Loneliness

Loneliness can strike you even if you are at the top
It does not give a damn whether you are hot or not :P

Photo editing...or creating incredibly amatuerish drawings

I have always loved pictures. Who doesn't? I mostly love pictures of nature especially the seashore. It always have some kind of relaxing effect on me.

So it is not surprising that I would take the next step, to create pictures of my own. Given my proximity to the world of technology, it is no surprise that I am no stranger to photo editing tools. But although I have always seen them in action, I have always been mystified on how to use them. Perhaps because of the narrow view that programmers could not be artists and vice versa that have deterred me from using them. Or because when I do try to use them, I am discombobulated by their complexity ( all those shortcuts and terms scare me ) and end up with a less than satisfactory experience in photo editing.

But life can be strange sometimes. Now I am thrust to a position in which at least a minimal knowledge of photo editing is required. Finally I have an excuse to dive in the photo editing world. I have been exploring a bit and there are two tools that I finally decided to learn. One is Photoshop, an extremely popular proprietary photo editing package and Inkscape, an open source vector graphics editor. Photoshop needs no explanation why it should be learned. It is the industry standard after all. I like Inkscape because it is flexible due to it vector orientation and it has a great user interface in my opinion.

As usual, starting to learn something outside my normal scope of skills is daunting. But I bet this endeavor would be worth it.

Character Generator

I got an idea yesterday evening while typing away in the late hours trying to help my mother finish an encoding task that was given to her by her friend for a non-trivial fee. Since I am still an amateur ( or rather a tryout ) writer, I have poor skills in world building and characterization. I have tried various techniques to create interesting characters but almost always end up creating a cardboard type that's too cliche or a Marty Stu type that is too much of a reflection of my own views. Then I got the idea of making a character generator, the type that will just randomly spit out traits, moods, attitudes, etc. It is definitely not a unique or new idea ( There are tons of character generators available in the internet, mostly for tabletop RPG's ). But since I am programmer, maybe it is worth making one to learn the how it is made. It will also mean custom features in the program, that is I can decide what info the program would churn out.

One of the interesting ways which I can use this program is to churn out a few characters randomly and try to make a plot for them. The idea is silly but I bet it will make my creative juices flow. It would train me to make good plots and flesh out characters.

I will be using Python to make the program since WxPython is the easiest GUI library I have used by far. If there is anyone interested in the program, just mail me and I will keep you posted.

Now if only I can make a world generator :)....

National Novel Writing Month

While I was surfing through a Catholic site that I visit often, I came upon a thread which at first look, just to be an announcement of one of those writing contests. It turned out to be an invitation to a web novel writing contest. But here is the catch, you only have 1 month to finish the novel. And here is the bigger catch. It must contain 50 THOUSAND words. As for me, at first I underestimated the huge amount of word count. Until I tried to write page one of a story that I just came up with on the fly. It turned out that it took me roughly 1 hour to write it and it only contains 700+ words. If you do the math, you will find out that it will take 72 pages to fill it up. That's not bad for a writer. But its really a monumental number for me. I mean, I can only managed to write one page stories most of the time.

It got me interested. Since I enjoy challenges that can make me hone my skills, I joined the contest. That means I have roughly 2 months before it starts. Plenty of time to prepare ( or to cheat for that matter ) . I'm interested in how this will turn out.

Content change

This blog ,more or less stagnated, because of the standard that I held to myself that everything I wrote here should be insightful. Another problem is that I can only right something worth reading only if I take the time to set aside time and really think things through ( Most of the time that means using pen and parer ). Since this blog is meant to be an idea pool, its better if I'll just post anything I can think off the moment. Maybe this will turn to be less than I hope for but I think I will just wait and see. Who knows, maybe more content will be published this way.

Simplifying Life

I'll try to do only what is necessary...

• Study the Catholic Faith
  
• Piano
• Story writing...ok ok its not exactly story but more like generating words
• Learn Web Design...( I am unfortunately not gifted in having an artists vision...I am not sure if this can be acquired)
• Write in this blog
  
• Other things...( actually I am just to busy too think of the more miscellaneous stuff )