GlennTube

Visual Effects Show Reel

Glenn — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 19:42:22 +0000

I Finally put together my Visual Effects Show Reel. Check it out:

Amazing volcano storm

Glenn — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 01:10:52 +0000

You gotta check this out. It’s amazing:

http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/06/06/photos_chiles_puyehue_volcano

Hovercraft Challenge

Glenn — Sat, 21 May 2011 19:54:37 +0000

I was just looking through some old files I had lying around and I came across an old programming project I did WWAAAYYY back when I was about 15 years old. Back then I was fascinated by hovercrafts (nothings changed actually). So I made this really cool ‘Hovercraft Challenge’ game. I never finished it so here it is for your entertainment! (click the image and it’ll take you to the page with the game on)

If you fancy the challenge (the hovercraft challenge ), why not try get the best time around the course and the best score, and post it in the comments section! Lets get a little rivalry going on around here!

How Do I Build A Website

Glenn — Tue, 17 May 2011 20:41:56 +0000

Chances are you’re reading this as a complete novice and would like to know the basics of creating your own website.

Here’s a guide to creating your first pages!

When I started out making websites I found everything very confusing, I didn’t know why certain code needed to go where it should go and why some bits of code closed its self and other bits didn’t. Over time of course I learnt these things and now I can create anything I want with HTML – within reason!

Down To Basics

First things first, HTML is an acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. It consists of these things called tags which surround normal blocks of text, such as a title for the page or the content.

A tag is surrounded by Angle Brackets ( < and > ) also known as ‘greater than’ or ‘less than’ symbols in mathematics and programming. The first word or letter inside the tag defines what sort of tag it is. For instance:

This is a P tag, or otherwise known as a Paragraph tag. This sort of tag along with many others require it to be closed as well. To close a tag you simply put a forward slash before the letter or word inside the angle brackets. Like this:

You would place P tags around a block of text that you would like to appear in a paragraph. You would do this so that later on you could style it with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets – but that’s for another day!) The completed paragraph code would then look like this:

This text is inside P tags!

Most tags require to be closed in this fashion. There are a few tags that do not however. One such tag is the IMG tag, a.k.a the image tag, this displays an image on the screen. It works like so:

You’ll notice this tag has a forward slash just before the closing angle bracket. This is how you close these kind of tags. The reason for it is because the IMG tag has nothing to contain where as the P tag contains a paragraph of text.

Tag Attributes

In the last example with the IMG tag, you’ll notice seeing the letters ‘SRC’. This stands for ‘Source’, and that means the source of where the image is located. This is an attribute of the IMG tag. It has an Equals symbol and then inside quotes it has the value to assign to that attribute. In this case the value is the full URL to the image you want to display.

Tags can have many attributes. We wont discuss them all now, just know that anything inside the angle brackets that is after the first word or letter (separated by a space) is indeed an Attribute.

Basic Code Framework

When you write any web page, there is a certain basic code framework which needs to be adhered to.

The whole page needs to be contained within HTML tags. You will have a HEAD section where you can put things like the TITLE and META data, and you will have the BODY section where everything goes that’s to be displayed on the page in a browser.

A basic web page looks like this in html:

This is the title of the page

This is some text in a paragraph tag, which is in the body tag

The TITLE tag tells the browser what to display in the very top bar of the browser (in-line with the minimize/maximize and close buttons)

If it’s easier to visualize, each page needs to work in this order:

OPEN HTML

HEAD Section

BODY Section

CLOSE HTML

You cannot put the BODY tags inside of the HEAD tags, and vica versa. Also, only certain kinds of tags are allowed in the HEAD section and the same for BODY. For example, you cannot put a P tag in the HEAD, and you cannot put a TITLE tag in the BODY.

Formatting Within The BODY

In the main body of your page, you might like to format your code to be easier to read and more functional for your purposes. This can include underlining, making bold, and italicizing text. As well as creating a link out of a section of text. You might also want to create some headings. We will cover this now.

Firstly to underline text you simply surround the text to be underlined with a U tag. For example:

This text is underlined and this text is not underlined.

That is all there is to underlining.

To make bold and italicize text is similar, except for bold you will use the STRONG tags, and for italics you will use the EM tags (EM stands for Emphasis). The example:

This text is bold. This text is Italic

You can combine tags in order to have a bold underline, or any other variation you choose. It’s good practice however to close the tags in the opposite order you opened them. To explain this, let me give you a wrong way of doing it and a right way of doing it. In our example we will create some bold underlined text.

Firstly the incorrect way of doing this:

This text is bold and underlined

The correct way would be to close the tags in the opposite order they were opened:

This text is bold and underlined

It’s just good practice to do it this way. Make it a habit now!

Hyperlinks

Hyperlinks, or just links, are simply a way of allowing the user to click through to another page from your web page.

For this you will use the A tag – the Anchor tag.

By default, an anchor tag requires an attribute called HREF in order for the tag to function as a link to somewhere. The value of the HREF attribute should contain the URL to where you want this link to send the user to. This is an example of creating a link:

Anchor Text

As usual, because the A tag contains something – in this case text – it should be closed with a closing A tag. If you don’t close it, everything else on the page after the first A tag will become a link and the sky will fall on your head!

Additionally, the text within the A tag is commonly known as the Anchor Text (you will hear a lot about the anchor text in the area of Search Engine Optimization – but that’s for another day). It’s worth knowing that you can put IMG tags inside of A tags if you wish to make an image a link.

Headings

Finally, headings.

