"What's a knock-out like you doing in a computer generated gin-joint like this?"
Will Riker: lady's man. I find his one-liners funny, but usually for the wrong reasons.
Hello again, Internet. Today I'm talking to you from my mom's new laptop computer and her beautiful wireless internet. I'm convinced that I need a wireless card. For the summer, anyway. Especially since, for some unknowable reason, AT&T won't recognize my laptop for dial-up service anymore. Alas. But maybe for the best, it'd be nice to have high-speed internet (oh-so nice!) and very convenient to have portable internet. Yay.
Let's see... other happenings include: snow. Parts III and IV. It keeps compacting on top of previous storms and nothing's melting fast enough. And what's worse is that my household is fresh out of decent snowshovels. Our last good one went to my sister last week when she got stuck in a storm and her space at her lot was too blizzard'ed for her car. So now we have a craptastic shovel that's about as old as I am and we have a few regular metal shovels. The latter actually works better than the former, but the lack of width and depth of blade is annoying. Lots and lots of ice. And walking the dog around the block is an adventure of wading through 3-5 foot drifts on the unshovelled sidewalks (such lazy neighbors!). It's a hoot. I tell her so. The dog, I mean. She gets a kick out of it, grabs the leash in her mouth, and drags me through drifts and across ice patches. HOOT.
And this stupid cat is trying to burrow into my side. What a dummy. She's purring like mad and wants to cuddle on my lap, where a certain computer happens to be. Blah.
I've been to Taekwondo twice this week. Still sore a bit from Wednesday, but joined my dad at class tonight too. There were all of 7 students, unfortunately. 4 black belts (2nd Dan and up), 2 black stripes, and 1 yellow belt. A tad unbalanced. Class itself was great. We did some traditional kick work (with obstacle assistance in chambering the kick) and a good deal of sparring kicking technique practice. No great exertion, but it was a good bit of work. We also did a bunch of forms. It's great to be back in class. There's no substitute.
By the by, I've done a bit more with my awesome graphics tablet. I don't have all of it with me here, but here's an image I happen to have on my thumb drive.
It's been really interesting, learning to color digitally. I'm enjoying it quite a lot though. I used a scanned drawing and Jasc Paintshop Pro for this and a few other kid characters that I'm creating for http://taekwondo.net. The administrator there is developing a sister site, especially for kids and wanted some characters and other colorful stuffs. So far I've finished designing four characters. He wants me to work on a comic also. Something to teach values and virtues and such. It's exciting, but it's also quite a project... as if I wasn't busy enough. We'll see. In any case, having this project has helped give me momentum in learning the media. I intend to go back and color some of my drawings in this format as well. Since a lot of them are sketches or they really only get seen online, I think coloring them digitally would be kind of awesome. And fun. And educational. I've been working with three tutorials, by the way. Yay for tutorials. One of them to convert clean drawings into a format that I can color (layer-y and stuff), one that allows me to trace an image (clean it up a lot) in a format that I can color, and one for the actual coloring aspect. I think it's going pretty well. I might post up more of the practice stuff I did. I also have three other kid characters if anyone wants to see them.
I suppose that's all for now. I have to watch Captain Picard and Commander Riker save the Enterprise now. Those silly Binars misjudged humanity. What can you do?