Picto Synthesis

I’m afraid I won’t have much to show on these pages for a while.

Too much work during the week, too many issues to keep track of and not much time in the evening to do anything else than chat around a cup of coffee and blow some steam off in the tropical battlefield of Far Cry. This is the longest ’low’ phase I had to go through for a long time.

Usually, creativity cycles go up and down every other month. High phases are spent cranking one image after the other, until I run out of steam. Low phases are usually the occasion to catch up on video games I set aside for rainy days, and work on the website if I have time. I have enough games to keep on like this for a while, although I can already feel the itch of creating new 3D scenes.

Maybe it is the influence of spending some time every night on keeping an eye on the Vue forum at Renderosity... although things have been running smoothly over there for a while. Hopefully, being a moderator won’t turn out to be such a distraction I can’t find the time to work on more images.

In the meantime, working on the EERIE alumni website has been an interesting experience. First exposure to PHP and MS SQL, blended together with a touch of Cold Fusion. The development of that site is going smoothly so far. I may even go on reviving some of my old pages soon. The next site in line will be the Cthulhu gallery.

Working on the EERIE website showed me how disconnected from my friends in France I have become. It is a great occasion to reconnect however. I didn’t realise how much I missed that until I started catching up with what everybody has been doing for the past few years. I feel like I just came out of a long period of blur once again. Seeing what everybody I used to know have become makes me appreciate even more what I have now. Things are not so bad after all.

Coincidences are really odd sometimes....

After months of silence, I received within a couple of days, news from three different people going back to the time I was in college in Nimes.

That was a good reminder that my plans to revive some of my past websites have not gone very far. So here it is, after a week-end and a couple of evenings of work, the website of the alumni of the EERIE school is about to open.

This site provides a forum to alumni to reconnect and share experiences, a directory of graduates and some old pages about Nimes and the school itself. It was a shock to find out that since the school has been transformed by a take-over from a nearby institution, there is nothing left on the web, of what used to be our school.

Hopefully, we will change that in time...

Quelques mots en francais pour les visiteurs francophones eventuels : le site des anciens de l'EERIE, Nimes, est enfin disponible. Vous y trouverez un forum de discussion pour reprendre contact avec d'anciennes connaissances, un annuaire electronique que vous pourrez mettre a jour, et quelques pages nostalgiques sur ce que fut l'Ecole pour les Etudes et la Recherche en Informatique et Electronique de Nimes.

Si vous etes un ancien... rendez nous visite !

We just came back from our Easter getaway  in the Florida Keys.

The weather was not that great, but it was nice enough to appreciate lazy afternoons by the pool, sunset cruises, dolphins playing here and there, parasailing and sailing lesson for the first time. Overall, it was a fun time. It was also the occasion to discover Key West (interesting enough to go back someday) and Key Largo (not much to see there).

We both needed that break from the crazyness of work, although something tells me that this restful feeling will not last very long once we are back at work.

It’s official... today I signed up as coordinator for the Vue forum at Renderosity.

I will be helping the curent moderator, gebe, with her outstanding job running that little community... answering questions, solving issues with images in the gallery, or helping other coordinators if necessary.

It is interesting to go through the miror and see the backstage of a site like this. For now, the team is welcoming and the issues we face are not so difficult after all. After more than 3 years visiting the site regularly, it is a good occasion to give back a little of what I found there.

We just spent a long week-end gateway, far from the tension of work, away from obligations.... a relaxing week-end in a coccoon, in the middle of nowhere, with nothing to do and almost nowhere to go.

The only appointment on our agendas was a glorious 80 minutes massage at a spa. It is still amazing to me how one can come out of a massage completely beat, after spending an hour doing absolutely nothing. I'll do it again...

The 'middle of nowhere' we were at happened to be situated a few miles away from Atlantic City. I have never visited AC before, or Las Vegas for that matter, so we thought it would be a good idea to spend some time out there and visit a casino.

I may be becoming too cynical..... we walked into the Trump Plaza with a feeling of ethnologists taking notes in the middle of a remote tribe. Rows after rows of blinking ligths, screaming machines, and sitting in front of them, an army of empty faces.

There was surprisingly very little happiness. Only people with glazed looks, feeding machines one coin after another. The most painful to watch were the poor and the old, half asleep in front of their screens, and yet feeding their machines with whatever money they had. Just trying to picture the amount of money collected by these machines at any time of the night was mind boggling.

My only experience with a casino before that was Monaco, where most people I saw there could afford to burn large amounts of money and walk away without a regret.

This was very different. It was like walking through a city of ghosts, of empty souls addicted to an illusion.

After seeing this, I am not sure I want to visit Las Vegas any more...

Happy new Year 2004 for my family and the handful of visitors to this website (a few more and I can start counting you with my second hand :) ).

Just coming back from a much needed vacation to Rhodes-Island for Christmas and Boston for New Year and ready to start this year with many projects. Namely, revive old web-sites taken offline a few years ago (including the Cthulhu Gallery and Necronomicon Project), practice modeling and hand painting for a new batch of images, practice photography with my new camera and spend more time on home improvement projects...

I am starting to wonder how I am going to find time to work with that busy schedule...

This seemed to be a good year to replace my old, 1.3 mega pixels digital camera. With all these new compact zoomy models, I even thought I found a good one.

The Canon S400 Digital Elph was a pleasure to unwrap and play with. Compact. Full of little tricks like the image stich mode. A decent 3x zoom. Manual controls for exposure, speed and light correction. Things looked bright until I put it in my pocket and ended up with a scratched and therefore wrecked screen   

Why would they leave such a fragile screen without any protection is beyond me. How much would it cost to cover it with a layer of transparent plastic ?! What made it worse was the absence of warning about how delicate that screen is.... there were plenty of warnings about how toxic the batteries are if you open them (!!!) but nothing about how to protect the camera when you simply put it in your pocket.

Back to my old model until this one gets repaired. For some reason, that old camera survived my pockets for years without a problem....

Caroline Bergonzi, one of my best friends, will be part of an art exhibition on December 3rd, at the EICKHOLT Gallery, Soho, New York. Opening from 6 to 10pm. 

If you are in New York and you are interested by a unique style, drop by and check out her paintings.

Good luck with the exhibit Caro...

Today is that time of the year again.. my birthday that is. This year’s treats are very ’graphics’ oriented : a new Wacom tablet to replace my antiquated Graphire and the magnificent Expose 1 from Ballistic Publishing, featuring a selection of the best computer graphics and illustration of the year. Lets hope this will turn as well as the Spectrum series...

Interesting coincidence.

After spending the week-end digging out my old web pages from the pile of dust they accumulated  since college, I received some news from a good friend from college who just happened to come across my site by accident. He kindly reminded me that our 10th graduation anniversary is coming up next year....   ... I was certainly not prepared for that one.

I can still remember a conversation I  had with another good friend from high school about what we would be doing 10 years from then. I guess I am overdue to folow up on that conversation. Fortunately, Iost track with that friend as well.

Unless maybe he finds this site and decides to wave from where ever he is...