Sites and Sights

I'm still working a lot implementing new content on a website. It's not bad, but I realize I like making interactive content much more than web pages. One cool thing I stumbled upon was Google Co-op and Statistics. Google Co-op is a service that let's you and up to 99 of your closest friends create a search engine customized to fit your needs. I've been using it to make a search engine that return results only from our affiliated sites. It works pretty well, though if you add content to your site you need to get Google to update their database before it will show up in your engine. One thing I had to do was to make a hack so the results would show up integrated properly in our web page. Since we use PHP to generate or webpages, it was a little trick. The hack was to send the results to a content page and then call that page from a .php page that was identical to our index.php except the default content loaded was the page containing the search results. Kind of tricky but it looks like it works.

On the less technical side, I took a long walk to the beach on the weekend. The walk takes about an hour and a half. Going there is fine but, coming back is harder because it's all uphill. The beach was breathtaking! It looks like something out of a movie. Other people must think that too because when I went there, everyone on the beach had expensive looking cameras. I thought perhaps it was a photography club out on a picture taking excursion. When I got to the beach my legs were tired and since the water is really cold I decided to wade in it. I learned a while ago on a trip that if you are hiking and then wade in really cold water, it stimulates your circulation and makes your aching legs feel much better. It worked pretty well though I think other people on the beach thought I was crazy to get in the water. I walked around the beach for a while taking pictures, then I climbed up the cliff to take some more. I still wasn't wearing shoes when I climbed the cliff and when I got to the top I found out there were a lot of thorny shrubs. There was a path though, so I stuck to it and tried to minimize my stepping on spiny plants. The view from the cliff was spectacular. When I walked down the cliff I realized there was a path to go up it, and I didn't need to climb like I did coming up. There's always a lot of big bits of seaweed on the beach in this area. I remember coming here years ago and enjoying the sound of hitting the hollow tube seaweed against rocks. The beach was fun and I found two seashells which is a feat considering most west coast beaches I go to don't have any seashells.

The walk back was slow and by the time I got home I had eaten most of my king sized bag of trail mix. The next day I was also surprised that I was not as sore as I thought I would be.

PHP keeps animation at bay

I've taken a hiatus from working on the animation for a while. It looks like I would be more useful working on updating webpages here. I don't mind because I was thinking I needed a break from painting art all day; plus to make it worth my while, I decided I would trade work with the web designer. She's working on the art while I work my way through pages of PHP.
I'm happy because she's doing a good job, I just hope I can get all these pages under control.

Yesterday I realized an inconvenience of living in a yert. I was taking out my contact lenses with the case on my knee and it slipped off. Normally that wouldn't be a big deal but, the lens fell through the crack between the wall and the floor and landed outside on the dirt ground. It's pretty cold here at night so I had to put on warm clothes to go out and get it and then, to wash it off I had to walk through the woods to the bathroom. I'm starting to have more and more respect for indoor plumbing.

Wild Animals

I spent all day perfecting the art for the rabbit. I think I've figured out the best way to make art so all of the 5 or so other characters should go more smoothly. It's hard to judge whether making art digitally is going to be better than scanning in painted art. So far it doesn't seem any quicker, but I am very happy with the quality of the art. After painting all day I was pretty tired, so after work I went across the street to the kitchen to get some dinner. But on the way there I ran into a herd of wild pigs. I think there were about 10 of them. They were running around and making a lot of noise. Their footsteps almost sounded like the waves on a beach. Since I am used to the woods most wild animals don't bother me, but pigs are the exception. I think it's because when I was younger I used to play a game where you had to get past some wild boars by spearing them on horseback. If you lost the boar would knock you off your horse and kill you. I don't know too much about how dangerous a wild pig is, but they do have tusks and I'm keeping away from them.
As I was walking back home after dinner, I was still a little paranoid about running into the herd of pigs. So when I suddenly heard a scrambling noise I jumped a little bit. The noise was the fox I saw before. This time he was inside of a parked pickup truck. The owners had left their window open about 6 inches and the fox squeezed through and was looking around the inside of the cab. He must have gotten freaked out at being in the cab because he jumped out in a hurry. Then he stood there and looked at me for a while. I told him that he looked busy and he trotted off.

