Heck no I’m not paid to advertise friends’ sites – I just do it out of charity (doesn’t that sound even more pathetic?)

Meet ShadyET, whom I bugged repeatedly to get a blog. Ah yes. She got a blog. She made herself a blog. (Saved a lot on the most weathered ears in town – mine!)

Who has the right personality to write a blog, anyway? Is it in your genes? Just because you’re opinionated, it doesn’t mean you can upkeep a blog. If you’re not opinionated, then your blog would be a daily diary (boooring!)

I remember reading from Brickchick that there were two types of bloggers. Designers and writers. I fall somewhat in a limbo; a no human’s land. (Politically correct eh?)

Being a programmer at nature uses logic. Designing is artistic creativity and aesthetics (that I don’t have!) I can only do graphics based on real life, because nature has rules and logic that govern the way a tree grows, or how light falls on an object and casts a shadow.

Writing, however, requires verbosity and good English. Text and philosophical thought appeals more to writers. Grammar is important, too – if you weren’t a stickler for detail, you wouldn’t be able to write a program. You’d have to follow the computer programming language’s syntax very closely in order for anything to work. Notice how there are lots of programmer/writers, but few designer/writers?

If it isn’t obvious to you now (because I have confused you so much already) I am a programmer/writer! Whee! Now if only I wasn’t a procrastinator, I’d make a simple quiz that would tell you what category you fell in, complete with banner (like above)!

Yep, that’s right! Not only has Glaring Notebook Under Construction the skin been added to the skins list, it’s the default skin! Before this, it was the nauseating Infinity skin.

It’s been awhile since I touched graphics again. I started off in computers doing mostly programming – LOGO programming (that was a nice hybrid of programming logic and graphics!) BASICA taught me about proper program control structures, while QBASIC was my first full-fledged programming language.

Soon after the antiquated 6-year-old 486’s BIOS chip fried, I played with Visual Basic 6.0 on my current system. When I got my Internet connection, I downloaded Quake 2 Transformer plug-in player models, always wondering how cool it would be to play as one.

Within 6 days, I made a model. I made one after the other. I made Quake 2 plug-in player models, dude! I even made a section devoted to my creations! I learned HTML and made my website just to showcase them!

Each model needed a digital texture wrapped around it, and this was where I picked up computer graphics. There was a great play of shadow and highlights just to achieve the effect of 2D translated and wrapped on a wireframe. Although I didn’t use layers to do my graphics then, I still enjoyed making photorealistic textures (well, not even close!)

Also, the models moved, and I had to make them look fluid. However, I still suck at animating! 🙁

College, work, and having only a 100 Megabytes of hard disk space forced me to game development. (This includes making maps and code tweaks.) At work, I reverted back to my old hobby – programming – but this time, webprogramming! Programming for websites is a whole lot different from programming applications or games, but I found it fun nevertheless because of the huge tie-in with HTML.

So why am I telling you this story, anyway? Will I ever get to the point? You can only hope.

The point is: I made this skin to get back in touch with my graphics skills. How’s that?

I am pleased with it.

Oh, and one of my wise Quotes forced down your throat: “I don’t pay to learn; I play to earn.”