It’s been a long summer, filled with fairly crappy weather, Spongebob Squarepants and several hundred yards of Bounty paper towels. And if there’s anything I learned this summer, it’s that toilet training a puppy when it’s constantly raining is a HUGE pain in the ass! But it seems with back to school coming up next week, summer finally decided to start about a week ago. It’s honestly been the worst summer I have ever seen in this city weather-wise, I can not believe how much rain we’ve had. But now that August and September are here, so is ragweed, so now my sinus ass-kicking has begun.

My stay-at-home summer duties are almost up and Rosebud doesn’t need to pee every 35 minutes, so it finally means I can start catching up and stepping up the efforts on Pixel2life v5 and the community’s overall development. Not sure if anyone has noticed, but P2L was recently awarded a PR7 from Google on the last update. No idea how long that will last, but… GO US! Nick is back in school but still working hard on the site. At this point I would say we are 75% – 80% done, so it’s getting there.

In between work, I am also working with our NAID puppy on training and she has been doing VERY well. Here she is at 5 months old, taken today:

We started obedience training about 3 weeks ago and she has picked up basic commands EXTREMELY well, I am totally impressed. She seems to be able to grasp and accept commands immediately… As an example, she went from never hearing the lie down command to doing it on command anytime while walking (You can literally go Up, Down, Up, Down.. and she will keep standing and laying down) in 3 days. And she does this with minimal praise, I don’t even bother with food anymore. So I am extremely proud of her and I can’t wait for this winter to start Skijoring with her. We’ve been training with the harness too and she LOVES to pull! We haven’t had much training time though, I’ve been busy with P2L plus the crappy weather makes it hard to go out and pull in the muck.

So that’s about it from my end… all is well, just trying to hang in there until we get v5 out the door. I’m also happy to report we are back to the 5 – 7 day tutorial queue time on P2L, rather than the 2 weeks+ we had going all summer long.

That’s it for me guys and gals, take care and good luck to you students in your new school year!

Dan

Introducing the latest member of our family, Rosebud! This is Corina’s new 4-legged sister, which she met to her complete surprise when we got back from Florida.

Rosebud, named after Rosebud (The only female puppy) in the cute “Buddy” movie series with the little Golden Retriever puppies, is a Native American Village Dog purchased at Indian Valley Kennels. This is my daughter’s dog, so we gave her complete freedom to choose the name… personally I liked Shasta but Corina had zero intentions of hearing my suggestions. When Simba was returned to Mira (some of you might remember we were a sponsor family for Mira Guide Dogs and we volunteer to raise one of their puppies until 1 year old) Corina was obviously devastated and has been crying for a dog since. With my wife mildly allergic to dogs and not really wanting another dog in the first place it wasn’t looking too good. But with Corina and I badgering the crap out of her, Terri and I sat down and started looking at Hypoallergenic dogs. Aside from the “Doodle” type dogs such as Labradoodles, all the hypoallergenic dogs were those little annoying yappy type dogs that I can’t stand until we found a picture of what appeared to be a gorgeous wolf! Further research got me in touch with Carla at IVK and that’s when I found out about this remarkable breed of dog know as NAIDS, Native American Indian Dogs or in Carla’s breeding program, Native American Village Dogs.

These GORGEOUS dogs only shed their winter coat in the spring so there is no fur all over the house, they have no doggy odor and best of all, some lines have shown to be hypoallergenic! A test sample of fur from the dam and sire confirmed Terri had no reaction whatsoever! With Simba’s fur, her eyes would get itchy and feel nasty and irritate her skin a bit. With the test swatches, there was absolutely no reaction at all, we were amazed!

I immediately placed by downpayment and reserved a puppy and last week we met Carla in person in New York to pick up our gorgeous little girl and Corina was completely shocked and speechless, she had zero clue we were getting her. I had even bought all the supplies and hid them in my office.

So now she is 10 weeks old and proving to be an extremely smart and loving little miss, and her behavior is calm and very gentle. I thought Simba was pretty calm but he was the Tazmanian Devil compared to this one. We’re all very happy with her and love her to bits!

