ricardocabellov5.5

I'll certainly miss working in the offices, I decided to leave a couple of weeks ago as I had some ideas in mind that I wanted to develop and to do that I need to be fulltime working on them. Also, a break in your life is always needed. After all I've been working there for 3 years now, (full time since 2'5 years). When I started we were more or less 3 guys, and now we're 25+ now... So I can say that I've learnt as much as the company has. In my case I've learnt a lot about managing clients, design process, some softwares, AS, English, slang (hello Mike!), accents, and even culture :D

So, after deciding it, I went to see the big guys, said the news and they got it quite well, so I'll still do freelance stuff when needed for them and some extra things which sound quite interesting... I'll like to see how it works out. So, after informing the big guys it took 1 week to let the rest know. It has been a very hard week, because anytime anyone were saying somthing like "and you will have to do that later on...", I was like.. eu.. uhm.. yeah! And it's kind of hard situation really.

The pain is over and the new was spread today... And well, it was quite emotional, I've never felt that needed/loved in a company, looks like everyone was shocked (some of them extremely more than others :P). I better don't mention how hypocritical was on the other Spanish companies I work for. Oh well.. I'll miss all that.

So well, my last day is September 8th, but I already want to thank to all the Spring'ers for all the help and the support they gave me, and just for staying there and be as they're! (that sounds really gay!). I'll see you every wednesday that the weather let us play football anyway ;)

The good news for whoever reads this blogs are that I'll probably write more, about cool projects that I may work on, i'll probably improve much more/faster xplsv.tv, and do some new sites I got in mind. And for the other companies/individuals is that from now on I'm again available for doing freelance jobs. So if you think I could help in anything, just drop me a line.

Believe it or not, yeah, i own a iBook now. As now the airports doesn't let you go in the plane with a big-size laptop, I had to buy this one just for PMP... just kidding...

I'm not really a fan of the OS, but I like the size of the machine and I also like the machine technology-wise. I was waiting for a intel one, but looks like Apple will still take a bit of time to release a 12" one with a proper 3dgfx card. So by now i'll play with this one and see what can I do with it. Got to see how, Photoshop, Flash8, Reason and Traktor runs on it... :)

For the ones that doesn't know, I'm talking about 1995 by Kewlers & MFX. If you go to the profile in pouet, you'll find that 154 users liked this production and even 5 of them think is one of the best prods ever.

Ok, first of all, I think there is a lot of hype here, A LOT! But that's not what made me to thumb down the prod. Kewlers is one ot the demoscene groups that has been innovating in style in almost every prod they were trying. MFX also tried to innovate, and after his awesome last prod Deitie the last thing you will expect is having abstract objects rotating while moving in a tunel or something. Homage to the oldschool art?! Well, the style of the website doesn't remind me at all the oldschool style, really. Also, apart from the kind of raytraced balls that are done by particles and then explode, there is nothing else new in the demo.

Anyway, if the demoscene needs something now is start moving to new visual styles. Right now, if you see a new demo, you may feel a deja vu. They design demos to look like other demos, and that's something that doesn't work anymore (atleast for me). There are always exceptions (like Aesterozoa) which is still one abstract object on the middle of the screen, but everything creates such a great experience, mood, that in a way the the concept makes sense.

Luckilly the guys at Fairlight now this, and they always try to do demos that doesn't look like demos everytime (getting some inspiration from xplsv.tv if needed ;D) Do you want an example? Check out Track One by Fairlight!

Ok.. My laptop is now obsolete :( Looks like a Radeon X300 now is not good enough... well.. that's how it is...

Anyway.. here are my favorites prods released at Assembly this year in order of preference...

Starstruck by The Black Lotus
Aesterozoa by Kewlers
Track one by Fairlight
Bombman by Matt Curren

Any other one? Well, i'm just not too sure about the other ones :_(

Since I've been in London, I've experienced a lot of interesting things related to movies.

The first one was when a movie I saw (which unfortunatelly I forgot the name right now) was filmed in a pub down the road of the first place I was working in London. It took me a while to recognise it because they changed the colour of the pub, but it was that one. I'll try to remember the name...

Edit: The movie was Intimacy.

The second one would be when I realised that a bus stop that is below a highway I used to walk trough was where one of the last scenes of Sexy Beast was filmed (A couple scenes were filmed in the same area in fact).

The third one would be when we realised that we were living in the same road that where the shop of the movie Notting Hill is, tho at some point it changes the name. We used to walk a lot looking for that shop, but it was just in the same street. We weren't able to find the park tho.

The fourth one was when in the cathedral that we got in front of our actual building they were filming a movie, and one of the actors there was Jordi Molla (which is from Barcelona, as I am). But no.. I didn't saw him.

