Photoshop

A few weeks ago, I figured out how to make skins for weapons in one of my favorite games (CoD4). I found this extremely fun, and soon began using GIMP 2 to create my own weapon skins. I guess the reason I found this so entertaining was because I could make something, and then put it into a game, and it would be my own personalized thing that I created (bragging to my friends about it was also fun). Even though they didn't show up for other people that picked up my gun over the online server, it was still cool to be playing and then remember that thing that I created and put into someone elses work, almost contributed to. This also opened my eyes to more things I could do on the computer, like making just images on Photoshop. Not everything had to build on a game. So I went to http://www.youtube.com/jxtutorials and watched some tutorials on how to make cool images in GIMP. I started making some images just for myself, to experiment with what I could do with this program. I made backgrounds for myself, I tried messing around with new brushes (by the way, I get my brush packs from deviantart.com or brusheezy.com), and found some cool things that I couldn't do before, just by looking up some things on the internet. Then I thought about how it was winter time, and Christmas was slowly creeping up on me, and I really didn't have anything to give to my family, and I also didn't wanna spend any money. So I said, "Hey, what if I combined this skill that I just acquired with that?" and I decided that I would find out all of my families' screen resolutions on their computer, so I could make wallpapers for them for Christmas (and certainly more than one, and not just 2). Because most of my family has mobile computers (except for me and my grandpa), I thought it would be cool to make the wallpapers a week in advance or something, and then when we go on our ski trip starting on the twentieth, then on Christmas, they would boot up their computers and find a cool background for Christmas, and thanks to Windows 7 themes, I can make a slideshow of pictures that I make. I also thought about it from even a career standpoint. There are people in the world that live under great living conditions, and all they do is graphic design for a living. Most of them also do some normal photo editing for people, maybe even some photography, but I thought that would be a really cool way to make money. Or, there is a website called threadless.com where you can submit designs for t-shirts you make, and if they pass criticism from all of the people who vote on them, and if they make it in a certain margin of top votes, then you get around $5000, and your shirt gets printed and sold regularly. Plus, every time they bring it back to re-print it, they give you $500 dollars, which would be a cool idea for a job, even though it would be a bit chancy.

Call of Duty 4 Skinning

A few weeks ago, I figured out how to make skins for weapons in one of my favorite games (CoD4). I found this extremely fun, and soon began using GIMP 2 to create my own weapon skins. I guess the reason I found this so entertaining was because I could make something, and then put it into a game, and it would be my own personalized thing that I created (bragging to my friends about it was also fun). Even though they didn't show up for other people that picked up my gun over the online server, it was still cool to be playing and then remember that thing that I created and put into someone elses work, almost contributed to.

Weekly Reflection

Jeroo is done, because we took the final quiz. I liked it, it's more fun than Alice (in case you can't tell at this point, I didn't like Alice, I know it taught fundamentals of Java like methods and loops, but the syntax was most of the time confusing and was hard to find stuff), and I liked it. This week, Mr. Stephens noticed that me and my friends tend to play a lot of games once done with the labs, and so he gave us an interesting (and mandatory) challenge for next semester. He told us that if we wanted to play a game in his class after the Christmas break, we would have to make it ourselves, which got me thinking about how would I incorporate multiplayer into a Java game besides sharing a computer...? Like for instance if I wanted to play Pong with Gus, but didn't wanna have to share a keyboard? Hmm. Anyways, this week was fun as usual.

Grooveshark

When I am on my computer and I hear a thing of music, but I don't want to bike all the way to Waterloo Records to buy a CD, I go to Grooveshark, a website dedicated giving you free music to stream. The way it works is that Grooveshark hosts their servers, and you can upload your own music libraries to Grooveshark. You and other people can then search for music, and listen to each others copyrighted material, but don't worry, it's 100% legal. It doesn't include downloads, just streaming. Check it out! http://listen.grooveshark.com/#

Weekly Reflection

This week in Computer Science, we finished up Jeroo. Jeroo actually got hard for me when I tried to make compound conditionals work, and it failed horribly. Ifs was very easy for me, and I kind of went through those labs really fast. I had a fun time with Jeroo overall, and using it kind of got me warmed up to Java which we will be using next semester. Trying to use the methods in Jeroo was a bit unorganized, because they were all kept in this one little method (tab). But I like Jeroo, and am ready to move on to Java.

Call of Duty: Black Ops Release

This week on the 10th, a new addition to the Call of Duty first person shooter series was released. Dubbed "Black Ops", it combines many of the game series' previous titles with aspects from other game series. Being a huge addition to the series seeing that the previous game was a glitchy mess, in which every single gun in the game was over powered, being an owner of Black Ops myself, I can say for sure that I like Black Ops much better than Modern Warfare 2. I also play the game with friends such as Calvin and Michael, and others from Kealing.

Weekly Reflection

This week was more of Jeroo, which I thought to be a very nifty program now. At first, it seemed a bit repetitive and inefficient, but as we got into methods and loops, the challenges actually became easier and easier for me. Instead of having to type up 20 lines of code to do a very simple task, it took me 5 lines of code to call a method a certain number of times, and using while loops to detect conditions. I am enjoying Jeroo much more than Alice so far, because it gives you more freedom than Alice, and also because you don't have to search around forever for a certain function, you just type it.