I.V. Therapy

As a nurse in the Philippines, it is now a requirement by law to be a licensed I.V. therapist. To be one, you need to attend a 3-day I.V. therapy training course. Right now it would cost about P1,500 - P2,500 depending on the location of the seminar and institution behind it.

I've been in attendance in the said seminar here in Saint Gabriel Hospital in Kalibo, Aklan, Philippines. It cost us P2,500 for the seminar with 2 free snacks and lunch. It starts at 8:00 A.M. until 5:00-5:30P.M. depending on the lecturers. We just had our demonstrations by the preceptors just this afternoon and tomorrow we'll be doing the return demonstrations complete with all the enumerations step-by-step.

The institutions responsible for this training program are the Iloilo Misssion Hospital Nursing Service and the Saint Gabriel Hospital Nursing Service. Also there are sponsors for the said seminar including the Saint Gabriel Hospital, Inc., Saint Gabriel College, and GenCare Medical Distribution Inc.

For me, completing the requirements in this seminar is not enough to be able to fully call yourself a licensed I.V. Therapist, EXPERIENCE is still the best teacher. :-?

Ellusionist

Talking about magic, here's a cool site about it. They've got great video demonstrations there and a lot of cool stuff too. So check their website at www.ellusionist.com. ;-?

Just remembered...POOF!

Just remembered another hobby of mine. It was a year ago when I really got into it. It was a childhood ambition of mine to become a MAGICIAN! So last year, while we were reviewing for our board exam in Nursing, I was reviewing my magic tricks. I got some of my classmates to be in awe especially if I acted stupid and they thought I was wrong but in the end I was right. I just remembered it cause I'm gonna start reviewing my tricks in a few days.

New site discovered

I just discovered a new site for tutorials about after effects. It looks great and I'm still going to explore it. Here's the web address: http://ae.tutsplus.com/. :-?

My first major project!

Yeah! I finally made my first major project in after effects. It's my 75th monthsary message for my girlfriend. It's a start for me and that I finally turned the tutorials I learned from a lot of cool sources into a project. I really learned a lot and from these cool sites:

1. Videocopilot.net
2. creativecow.net
3. allbetsareoff.com

They are the coolest sites I've been into and the people there are amazingly creative, artistic and very helpful. I enjoyed watching their tutorials and hope you watch too. Here's the link to my project which I posted in youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIRZQbOQEf0

Finally

I finally created a project!Yehey for me! I made a project for my lovely girlfriend for our 75th monthsary!I love that girl!She's my only and last one! I'll post it here when it's finished. :-?

Gregory House, M.D.

Another hobby I do is buy a lot of dvd series like House and watch them all day long from the 1st episode till the last episode I can watch. Right now I'm starting to watch Season 5 of House and I'm excited.

Also, on videocopilot, there's a tutorial about making the video in After Effects about House where the cells in our body are magnified just like in House. It's a great tutorial and I love it!Hoping to make one in the near future! :-?

Electrified

I was shocked, well not really cause I was expecting it. Our electric bill is so high for a residential bill- I guess. It's up to 1,800 pesos. That's about $40 now. It's very high. Last month it was about $22. So what went wrong?

Well it was the overnight duty of my laptop because I'm downloading a lot of torrents right now and they are about 3 gigabytes in average size and there are about 7 of them so I really had to turn the laptop on till morning. So it's probably all my fault why. So the solution is to be patient in downloading the files and turn off the laptop when not in use. :-?

Freeze!

I made a project just recently about freezing time in After Effects. It sucks and I know it. I just kind of made it in a hurry because I was running out of patience as I always do cause I'm doing it on a laptop and it's kind of slow. Also, the camera that I used is a digital camera with dimensions of 320x240. I wish I had a better camera. It's not cool but hey, it's a start. I learned this from videocopilot(the best site ever). So here it is...

Who Are You?

Conflict

I'm having a hard time right now between Illustrator and After Effects. I'm always tempted to view tutorials for after effects when I see one. It then diverts my attention back to after effects and lose my focus in Illustrator. So, I'll go with whatever pleases me. hahaha...

I've also started to download symbols from deviantart. It's a great website for digital designs. A lot of pictures, graphics, photoshop brushes, and a lot more about art. So check out the website and there are a lot of free stuff there. :-?

Illustrator

Right now I'm learning illustrator so I could get started with making my characters that I'm going to animate in after effects. It's really taking a lot of my time and I'm already excited to make my cartoon skit.

Illustrator is like photoshop but for me, it's more of like drawing things as vectors, they don't lose detail even if you scale them up. It still gives you sharp edges not like in photoshop where the picture would pixelate. So I'm gonna continue watching the tutorials! :-?

Learning After Effects

I'm still trying to learn more about after effects and it's taking longer for me to make my projects than I expected. There are a lot to learn and remember and I can't seem to remember most of what I've learned. Must be "short term memory loss". However, I'm trying to start from animating cartoons because I don't have a good video camera right now and videos are nice to edit if they are high quality which in my case is out of my league.

So what I'm trying to do is to start a 1-3 minute animation in cartoons and see what I'm capable of. I'm having a hard time thinking of what my characters would look like and the plot of my animation. So I'm researching on the net but can't seem to find a good topic. I'm still trying though. I'm also learning from some cool websites and would like you to check it out also.

• Creativecow.net - a lot of tutorials here from a lot of sources
  
• allbetsareoff.com - a good site with cool and useful tutorials
  
• videocopilot.net - the best site for me and my mentor

So I hope I could start animating my cartoon and hope to post it here soon. :-?

