First Playground Romp

Marcel's first romp in the playground...very popular with the "ladies" it seems...

CS3 9-Slice Technique

The 9-Slice Guide Feature in both the Fireworks and Illustrator CS3 versions is an incredibly useful feature that will save you a lot of time in producing graphical assets.

Let's take a look at how you can take advantage of this feature in Fireworks CS3.

First, go to the Edit Menu and click on Insert and choose New Symbol. Make sure you click the check box to Enable 9-Slice Guides in the following options box.

This is what the 9-Slice Symbol window looks like -

Next, let's add a graphic element to the symbol. Select the Rounded Rectangle Auto Shape from the Tools palette.

With the Rounded Rectangle Shape selected draw a rectangle in the symbol window and make sure the edges of the rectangle are within the boundaries of the 9-slice guides. Here's what that should look like -


To add some flair to the symbol, select the symbol and click one of the styles from the Styles palette.
In this case, I used the Dark Chrome style.

Now your symbol will look like this -

Next, return to the main canvas/stage window and select the Text tool and add some text to the shape

Now, you can make some copies of the symbol, modify the text on it and use the scale tool to make the symbol fit horizontally with the text without distorting it's corner radius.


Have Fun!

Interview with a 16-Month Old

He says "bye, bye" right before he walks away from the camera. His other favorite words are "pup-pup" (translation:anything with lots of hair such as a dog or his dad) and "kai" which is Hawaiian for "ocean" or an Egyptian High Preist. Oddly enough, that was almost his name but we thought it might be tacky to have a half Hawaiian, half French name. He also likes to throw things down and say "uh-oh". He's a trip.

Lunar Alien Architecture

Not sure if it's real, but it's very beautiful in it's organic nature and very different from our own style of functional constructs. Very much like one would imagine alien architecture..like H.R.Gigers' Alien movie concepts. Maybe too much like that. This is allegedly a city on the moon taken from a cryptic youtube user that I've mentioned before in previous posts. There are very low resolution versions of these images that are available on the NASA website but they look like mexico from the space-station...just blotches of light were there should be no light...especially those on the dark side...are we supposed to believe that this is some sort of crystalline structure emanating it's own light source? Judge for yourself but more information is coming out that our closest celestial body is a lot more interesting than we ever thought.

New Skin

BTW: I've customized the skin for my blog because I got tired of looking at the Simple Bits created skin. There are a couple of elements that I've kept but for the most part, I've loaded all new background images. I kinda like it..it's a bit conservative..perhaps I'll do a more organic version in the future using the Dekonstruct brushes by Keith Bowman. I'm just glad to not see the same skin all the time.

The Theory of Everything

This is a great BBC documentary about what is apparently the long-sought-after "Theory of Everything" for theoretical physics.

Ancient Spacecraft on the Moon

A new youtube user just started posting some incredible footage of what he claims is footage of a secret apollo mission to investigate an ancient spacecraft on the surface of the moon. Retiredafb claims to be a 76 year old Air Force Officer located in Rwanda.
Now I've been a computer graphics professional for over a decade and the footage below looks very good..the interaction of the shadows, lens flares and surface are impressive if it's a hoax.
According to the user, he has limited technical resources in Rwanda and was unable to get the audio right so he added his own captions. He claims the findings of the mission determined that the spacecraft was 1.5 million years old and had been excavated before we did.
He also claims that the government will have be forced to disclose the information by September 2007.
View it and judge for yourself.
First, the stills (which can be seen with less detail in the public missions)-

And the video with much more detail -

CS3 Suite First Impressions

Just got my hands on the Adobe CS3 Suite. I wasn't too impressed with a lot of it but Illustrator is way better with the Flash/Fireworks type features..particularly the Styles and Symbols workflow. They have a dumb name for editing symbols called "Isolation Mode"..that's an attractive name, don't you think? Yeah..it's editing an object oriented graphic by just double clicking on it and they give it the name "isolation-mode"...too funny.

The two things I was disappointed with are the presence of the inferior Info Palette and the range of the Find and Replace tool. I had hoped they would drop the non-interactive Info Panel in favor of the Property Inspector that all Macromedia apps have. When I select something in Flash, Fireworks or Dreamweaver and I want it to to be flushed to the upper left corner of the canvas/stage/page..or whatever, I can select the object, go to the Properties Palette and put the number zero in the x and y coordinates and wham!- the object is is positioned exactly where I want it!

Also, in MM apps like Fireworks I can Find and Replace any property but in Adobe the scope is limited to text-based properties.
I love that kind of control cuz I'm used to dealing with code and I like changing an objects size and position in precise, numeric fashion but sadly, Adobe did not adopt this and the info palette is still just an informative type of feedback rather than an actual interactive control over the properties of an object.


If you want that kind of control, you'll just have to stick with Flash or Fireworks and that's fine with me. I still like Photoshop's brushes and pixel-level controls over Fireworks but for prototyping, Fireworks is still the best with the new Illustrator and any version of Flash coming in a close second.

My Friend, Dr. Michio Kaku

Dr. Michio Kaku is my friend!

Well, on MySpace anyway. I'm still stoked. He's one of my favorite futurists. Hold on to yourself and check out his myspace site and his main site and prepare to have your perception of reality expanded.

New Video of Marcel The Younger

Retro Video Goodness

Yngwie cover of "Carry On Wayward Sun" by Kansas
(dig they way he goes into the Phrygian mode toward the end and the double neck strat).
It's from the album "Inspirations. Is that Tommy Aldridge on drums? Anyway, killer - Ever wondered who really sang the song "Stand Up" from the movie Rockstar?
You didn't really think it was Marky-Mark did you?
Well, it was none other than the mighty lungs of Jeff Scott Soto who is probably best known for the first two Rising Force albums.
Don't know why Yngwie would ever give this guy a pink slip, but here's a video of the Jeff Scott Soto Band doing Stand Up -
Want more retro goodness? Check out this old performance of ELO doing "Mr. Blue Sky" (notice the backup singer...her intonation is killer). I don't know why I like this song but I'm curiously attracted to it. Living Thing and Turn to Stone are out there too but let's not go there, ok?