After spending all week working with CSharp/Visual Studio and Git, taking copious notes for inclusion into my book I have found CSharp programming wonderfully addictive. At the same time using Visual Studio to create the simplest of programs seems to give much more satisfaction than it did when I was in high school.
The problem now is I have so many irons in the fire and I want to do them all. I have 25 lessons left in the latest CSharp course which is helping immensely with my investigation for my book. This weekend I also signed up for another 20 hour course with the same instructor as I like his style very much.
I want to keep working on my book, work through a course for the Arduino I purchased … argh … there is not enough time in the day for all of this.
In last weeks post I made the comment about not finishing a single project of my own. I have finished plenty of tutorial types which is all good, some of the results were great. It is now time for me to complete one of my own. I started model for my favorite World War II fighter, the Messerschmitt Me262. I purchased the blue prints for my references and all so it is high time I started serious work on this model and finish it.
It terms of the references I located them at http://the-blueprints.com/. I purchased a set of .dxf, .pdf, and .png all of which looked great until I started moving the images around and creating the top, side and front views. I found things did not line up quite right. This time I have done a little more research starting with the eBooks ‘Virtual Airplane’ by Witold Jaworski. and how he went about locating, creating and modifying his references.
After realigning and scaling the reference images I obtained, here is what I have.
My introduction to Scrivener was obviously God sent. I was delaying writing for so long it became an increasing effort for me to begin writing the first word. The reason for this, I am now thinking was because I did not know where to start. After setting aside the time needed to read through the provided interactive tutorial, avoiding the quick start guide, I can see how you can start anywhere, then organize as you go. Heck you could organize all of your writings at the end if you wanted to. I’m not sure how that would work with a novel but with how to, instructional formats it would work fine and gets me started.
The book has started, getting organized and I have begun collecting my references.
A possible draw back to this software, much like Blender and Unity I might try to start too many books and not finish a single one. Much like my folders full of Blender and Unity files. I have started and completed a lot of Blender files however these were tutorials for learning purposes. I have never finished a single Blender project I have started on my own. My Unity files are for learning purposes only and do date I have never started a Unity project I actually meant to finish as a published game.
I also dropped a good chunk of change on a Surface Book. What a great piece of engineering. So far this make a MacBook pro look like a Childs toy.
Its seems strange how as I start to organize my thoughts on writing this book I have been talking about, useful blog posts and tools start showing up out of the blue. For no reason other than I had not perused the site in a couple of months I logged into CR4. The first article I started reading lead me to a piece of software specifically designed for writing and looks like a great program for its stated function. I am one that always prefers to use software for their intended function therefore you will never see me use Excel for any kind of data access or flow charts like everyone where I work. I will use Access and Viso for those functions and Excel for spreadsheet calculations and have become quite a proficient user of all three.
Without further ado I give you Scrivener. At first glance it looks to be another word processing program but after a couple hours of YouTube videos describing the various features such as organizing your chapters and research items. The ease with which you can rearrange your content which is nothing like a cut and paste in a Word document I find quite appealing. As I start creating the content for my book I will continue to update you with the various features I discover within this software and at 40.00 I will definitely be using this for much longer than the 30 day trial period. Actually my trial period finished last night 🙂 after watching those great videos. I love getting other users opinions of software or items I am thinking of purchasing outside of the comments reviewers leave on the product websites. I believe those as much as I believe the commercials that state, “These are not actors but real people…” yeah right.
Another item of note, I completed my taxes for 2015, yes I am getting a refund from my Federal but alas I must pay the state of Oklahoma. Another check mark on my todo list for the day.
I uploaded a new YouTube video from the Udemy course ‘After Effects – Genius’. This video is not the full length video from the course, just a short for trying out the Adobe Media Encoder.
New video
New site covering miscellaneous activities including my favorite activity: Blender
