Maintaining progress

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.

 

Spring Break recap

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.

 

ZMT might be saved

On thursday night, I discovered that the data for all of my websites on my old hosting account was deleted. This put me in tears because it meant I lost all of the data in the database for

Zarbon’s Masterpiece Theater

since it hadn’t been moved over to my new hosting account yet at micfo.com

But today, I was relieved to find out that my old host has a backup and will have it restored tomorrow. So hopefully ZMT will be up and running just as good as ever tomorrow.