Silran's Playground

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Job Woes

So I've been a contract worker for Rockwell Collins for 11 months now through Donatech.  Being that I only had a month to go, I felt it was important AND necessary to talk to my lead about my future with the company.  I.E. will I renew my contract, get hired on as a permanent employee or not continue on with the company.
It turned out to be the last thing on the list above.  Due to two projects (with projected hours above 20000 for each) being cancelled or delayed there isn't enough work to keep ALL of us contract workers there.
All four contract workers are being let go by mid October.  It was a shock to a couple of my friends who are employees and too the person I am answering to for this marketing demo we are preparing for the beginning of November.
You see they expected me to be there until the end of October for the crunch period, which this changes.
Can I say that my motivation went out the window, I think I spent a half hour in shock, then talked for awhile to the other contract workers about the situation.  I contacted Shreyash who is my liason with Donatech to start looking for jobs anywhere he can (meaning out of state, because in UT there are no prospects).  I also am preparing to give my Mazda back to the bank and walk away from it and take out the last of my mutual funds to buy a POS car to replace it with.
I have a $467 car payment which with rent and other bills will not be payable on Unemployment if I don't get a job.
My drop dead date is October 19th which is a Monday.
I didn't feel like working on Impossible Box stuff or on anything for Miah or April and barely scraped together the desire to turn in another business card design tonight:



Instead, I went over to Chris H's house to watch Battlestar Galactica: Caprica, have some yummy fish that he cooked up for us and a salad as well.  Then Erin joined us and we watched House.
I needed that, I needed to just center myself and be with friends to bring me to Earth.  If I had been alone I probably would have kicked the crap out of my punching bag (not a bad idea but is that really productive, wait neither was what I just did).
So, tomorrow is a new day where I work to take a negative and make it into a positive.

Monday, September 21, 2009

Business Cards

So designed a new card for a company CPMC which they then have to decide to choose amongst other candidates.

Here are the designs:




And a horizontal version:





They like the first design, but haven't heard back on second one yet.

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Impossible Box update

So Impossible Box meeting went well, we discussed some story ideas and a pulse on where we are in relation to the project and each other with the project. That way we're all on the same page. :-)
We cleared up some ideas on logos for the "universe" and made up a game plan as to how to safely and legally show our work without getting ripped off before even getting started.

Monday, September 14, 2009

New T-shirt design for Spreadshirt

Alright folks, here is another design for a T-shirt, this one is based on a song, from a certain band suggested by my friend Diana.

http://www.spreadshirt.com/us/US/Detail/Detail-3376/Marketplace/Products/detail/article/5072467/

Hope you enjoy

Saturday, September 12, 2009

Logo Designs for Bay Area Warriors

 Well my friend Mara'D asked me to do a logo for her air group the Bay Area Warriors.  She's an old friend and workmate from SingleTrac Studios and I thought I would help her out.  She had sketched up a design for her logo and I did my best to emulate it.  As with any logo I do, I offer variations to see what is possible and to jog any brain cells into suggesting a more cohesive direction.

Here are the logos below:

Pocket Dimensions

It must have been all the rich food I ate, because lately I don't ever remember my dreams. 
In my dream we're at so me park, the park is part of the environment surrounding the "complex."  I'm there with Jeremiah and we're just hanging out, when Ed appears and wants to join us; naked.  Odd but ok, she throws a blanket on herself and we walk around the park.  At one point, Ed lays down and emotionally crumbles, Jeremiah and I try to get her up but to no avail.  Ed's next move is to throw off her blanket, I being a gentleman and also because of the kids decide to climb on top to cover her.  Why simply not throwing the blanket on her wasn't sufficient I don't know.  As we argue with her and a bunch of leering men and teens begin to gather, Ed bolts to the bathroom and disappears, running past Jen Simoni who comes over to chat with me.  We talk and the park area half becomes a bar while we are chatting and ten there is commotion in the bathroom and everything becomes the bathroom again. Jen is gone. 
Jeremiah comes out of the bathroom carrying Ed who looks like a tight emotional ball of flesh, but somehow she has some clothes on again.  We begin walking towards our car's to get out of this place, when she hops out of Miah's arms and runs to get water.  Miah is a bit frustrated at this point.
I run after her to make sure she doesn't get into mischief and as I approach her I witness something that Ed had mentioned before but I had not had the privilege to see (at least that's the way it was in the dream), the world in front of her hand goes all fuzzy and wavers and she reaches into this fuzziness and pulls out a water bottle!  OMG, I've just witnessed a fully functioning and existing pocket dimensions, what a find!  Jeremiah catches up and sureptiously  I try to convey that message to him, in a sort of over the shoulder mouthing exageratingly sort of way.  He just looks at me like I'm an idiot and there it ended.
Wonder what it all means?  Just a piece of grool stuck in my belly?

