Rants are finished

Chris and I finished up the rants last night, I was up for 24 hours took a 5 hour sleep break then worked for another 40 to get everything ready to go and shipped out. I'm going to be putting up a demo on the site later today.. I need to get more sleep first though.

Printing the CDs

Assembling the boxes
There were a lot to assemble


Chris holds the first completed rant to come off the assembly line
The package!

Finishing up the rants

We've been working really hard on the Rant animations for the last couple of weeks. I'm trying to get them ready in the next couple of days so I can get the preorders to people before Christmas. Needless to say everything else has been taking a back seat to this project until we get them out. As usual I always underestimate how long things will take by x3. I would factor that into my calculations, but I'm afraid that if I did things would take three times longer than THAT! Still I think with a lot of hard work we should be able to meet our deadline. The Cd packages are going to be a little different than I originally planned. Instead of two cds per season there is now one, this is because we will be putting all of the animations on a separate disk. So the Box set will be 3 CDs with mp3s and a Flash player interface, and the Rant animation disk.. I may make it into an actual DVD. That would be cool, but I may not have time to figure out the details on that one. Either way there is over an hour of animated Alpha Rants. I think they are pretty funny and I can't wait to share them with you guys. I'm pretty excited about getting this out the door. I'm sorry that it took so long, but I think in the end it will be worth the wait! Once the preorders are done I will be raising the price on the Package deal. We will be offering the Animations separately after the preorders.

Here are some more preview images from the rants for you to enjoy!

Fun Fun Code Time

Well this week has been full of irritating coding problems. I've been trying to code up a mp3 player for the alpha Rant CDs using the new Flash components. Unfortunately that mean having to learn how to link up xml in Flash the new way, learning all the new annoying things they have done with Actionscript 2 and a whole slew of annoying and needlessly complicated programming tasks.

After getting everything talking to eveything else I realized that when the playhead of the MediaPlayback component reached the end of the track it just stopped. It didn't go to the next track.. "That's odd" I thought. And after two days of searching for the new way to program it to go to the next track, ( the old way only half worked, interestingly enough it would go to the next item in the list, but nothing would happen?!?!) I gave up, and had my programming friends look at it, only to discover, though much digging, that there really isn't a way to do it, they didn't include any way to handle that information in their component. :P

So tonight the Forum was hacked.. yay, more idiotic programming problems. So I'm working on restoring THAT... Oh well I guess it was bound to happen eventually.

I remember the old days, when all I had to do was draw little pictures of bikes and trains and ducks for courseware. It was great, at the end of the day I could go home and leave it all behind. Cook super for the wife, watch a movie, maybe go out with the friends.. Sigh.