Querks

The importance of self-motivation

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 02 Jan 2014 00:53:00 +0000

Abandoning the goals you set for yourself - don't be that person.

Today, I'm going to try something new. This post is not going to talk about the ordinary CG-related stuff, neither is it going to focus on anything that's related to technology. Before we jump right in, I find it necessary to profess that this post does not fulfill the role of bravado. This article is not intended to depict how prosperous I am, it is designed to give its readers an idea of where self-motivation comes from and how one can uphold it.

I want to cover the single most important topic that affects all of our lives: motivation. Specifically the kind of motivation that stems from yourself, from the inside.

I'm mainly bringing this up because most people set ridiculous goals for themselves once New Year's Eve is lurking around the corner only to abandon them a few days later. I have been there myself.

Before we explore the concepts that can help you attain the results you are looking for, let's establish why the sheer idea of having such a thing as a New Year's resolution is not very effective, the essential question here being:

Why do you set a goal for yourself starting January 1st of the next year, when you could already start today?

People might have individual answers to that question, but for me personally the only one I can think of from the top of my head is: You are constructing an elaborate escape plan for yourself that allows you to stay inside your comfort zone just a little longer. Due to that exact problem I am convinced these resolutions do not help your cause at all.

Making excuses for yourself will inherently result in failure

I personally found that, when conceiving objectives for yourself, you should start making them a reality ASAP. This greatly increases the odds of being able to carry some of that initial momentum over into your daily routine.
As long as that initial motivation is still fresh, it is surprisingly easy to pursue the aims you set for yourself, working towards the desired outcome. However, as that original momentum subsides, many people will abandon their plans, finding that they become too tedious to uphold.

Once the motivation fades, people will fall back into their comfort zone, instead of pushing its boundaries.

Some will make excuses for themselves that allow them to give up, here are some common examples:

The goals I set for myself were unrealistic.
If you figured you could cultivate The Rock's physique within 2 months then yes, that was indeed an unrealistic goal. The important thing here is to strike a balance between reaching for the stars and selling yourself under value. It is actually better to start off with smaller goals and as you achieve those, gradually increasing the stakes as the euphoria you get from achieving those smaller goals will help you stay motivated in the long run. Nevertheless it is important to have an ultimate goal you long for.
I just have so much going on right now, I'm not able to do this anymore.
This is probably one of the most common excuses people make for themselves, for example when they decided they are going to start working out and then, after a while, when they get home from work/college they feel tired and lack the motivation to go on. In cases like these, you'll need to man up and push through that initial pain period. Sticking to the workout example, a way to overcome this excuse would be to start working out at home, dedicating around 15 minutes a day to exercise. Although this may not yield the same results as going to the gym, it is far less tedious than having to go to the gym and back every time and once you are starting to see an improvement in your strength/endurance you will get hooked and going to the gym or just generally dedicating more time to your workout will come to you naturally.
After all, investing a few minutes every day is better than spending them watching mind-numbing TV.
It's just a stupid dream, I need to become more down to earth and stop living with my head in the clouds.
Most of the time, when this excuse comes up, it is due to the fact that somebody in your life told you that you're a dreamer or that you won't amount to anything either way.
If that's the case, ask yourself this: Why do you care so much about that person's opinion? An important lesson to learn in this context is that most people will make such snide remarks simply because putting others down will make them feel better about themselves.
The proper mindset here is: You know best what you want out of life and if achieving the desired goal adds significant value to your life then keep pursuing your dreams. Giving up simply because people tell you to expresses a lack of confidence and self-esteem.
If this doesn't convince you, become aware of the fact that stars such as Shaun White or Jared Leto were told they would never amount to anything and yet somehow managed to push through this wall of destructive criticism.

Why is self-motivation the go-to means of pursuing your dreams?

Well, for one thing, you can't possibly rely on other people to keep you motivated. They have dreams and lives of their own, that require their full attention, also, most people are narcissists that do not give a damn about anything but themselves.
The beauty of self-motivation stems from the fact that it is independent of most, if not all, external circumstances and is maintained inside your own mind.
Most problems we face on a day to day basis root in our own minds, such as vanity, laziness or a tendency for a lack of drive. Having a motivation that comes from the inside helps to contain these flaws.

