The Rogue King

Do you like boring?

Boring is safe and guaranteed. Boring is conventional and unchanging. Boring is bureaucratic, ridden with fail safe policies and guidelines chiseled in stone, locked away in a bullet proof glass cage. To be seen and followed, but not touched.

Boring is following protocol and standard procedure. Boring is looking at your friend’s boring car and thinking how nice and good it would be to have one just like that.

Boring is when you’re being evaluated and you know that the passing score is 75% and you aim for 76%, because it’s easier.

Boring is accepting that “that’s just how things are, so it’s aight!” following rules that don’t make sense because, heck! that’s what everyone has always done, and that’s what you’re going to keep doing.

Boring is a steady, dull 9-5 job. Yes, it gets the bills paid, puts food on the table. But it’s boring! Boring is being scared of change, of a destabilization of your status quo, of the sheer panic that grips you when you realise that your salary is going to be a few days late and you’ve queued up bills.

Note: [ Actually, the scared-shitless mindset is predictable and boring, but the panic, my goodness! is not. I like panic. ] (more…)

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About two years back, I realised that if I were to go [back] to school for anything, it would be either Robotics / Micro-Electronics or Industrial Design. Why Robotics? It’s pretty obvious from the amount of noise I make on this blog, but Industrial Design, not so obvious. In brief, it is the perfect blend of the wannabe geek in me (who loves taking things apart and tries to make them better) and the wannabe designer in me (who’s so efficient at googling that he’s made a living out of it).

So about six weeks back,  I decided I’d systematically study 3D modelling and animation, as opposed to jumping from one online tutorial to another. The tutorials online thing has served me well, very well, I must say, but I need to be a little more serious. So I ordered a couple of books from Amazon which arrived week before last.

So this little post is to show what I’ve been upto so far: Prototyping a fictional USB thingie and properly learning 3D modelling and lighting.

Modelling & Texturing in 3D (Maya), GUI / Interface designed & composited in Photoshop.

Click for larger images.

Hope you like. There are lots of flaws, too many to list, but comments & critiques welcome.

This stuff below is for my own reference. Ignore it.

render time 7:39
U/V 10 Image Based lighting (building_probe.hdr from debevec.org) primary visibility off + Final gather – color gain: light gray.
Images based lighting shader. Adjust Emission On. Gain: dark grey
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render time 11:27
U/V 11 Image Based lighting (building_probe.hdr from debevec.org) primary visibility off + Final gather – color gain: dark gray.
Images based lighting shader. Adjust Emission On. Gain: darker grey. mia material preset 90% blend/gloss/reflect@.750-.450

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Rogue FM: Cranberries – Analyze

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Offtopic:

“If you’re a designer, get it straight right now: it doesn’t matter how much work you put into it or how much you wanted to do a good job or how much cool collaboration you experienced on the project or how silly the client’s constraints were or how poor the working conditions are at work. It is only the results of you…r work that matter. Ever. Period”

- Andy Rutledge

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Hello, Reader Dearest.

After doing many funny brain things, I have decided that I will no longer write fiction on this blog. The reasons are many, the deliberations were long and tedious, but I have made a decision.

In summary;

1. I want this blog to go back to its original theme. Life, Design, Business, Technology.
2. Much of what I write here is heavily misconstrued as being true, even when clearly labeled as fiction.
3. I like to keep things separate, helps me focus better.
4. I want to write better, with more thought and meaning to the process, not a hurried scribble in one sitting.
5. I can’t really write some of the stuff I want to write, for fear of content dilution, misinterpretation, or very simply, professional image.

So, no more fiction, on this blog at least.

I’m working on another blog, which will be strictly fiction under a different name. And it will be no no-holds barred, no reader-friendly censoring and no politically correct BS. It will be light and funny, dark and gritty, sad and contemplative or whatever I fancy. I will write anything, everything and nothing.

And maybe, just maybe, you may like it.

I’ll probably lose many readers here, but it is necessary.

This blog will not die, so stay tuned, I’ll be posting a link in a few days. Maybe. Because it may be a closed, invited readers only blog, I don’t know.

In any case, I’ll see you on the other side.

With much sincerity.

The Rogue King.

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Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus,  a Roman equestrian and historian, is famous for writing a series of biographies on Roman rulers, especially Julius Ceasar.

In his work, Vita Divi Iuli (The Life of the deified Julius), Suetonius tells the story of Julius Ceasar’s famous crossing of the Rubicon River. The Rubicon divided the Roman Gaulish Province of Cisalpine from Italy. A Roman law to protect the republic from internal military rebellion prevented the crossing of this river by a general leading a legion. To do so was to declare war on the Roman Empire.

Which, of course is exactly what Julius Ceasar did in 49 BC. It started what eventually led to transformation of Rome from a republic to the Roman Empire.

