Francis’ Weblog

Escape have announced a 100% free course funded by SkillSet. Not only that you get paid UK minimum wage through the period of the training, you get 4 weeks work experience at a post production house (oh and you get paid for that as well)! I think you’d be stupid not to apply. The course runs from 11th August for 18 weeks and then the 4 weeks in industry. More info can be found on Escapes website.

They have also just launched a competition to win £10k worth of free 3D/CG VFX training! Its in conjunction with Channel 4 and you can find more information at the 4Talent website. All you have to do is write in 50 words or less why you love 3D animation, what you aspire to do in the future and how the Escape course will help you get there!

Ok now this is one hell of a neat keyboard! and I want one! (see if I can persuade my boss!) . The basic concept is that you can change the keyboard keys and say what image or video you want to display on each key. Its been released next month! they have been promising it for.. well forever but now they are shipping it. They have three versions depending on how many active keys you want. The most expensive being ALL 102 active keys which is around £976. But what you can do is buy the keyboard with just one active key and then buy the extra active keys over time. So you can buy the keyboard for £288, with the spacebar being active… and thats about it.
Maybe a bit expensive for me, but very cool!

More info http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus/

They’ve gone on sale!!! yupiee! You can now buy early bird Mt Ruapehu lift passes at $399, for both sides of the mountain Whakapapa (which is new zealands largest developed ski field) and Turoa. Its interesting to see the price difference to europe nearly 4.5x more to get a 3 valleys season pass, but hey its a bigger skiable area

Off to snow planet tonight for some snowboarding. Its open 365 days a year. I asked them how many people came on christmas day and they said it was totally packed out! Bizzare!

Oh in tech news McAfee FAILED the 100% virus scan at VB. Virus Bulletin tests a load of virus scanners for “100% virus detection”. They failed to detect viruses running on Vista, ironically enough Microsofts’ OneCare also failed.

Well has promissed I have uploaded the GT Vid you can get it from:

http://www.gtdev.net/crimbo2006.mp4 - Mpeg4

http://www.gtdev.net/crimbo2006.wmv - Windows Media Player

Its only a very rough cut, and it goes on a bit. But you get the general idea. For all those who want to know I ran the footage through a de-interlacer and then colour corrected it to give it a little bit of a filmatic look.

Ok well as some of you know my laptop hard disk died some months back and i’ve eventually got round to pulling off all my music off my iPod onto my computer. Easy! well all except Apple decide to create 100s of directories on the ipod and put 5 or so music files in them and rename the files so you have no idea what they are… nice! Anyway rather than going through my entire CD collection re-burning the MP3s I thought I’d hunt the web for a util. Well I must say there is a LOT of junk relating to MP3/4 management… anyway in the end I found this great MP3/4 manager called “The GodFather“… and it really is! and best of all its Free!

A mate of mines brother has just released a new album. Ok it was released last month but I didn’t know then :). Ben Smyth is the bassist in Rooster... its quite good you can hear some snippets from their website. They have quite a big following in Japan but I don’t know about in the UK and elsewhere but it looks like they are doing quite well, go buy the music!!

Ok this is cool, its visual look of flight paths going over the US, using US flight data over a 24hr period.. over 19000 planes in the air at a peak time!!

I’ve re-found pimpthatsnack.com a great website with recipes’ for “pimping up your snack” … I think a mate created a huge cookie using a recipe on the site. I am going to make the kitkat bar! so watch out supermarket, here I come!!

Synthetica is a great easy to use look and feel framework for Java; AT LAST java doesn’t look square, blocky and horrible.