Face Lift

You’ll notice that I lightened up the backgrounds on my menus so they blend better with the gray (#C0C0C0) background. The “what’s new” option seemed to fade into the background so I didn’t shrink it down so much which is why the shadows look a little heavier. I kind of like it because it makes that stand out more and people that know the site, know to go there first anyway (once they’ve scanned the rest when they first come across it). I attempted to get some “hover” buttons working. A few of the bullet items have hover buttons, but when I attempted to attach an animated GIF to the “on hover” property, I didn’t get very far. You’ll notice that when you drag your mouse over the rendered CiCi symbol that it disappears. I’m not sure why this is, but I hope to get it fixed soon. Once it’s fixed then you’ll see a cool animation of the symbol rotating about its vertical axis.

I yanked the “SpilledMilk.com” graphic on the top of the page. I’ve seen other sites that have this at the top, but mine didn’t look all that great and you should already know that you’re at the Spilled Milk site (the dot-com is pretty much implied at that point).

I replaced the banner with glasses of milk. I created these with Bryce 4. The glasses are symmetrical lattices with one half chopped off using negative space. The inside of the glasses were “dug” out using more negative space, which happened to be a shrunken down version of the outside of the glass. The milk was then added. I copied the negative space that dug out the inside of the class and made it white with a pretty high ambient color (made it sort of glow through the glass). Instead of clipping the milk at the top of the glass I lowered the negative space to cut the milk off half way up the glass. Voila! You got milk in a glass. The spilled milk glass was a little tougher, but I already had a good framework to work with. I copied the upright glass and moved it to the right of the frame. I tipped the glass over by adjusting its rotation attributes. This looked rather funny, because the milk was defying gravity by staying in the glass. I had to make the new milk level appear as it was flowing out the glass. I moved the negative space that was clipping the milk half way up the glass all the way to the top. This looked even worse, because now I had a full glass of milk that was not obeying any laws of physics whatsoever. I made another negative block and moved it so it clipped the milk in such a way as to create a new level of milk. The spill was created the same way I created my Spilled Milk logo.

Once I get this “hover” bug worked out you should see a little more animation, but it won’t be in your face all the time.

San Diego Comic Con

I’m definitely gearing up to head out to San Diego. I’m bringing some of the postcards that I had last year which I’ll probably dump off in the “free” area. I’ll have the preview issue for people to look at and hopefully will want to purchase. I’m still not sure what to sell them for. The print run is rather small (5,000) so I’ve got that going for me. My gut is to sell them for $3.00 since they are so limited, but it is just a preview issue and I’d love to give them away. I’m thinking it’s 30 pages (gray tones) with a color wrap around cover and free signatures limited to 5,000… That’s go to be a good deal at $2.50. I still don’t know, and I still don’t have the preview issues in my possession. They’re still at the printers.

I’m actually listed on their site, but they overlooked the fact that I have a website. I just sent them more e-mail and I hope they post it soon. It’ll make me stand out a little better from the rest of the crow of thousands.
http://www.comic-con.org/Pages3/exhibit2000f.html

Monte is listed in Artists Alley:
http://www.comic-con.org/Pages3/artistsalleyf.html

Don’t worry Monte, I sent them your website address so hopefully they’ll update it soon.

I’m downloading my entire website onto a laptop as I write this. It’s not the greatest machine in the world, but it’ll work for San Diego. I should be able to type up some notes and more importantly I’ll be able to have the site on hand at the Con. It’s a pretty decent little machine, but it’s definitely not what I’m used to working with. It’s an IBM ThinkPad 133 MHz Pentium, 64 Megabytes RAM, 1 Gigabytes hard drive, Windows 98. I may even have a small power point slide show running most of the time if I have time to put one together. That may just have to happen on the plane ride and maybe as home work on Wednesday night. I thought about putting Photoshop on there to show people how I’m lettering the book, but I don’t think the ThinkPad is fast enough. Plus I’m running out of space FAST! One gig runs out pretty quickly when you’re dealing with Microsoft Applications.