Suetonius famously writes that as soon as Julius Ceasar crossed the Rubicon, he uttered the phrase:

“Alea iacta est.”

The die has been cast.

The phrase is now more commonly used to denote a “point of no return”, in which a decision and an action has been taken that cannot be revoked, rescinded or otherwise back-tracked.

In many, many ways, for me,

Alea iacta est.

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Offtopic: It’s good to be back.

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Apologies, I should’ve blogged this earlier.

Design Kingdom presents: FlashQuest
Date: 16th Jan 2010
Time: 10am-3pm
Fee:20,000/=

Only 7 spots left. Book Now.

FlashQuest is a series of Adobe Flash training, discussion and learning sessions, covering animation, interactivity and programming. Each session is unique and will have a specific theme or target project and will last 4 hours long, with a Q&A session at the end.

The Project: Creating an Interactive Portfolio CD with Adobe Flash

The session on 16th January 2010 will focus on interactivity with Adobe Flash and our goal will be to create an Interactive CD based portfolio.

The training will be carried out by Solomon King, founder of Elemental Edge and Node Six, and who has very many years of Flash animation under his belt.

Details and Booking here.

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If I had to choose the two greatest speeches I’ve been priviledged to read, it would be a tie between Steve Jobs’ Stanford Commencement Speech and Leo Burnett’s “When to take my name off the door” speech.

I have talked about Steve Jobs’ speech before, but had always forgotten to talk about Leo Burnett.

This morning I was going through Facebook and saw a friend’s status message that had another great quote by Leo Burnett, and I remembered that I badly needed to share this speech.

However, since it’s more pertinent to creatives/designers/advertising agencies, I posted it over at Design Kingdom. But I would recommend you read it, even if you’re not in the creative/advertising industry. He may be talking to advertising agencies, but the wisdom applies to all facets of life (in context, of course).

Enjoy.

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Offtopic:

“I have always taken the attitude that no account is a ‘problem account’ but that all accounts have important problems attached to them – that you can waste more time and burn up more nervous energy by fighting a problem than by taking a positive attitude and solving it.” - Leo Burnett

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Tumwijuke ( Ugandan Insomniac ) blogged about it a while earlier, and it’s been making a few waves. And right now, I just discovered from @whiteafrican that Vertigo, the DC Comics subsidiary is making the first Volume first Issue in Volume One ( Haunted House ) downloadable. Yup, it’s free, and yes, it is legit. Get your copy here. ( 20MB Download)

I’m too excited but dashing out for a meet so I can’t download it right now, but let me know what you guys think!

For a synopsis:

Welcome to Northern Uganda. In 2002, it’s a place where tourists are hacked to death with machetes, 12-year-olds with AK-47s wage war, and celebrities futilely try to get people to care. Moses Lwanga is a pacifist doctor caught at the center of this. But when his life is threatened, Moses suddenly realizes he knows how to kill all too well. What is this voice telling him the only way to fix what’s wrong with the country is by slaughtering those responsible? And what is Moses’ connection to past bandage-wrapped warrior?

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Yes. You are.

Allow me to explain.

First, the general description of a wuss is; “a person who is physically weak and ineffectual”. It has been used more recently however, to derogatorily  describe a man who is weak, ineffectual, effeminate and wishy-washy, especially when it comes to the ladies.

Some friends and I have a long running joke about wusses, sometimes even dissing ourselves in the process. Don’t sweat it, it’s a guy thing.

So, couple of days back, at the week-long peak of this joke, we’re in an informal meeting discussing a way forward on some project and because someone was being indecisive about a certain action, we jokingly called him a wuss. We laughed it off and eventually forged a way forward.

That night however, those same words came back to torment me during my quiet moment of self-reflection, and the reality hit me hard;

I realised that I was being a (business) wuss in so many ways.

It was a very painful blow to the gut. (more…)

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Help us spread the good news! http:/www.designkingdom.ug

And now, I need to head over to Sanyu FM. I’m appearing on the Breakfast Show today at 7am. Tune in give some moral support, will ya?

Peace.

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So, from Monday to Wednesday, I was kinda all over Tanzania. Route was Entebbe to Nairobi to Dar es Salaam to Mwanza to Bukoba to Mutukula and back to our lovely country.

I took thousands of pics. Yeah. Thousands. That’s how I get when I lay my hands on a camera. This time I was privileged to travel with a Nikon D80. Awesome machine. It was my second proper exposure to the finer workings of a DSLR, over three days. My first exposure was just a few hours, in which I was too scared to mess up the person’s settings.

But, let me not bore you. I have a few teaser pics. I have tweaked in a little Photoshop magic. I can’t release the rest till the project is complete, which will be next week, so a little patience, toute le monde, s’il vous plait.

Without further ado…

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