Job hunting, in and of itself, is a flawed institution. No matter how good your resume looks, no matter how much or little experience you have, no matter how charming you are whether or not you get the all important call back boils down to the personal prejudices of the person reading your resume. You are competing with 400 other people who are just as desperate as you are to earn a regular paycheck and support themselves and/or their families. In that type of situation nothing you can do will really make you stand out. Everyone is jumping through hoops to try to be "unique". It is all about who you know, how you know them, and how well they like you personally. It is hard to look at this situation and have any hope at all. For someone like me who has been in school and unemployed for 3 years, who has no real contacts and no friends in the industry yet, it feels like trying to break into Fort Knox with a tooth pick. Maybe if I was McGyver it would be possible, but as myself looks damn near impossible. Does this sound a bit pessimistic? You bet your ass. Is it realistic? Absolutely. So the next problem to tackle is how to restore faith in my ability to get a paying job against all these odds. I think I would have more chance of succeeding relying on the Lottery Fairy to bail me out. :P
OK....rant done. Now time for the other crap. This weekend I really haven't produced much. I have been planning on my next stop motion, and researched free stop motion renderers online. I am surprised at how few actually allow you to import pictures rather than managing your camera.
My camera is a Cannon AS590IS Powershot. Not exactly an expensive or fancy camera. Being a student I really haven't had money for fancy equipment. The reason I got this camera is it gave me the most control options for the amount of dollars I was spending. However, I cannot control my camera from my PC. I have to be able to import my pictures into the movie application in order to make my stop motion work.
Yes, being the computer geek that I am I did try to download stuff that was supposed to make my camera work that way. Nope. Apparently none of them support my particular camera. And the ones that support models close to mine don't actually work with mine.
When I had Vista (ptui, ptui) I used to use Windows Movie Maker. It worked great. But then they started modifying it, so now it isn't so good for making stop mo anymore. I can't control it as much. And it assumes I am adding video instead of pictures, so it doesn't allow me do to some of the things it used to. Settings that used to be there are gone.
I tried MonkeyJam. This would be a great and handy program....if it worked. My old laptop didn't have the RAM or the processing power to allow it to work correctly. My new laptop does, but it seems they have stopped developing it or something because it doesn't play well with Windows 7. I can download it, I can import a maximum of 100 images into it. And that is about it. It doesn't even get as far as allowing me to do a preview. Then it closes itself down because it can't handle what I am asking it to do.
Several site suggest VideoDub. I downloaded it, but I cannot get it to import images. It only wants to capture and can't find a capturing device (duh, I don't have one). And it won't advance until it detects one. My guess is that the paid version has that feature but the free one doesn't.
And that is where my swear words started to outnumber my regular words, so i wisely put that project away and went to get cake. Cause cake makes everything better. Just saying.
I did start a crochet project. I found a spool of green colored yarn in my stache, and as it is getting warmer here (we are finally in the upper 60's. woo hoo) I decided to try my hand at crocheting a tank top for myself. I have never been one for constructing anything. I can make hats, socks, scarves and blankets. that is about the extent of it. Although I have been crocheting since I was 6 years old, I have for some reason never mastered the art of reading and following a pattern. Which might not be so much a surprise if you knew that it took me 20 years to finally be able to bake a decent loaf of bread.
So...here is that project:
Yeah. I have no idea how to construct this thing, so I have decided to crochet a big giant rectangle, sew the ends together and add straps at the top. I am 4 rows in. It took me 5 hours. I have majorly slowed down. Well, that and this is really a fine yarn. It isn't like the thick worsted you get from you regular craft store. It is the thickness of your average dental floss, so it might take me a while. Hopefully it will be done before the cold snap sets in. It will be my TV project for the next few weeks. Hopefully. :P Yeah, like adding that word will make it go any faster.