During the 5 hours driving back to my home with Jetta 2000 yesterday, I hit a young deer very hard at around 75 MPH. It was raining pretty bad that day so visual distance isn’t great. Everything went slow motion after I saw that deer’s eyes..

Luckily, I turned right a bit and hit him by the corner of my car’s body frame instead of middle. If he hit my car in the middle, my car’s bumper and hood would have been crushed like a cheap soda can and windshield all cracked. I also could have been hit by a large truck following me. Adrenaline Rush saved the day.

Amazingly, the damage on my car is very minimum. The only thing that is damaged is plastic in the tire area (maybe worth around $100) and some bended plastics. There’s lot of blood and fur all across the side of my car. My leg’s pretty sore after flying off the seat (even with a belt on) and hit the driver’s wheel. Very bad headache too.

I did plan to find a nearby policemen so I can ask him/her to fill out a report but changed my mind as I remember that any nature-related accidents get a 25/75 chance of being covered by insurance company. If they’ve decided not to cover it, my monthly insurance bill will be much higher. Around $100 for a plastic part isn’t a big deal though.

Truly a scary experience.

FreeVerse recently released a new freeware game called Big Bang Chess. I was never a fan of FreeVerse games (feel too ‘Carbon-ish’, some weak graphics, etc) but this new game really changed my opinion. The graphics and OpenGL effects in it are very well-done and beautiful. It’s one of the most OS X-like game I’ve seen next to Stratéges, iConquer, JewelToy, and few others.

The only thing I don’t like about it is, of course, weak App Icon :)

If you’re on Mac OS X 10.3, give it a try.

PulpFiction will be available at an introductory price when it’s out at May 15th. Better grab it while it’s fresh!

One thing I’m curious about is if there’s a high demand for Graphite Icon? I would be glad to make them if enough people prefer Graphite over Color.

Some of you have been asking when will I release next batch of Flag Screensavers, I plan on releasing them sometime next two weeks. My clients’ projects is on the highest priorities right now.

Several more flags will come after that then it’ll be the last. I have some other ideas that I would like to work on next :)

Stattoo is pretty cool even though it’s basically feature-less at this time. I like it over Konfabulator. Here’s what I like/dislike about Stattoo:

Get Panic’s Stattoo Here

“Motion is a completely new take on motion graphics for film, TV, video and DVDs. Motion brings together design, productivity and industrial-strength output in one comprehensive package.” – Apple Motion

I’m so drooling at this! This is exactly what I’ve been needing for DVD Multimedia, TV commercials, etc. I’ll buy two licenses once it’s out, one for me and one for my brother.

This ought to teach Adobe some lesson for not paying close attention to AE on Mac. It’s a Bad Carbon Port™. AE’s performance is terrible and the GUI is so 1990s.

4 days and counting.

I saw most of the entries and they’re very impressive. I can’t wait to see some of them made into a theme soon.

Only 7 days left. Stretch your photoshop muscle and build a mockup to submit! The prizes are very impressive if you ask me.

Instruction on partipicating in the contest can be found here

For those who doesn’t know, I’m a staff at MacThemes.net as a web/graphic designer

This week will be pretty busy for me since I’ll need to create trophy/award graphics, formatting the theme entries and redesign the site to feature Ballot Theme. You’ll see soon :)

I’m really sorry about the site being down yesterday and today. The bandwidth exceeded 10GB in three days.

I’m not exactly happy with the way my host provider treated me though. I thought it was a little unprofessional but I’ll not discuss about that right now.

In the meantime, anyone have better recommendations for host provider?

“VFXSoup: Blue screen or green screen?

Alex: I’m a green screen kind of a guy. Green has a much higher luminance than blue, so it’s much more forgiving for lighting and exposure. I don’t know why more fx supervisors don’t insist on it – it would make their lives a lot easier. Blue screen tends to suffer in the shadows around the feet. If the blue screen gets too dark, you’ll end up waging war in the blacks and your comps will look like bad holograms (think R2D2 + restraining bolt = “help me obi-wan”). As far as I know, blue and green cost the same! The only drawback with green is that it does tend to show the dirt more – but there are always those natty little elastic shoe covers – very chic.”

Read the Interview

Pretty interesting to see what techniques he used to make iPod commercials. I really don’t understand why some major production companies such as Industrial Light & Magic still prefer to use blue screen over green. Two leading digital productions companies; WETA Workshop (LOTR) and Manex Enterainment (Matrix) prefer green screen because it gives depth to objects while blue screen make objects feel too flat (ie: Star Wars Ep. 1/2).

Industrial Light & Magic haven’t made any breakthrough in technology lately though. The effects in Hulk, Harry Potter, etc are not that well-done, IMO.