Get Stoned!

So this weekend I started back at work on one project and got drafted into another!?! How do these things always happen to me? Oh the humanity :P

She has always been an artist at heart, but a much more hands on artist than I. No digital for her. No sir. She prefers the feel of a brush in her hands over of a mouse. The past few weeks she has been learning how to paint her art onto rock... Mexican black river rock to be exact. She has gotten quite good at it I think and so far it has been some of her best work to date.

What started as a hobby has turned into a small business for her. She has sold 17 rocks with different critters on them. Everything from cats, dogs and racoons to dragons & polar bears. Very cool stuff.

So of course she needs a website... hey listen I need a web site too!?! Ah well. Some how the ladies always win. So I started putting together something for her. It's a work in progress, but at least the main frame is together with a few bells & whistles. The rest should go live over the next few days.

Take a look and tell me what you think. These "Whimstones" as she calls them make great gifts. (hint hint). Oh and if you like them tell a friend for me would ya? We artist live by word of mouth. Thanks :)


Whimstone.com ~ Tell a Friend! ;)

Super Secret Project

Spent too many late hours last night working on a new super secret project. If all goes well I can kill 2 or more birds with about 150 well placed digital stones :O Wait didn't I say I needed to create a website?? Ah well maybe later :P


shhh! It's a see-crete ;)

Hackin' Up a Lung

I've always had a productive cough. That's a nice way of saying when I cough it sounds like I'm "hawking up a luggie" ewww. I wake up most mornings and sound like a heavy cougher. Nasty stuff. I don't smoke, but I do joke about second hand smoke, because I live with a smoker. Living with someone who smokes in the house is tough for a non-smoker. You never really get used to it.

Anyway I've lived with this problem since I was a kid, but lately I have had some scary bouts of feeling like a heavy weight was on my chest. Whenever I would get like that I could usually use Primatine Mist (over the counter) to clear out my lungs, but this weekend it didn't seem to help much.

Then I read about CF (Cystic Fibrosis) and got scared enough to go see the Doc and ask for some real answers as to why I have this chronic problem. She doesn't feel I'm a candidate for that terrible disease as unfortunately it kills most afflicted with it before they reach their mid-thirties. I also lack a history of it in my family. She took a listen to my chest and told me that I do have some rattling going on in there. She ordered a whole battery of x-rays, blood tests and put me on some antibiotics and a weird disc shaped inhaler called advair. I like her. She gets right down to business ;) Hopefully it's just allergies and a mild case of asthma.

I blame the cat... he's shifty eyed and I think he wants me out of the picture (probably laying on my face at night trying to smother me - lil bastard :P

My pixel kingdom for a digital horse!

A fellow publisher tried to email me and he had to dig through about 4 different websites to get ahold of me. Man that is just embarassing. I really need to find time to plop down at least a basic website. As much as I enjoy blogging, it's overdue for Dirty Unicorn Games to have a place to call home. (now if I can just get my head out of the clouds, put my feet on the ground and BUILD it then things will be peachy ;)

In related news I managed to spend a whole lot of time and money to increase my productivity just a little... funny how that works *sigh*

I grabbed some more super useful progs from Stardock. They are a suite of tools collectively called ThinkDesk and if you do a lot of work on the computer you may want to at least give them a glance. ThinkDesk consists of 4 utilites:

Multiplicity - not just a funny Michael Keaton film, but also an interesting program (albiet one I personally may not use very much at home). It allows you to control multiple PC's with one keyboard and mouse. This may sound rather dry and surely there are other programs that do this (remote desktop springs to mind), but this one is cool in that you can apparently run your mouse off of one screen and onto the next. Imagine dragging and dropping files from one PC screen to another. Want your son or daughter to turn off the computer and come to dinner? Grab the mouse and roll over to thier screen and shut it down for them muwahaha. Play multiple characters in an online game by jumping back and forth. Lots of intersting ideas here. It's sort of a super "micro-network" between your computers.

KeepSafe - extremely useful for artists or writers. KeepSafe will make backup copies of file seach time you save them. So say you mess up and delete a chapter of your manuscript you can go back to an older version and retrieve it. It's a nice and simple backup utility that works on individual files, file types or whole folders. Good stuff for lazy people like me that always wait to backup important stuff.

ThinkSync - this program lets you synchronize 2 folders so that they contain the same files. I'm using it for a backup tool that runs every few days. The nice thing here is that it can work like an incremental backup and just save files that have changed. I use this to backup my art folders that I dump most of my work in.

