I immediately went onto iTunes to purchase the song.

It's funny how this whole thing started and ended with Dragon Ball Z. The source of all knowledge truly is Dragon Ball Z. Things really came full circle.

For those interested, there's a new piano arrangement available in the Music section called Magi Homeland. Be sure to check it out. I'll have more music posted soon within the coming weeks.

So at work we do these things called Snippets every week. It's just basically a list you email out on Mondays showing what you accomplished last week and what's on your plate for this week.

I like doing these snippets so much that now I maintain a personal active snippets page for keeping track of all of my personal projects such as PaperDemon.com, Zarbon's Masterpiece Theater, and Surviving Together.

I'm working a second internship full time at Google again. And I convert to a permanent employee as soon as I have my degree, which will be sometime in May. It's pretty sweet to have a job lined up for you right after finishing college.

But back to the snippets thing, I've tried so many different types of strategies to keep track of my work. I've tried planning things out on a calendar. That didn't work because I didn't like being held to a set schedule. I'd rather work on the projects I feel like working on when I want to. With the snippets thing, I can work on whatever I want to from my To Do list. I still have the flexibility to work with my moods but still get things done. I think this strategy will be the one that sticks.

I've started working on Surviving Together again. LavenderGoddessV has just finished posting a revamped version of part one of this awesome fan-fiction trilogy. I will be working from this new version to create my animated rendition of it. This means I'm back to square one on a lot of the project but that's ok. I'm totally fine with starting over. I love the new version much better anyway. So I'm working on adapting the fanfiction to a screen play. I've already completed chapter 1, which wasn't too hard. But other chapters will be more of a challenge because there are parts where the characters are describing key events in the past tense which means I'll need to write dialog and other stuff to make all the events happen in present time.

I've finally gotten around to programming one of those images with numbers thingies that prevents spam. I'll implement it soon on my blog so that I can reopen the comments feature. Look for that in the coming weeks.

You'll be happy to know that I have purchased the new Reason Pianos refill. :thumbsup: This has allowed me to take my MIDI recordings and apply these samples and it makes the music sound like it was played on a real piano! :bounce:

So I am proud to announce that TWO new piano songs have been added to the Music section and both were created in Reason using Reason Pianos.

I really love this Reason program. It saves me so much time in so many different areas. Like if I happened to play a sequence too softly, all I have to do is select all the notes from the sequence and tell it to add 15 points of velocity. I couldn't do that with crappy Cakewalk Music Creator. :annoyed: If I needed to make a sequence of notes louder in Cakewalk, I had to change the velocity of each note in the sequencer separately, which, as you can imagine, takes a really long time and is very tedious.

I still use Cakewalk for recording my MIDI data though because Reason doesn't automatically stretch the song length if the recorded data exceeds the length of measures. Instead, it just cuts off your recording. I learned that the hard way :slant:

Ok so I finally have the money to support my projects and one of the first things I bought was this midi music program called Reason. I heard about it from some members over at OC Remix.

It's definitely a step up from my shitty Cakewalk program. Reason is so amazingly powerful. I can't believe the quality of the songs that I've heard come out of this program.

But with power, comes complexity...

When I first got it and installed it I tried doing some simple stuff with it like taking some of my piano midis and putting a nicer piano sample on it but I was having trouble doing something as simple as that. o.O I found out about a Reason beginner's workshop in San Fransisco and I signed up. The workshop was 6 hours long and was only $165 bucks. And it was worth every penny!

If any of you are thinking of trying out this workshop, I highly recommend it. It's very reasonably priced and you will learn a ton. :thumbsup:

The sequencer part of Reason was pretty easy to figure out because my other MIDI programs, Cakewalk and MIDI Orchestrator Plus have sequencers that look and function almost exactly the same as the one in Reason. But the part that was tripping me up was all the hardware racks and wiring. I have absolutely no experience with audio engineering. A lot of the terms are based on the actual physical hardware that is used when audio engineers create music. All these terms I really didn't know. :question: The workshop really gave me enough information to really get started working with the program.

As a result I have a new piano piece available in the Music section! :bounce: It's a piano rendition of the main theme from Surviving Together. It is an original composition. The midi was recorded with Cakewalk a few months ago but the piano sound is from a Reason piano patch.

Reason just came out with a Piano's Refill pack. I've tried multiple times to order it from their online store but for some reason it isn't going through :(

But when I finally do get it, I will use it on some of my existing piano songs in the music section and submit them to OC Remix. I'll also record some new songs.

Life is good. Work is hard. It’s almost the end of summer and the end of my internship. This has been my first real experience with a real full time job. It feels great to be moving out of the school phase of my life and into the working phase but at the same time I feel a little depressed about it. Not because I’ll miss school. Far from it. I am getting sick of school! But I’ve found that having a full time job that mostly involves sitting on your butt in front of a computer all day can be quite draining. I’m often so tired by the end of the day that what free time I do have, I don’t want to spend on the computer. Which means my personal projects like ZMT and PaperDemon.com don’t get as much attention as they used to.

I still have one last year of school left. I will be working part time during the school year.

