the construct :: weblog

I Just got back from the HIM concert and it was to say the least, awesome. The sound was great, the vocals were a little odd sounding at times, yet overall it was an awesome show. Ville Valo’s (the lead singer) stage presence is just awesome. He dresses super cool, then just goes up there, does his thing. He doesn’t really dance around or anything, he just is there, like the heart of the band.

The setup was great, lights, sounds, everything. Soma is not really a large venue, yet it filled up with a couple hundred people. I only saw one of the openers, by the name of Monster Magnet. They were okay, I really just wanted to see HIM.

Here is some HIM links for your pleasure :
Heartagram.com - official band site
HIMonline.tv - one of the main band sites
HIM on myspace.com - listen to a few songs
HIM on Amazon.com - buy some stuff, by doing so you support this site!

Just and awesome, awesome concert. So glad I was finally able to see them. Now I have seen one band of my two favorite bands. Now I have to go see thursday

I need to do some work around here. For one, finals are coming up, so once I get that over with I need to do a few things. For one, finish things that I have started, and redo things that need to be redone. Basically I am saying this regarding to design, such as my various website. I just need to get to work. Lots and lots of things need to be tied up and finished. I also need to get a job so that I can have some financial income.

That’s that for now.

I am back from Maui, and I havn’t put any photos up yet. It was a wonderful trip. Perfect weather and water temperature.

I’ll update this post with a link to the photo gallery later.

I’m going to Maui tomorrow. My first time ever to the islands. It should be alot of fun. Expect alot of photos over at my photo site. That is the actuall place I am staying, The Outrigger Maui - El Dorado. Looks promising. There are a few plans on the agenda, such as a hike up a mountain on the other side of the island, along with the usual vacation activites… relaxing, and relaxing. The only problem is I have a term paper to mail in on friday. All well, it’ll be nice to work in paradise.

For photos updated daily, go tophotos.adion44.com

I havn’t made the album yet, but it should be there by thursday night when I put up the first set of photos. All I can say is that I’m excited. Yay!

HIM - poster.

I just finished making this poster with Dotamatic which is a pretty nifty little program inspired by The Rasterbator You can do a few more things with Dotamatic such as just blowing up an image to fit on multiple pages, just like I did in the photo. I was reading Forevergeek and found the program and decided to try it out.

Overall it did it’s job, yet on my machine, which isn’t slow and running Windows 2000 SP4, it took a while to communicate with the printer. So I’ll just blame that on my HP psc 1210. The program is very easy to use, and the help files are extremely useful aswell. If you would like to make your own poster, head over to http://dotamatic.sourceforge.net

Also, to check out HIM (it’s a band) go to heartagram.com

Just beat Halo 2 on Co-Op on normal. Quite the feat and lots of fun. It took around 10-20 hours. I don’t know the exact amount because we picked up ours on Thursday, and did things besides playing Halo between then and now, which is Sunday morning at 3:19am. I don’t want to give away the ending for any of you who care, just look forward to Halo 3.

Overall, lots and lots of fun. You will probably have more fun playing multiplayer with your friends or on xBox Live.

My Ratings:
Story and Play: 9.0 of 10
Artificial Intelligence: 9.0 of 10 (the AI was amazing compared to what I have seen)
Multiplayer: 11 of 10 (not possible but hey, if you have played Halo, you would agree.)
Overall: 10 of 10

Support this site : Buy Halo 2 on Amazon.com

The Punisher(2004) was an awesome movie. It does not break away from the real original story of the Punisher Marvel comics, which is a real plus for me.

The story is very good as all of you may or may not know. Simple yet good : Bad guys kill Punishers family (whole family mind you) , Punisher nearly dies yet is nurtured back to life by some witch doctor type guy, Punisher then begins his pursuit of justice, which is killing everybody who killed his family, thus making him The Punisher. There is lots and lots of pretty crazy fighting. Not a whole lot of special effects, just brute force. One of my favorite “fights,” I say that because The Punisher doesn’t really fight, he just wrecks people… back to my favorite fight. It was towards the end of the movie when he takes quite the large knife, twists the other dudes arm around and sticks the knife through the guys hand into his thigh. Ouch. Oh yeah, then he just shoved another knife through the guys chin, through his mouth, and up into his nose area. Ouch again.

Overall a very good action flick.

My Rating : 7 of 10
Support this Site: Buy “The Punisher” on Amazon.com

I just setup this little photolog of mine… photodan.blogspot.com I decided to set it up just for the heck of it. I thought it would be fun to use Google products for this little project. Picasa for image organization, Blogger for the internet space and Hello to post the photos to Blogger. It’s a huge circle of google! I could probably add more, yet that will be later. For now, enjoy my sorta artistic photos log:

photodan.blogspot.com

If you have not heard of or seen Picasa or Hello.com as of yet, I urge you to go check them out. They are both ownd by Google and they are awesome tools to say the least.

I had heard of Picasa before, yet had not used the program. It is completely free and they most useful photo/media organizer I have seen recently. It has a very clean interface, and it is extremely easy to use, yet still has powerful features. Anyone can use it to edit pictures or just keep them all organized. I have only been using it for about 10 minutes and I love it already!

As for Hello.com it is equally awesome, yet in a different way. It is kind of a competitor to flickr.com in that it is basically a “community photo social network thingy.” You can use Hello to post photos to your Blogger.comweblog or just to chat and share photos with others. Compared to flikr, flickr wins for me simply because you have to download a program to use Hello. Flickr is all web based and extremely powerful.

It’s crazy to see so many tools to use in this digital media age. You can have a weblog, post photos to it, chat with anyone in the world etc etc… and all for free! The world is internet driven.

Today I decided to delve into some graphics stuff with Adobe Photoshop. I browsed good-tutorials.com looking to learn something new. I also found alot of other awesome things like : Howie Zine : fonts and brushes from Authentic Boredom I learned quite a few new things and created a few things aswell.

You can browse through my workspace at : constructds.com/dev/graphics

This was one tutorial and technique I was having a hard time with : Wireframe Cube. I will get it eventually and you will see it most likely here on this blog aswell as over at my porfolio site. Thats it for now, I have work to do all over the place… school, website stuff, the list goes on….