And the last one was today, when I was walking (instead of taking the bus) from Spring to home because the day was great. After having a quick stop at Foxtons I went to a cinema I like to see if there were any interesting movies and just when I was arriving I was hearing people screaming, I thought they just were complaining about something. I arrived there, and stopped in the middle of the road, then I saw that there were lots of photographers, and people on the other side screaming. Oh right.. it was a premiere.. a small one as the cinema isn't too big and the road was quite small (it's not like Odeon or Empire ones). So I looked for the poster of the movie.. "Volver", uh? tried to recognise the girl in the poster, I wasn't able to, readed the name.. "Penelope Cruz", uh?! Then I turned my head to the right and I had "Pe" just on my side, looking at me, she was just walking a bit so the people could take some pictures of her. And she was at the end of the road at that point. Then I tried to see who was the director, oh! Almodovar!! turned my head again and saw him at 3meters of me. Hehehhe.. By then a policeman just pushed me away of the street, as I was kind of the middle.

I had more experiences like that, but these are the ones I remember right now. It's funny how many movie sets you can see in the city in very random places.

Back from old days I used to listen Game40, a radio show about videogames in Spain. It was (apart from other people) by Guillem Caballe, Manuel Martin Vivaldi and Carlos Ulloa. It was quite a good show. Both of them were ex-sceners, and they used to mention a little bit the demos released in spanish parties. Meanwhile they were doing the program Carlos was hired at Psygnosis. And months later they just stopped doing the show. Manuel Martin Vivaldi was running a webdesign company were some famous sceners were working in too :P As far as I know, he is still doing the same.

Regarding Carlos... I think he moved back to Spain (Madrid), and was trying to create a webdesign studio, or this is what I thought when I saw the site, maybe was just as a freelancer. Long time passed since them and I found him again reading the fantastic Andre Michelle blog. Aparently, mr. Ulloa is now working as a freelancer interactive designer for Double You (barcelona), and Outside Line (London). His personal site is interesting, but, honestly, not too stylish. However, he is doing a great work with a 3dengine done with flash. As far as I know he must be one of the first persons doing a commercial sites with a 3dnavigation done with flash. Kudos to him!

As you may know I'm also trying to do my own 3dengine, but it really needs a lot of love. With sole we did a Wild demo with everything I had done in flash for Euskal (and we got 3rd prize :P).

Check it out!

Well, I was trying to hold all this a bit more but as there is an article on a newspaper already I better say something.

Ok, so, yeah, xplsv is back doing serious prods! :) It was suposed to be a surprise, because nobody knew that blackpawn were working with us, and I think it end up quite well, 1st prize o/


tokyo / xplsv - pouet.net profile

I'll write a bit more about the prod in a few days (a little bit of making of :D), I still want to finish some parts of it this weekend, and probably release a video version.

It was quite fun to see the vote counter and see how xplsv was fighting against xplsv. As the main crew founder it was very interesting to see how the crew is getting big in that way that there are two subgroups doing prods. And as sole said, the best thing of all this is that all the members respect each other so there is a good vibe.

Just after getting the prize a journalist was asking me for an interview, he even didn't let me enjoy the celebrations, i had to ask him to wait atleast 10min. Anyway, he wasn't too bad, he was understanding the point of all this, or atleast I thought so. However some of the answers are quite different of what I said. For example, I didn't say that the other productions didn't took as much time as Tokyo.. I didn't say that I won the same prize some years ago just by myself.. and stuff like that, well, you know how is the press..

Here you have the article (spanish only)

The thing is that PSP also supports a memory stick, and at this point the memory sticks have more capacity than those little shitty CDs. So, as the memory stick is a technology that is not stopping will keep getting bigger and bigger, so what's the point of keeping those CDs? What about releasing your game in a memory stick? Then we will end up with a game portable which doesn't use 20% of itself (UMD reader). Which makes me think that Sony would probably redesign it and do it lighter... I guess.

Poor thing.. it only had 2 years of life :) Not too many technologies had such a short life.

Sorry about that but I had to stop the feature. I was getting 100+ spams a day. Hope with this "new" system I can stand for a bit longer.

So, feel free to write comments again :)

Yesterday I found something that was a bit tricky with ubuntu. I downloaded some stuff that was compressed in a .rar file and when I was looking for a program that was able to handle the files I found Ark and Xarchiver. Two "goo enough" tools that aparently were able to do the job. However they cann't handle the files like out-of-the-box. You need to install manually rar and unrar. After searching internet and following some solutions with unrar-free and things like that I tried something that was even easier.

1. Install Ark / Xarchiver
2. Download the latest version of RAR (now is RAR 3.60 beta 6).
3. Uncompress the file anywhere.
4. Open a Terminal and do this:

cd /usr/bin
cp /wherever/you/uncompressed/the/files/rar .
cp /wherever/you/uncompressed/the/files/unrar .

That's it! Enjoy!

UPDATE!! ( 26 / 10 / 07 )
Nowadays it's much more simple than that:

1. Open a console
2. sudo apt-get install rar
3. sudo apt-get install unrar