NBA Finals 2009 LA vs ORLANDO

The NBA finals just finished a while ago. I had always admired how the Lakers play because it's showtime when they play. It's pure entertainment when I see the way they play the game. They don't play like Detroit and San Antonio - teams that are defensive specialists. It's nice to see their defense but it's boring all the way. There is nothing in their game that could make you jump out of your seat and make you cheer for either team. Back to the game, I didn't watch the game from the start and only saw it from mid 2nd quarter. It's a closer game today than it was on game 1 but still, I'm cheering for the Lakers! They got smashed by Rashard Lewis of the Orlando Magic in this quarter with his 18 points and 12 from the 3 point line. I think they got 3 pointers because when they post Dwight Howard, he's got 3-pointers all over the floor and can pass it to anyone of them when they double team him. Howard's my favorite active center right now. Go Superman!

And the game goes to overtime. I hate it when the Lakers get complacent. I like the play in overtime at the 1:20 mark. Gasol makes a 3-point play and gave the Lakers a 6-point lead!

Finally, the Lakers won! :-?

After effects

As I've said earlier, after effects is really an amazing program. I'd convince you to try it and you too will be amazed on what you could do with it. I think a lot of people will be discouraged the first time they see after effects because of its overwhelming array of tools that can get you thinking, "What now?". I got the overwhelmed and discouraged the first time I looked at after effects' interface but because I was amazed of what it could as to what I've seen in the net, I was really determined to learn about it.

So I started gathering the resources I needed and got all of them in the net. I started out at youtube, the most popular video resource of the net these days. I searched for after effects and a lot of results came back as I expected. I didn't know where to start so I clicked on one of the videos not knowing what to get. I didn't start out reading articles or help files because I hate reading especially if I'm reading from my monitor. It makes me sleepy in under 5 minutes of reading and dizzy in under 3 minutes. I'm also bored because if I'm reading, nothing moves or it's so dull but when I'm watching video tutorials or pictures, it makes learning after effects easier and more convenient.

There are a lot videos on youtube but the quality and contents are not as convincing and not as educational for me. I needed more. So I turned to yahoo's search engine(I prefer yahoo than google's because it's much easier for me to type). So in yahoo, I typed After effects tutorials and as usual millions came up. I looked at all the web pages that came up in page 1 of the search but found nothing convincing or worth it. So I looked further and I guess it was the 3rd set of results that got me lucky. That's also when I learned that if nothing good comes up in the first page, there are better things on the next results. I had the mentality that after I search, I only look at the first set of results and I don't look any further. So this experience told me, you won't always be lucky the first time around. Okay, so now I clicked a result with the website named videocopilot.net. It didn't hit my mind that this would be the site I'm looking for when I saw the site name. I couldn't see a resemblance with after effects but I didn't judge the site by it's cover so I looked further.

I was all smiles when I saw the tutorial videos especially the most recent post. So I started opening the tutorials and saw what I needed. I got hooked to this site and it was all about videocopilot after that. There are a lot of useful things at this site. The first thing I noticed about the tutorials, the guy talking/ teaching is not boring to listen to. He's like a professor in a classroom with interested students in him because he knows how to throw those punch lines out of nothingness. He know's when to joke around in the tutorial and when to get serious. His name is Andrew Kramer. I haven't looked at his profile yet but he's a great at making tutorials. So if ever you're interested in learning after effects I'd recommend you start out at his website and you'll be learning in no time. I'll stop right here because after a few weeks when I started with after effects, I lost interest because my computer is toooo slow to render my compositions. I just got interested again about 2-3 months ago from writing this blog.

As my first article in this blog I will enumerate things that make my life from boring to exciting.First up is what I'm currently busy with right now and that is After Effects. So let's bring up our online encyclopedia to define it for us. According to wikipedia Adobe After Effects is a digital motion graphics and compositing software published by Adobe systems. Its main purpose is for film and video post-production. For more information regarding this program, check their website at http://www.adobe.com.

So how did I this become a hobby of mine? Well, it as it turns out I'm interested in making films or animations and it really amazes me as to how technology has put it into the hands of simple people like me. Imagine back in the past where people made films and animations but they had to have special training or skills to do it. It could have been their hobby and it's what got them a job but hey, they had to have necessary and professional skills to do it. Today, with the technology that we have, even a person without prior knowledge or skills could get the hang of it even in just 24 hours. But today with programs like after effects, what they did with the first film of Mickey Mouse (one of my favorite cartoon characters growing up) can be done by an amatuer in after effects. I just can't stop talking about after effects because it has really amazed me of its capabilities but enough of that, let's go on to my next hobby which is...

Another adobe product, Photoshop, the first program that really intertwined my interests in digital designs. If I could recall, oh crap, i can't recall how I first got my hands on photoshop cause it's been a long time since I've started using this program. But anyway, I guess I was just out in the mall looking for some cd's to buy until I came across a cd of photoshop cs2. The picture on the disc that really got me buying the cd was a picture of a building with an edited copy of it by its side. I don't know what got me interested in that picture but I sure bought that cd. So right from the moment I first opened CS2 on my slow laptop I was already amazed even with the lasso tool alone from the tutorial and it just went on and on with amazement.

So the next hobby on the list is downloading. My day wouldn't be quite right if I haven't downloaded anything. Everything in the net out there is just ripe to be downloaded. It's like impulsive shopping in the mall only that my mall is the internet. And the net is complete with all the resources you need even some for free.

The most important hobby for me which really makes my life complete is going on a date with my tender, loving and caring girlfriend, Kaye, and watching movies every month. We just love to watch new movies especially box office hits(so we get our money's worth, especially now that movies here in the provinces in the Philippines can cost as much as P100.50. We used to watch it 6 years back then at only about P35.50, I don't know I can't remember anymore but what I remember was it was very cheap!

That's what I'll blog right now. Add some later. :-?