Building a master plan that allows you to go after the unattainable

In our adolescence, we all have at least one big dream we want to achieve. Some people will relentlessly pursue it, others will give up, ending up in jobs/locations they don't really like, ultimately settling for less.

The question that arises is: How can you keep yourself from settling for second best?

The obvious answer would be: Stay motivated. However, that answer is completely void of any content, therefor it becomes necessary to establish how you can develop the lasting motivation you crave.

Make a list

I know what you're thinking, this sounds like something a kid with OCD would do. In reality, this list, as it contains both the milestones you set for yourself and the problems you may run into, will greatly aid your cause. For one thing, it will help you become aware of the specifics, maybe even give you a time-frame to work with. For another, it will point out the intricacies that come with your endeavor.

Find and/or build a group of like-minded people

While this is only partially a form of self-motivation, it will become incredibly helpful once your inner spirits run low, as the community can give you a gentle kick in the ass and encourage you to keep going. Also, the collective mind of the group can be surprisingly inspiring, helping you to come up with even better game plans.

Keep reassessing your goals

Set an interval for yourself. Then, every time that interval of time has passed, take a moment to pause and assess your progress. Essential questions at this stage are:

Am I at track with the milestones I set for myself?
Have the external circumstances changed? Is this going to be reflected in the outcome?
Am I happier than I was before? / Do I feel more achieved?
Do I need to make minor adjustments?

Start tapping into the reserve

Sticking with the initial example of a regular workout, the worst thing to do is to stop once you start experiencing pain.
Instead, find a way to unlock the potential that lies inside of yourself. An extraordinarily powerful tool to achieve this is cognitive dissonance, a concept originating in social psychology.
In brief, applied to the topic of this post, cognitive dissonance describes an incongruence between where you are and where you want to be.
This incongruence will ultimately cause you to push harder, closing the gap between the dream and the status quo.
The overwhelming feeling of being sick and tired, unwilling or even incapable to go on, is normal at times. Although some people do experience it more frequently than others.Once again, the most important thing at this point is to not give in to these self-doubts and maintain an objective mindset, instead of falling prey to your subjective emotions.

This post is already getting longer than I originally anticipated. That is mostly due to the extensive nature of its topic. Nevertheless, I can confidently say that the concepts I personally find to work best have been covered. If you want to dig deeper into the matter, there is a ton of reading material out there that will help provide insight on how to become the best self one can be. I will conveniently post them below.

Additional material:

Self-Esteem: A Proven Program of Cognitive Techniques for Assessing, Improving, and Maintaining Your Self-Esteem

The Mind-Made Prison

or also, to some extent

The Game (primarily concerned with a sub-culture of pickup artists, it still is a good read that deals with rewiring your desire to succeed)

The promised update

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 24 Nov 2013 17:23:00 +0000

Changes keep happening.

Since I promised last week that I am going to keep you updated on my current project, you can probably guess what this post is going to be about.
I haven't been able to do too much work on it this week, as with 2 exams and 3 major presentations coming up this week I was busy preparing myself, mentally and physically.

Nevertheless, I managed to squeeze out a few design ideas that ended up completely changing the silhouette of the building. For one thing I had neglected the need for a bathroom of some sort, for another, the planned staircase filled me with displeasure and so I just swapped it for a ladder (talk about minimalism). I am also going to swap the supporting pillars for something a little more high-tech and sturdy. After all, the current generation was never expected to be anything more than a placeholder.

I have also started with some rudimentary blueprints and concepts for the environment which will hopefully be turned into something a little more useful once I find the time to do so.

Either way, other than that, there really isn't much to talk about this week.I hope you guys found this post useful.

Back after a long absence

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 13 Nov 2013 21:28:00 +0000

It's been a while.

I know I haven't posted on here in a long time. If I wasn't busy working on my research paper or studying for exams I felt blocked in terms of my cretive work. The summer vacation didn't provide the anticipated relief either. I couldn't bring myself to get done anything CG-related. After all, self-doubt and discouragement are no strangers in the industry. Allan McKay, a genius in the field of VFX recently published an article on the topic. If you can find the time, I recommend you read it, as it has helped me out a lot and I am certain, if you are facing similar issues, you will find it just as useful.

