A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup

Listen Up!
Sorry about the delay, two reasons is that I was again quite busy now that Jugglers On Juggling is back in production, and nothing really all that interesting happened last week.
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Did you hear me say Jugglers On Juggling? Yes you did. I've started the new season of the show, and I have a few ideas for episodes now that it's started. The first 2 episodes are IJA convention videos, and after that will begin a massive 4 episode series about juggling music videos, starting with 2 episodes about video, and 2 episodes about music. Then I've got another episode where I will SHOW how to do animated GIF's from a video file instead of telling you like I'll do today. After that I'm not sure what to do, but I am ALWAYS open for suggestions.
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Work is doing absolutely fine. They keep rearranging the racks on me at Garwood, but hey, that's their prerogative and I just need to adapt to it. I've still got plenty of hours and the water tank at Elizabeth finally works so I can properly water the indoor plants. Overall things are good, even if I'm getting carts upon carts of Boston Ferns that nobody wants with nowhere to put them at a price that is STILL not low enough to sell...
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So college is almost starting up, and I've still got the dept with my parents from last semester, but then again once I get a few more weeks of work in that will absolutely be gone. I'm expecting this semester to be pretty good for Tech.MCC because we're gonna have a big TV that I found to tear apart and mod however we want, we're going to have the LEGO Mindstorms kit to work with, and we've got a brand new budget to work with, so things ought to be interesting, I just need to start setting everything up with the college, which I absolutely hate doing, but hey, I'm president and it has to be done....
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Daily Life:
So my truck has a new set of brakes and a new brake rotor! YAY, sort of, wait, no. Not yay at all.....
So as everyone knows, I had decided to drive all the way down to the IJA in North Carolina, and my truck had never had it's brakes worked on. So it's a few yeas old and the pads were wearing down, and I had the type of pads that DON'T give a warning noise before they run out of padding, they just go straight to metal. So on the 9 hour trip down I thought I was hearing some squeaks near the end, but dismissed it a little because it still braked fine and drove fine. As the convention went on it was still there, not getting any worse, but I knew something was up at the end when it was time to leave, so I started my big 9 hour journey back to NJ.

I did try to go easy on the brakes, but more and more along the trip they squealed more and more and the truck began to not brake so well. I knew they were worn out, but I had to keep going because I didn't have enough money for a hotel somewhere in Virginia, and I had work the next day, so I pressed on, knowing what was happening. When I got home, We saw what had happened, only what I didn't see was how much the left front brake had worn out the ROTOR, the thing looked like spin art from all the grooves it had in it, and though it was cool to see, it was a hundred bucks that my parents are making me pay. Granted a hundred isn't much and it is "Maintenance on the truck", but it really wasn't my fault......

Juggle This:
So as promised a few weeks ago, here is a quick tutorial on how to make an animated gif from a video file.
What you need is photoshop with illustrator, I use PS7, RAD video tools by Bink and Smacker.

What you do is in whatever video editor you use, find the 1-8 second long clip you want to use for repeating and clip the video and export it so it starts at the frame to begin and ends at the ending frame. This is the hard part because you have to find a clip where your body stays in the same position and your arms/props are moving really consistently, so take some trial an error, use windows media player classic or a lightweight media player to watch the exported clip and see how the beginning and end frames match.

Once you have that the hard part is over. What you do now is select that file in RAD Video Tools and hit "Convert", go up to the right-top box and change the exported filetype from "default (AVI)" to a series of jpg images. This will save every frame of the video as a jpg image in whatever folder you want. From there, go into photoshop and put all those files together into one project file, each file as a different layer, in order. This can get really time consuming if you have a long video. Go to illustrator. In illustrator, set all the layers to invisible (click the eyeball button on the layer in the layers window), then copy that frame in the frame window as many times are there are frames. So you'll end up with the same number of frames as there are layers. I order, select the frames and turn on the appropriate layer, so for the 1st frame the 1st layer is on, the second frame the second layer is on, etc...

save that as an optimized gif and there's you're basic gif! To add text and stuff, all you gotta to is make a new layer on top of all the other layers, write whatever text or borders/art you want, and make sure that layer is visible for every frame. Save that as optimized and there you go!


A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150