I can’t take on anything new. From now on, anyone who approaches me about any sort of project, whether it be a flash project, art request, website design, I will just have to say no. For the first time in my life I’m saying ‘no.’ I have this problem where I get really excited about projects and say ‘yes’ to every opportunity that comes at me, whether or not I have the time for it. Now I don’t even have as much time for the project that matters to me most, PaperDemon.com.

In other news, I’ve finally got my hands on some real music software. I bought Reason. I’m still trying to get the hang of it though. It’s not the most user-friendly program out there. But I’ve signed up for a workshop being held next weekend. So as soon as I get the hang of this program I can start posting more of my music.

I’ve finished my first week at Google. It seemed to go by so fast. They had a lot of new hires this week so my equipment still isn’t all available yet. But luckily I got enough of it to get started on some actual work by Friday.

I made my first submit to the Google server on Friday! That means I made my first change to a web page on the Google server. It was just a small change on the about page for Gmail. All I did was change the languages from 38 to 40 and add Hebrew and Arabic to the language list. But I feel pretty special about it. I also got to work on my first icon. I also have a meeting for my first real project on Monday :D!

I really like the atmosphere at Google. By the end of my first week I was feeling really comfortable. I no longer feel nervous or anxious. My co-workers are really nice and have been a big help in getting me up to speed on how to use the Google file systems and learning the procedures. There’s a lot of documentation I’ve had to go through and read. I sort of felt like I was cramming for a final :lol:. It's been a challenge though because a lot of it is centralized around Unix and I only just started learning Unix a month ago.

Anyway, I just really love it there. I like the people, the food, the equipment, and the work. I just know this is going to be the best summer of my life.

That's pretty much how it is at Google. I can't tell you anything about what's going on there. That's just how it is.

I'm very tired. I didn't really do any work today but it was hectic running all over the place to do orientations, setting up stuff, etc.

If you'll excuse me, I'm going to go shower and collapse on my bed

On Tuesday I start my new internship at Google. I’m really excited about it. I can’t wait to meet the other interns and learn what life is like as a Googler.

I am really proud to be working at Google. My manager is the guy who does all of the Google holiday logos! Can you believe that?! That is AWESOME. I’m looking forward to working with him and learning the secrets of the Google doodles. Every time I think about the fact that I’ll be working at Google I pinch myself just to make sure I’m not dreaming.

Another Google intern sent me a link to this cool site called Gintern.net that displays all the Google intern blogs.

Anyway, the art section of my blog site is FINALLY done.

There are a lot of things I’m looking forward to learning this summer. I’m told I’ll be making a lot of icons and such. I don’t see myself as a really great icon designer so I’ll get a lot of practice and learn all the tricks. I’m hoping to take what I learn at Google and apply it to PaperDemon.com to make it easier for members to post their artwork and such. I’m also looking forward to trying out the hardware. I hear they use Tablet PCs for drawing and I’ve never drawn on one before. If I like it, I may buy one for myself. It will be nice to have a little computer to use as my sketchbook. I will be able to do watercolor without carrying around a paint set! I like painting digitally better than painting traditionally anyway.

Another thing I think I will buy is that Reason software for making digital music. The music programs I have now are so crappy. That is part of the reason why I haven’t posted any new music in the music section of my site for a long time. I’m waiting to get some better software with a better piano sound font.

Google gives free meals every day for employees and I’m hoping I don’t gain any weight.

I did work on my vis dev work but not as much as I should have.

I didn’t touch my short film or Surviving Together.

I did work a lot on Zarbon’s Masterpiece Theater. We released two episodes and have recorded three more that are ready for animating. I will work on these slowly though the semester.

But mostly what I spent my time on was PaperDemon.com. I decided that it was time to build all of those nifty features that I’ve had in mind for PD and prepare to sell Premium Accounts. I still have some more work to do but Premium Memberships will be offered some time in mid to late February. I’ve spent a ton of time on it and I can’t wait to offer the Premium Memberships and see what people do with the cool new features. I don’t want to get into the details of the features because they are already explained on PD.

I’ve done a lot of thinking about what it is I want to do in life and what it is I enjoy doing. I spend an awful lot of time on my website and it makes sense to me that web design or web programming is where my future is. Even though I don’t have hardly any formal education or training in it, I have a lot of knowledge and experience on the subject. I really enjoy organizing information and designing an interface to display that information, which is exactly what the Paper Demon website is all about. People upload their artwork and writing and it is categorized and organized into sections. Then that information is displayed for the viewer. I don’t know why but I really enjoy doing it and for the past month I’ve been working at least 40 hours a week developing new features for PD. I often work late in the night until I can hardly think strait or keep my eyes open. And then I just collapse on my bed and sleep. So that’s what I want to do.

My Mom sent me a link to an article on Monster.com recently that was really encouraging:

http://technology.monster.com/articles/webdesigner/

It says in there that your ticket to getting into the field is to build something. Haha! I have PaperDemon.com as well as a few other websites. It’s encouraging to know that the hardest step is already done! I do think I need to spend some time improving the user interface of PD though. I know that some of it is a little plain and confusing so I’ll need to get a book on UI design principles and look at other websites for ideas.