Greek Festival

What a great night!  Yea the lines were long, yeah the food was expensive, but hey, it was good times.  Had a beer to pass away the times, Erin (ever the caregiver) bought us these cheese stuff things with a flakey crust like baklava and some dough stuff fried and doused with honey.  That held us until then, unfortunately with the diet I'm on, if I miss a meal no matter how small it might be, the sugar levels begin to drop and I can feel the "monster" in me begin to come out.  So she saved the day.  The line was HUGE, it took us about an hour to finally get our food and it cost me $21, Chris ended up with a $29 bill for his food.
I figured out that I had 6 different items on my plate and each of those items added up to a serving a piece, so I had a serving for 6...I haven't done that in 3 months!  I actually got woozy from the carb influx, but didn't suffer from the carb slush that i get when I dance sometimes, so that was good.
God, like 3 dolmatis, meatballs, lemon rice, beefstew, some flaky spinach thing, and some other item I can't remember...six items!
We ate, some of us admired the beauty of all the Greek women, my lord they keep themselves well even the ones my age or older.  sigh.
After that walked back to Area 51 (we had parked Chris' Rubicon there) and went into Area to look around.
Finally we left a little after the bar shut down but before the club closed and went back to Chris' house.  Chris offered up some Barton's gin and pineapple.
Danced a little bit, got offered a cupcake for a birthday, a shot for being there, it just never ended.
Tomorrow, back on the wagon for this boy.

Friday, September 11, 2009

The Stand-In night.

Is home safe, and going to bed no later than he normally would be going to bed, save that his legs are really sore from dancing first upstairs to some Depeche Mode and then downstairs to finish off, I swear that Kevin was trying to kill me down there.  Dude, back to back marathon songs? Oh well at least at my age I can do it right?
This more than makes up for some frustration earlier, but that is past.  Once again, it was nice dancing out there with Miah and April, less idiots down there.  One tried to parody Miah but he was dissuaded by him and sent on his way.  Interesting, why does Miah get parodied by younger gawky 21 something male and I get parodied by the munchkin 18 year old?
Sigh, that girl, she literally lasted a minute trying to dance around me and make fun of me.  Finally, it was like "man I'm going to accidentally hit that girl," SHE WAS THAT CLOSE!
I turned bent down to talk to her, and said: "Hon if your unable to dance, you might want to get off the dance floor."
Sigh.  Probably should have ignored it, but a minute?  Come on, most times when that happens it's over like in seconds with male or females, because I just ignore them and (especially with guys) dance through their space as if their not there, they usually get the hint quickly.  But this little girl was literally less than 5' tall! 
Oh well, the night ended well overall.  I got a good workout.

Thursday, September 10, 2009

New logo stuff!

Still working at trying to get some logo's actually accepted!  So far...no go :-(
But I keep trying!  It's how you learn right? :-)  Rejection is a learning tool.

I mean that's how we learn to date better right?

The latest logo is for a lawyer, she wanted to incorporate a fox into her design:

 
I dunno, the fox is cool, the requirement was to put the fox in without making it look to cheesy.
In the meantime, I've been busy making funny parody logos for our Impossible Box project, look for updates coming soon on the Impossible Box Blog: http://impossiblebox.blogspot.com/
Bye for now!

Thursday, September 3, 2009

The monkey see monkey do syndrome

Here is what I think is amusing...I submitted a design for a logo at 99designs.com for a company called Statrad.  The image at the link below represents the artwork previous to my entry.

http://99designs.com/contests/27446/entries/91

Then came my design:
 
Most entries previous to this were eliminated.  After that this is what the designs ended up looking like:


 
See a pattern?  This happened after I got some positive comments on my design.  My design is still in the running but so are all the ones afterwards which look like :-/
So much for originality on their part eh?
This is the final design based on their requests for a difference in color and removing the dots, which some people afterward didn't pay attention to.

 
Not sure if it's any better.

Shaving a penny here and a dollar there.

Trying to survive financially in this economy blows let me tell you.  I'm trying to pull some magic spells here to help.  I've reduced my gym membership to a pinance to just keep it open and locked at the rate it's at now, I'm getting rid of my storage unit and going to stuff it all into my one bedroom, I was able to do graduated payments at SHC and I'm negotiating my auto insurance to shave off $30-40 there as well.  Once I finish paying off this new phone my cell phone payments should drop another $60 as well.
All in the name of pinching money and surviving.  If this works out right, I could save almost $200, which turns into $100 once my loan payments start back up again.
To top it off, I begin my annual pilgrimage to any bank including my own to see about refinancing my car so that I can get lower paymens (that's what's really eating into my finances-$467 a month is a big gouge).
I'm sure you can understand.

Crom!

We had a good meeting, Amanda's stuff looks great!  Her process doesn't leave me with any worries, and Jayson came up with a good plan on how we should proceed with our workflow :-)
On a lighter note:


http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8s6pn_conan-the-barbarian-battle-of-the-m_shortfilms


Crom!

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Our third meeting for Impossible Box

Today we're going to look at Amanda's artwork and see what here process of developement is, in the hope's or better yet not hope to enable a more efficient way of producing artwork for the comic book.
Besides that, I am showing the directory structure for our files (so we know where stuff goes and where to find it, and we don't stand there going ugh...) and the naming convention for the files (so that we're not just naming thing willy nilly: like "hat" or panel1, but more like panel1_issue1).
In addition, Jayson is going to go over what workflow we should choose, waterfall or .....I forgot, BUT what I do remember is that I like the flow of the second one rather than the first one.
I'm sure that Jayson or I will be updating the Impossible Box Blog sometime later or tomorrow, might be able to show some artwork that Amanda has cooked up. :-)
Ta Ta for now.