Allan McKay's article on how to reach the unattainable

This article and some events in my personal life have pushed me to reconsider targeting a career in CG and I am glad to announce that I am officially back. At present, I have started a study on a piece for architectural visualization. You can find a screenshot below.

Figure 1: the current stage of concepting; blocking in basic shapes

The idea

As you can probably tell, I am going for residential architecture. This is still an early concept and I might actually end up switching a lot of it around, as I always do, however, my mind is generally set on a modern tenement in the hills, creating contrast. Another key element for me is to make sure that there is a sufficient amount of light in the building that can, if required, be dimmed. In the current stage of concepting it has become very clear that a lack of light is not going to be an issue. As far as the use of props goes I might actually revisit some of my older pieces of furniture I have modelled over the course of my learning process. There really is no need to model assets from scratch when you are free to choose from several older pieces of yours. As long as you deem them good enough, that is. The third and last key aspect of the design is the mix of symmetric and asymmetric elements.It makes the entire residence seem less organized and more organic, all the while maintaining a certain contemporary style, being composed of very basic shapes.

That should be all for today, however I will make sure I keep you updated on the process of this project.
I've been thinking about ending this article with something corny, so suffice it to say:
Do what you love, it'll make your life infinitely better.

Alex

GTX 770 - Battlefield 3

noreply@blogger.com (Toquen) — Sun, 07 Jul 2013 18:31:00 +0000

Building a gaming PC

noreply@blogger.com (Toquen) — Sat, 29 Jun 2013 13:17:00 +0000

A while back I started looking into the specs for the upcoming PS4 and Xbox One and couldn't help but wonder what it would cost to build a PC of similar specifications. Well, just as I was about to find my answer I was sidetracked and ended up buying myself some high end parts. I suppose that's just typical me.

The parts are as follows:

Motherboard: ASRock Z77 Extreme6

CPU: Intel Core i5 3570K 3.4Ghz

CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo

RAM: 8Gb (2x4Gb) Corsair Vengeance 1600Mhz CAS 7

HDD: WD Caviar Black 1Tb

GPU: Asus DirectCU II OC GTX 770

Case: Cooler Master Storm Trooper

PSU: EVGA NEX650G

All higher than the upcoming consoles' specs. Much higher. That's £1030 worth of computer parts (excluding Windows 7), enough to play most games maxed out. It's also much more expensive than even the Xbox One's £429 tag but for me, it was worth it.

Motherboard with CPU, cooler and RAM already inside
(Poor quality due to laziness, couldn't be bothered to bring out my SLR)

As soon as the parts arrived, I cleared my 27" iMac from the desk to allow for room to build (and generally lose tools and equipment). The CPU and RAM were nice and easy to insert, just plug and play. The CPU cooler was a little fiddly at first, but with the help of a friend it fitted on nicely (the wrong way round at first, but that was easily fixed).

The Storm Trooper case originally had its front fans facing perpendicular, which would only cool the hard drives. With a little bit of tinkering, they can be turned 90 degrees to create a convection current throughout the case.

With extreme care, I attempted to insert the GTX 770 into the top PCIe. When I figured this wasn't working I applied a little pressure and 'click', it was in. Despite the nerve-racking experience I was happy to have the most expensive component inserted. Next was the dreaded cable management. I started with connecting the case I/O to the motherboard, USB 2 and 3s, power and reset buttons and so on. That was the easy part since the length of the GTX 770 made the SATA ports challenging to access. I would have removed the GPU, but it was about 1am and I wanted this thing finished. So with a little guessing (iMac owners are experienced at this) I managed to fix in the SATA ports for my HDD, DVD drive, eSATA and 'X-Dock'. The power cables were fairly easy to route, and thanks to my modular PSU they were nicely managed.

Then came the moment of truth: the first boot. After hooking up the computer to my cheap Samsung P2470HD (I know it defeats the purpose of a gaming PC but it's only temporary), I hit the power switch and turned on my newly built PC. The fans spun up, graphics card gave the green light and... the screen was blank. The motherboard didn't show any warning signs (with the sound test provided with the case), nor did it display any numbers on the LED counter. It took me about half an hour to realise that I had forgotten to hook up the CPU to the PSU, it couldn't have been more obvious.