Living in a yert

Now that I have been settled in enough to realize I am neglecting my blog let me tell you what it's like to live here. I live in a yert, that is a Mongolian tent home. Here's a picture of it. It's actually pretty comfortable besides being chilly. There are a number of bugs that live in it with me but, I don't really get bitten so it doesn't bother me. In fact living with some bugs around can be kind of cool if the bugs are moths and they look pretty. Check out this one I found on a window at my workplace.

The main thing I miss is indoor plumbing. The first couple of days after I arrived I had food poisoning and there's nothing like vomiting in the woods a couple of times to make you homesick. After I recovered it was much more pleasant. Another strange thing about living in the woods is the giant slugs that you sometimes find. I remember the first time I saw one I thought it was some fresh animal dung but then it started to move. When you need to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night you have to be careful not to step on them. Just to give you an idea of how big these slugs really are I made this handy picture of one next to a new number 2 pencil. In fact I think this slug was longer than the pencil, but when you get near them their heads suck up into their bodies so they look fatter and smaller.

One thing I love about living in it is the sounds I hear at night. Since I live in a forest full of wildlife there is a full chorus of night sounds to listen to while I lay in bed. Now you may think you know what a forest sounds like but it's nothing compared to what it sounds like late at night. All sorts of night creatures wake up that you have never heard in the daytime. It reminds me of the sounds you would hear in an old Disney cartoon if the characters went into a jungle.

I've begun working on my animation at last. I am animating a story called "The Rabbit Who Overcame Fear", it's like Chicken Little, with a rabbit and a falling mango that scares him. It's a Jataka Tale, which is one from a collection of stories of the past lives of the Buddha. As I was researching the story I was surprised to find that many of the Jataka Tales are the basis for modern children's stories. It seems that after the Jataka Tales were created, they spread to Persia and then through Alexander the Great to Europe. It's pretty funny to see the changes that each culture made to the stories. I read several versions of the rabbit story and in each one the falling mango was replaced with a new type of fruit. I think if I were retelling my version of the story I'd make the fruit a Durian. With all those spikes I bet they could do some real damage. My old roommate used to call them the king of the fruit.

Here's an in-process picture of the rabbit I am making for the animation. I think the animation will look pretty nice, though I wonder how long it will take to make the art. After all, this story has as many characters a Chicken Little, they just don't have clever names like Turkey Lurkey and Goosey Loosey.

Go west my man.

Hey I'm Luftbuefel, LB for short and I'm an animator and programmer that decided to take a break from stresses of everyday life to go do some volunteer work in the middle of nowhere in California.

So I've lived in California before so it's no big surprise to me but I still find the differences to be very noticable. For instance, on the way to where I was going from the airport I stopped by the supermarket to get some soap and shampoo. Then I realized that the store sold only organic products. I have nothing against organic stuff, I just don't care too much about it either way, and with my current lack of income I don't want to pay more for organic. Either way, I got some shampoo, conditioner, soap, and since they didn't have any rags I got a body scrubber ball. That's all I bought and when I got to the cashier she asked me if I was doing some deep cleansing. Not really knowing what else to say, I told her I was and she smiled. I'm not really sure that I had a reason to be, but I was embarassed.

The great thing about the trip up to where I'm staying was that we stopped again at another store which was very Californian but in a different way. The store had a wooden porch on it and looked a lot like a building you would see in an old western. Best of all it has two signs: one advertising rabbit meat at $5.99 a pound, and another for a sale on buffalo burgers.

Also pretty close to this store was Bodega Bay. This was where Alfred Hitchcock filmed his excellent film "The Birds". There weren't too many birds around when I was there, but where I'm living there are some pretty huge ravens that look like they could take on a man.

Anyway, where I'm living now is ridiculously beautiful, there are wild animals everywhere and they're not to used to humans. So it is pretty easy to get close to them to take good pictures. Here are some deer I saw as I was walking home from work. A couple of days ago I counted all the deer I could see in the field I was in and I got all the way to 15. Besides all the deer, so far I've seen several flocks of wild turkey, a family of quail, lots of ravens, a tree frog, some monster slugs, and a red fox carrying something that looked like a white pipe in his mouth.