So, if I sound cranky on the P2L forums, it’s because of the late night bathroom wake-up calls

Dan

Spring is in the air, and what better way to spend the rain soaked, mosquito infested, manure scented days of spring than working on the head-splitting task of updating Pixel2life? Actually, I think jamming a hot poker in my eye socket would be less painful to be honest, but I think it’s time for a change. A BIG change. I’ve been very busy in my personal life and actually spending less time on the PC and I’ve also been working on my little import business, which is thriving quite well. In a twist of fate, P2L went from my only real sustaining source of income and fulltime employment to a side hobby that actually costs more to run than it makes. To put it bluntly, I’m bored with P2L and it has become increasingly difficult to justify keeping it as part of my life, and I think it’s probably showing.

So once you come to realize that something you BUSTED YOUR ASS to bring to life has become nothing more than a tedious chore to you, it’s time to make some decisions. In my case, giving up is pretty much non-existent in my vocabulary, and with P2L drawing thirty thousands visitors a day, it’s hardly a site worth trashing. So I sat down and thought long and hard about what to do, and I came to the decision that it was time to create one last version to see if it could re-stimulate my interest and get me back to my P2L roots. But this can’t just be another upgrade to something a bit different or add a few new goodies like was done for v2 to v3 and v3 to v4… this needed to be major, something along the lines of v1 to v2, which was a total and complete ground-breaking change for us.

The first thing I knew we needed was a new layout, no question. Not a layout based on what we’ve been using since v2, we needed something totally new. So I started talking to all kinds of design sites… I contacted high-end studios like 2Advanced, I spoke to freelance designers and I went to smaller design places. I felt that in order to get away from the stagnant design, I needed someone ELSE to design the layout… some fresh eyes and hands to get some perspective on the new direction P2L needed to take. Much to my disappointment, people either didn’t want to work, wanted retarded amounts of money for a single PSD layout or simply submitted designs that were so God awful that I covered my ears and ran screaming for my life. Even Nick (NGPixel) handed over a design that wasn’t bad, but I still wasn’t “feeling it dawg”.

All the while, I had to work out a way of making P2L different… obviously we’re still going to be the huge tutorial portal that we’ve always been, kicking the crap out of the competition and all that good stuff, but that’s secondary now. I needed it to be new to ME, and in a world where the general feeling is that it’s all been done, that’s no easy task. I want the experience of using P2L to be different, and I want people to love using the site while still finding the tutorials they want. I also want to give members a reason to be members, and have fun performing a variety of tasks on the site. That’s when the light-bulb went off and some plans started to take shape… I talked with Nick, Jamie and Donna and shared some of the ideas I had cooking in the oven and they all seemed to think it had some serious possibilities. Then Nick came up with a boatload of other cool goodies he wanted to include, and some of them would be a BLAST to do, and that definitely had my undivided attention.

So now we had our direction, we just needed a layout… I was then forced to take matters in to my own hands. I decided to clear my head and not even look at the old designs, and I roughed in something I thought would look cool. I worked on it for a couple of hours and this basic outline I had put together looked… well.. pretty darn cool! I sent it in to Nick to flesh it all out and add the details, and he absolutely RAN with it and knocked my socks off with the extras he added on to it. Yes ladies and gents, we had our layout, and Nick is da fuggin man!

So fast forward to now, and development has been going on for several weeks now and it’s really starting to take shape. Nick is working constantly on the coding for now and Jaime and Adam will be brought on later to work on their respective parts plus I’ve hired some extra talented folks to help with the additional media we’ll need for the site. Overall I think you guys are going to LOVE this new site and while I’m sure there will be the usual moaning and groaning from the haters of change, the vast majority will be too busy having fun with the new goodies. This will be a massive change in two ways… visually the new site is stunning (I think anyhow) and second, the new member related services (sorry, it’s hard to describe anything that we’re doing without it becoming fairly obvious what we’re talking about).

I can honestly say that this is the most excited I have ever been about a new release and I can not wait to get back in to working on P2L and being super active with the community again! I spoke to Nick this afternoon and we sort of passed around a July release, so at the moment that is our target release date.

So thanks again everyone for your tremendous support throughout the years and I can not wait to welcome you to Pixel2life Version 5 this summer!