It was 3am and I had booted windows from the DVD drive first and was half way through the installation (Which took a surprisingly short amount time compared to when I set up Bootcamp, I didn't know just how slow Apple Superdrives were until a £15 LiteOn drive beat them).

Finally, the build was complete. All the divers ASRock had provided are installed and are working perfectly (I downloaded the Nvidia drivers online). Not bad for a spontaneous purchase if you ask me. I'll be posting some Benchmark tests here in the near future to show off my new PC.

Global Illumination in VRay

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 02 Jun 2013 21:03:00 +0000

Here's another CG-related post.

Today, I want to talk about a very helpful set of algorithms that make your life as a 3D Artist just so much easier : Global Illumination
In order for you to understand what I'm talking about, we'll need to examine the concept behind global illumination a bit closer.As you might be aware (if you're not, you will be after reading the next few lines) global illumination is a technique supported by most of today's rendering engines.
It helps artists create more realistic lighting solutions, since it also adds indirect illumination (e.g. light bouncing off a wall) to the calculations that happen at render time, ultimately making the lighting look a lot more natural than pure direct illumination which is the light getting emitted directly from a light source.
I don't want to get too technical on you, so we are not going to dig too deeply into the different methods that exist for calculating global illumination, but the most common approaches are:

ray tracing
path tracing
photon maps

VRay supports several different GI solvers (aka engines) and depending on what you are doing, you might prefer one over the other. However, before we can take a look at those, let's take a look at two different renders, one with, the other without indirect illumination.

Figure 1: Scene without GI

Figure 2: Scene with GI

As you can see, the first render has some noticeable noise in areas where there is not enough light, whereas the render with indirect illumination enabled does no longer have any visible noise despite the mediocre render settings.
That's due to the fact that in the first render, light does not bounce, it just hits a surface and is immediately removed from the calculation, unless there are reflections or refractions that need to be taken care of.
In the second render, however, the light bounces multiple times, enabling light to bounce around corners. Also notice that the second render is a little bit brighter, since the walls get illuminated by bouncing light multiple times. Also, the image is more saturated. This may result in a need to adjust the exposure.

Moreover, the light bounced off of the objects inside the room adds a slight tint to the walls and while this is only a very subtle effect right now, one could easily turn up the GI multiplier to bring out those colors a bit further.

Always bare in mind though that any global illumination solver will add additional render time therefor it should only be used when needed.

So how do you turn Indirect Illumination on?

It's actually a lot easier than you might expect. Open up your render setup (hit F10), make sure VRay is set as your current renderer, then head over to the Indirect Illumination tab and check the "On" checkbox.

The following video should explain most of the features and the different GI Engines in VRay to an extent that should give you a basic understanding of how GI works in VRay.

I also go over how to achieve flicker-free Irradiance Cache GI when rendering animations.

As a summarization, it is safe to say that:

Brute Force GI is very slow and might cause noise in the render, however it is physically accurate and preserves details. Furthermore, it will not cause any flickering in animations.
Light Cache is a very fast path tracing solver that creates instant previews and while it's not only quite easy to set up, it also produces very accurate results on edges and small objects, however it only works with VRay-Materials and it does not work very well with bump maps. It also might cause some subtle blur.
Irradiance Cache is a lot more efficient than Brute Force GI since it is based on interpolation, however it blurs the smaller details in the image and it can create some flickering when used to render animations
Photon Maps are fairly fast but they use extensive amounts of RAM and can introduce a lot of undesirable noise into the scene. They also cause trouble on hard edges due to their approximation algorithms

In the video below, I employed the aforementioned methods to achieve a flicker-free GI solution:
I cached out the Irradiance Map for each frame from frame -2 to frame 502 using the Animation (prepass) mode:
Medium settings, 30 interpolation samples, about 15MB per frame

After succesfully saving the maps to disk, I then rendered the final sequence with my interpolation samples set to 10 and my interpolation frames set to 2, once again using the Animation(rendering) preset.

Furthermore, I disabled the secondary GI engine since its information was already stored in the irradiance cache maps I saved out earlier.

As seen above, I added 2 additional frames at the beginning and the end, but I only rendered the sequence from frame 0 to frame 500. There's a plausible reason for that:
The additional frames are used as interpolation frames for the irradiance map, otherwise the first and the last frames of the animation could have wound up with glitches such as noise or artifacting.
There's also a bit of warping going on, but that's because I eventually decided to retime the animation in post.

