you sick liiitle monkeeeey!

Welcome back, dear reader.

I switched hosting providers last week and migrated over to Host Gator. The old provider, Midphase, was giving me a lot of downtime and I finally got fed up with them.

Moving is never fun, whether it’s packing boxes or sorting through old directories. There’s years of old junk and lots of stuff I forgot I had on the server.

Update: 4/2/2009
If you are contemplating hosting with Midphase, don’t. Aside from the problems I had with downtime, getting a refund was a hassle. I wasn’t able to move all my stuff over in time, so I renewed my plan and prepaid for the entire year ($150), thinking I can use an extra few days to move my stuff over then cancel and get a pro-rated refund. My fault for not reading the TOS, yes, but I assumed refunds are standard business practice.

Not so. A billing representative sends me a terse 1 sentence response and a cut & paste block from their TOS, which states that refunds are not issued once your credit card has been charged: “If you cancel your account after the first 30 days have passed, or after your account is renewed then unfortunately we will not be able to issue any refunds.” I used less than a month of the new contract. They’d keep more than $140?!?

I was pretty mad at this point and contemplated taking the issue up with my credit card company and the Better Business Bureau. I was finally able to get a refund after persisting, but it was a hassle I didn’t need. Being polite probably helped a lot. I was always courteous in communications to their staff. Their TOS has this strange bit in it: “midPhase also reserves the right to cancel your account with 72 hours notice should an event occur in which proper evidence exists that a customer was exceptionally rude or vulgar in communications with our staff.”

They must get angry customers a lot.

I’m now an award winning animator!

This is a Flash piece for FS/TEC 2007 (Oct 10-13 in Atlanta), one of the biggest annual restaurant tradeshow in the US, attended by some big names in the biz like Sharp, Toshiba, Panasonic, Microsoft, etc. My client wanted something to portray his company as a younger, hipper newcomer to the field of restaurant management software. This animation would be played continuously on a 40″ monitor over their booth as well as on the PCs placed around the floor. He specifically wanted a cartoony illustrated look and showed me some visual styles he liked, especially a designer named Paige Pooler.

Cartoony illustrations are something I specialize in, if you’ve looked around my site, so I felt right at home working on this project. The storyboard and narrative progression came to me really quickly and I sketched it all out in Autodesk Sketchbook. I presented that to the client and got the go ahead to start animating.

That’s where the drudgery starts to kick in and at some points, I felt a sense of dread at the sheer amount of art I had to draw and animating that still lay ahead. I always had a clear idea of what I wanted, but getting there took a bit of time. Specific things were the look of the restaurant, which was one of the last things I nailed down, and all that decor to fill up the vast amount of space this Flash was spec’ed for (1200×800). After 2 weeks of intense drawing and animation, this is what I came up with.

The client was very pleased when he saw this and said everyone loves it. He also said how he loved the look of the restaurant too, so I got it right. I told him this would turn a lot of heads at the convention, having full confidence in the quality of the work I do. Little did I know just how many heads this would turn. He emailed me the Sunday after the show to tell me they had won the First Time Exhibitor Award (scroll all the way to the bottom)! A lot of work went into this and people noticed.

This was a really fun project to work on. Lots and lots of details, but they all paid off. I’d like to do more fun projects like this.