Dan

Hi all!

Phew, I have been MAD busy with P2L and the Predatorstuff.com website (AvP-R was recently released in theaters so everyone has Predators and Aliens on the brain), but I hope everyone had a great Christmas and I wish you and your families all the very best in the new year. I would especially like to thank the P2L crew for all of their very hard work in the past year and I look forward to working with you guys in 2008! We’ve got a lot in the planning so it should be quite the summer.

Anyhow, I wanted to share with you guys a fun little experiment I did this morning for a photo review… I wanted to try something with small detailed backdrops on one of my kits and I think it came out pretty sweet so I thought I’d share this with you photography buffs to try it out. Here’s how it turned out:

You can check out the rest of the pics from this experiment in the Predatorstuff Gallery.

It was a fairly simple trick, but I love how dramatic it looks… first thing you need to do is find your backdrop images. I went on DeviantArt and did a search for “1920×1200″ and it showed me a list of TONS of high resolution wallpapers and artwork. I picked out a few that I liked and printed them with my inkjet on some Cannon Matte Photo Paper (It’s important to use a matte finish, not glossy or high gloss or you’ll get shines and reflections from your lights) with my borderless printer. I let them sit for about 30 minutes to ensure they dried completely and I started to set up by photography table, light tent and lights. I then placed a light at the back of the tent and pointed it forward towards the camera. I used a clamp to position the printed backdrop upright directly in front of the light fixture and you immediately get this cool backdrop effect where the darks stay black and the lighter areas of the print out are glowing brightly with clean diffused light. Then I just place my kit in front of the backlit backdrop and it’s photo time!

The only limitation is that by printing on a 8.5″ x 11″ you only have a tiny backdrop, so I couldn’t get complete kit shots, but I managed to pull off some very nice close-ups. The end result was the Predalien standing in front of a fire or explosion in a very natural looking photo without any post editing in Photoshop. Why mess with photo editors if you can do it straight with the camera?

Anyhow, that was my little experiment today and I thought it came out pretty cool… I’ll need to order some large prints from DeviantArt so I can have larger backdrops and use them to photograph larger pieces. Give it a try to spice up your photos, it’s a fun way to spruce up your product and macro shots.

Dan

Hi gang,

Wow it’s been a little while since I’ve had a minute to post, but the fun never stops. Truth be told, my schedule sucks and I just can’t get the time in that I used to despite having a TON of new projects I want to get going. Seems like all I can is struggle to keep my head above water at this point. But, all depressing thoughts of self-loathing aside, HALLOWEEN IS HERE! This weekend most of us will be out at Halloween parties and such, so here’s an early greeting from Simba, who is now 5 months old and already nearing 60lbs! Oh, and this is my pumpkin Ned. Ned says hi!

Corina and I worked on some pumpkins this weekend while Terri handled pumpkin seed duty… for those of you missing out on this, baked pumpkin seeds are DA BOMB! Seriously, if you’ve never had pumpkin seeds before, you are missing out on a seriously good treat. Not those store bought nasty things that taste like small bits of salt, but I mean do it yourself seeds right out of the pumpkin!

Actually for those of you that want to seriously try this, here’s how I do it:

1. Get a decent sized pumpkin and cut a big round hole in the top and remove the lid. Then with a big metal spoon, scrape out the guts and then separate the seeds from the gunk and put them in a bowl.

2. Lay the seeds out on some cookie sheets (non stick or put some baking parchment underneath) and make sure you don’t pile them over each other.. you want them flat and not covered by other seeds. Don’t worry about orange residue from the pumpkin guts… that will all dry up and vanish.

3. Pop the tray(s) in the oven and let them dry overnight (no need to turn on the oven). Check them the next morning, you might have to flip them a bit.

4. Once dry, spray the seeds a bit with cooking spray or olive oil and salt them.

5. Pop them in the oven at 300F for 15 minutes or until they start to get golden brown and you’re done!

6. Eat them before other people find out you made delicious seeds!

You might find other recipes that say to boil them in water all this other stuff… that’s nonsense, just go with the dry route, they rock!

Now who says this is just a tech blog