SecureProcess - the last utility may be the best for just about all users. You train SecureProcess over the course of a week (or longer if you like) so that it gets used to what programs you use regularly. After that it becomes kind of an internal firewall as it protects against unrecognized processes from installing or running. This is really sweet because it works at the system level instead of looking for programs that are trying to send or recieve in and out of the computer. Combine this with Startup Monitor, Spyware Guard, and Spyware Blaster and you have a really good chance of keeping that spam and virus crap off of your system!

T.G.I.S.

Well the week is over and I made it through alive. Wish I could say that I was able to clean out my workload and not have to go back to a mountain on Monday, but C'est la vie.

At least my art batteries are starting to fill up a little. I can always tell when I'm getting "too" artsy with the computer - I begin by trying to replace my Windows shell. If you're not sure what this is check out sites like Customize.org, Wincustomize.com and Shell City.

Basically there is a whole grass roots movement out there of artists and programmers that are creating all manner of replacements and improvements to Windows from nice icons and wallpaper to wholesale replacements of the windows GUI.

In the past I have used many shell replacements like LiteStep, Talisman and Hoverdesk to completely change how my system looks and works. To get what I mean imagine if your desktop had almost no icons on it, but it had a clock whose hands moved and kept the actual time... or a silver sphere in the center of your screen that when you click on it, your most recently used program icons whirled out around it for your use. Shell customizing allows you to do all kinds of crazy stuff that Windows was never really designed to do. Not that it can't... it just doesn't (thanks Microsoft)

I decided to err on the side of caution thsi time and not complete slag my system (as I have done many times in the past - it can be quite addicting onc eyou start tweaking windows ;))
So I am sticking with a great little utility called Object Dock. Object dock can replace or work with your task bar. It has a lot of cool little features and allows me to organize a lot of programs along the bottom of my computer for quick access. I am loving it. There's a free version available or for $20 you can have the full featured thing which includes many cool features.

The upside is that I should get to working on an actual website now for Dirty Unciorn Games (yeah!). The downside is I spend a lot of time creating little icons and organinzing shortcuts. Productivity sure does take a lot of work! :D


My ObjectDock - if you look close you can see little Flatlands and 12 to Midnight links hehe ;)

Gaming slump...

Ugh work can drain the life out of you!

Over the weekend I was bursting with creativity. Overflowing with enthusism. As the long weekend faded so did my hope.

When I finally settled down into my chair on Tuesday morning, two hours late for work, the inevitable began... Like a salt-sucking monster from Star Trek, work began to drain the creative life force from me. It squeezed me like a lemon until I was a dried out crusty, rusty, discarded automaton at the end of the day.

It didn't help that every nice time extension I had received BEFORE the holiday weekend was suddenly yanked out from underneath me when I returned. Now I need to send four huge magazine columns much sooner than anticipated. On top of a mountain of other work. In fact in order to get everything done I will require a time machine or some other device for warping space & time. :P

When everything was said and done I was ready to blow off some mental steam and I was craving some gaming (something I dearly miss) . It was sheer luck that I stumbled across Temple of Elemental Evil at the local bargain-mart. I remembered playing a 100 time limit demo if this game last year and it was a lot of fun. Put out by Troika games, this is one of the few computer RPGs that uses turn based combat instead of click-fest mania. Best $10 I could spend right now as it affords me some pseudo-roleplaying (although roleplaying by yourself feels a bit like mental masturbation, pleasurable but short lived. Hope I don't go blind ;)

Of course playing computer isn't very productive, but sometimes you just have say phuck it and recharge the batteries.

I think everybody "self medicates" in some form or another to kill their doldrums. Some people smoke, some people drink, some take drugs (legal and illicit)... for me it's computer games. I like to unplug from real life for a while and let a pixel fantasy world keep stress and boredom at bay.

If I can just make it through this week I know there will be light at the end of the tunnel.

Alright enough talk. Kromm the Barbarian decrees that the blood God needs more Orc sacrifices to sate his fury so I'm off to save the world... or at least Hommlet.

If you blog it they will come...

O.k. so a friend kindly pointed out that I'm not really updating my blog.

Now who in the world would want to read the rants, ravings and incessant droning of an old, nearly senile misanthrope like me???

Originally I created my blog so I could post on another friends blog. Now it just sort of functions as a pseudo-website for me... until I could get my lazy butt around to designing a real website (which when done someday will be parked at DirtyUnicorn.com )

I mean if I post my assorted daily drivel who would even read it?

I do admit a certain strange fascination with reading other blogs. It's fascinating (and a bit voyeristic) to peek into other peoples lives. To compare lifestyles and interests with people on the other side of the country and even the globe! So maybe... just maybe someone as demented as me is out there in the vast electronic ethereal who will find something I write here interesting.

Well I guess I've resigned myself to give it a shot.

If nothing else it's gotta be good for the psyche... or the id... or the karma... or something!?!