That's it for today, I hope you enjoyed this post and actually learned something from it.
Share the love.

Speed Modeling - Interior

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 24 May 2013 21:46:00 +0000

I'm glad to announce that I'm back with another CG-related video.

It's not a tutorial, however. It's a screen-capture of me creating a room for a class I'm taking at school.

The footage does obviously not depict the entire process, but it is a fair part of it.
As you can see in the video, I also started assigning material mock-ups. Those mock-ups make it a lot easier to adjust materials on the fly without having to go back and forth between the material editor and the scene just to change selections.

I had a little problem with getting my head around the shape of the keyhole at first, which is why I probably spent a lot more time on it than I should have, but nevertheless, I'm okay with the final result (which I'm also going to post below).

All of the content that went into this project is my original work.

Textures were either hand-painted(for example the blackboard) or photographed on-site(floor). The entire modeling and lighting solution was done by me.

Lighting the scene in VRay was a real pleasure, thanks to how quickly the VRay Sun and its Skylight portals can be set up to create immersive and satisfying results. (the lights in this scene could probably have used some tweaking, but it was certainly good enough for school)

Here's a video of me painting some textures in Photoshop.

I'm using a Wacom Bamboo which happens to be a blessing from heaven ;)

And here's the final scene from two different perspectives.

These were originally quite high-res (3840x2160), but for the sake of this post, I had to resize them.

The high-res version of the second render may be found here

Xbox One

noreply@blogger.com (Toquen) — Tue, 21 May 2013 16:59:00 +0000

Microsoft finally put a name and face to their once mysterious console when they introduced the Xbox One. With 15 new titles and 300,000 new Xbox Live servers promised, I'm already gathering what little money I have.

We are faced with a sleek rectangular console, void of any awkward curves like we've seen previously. They confirmed Blu-ray support in the slot-loading drive, good news for larger games as we'll no longer be faced with the dreaded "Insert Disk 2". We've lost our front USB ports, but they've likely added just as many on the back for multimedia devices and this time they've gone 3.0.

It doesn't stop at its good looks though, we now have a massive 8 cores to play with. The 8GBs of system memory will allow for their '3 Operating Systems' to run, this makes switching between movies and games almost seamless. We have a HDMI In/Out as expected and a 500GB Hard Drive to store downloadable content and gameplay videos after editing them naively right on your console.

Xbox One's controllers bare a similar resemblance to the 360's but this time packing updated ergonomics, a taller base and thinner holds. The Xbox Guide button is wider than before and is positioned next to the bumpers. They've changed the D-Pad design to something more accurate and thanks to the internal battery you'll no longer have to hide your AA batteries. And for the first time ever we'll have feedback resistance for our fingers, something I've wanted for a long time.

The new Kinect looks more visually pleasing than the previous model being shorter and more square. It is more accurate at tracking motion than before as displayed at the reveal event and will interact with the '3 operating systems' allowing you to use voice commands to switch between apps.

All of these amazing features combined with the 15 release titles I'm sure we're in for a great December. Next stop: E3 where we'll get a chance to see some more of the Xbox One in action.

First 3Ds MAX Tutorial

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 20 May 2013 19:44:00 +0000

It's here, my first 3Ds MAX tutorial for this blog

As I already mentioned yesterday, I'll be posting a lot of CG related stuff in this blog, so if you're interested in the field, you should definitely become a regular to Querks.
Anyways, it might not be as much of a tutorial as it is a comparison of an editable poly and an edit poly in 3Ds MAX. This is obviously intended for beginners since intermediate users will already know everything I mention in this video.
Sorry for the bad "essing" in the audio track, but my microphone really seems to amplify any s-sounds I make.
Other than that all I can say is: If you're beginner who wants to learn a tad bit about 3Ds MAX and its modeling pipeline, check out the video below.

GUIs in Java

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 20 May 2013 17:12:00 +0000

I might not be the first one to mention this and I'm certainly not going to be the last one, but creating a user-interface in Java can be a pain in the you-know-what.
Swing is a rather unintelligible API to begin with. Coding every single line from scratch is tedious and annoying, especially so if the result looks nothing like you intended.