I should have a Power Point presentation running during the Con in an attempt to draw people to the booth with some flashy graphics and maybe some sound.

I thought about renting a big monitor (21 inch) for the occasion, but with my luck it’ll get stolen or even more probable the ThinkPad video drivers won’t drive the monitor. Plus the graphics will look chunky and possibly slower.

Preview Issue (taking orders)

The preview issue should already be off the presses and ready for assembly. Again, these are black and white with a glossy color cover. It’s a full 32 pages (30 pages of story and 2 pinups). The print run is limited to 5,000 and most of them will go to retailers and then they’ll jack up the price. My cover price is $2.50 plus shipping. I’ve done extensive eBay sales so I would hope that my reputation as “psmart” precedes me with a 209 rating. If I get the company logo stickers made, then I’ll throw one in too. I’ll have the results of the drawing for the free preview issues so you may win one anyway even if you put in your order (then it’ll be free). So joining the mailing list really paid off, I guess as long as you win. Don’t bail out just because you don’t win though.

Pencilling / Status

It looks like Jason has about 5 pages to go. I just got 7 via FedEx the other day and they look awesome. He says he’ll be wrapping up in the next couple of weeks so I should have more images for the website soon. I’ll also be able to nail down when this book will actually go to press. Once I get a feel for how fast Alp inks the pages. I’m able to letter a page pretty quickly and I’ll probably go into more detail on that as I finish up the books.

Nanotechnology Made Simple

I added a bunch of links to my links section which explains in layman’s terms what exactly nanotechnology is. Actually the other websites do a better job at explaining what it is a whole lot better than I would so I’ll let them do the talking.

Institute for Molecular Manufacturing - Tons of great information to get started.
Nanodot – A new online newsletter that people can post their messages to.
Unbounding the Future: the Nanotechnology Revolution - by K. Eric Drexler - more of a Lehman's guide to nanotech.
Zyvex - Theory and reality all rolled into one company.

If you check out IMM their LEGO block (yeah the toy) analogy is a very good example of what we need to do in order to achieve full atom & molecule manipulation.

Rant #13 update

This was pretty anticlimactic and I’m a little disappointed at how things turned out. Remember “The Idiot” who accused me of spamming him, well he fessed up and I was able to take him off my list. He said something to the effect of “How many times do you have to be told that we don’t want this.” I’m not even sure I got his first request. I’m sure he knows the trouble he’s caused and how much of my time he’s wasted, but I’m pretty sure he’s probably happy about it.

B2Bnow.com didn’t really come up with the cash. They attempted to give me one month free, but after I talked with them they said that the maximum they could give me was three months. They had totally botched the whole “customer service” part and wasted more of my time in not responding to my e-mail in a thorough manner. I got some form letters saying they were sorry. It wasn’t until I sent them two e-mail messages and called them twice that I got somebody to call me back with the authority to reimburse me for my time wasted. Each time I called I got a different person and they were more than happy to help, but I had to get them up to speed on what was going on which wasted more of my time.

So once my “free” time runs out I’ll probably look for a new server. I can’t believe that they wouldn’t give me more “free” server time. It’s no skin off their backs and in the big picture they wouldn’t be losing a ton of money. They’ll lose more in future revenues when I bail, but maybe they’ll offer me compensation then.

The Rant…

NAPSTER – Bad. ‘nuff said. I told you to not get me started on this… Hmmmph, mmmph…. Ssssshhhh. Breathe deep. Calm cool collected thoughts. Whew. Dodged that one.

I’ll have an abbreviated update right before I head out to the con and then you can count on a novel when I return.

Thanks for all your support,

The standard removal policy if you should ever need it. Just reply to this message with the word remove in the subject and you'll be deleted from the mailing list. You might make it in ALL CAPS or else I might not take you seriously J.