Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Flash....

Today I updated the flash widget on the Overkill LAN Site. It's a simple animation thats effective.

I've never been a big fan of adobe flash. Today it seems to be used for something it was never meant to do. Originally it was used to create cool animations. With it's timeline based work flow, its super easy to create animations for the web. People soon learned how to use its scripting language "Action Script" to create games and complete websites. Creating these types of things in flash feel a bit awkward like I'm hacking the program to do something it wasn't meant to do.

I think adobe needs to create a new program for managing all of the scripting and dynamic aspects of the movie and keep the current tools for creating the content and animations. An interface that was more page based (like creating a menu in encore)rather than timeline frame based would make a lot more sense.

I finally registered my copy of Adobe Acrabat and got a free 30 trial of tutorials at lynda.com. I'm spending the day learning action script 3.0. We'll see if this changes my opinion of flash...

Overkill LAN #6 Launched!

With just a little bit more than a month till, I launched the site for Overkill LAN 6.
It will be Feb. 27-28. See the Overkill LAN site for more details.

Friday, January 23, 2009

I got a job!

Well I got a job. I'm going to be working as a technical assistant in the USF Student Government Computer Lab. I go in to day at Noon to fill out all of the paper work! I'm not sure what all I'll be doing but I get to work with computers all day so it can't be all that bad.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Portfolio Updated

Well last night I finally got around to updating my personal website. I added links to my Core portfolio, youtube and flickr accounts. Check it out at http://www.mcdportal.com

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Funny Coincodence

This story dates back to when I was looking to get a domain name for my personal site. The first one I tried was my intials- www.mcd.com but it was already taken. It owned by McDonald's. The next one on my list was the longer www.matthewdoll.com but it too was taken. There actually is another person named Matthew Doll in the U.S. He's a 3D Artist working in Hollywood.
He worked on the movie "Pirates of the Carribean: At World's End". It's kinda of funny seeing my name in the credits:

So in the end I settled with www.mcdportal.com. It was the working title of my cms software at the time and seemed to be a good fit for whatever I might need to put on the web in the future.

I still check every December to see if McDonald's forget to renew mcd.com but I haven't had any luck so far.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

About Me

Let me introduce myself (This is a blog about me after all). My name is Matthew Doll and I'm a Student at the University Of south Florida in the Master's of Architecture and Community Design Program. I have completed the first series of Design Studios (D1,D2,D3) and will be going on to Advance Design this summer.

I seem to have a natural talent to create. I like creating almost anything that doesn't involve writing essays (I was very glad when I was done with college English classes). I like to design buildings and everyday things. I like using and computers and tinkering with them which let me hosting LAN Parties. I also like write software for the web. I also enjoy dabbling in video and visual effects.

I love learning new things. If there was no such thing as the real world, I would love to get degrees in subjects like Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Film/3d Graphics. I like to study and analyze how things work. I taught myself html back in 7th grade becuase I couldn't get the geocities website creator to to do what I wanted and by ninth grade I learned PHP so I could create an even better site. You might ask "Why is this blog not running using your own software?" The simple answer is "It's not done yet" and Google hosts blogs quite well.

My current schedule is a bit strange because I got one of the few spot on the Architecture Study Abroad Trip to Japan. Which has let me to only be taking one class this semester and thus giving me time to blog. Currently I'm looking for a job interning at an architecture firm.

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

First Post

No Blog can be started without the first entry being titled "First Post"...

So I'm finally giving into blogging again. This is going to be a very interesting semester.....