I'm usually more of a .NET guy to begin with, so I'm used to a drag-and-drop UI-Designer and a XAML-parser that takes some of the coding work off my hands.
Creating a Layout that stays the same once you resize the window is a ton easier, too.

Unfortunately, the curriculum of my computer science class pretty much forces me to use Java for every app I create.At first I figured that I was the one to blame for a malfunctioning GUI, but after digging deeper and searching Google for answers I quickly realized that I wasn't the only one having problems getting my head around Swing. The different Layout Managers have their quirks and hard-coding every single value is obviously not an option. Generally speaking, the level of frustration is a lot higher than it would need to be. I recently stumbled across some ingenious IDEs that include some very sophisticated and easy-to-use GUI-Designers.
We'll see how that's going to work out for me. It's safe to say that it's going to be a lot less frustrating than coding everything from scratch.

Xbox Reveal

noreply@blogger.com (Toquen) — Mon, 20 May 2013 16:08:00 +0000

We are finally faced with a new generation of consoles. Xbox fans all over the world are preparing themselves for the big reveal tomorrow. This is something that I won't be missing, especially after all the money I've dished out on Xbox products. So what exactly will Microsoft be sharing with us tomorrow?

New face

Any guess is as good as the next when it comes to the name, but perhaps we can take a stab at the shell that will house our components as they melt from over-use. Following the changes Microsoft has already made to their 360 model, we can probably assume they'll go for something slim, black and glossy. I'd personally like anything that fits nicely underneath my Samsung without being intrusive.

It's what's on the inside

As with desktop computers, performance should always come before looks. Judging by the rumored specs, Microsoft may have taken this to heart. Similar to the PS4 the Xbox will be seeing a 7000-series AMD GPU. Some claim crossfire is a possibility, but considering the lower price range they will likely use two independent cards, one integrated with the CPU for multimedia and another dedicated for intensive games. This is an approach that is growing in popularity in laptop hardware as it saves energy and will prevent noisy fans while watching the latest blockbuster.

Some rumors suggest a generous 8GB of RAM, combined with the use of AMD CPUs designed for Desktop systems the new Xbox might finally support native HD and anti-aliasing. ~~Thanks to the x86 architecture we will also see backwards compatibility with 360 games, good news for long-time Xbox gamers struggling for shelf space.~~ The x86 architecture is different from the 360's so unfortunately we won't be seeing backwards compatibility.

It is common knowledge that Blu-ray takes the lead when it comes to disc space, so there's a good chance Microsoft will use this technology in their new Xbox. I believe discs are a dying race, downloads are taking the lead but with what Microsoft charges on their 'Games on Demand' I'm more than happy to see a disc drive.

Pricing

Microsoft will likely keep it similar to their previous launches. You could buy an original Xbox for around $300 at launch, with the 360 set at $100 more. From this we can probably guess that the new Xbox will be somewhere between $300 and $500 on release, likely closer to the latter due to the high-end components.

Only time will tell

It's just one more day to wait until we find out what we'll be spending the next eight years of our life on. Until then, stay eager and prepare yourself for the big reveal.

The obligatory introduction

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 19 May 2013 22:54:00 +0000

What can I say.
This is where I'd normally mention how thankful I am that Google provides a free and simple way to air your thoughts, but Nathan already beat me to it, so I'm going to have to come up with something more original now.
I suppose I should just give a basic introduction of myself instead.
Here's what you'll probably need to know:

My name is Alex and I live in Germany, Bavaria to be a tad more specific.
I am currently in my senior year, hoping to take my final exam one year from now.
I show a great interest in computer-generated imagery
While my taste in music has grown more diverse lately, I still prefer alternative rock over anything else
I might come across as a nerd, but I perceive myself as a challenged artist (just kiddin')

That's probably all you need to know for now. It's also very likely that I'm going to be posting some CG-related stuff on this blog as the topic comes up in my life, so be prepared for some awesomeness.

Oh, and in case you're wondering, the blog's name is misspelled on purpose, think of it as a weird form of creativity.

Are you ready?

noreply@blogger.com (Toquen) — Sun, 19 May 2013 22:29:00 +0000

I'd just like to thank Google for handing me the opportunity to let my opinions hang from my belt. Get ready for some biased ego-induced posts by Alex and myself.

Are you ready?