New Picture with Short Hair

I was going to wait till this weekend to take a new picture of myself with short hair. But then I was set up to do Erin Marcon's "Collections" column in Hyper Magazine.Left to right on the monitors is Fury, the original Command & Conquer, and Eye of the Beholder. The 5 characters on the Eye of the Beholder screen are all old Westwood Studios employees - left to right: Myself, Frank Saxon, Aaron Powel, Phil Gorrow, and Paul Mudra. The statue between the monitors is from the comic book Invincible by Robert Kirkman. You can also see Sergio Aragonés Groo statue sitting on top of the Nintendo DS games. The figures on top of the computer are from Homestar Runner.

It was a last minute thing so I had to quickly take a new picture and answer all his questions. I was up till all hours of the morning trying to get a decent picture.

I remember when I was taking photography classes at College of Southern Nevada in Vegas. One of the girls asked me for advice because I was getting A's on all my assignments. I asked to see her proof sheets for our last assignment. She had taken 5 pictures for the assignment. First I showed her one picture that showed what I had done to set up the picture, lights hanging off cloths racks and stuff like that. Then I showed her my poof sheets. I used 7 whole rolls of film just to get one picture that I could work on for few hours in the dark room to get it looking good enough to turn in. Then I asker her out and she turned me down. :-(

I'll still try to take another picture this weekend to make a new profile picture.

Back from Melbourne

Here is a picture of the Fury booths at GCAP, eSports and eGames in Melbourne.










I would like to point out that the girls in the last picture were kicking ass. The guy sitting across from them kept standing up and looking over the computers as if to assure himself that yes, he had in fact had his butt handed to him by a 8 year old girl.

While we were setting up all the computers at eGames, I noticed that our friends over at Australian Gamer hadn't arrived and set up yet. So decided to have a little fun. Now when I showed this picture to Yug he game me such a hurt look as if I had just stolen his last beer. I felt so bad. I would also like to point out that in the end, there was in fact cake. It was some kind of fruitcake covered in nuts, so really, no big loss.



The first night we got to Melbourne I talked everybody into going to the Hardrock Cafe for dinner because I wanted to get a pin for my collection. I had been too lazy to walk the few blocks to get the pin when I was in Melbourne last year. From our hotel this year it was all the way on the other side of the CBD. Once we got all the way over there we found out that it had closed 2 weeks ago. Sigh.

So thats about it for my trip to Melbourne. Well except for the part where some guy picked my pocket and I chased him down and tackled him to the ground. That was kind of fun except for the part where he ran off and when security got there they yanked me off in to the back room for some spit in your face yelling type interrogation.

Oh, and I cut my hair off. Pictures to come in the next few days.

eGames & GCAP in Melbourne

I will be heading down to Melbourne Wednesday for the eGames Expo. I feel Auran's official press release for the topic covers all the points nicely:

We're sending some of our unwashed* staff to the eGames Expo in Melbourne, which starts on the 16th of November and runs through to the 18th. If you're in the Melbourne region, get along to the expo and visit the Fury stand to have a chat. We'll have copies of Fury for sale at special show prices as well, so come with some cash to pick up a copy for you or a friend.

* Staff will be patched before the show to remedy this bug.

If you have yet to sign up as member of my rabid legion of followers and you happen to be near Melbourne next weekend; stop by eGames and bring your own pen. I swear newbie legion members steal more pens from me.

I will actually be switching between our booth at eGames and a booth at Game Connect: Asia Pacific (a.k.a. GCAP), an industry conference event also being held in the Convention Center; but I shouldn’t be that hard to track down.

Ashwin also just let me know that the Electric Playground video of me interviewing Connie and Baxter here in the office for is up on their site. I won't linking to said video because I look like shit. This is what happens when you live somewhere with high humidity, fry your hair by bleaching it blond and not know when you leave the house in the morning that you are going to be doing a video shoot.

I have dyed my hair back brown as you can see from the picture to the right, but half that length is fried. The natural curl is starting to come back but unless I use excess hair product it frizzes out halfway through the day. I am probably going to cut the damaged length off when I get back from Melbourne.

If you really want to see how bad it looks, feel free to go find the Electric Playground site yourself, but just remember. I warned you.

Hair Today

I got an updated picture up. The problem I'm having is that I'm a funny looking freak!... but that is besides the point. What I meant to say was back when I first put this blog up, I set up the picture in Photoshop to have a drop shadow on a white background. I'm big on the clean white background with drop shadows, notice that I drew the Thottbot logo the same way. When I uploaded my picture to blogger it displayed on the blog with a black line around it. I couldn't figure out how to get rid of the line in the template right away, so took it out and then linked it into one of the text fields of my profile using HTML.

Unfortunately, Blogger no longer lets you have HTML in your profile text fields. It still works, you just can't save it anymore without it giving you an error message that the IMG tag is not allowed. Even if I open my profile now and try to save it without any changes, it gives me that error. I host that picture on my own site though so I just saved over the 2006_blond picture with the new one and viola new picture.

I have since found the HTML that caused the black line and figured out how to remove it. It will just take some work to undo all the custom hacks I've done to the template especially since I'm not really all that good with HTML and got it all working with lots of trial and error.

"Hmmm wonder what this line of HTML does? type type type... reformatting my AHHHH!!! Put it back! Put it back!"

I have thought about going to one of the new blogger templates since they make it much easier to add stuff, but again that will take lots of work. I'd have to save out all my links and figure out how to get the resizing code to work again. Notice how if you restore down (that's what that's called? The middle Window's button in the very top, upper-left of the screen between the 'minimize' and the 'close X' buttons. The mouse over tool tip says 'restore down'. I could have sworn there was another word for that.) and then shrink the width of the window the main text area of my site stops before it starts overlapping the blue, left-hand border. If you go to other standard Blogger blogs and do the same thing, their main text area will keep sliding over till it hits the left edge of the window.

Anyway, there is the new updated picture. As you can see I am no longer blond. You can also see that the dye used to match the bleached areas back to my natural brown is fading and that I am due for another session at Orb Hair, my hair salon. What was the end result of being blond? Did I have more fun? Hard to say, maybe if I wasn't in constant state of 'crunch time' at work and got out more I have better data.