Heading tags come in 6 flavours. These are H1, H2, H3, H4, H5 and H6. Each one varies in size, starting at the biggest with H1 and reducing in size through to H6.

Their implementation is very simple:

This is a big heading

This is still a heading, but slightly smaller than the one above!

Tools

You will need a HTML editor to create web pages. Both Apple Mac and PC have a basic HTML editors built in that not many people truly know is an actual HTML editor.

On PC this is Notepad, and on Mac it’s TextEdit. There are additional steps for saving as HTML in these programs, I will instruct you on both below:

For Mac:

Write your HTML code as normal in TextEdit.
When saving, choose “Make Plain Text” from the Format menu before you try to save the file.
Then, when you go to save it, specify “.html” as the file name suffix.
Choose “Don’t Append” when TextEdit asks if you want to add the .txt extension or not.

For PC:

Write your HTML code as normal in Notepad.
When saving, choose “All Files (*.*)” from the “Save as type” drop down menu before you try to save the file.
Then, when you type the file name in, add “.html” to the end of your file name.

Both of these methods will produce a HTML file. This will work locally on your computer. If you want to put it on the internet you will need an FTP program and somewhere to host it, but that goes outside the scope of this basic tutorial.

My favourite program for making websites is Adobe Dreamweaver. This is because it has code highlighting and built in FTP. It also runs on both PC and Mac. There are other good programs too such as Coda, which is just for Mac. These programs do cost money though, it isn’t necessary for you to get these programs to do basic HTML for now however.

Conclusion

This concludes this very basic tutorial on making a web page. If you found it to be valuable, then please share it amongst your friends using the Facebook like button on this page and/or Twitter. Also please leave a comment, maybe suggesting that you’d be interested in more tutorials like this. If the demand is there, I will create a whole course on making websites.

The secrets to sleep and waking up

Glenn — Wed, 11 May 2011 08:13:14 +0000

Sleep is so important. If you have problems waking up, like I have, then what I have to say here may be of help to you…

According to psychologist and sleep expert David F. Dinges, Ph.D., of the Division of Sleep and Chronobiology and Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, irritability, moodiness and dis-inhibition are some of the first signs a person experiences from lack of sleep. If a sleep-deprived person doesn’t sleep after the initial signs, said Dinges, the person may then start to experience apathy, slowed speech and flattened emotional responses, impaired memory and an inability to be novel or multi-task. As a person gets to the point of falling asleep, he or she will fall into micro sleeps (5-10 seconds) that cause lapses in attention, nod off while doing an activity like driving or reading and then finally experience hypnagogic hallucinations, the beginning of REM sleep. (Dinges, Sleep, Sleepiness and Performance, 1991)

So lately I’ve been treating myself like a sort of human guinea pig. I’ve always been ‘plagued’ by sleep problems for as far as I can remember, so I decided to do a little testing. Here’s what I’ve found so far…

I use an iPhone app called ‘Sleep Cycle’ and so far it’s been the best alarm clock I’ve ever had. It’s designed to sense if you’re in a deep sleep or not and then attempts to wake you when your in the partially awake cycle. It doesn’t do this 100% of the time but its better than a standard ‘unintelligent’ alarm clock.

I found that when waking in a deep sleep your mindset is different to that when waking close to the awake state. By different I mean that your mind seems to only be able to think about how to get back to sleep, and it will be ingenious in reasoning while doing so! For instance you wake at 8:03, you’ll reset the alarm for 8:05. Then at 8:05 you’ll reason to reset it to 8:10. After all, what difference does a few minutes make? And then BAM you fell into a deep sleep again, managed to turn off the alarm without your concious brain knowing and its now 10:23, you’ve overslept. Thus enforcing the belief system that “I can’t wake up on time” and annoying anyone who was relying on you to be somewhere at a certain time.

A glass of water can pull you out of the deep-sleep-waking conundrum of wanting more sleep. It’s like an emergency defibrillator and thus you should keep one handy before you go to bed. When you wake up feeling like you want to go back to sleep, just sit up and drink a pint of water. It will help.

In contrast there’ll be times you can relate to where you’ve woken up and had no problem waking up. You have all your faculties and there’s really no problem. This is what happens when you wake up in a partially awake state and not from a deep sleep state. Your mind is more on the day ahead of you rather than finding ways to reason with yourself for going back to sleep.

The thing I’ve discovered is that half an hour can be all it takes to make a difference. This is really important. Just getting to bed half an hour earlier it can make you wake up in a partially awake state instead of a deep sleep state.

Another thing I’ve also discovered is to cut caffeine at least 6 hours before you intend on going to bed. Even if you don’t think caffeine affects you that much any more. It’s not that it doesn’t affect you any more, it’s that you’ve become so used to it from abusing it!

Drinking alcohol or beverages containing caffeine in the afternoon or evening, exercising close to bedtime, following an irregular morning and night-time schedule, and working or doing other mentally intense activities right before or after getting into bed can disrupt sleep.

If you have trouble getting to sleep quickly or you often find yourself staying up on the computer, take sleeping tablet an hour before you want to sleep, I promise you it will trigger a subconscious countdown in your head that will enable you to get things done quickly that you intended to get done before sleeping tonight and will prevent you from procrastinating. And you’ll feel so beautifully drowsy come the time you actually should be in bed you’ll have no option not to, in fact you’ll want to, instead of staying up all night on facebook, youtube, games, or some other poison.

Stress is the number one cause of short-term sleeping difficulties, according to sleep experts. Common triggers include school- or job-related pressures, a family or marriage problem and a serious illness or death in the family. Usually the sleep problem disappears when the stressful situation passes.

You may think you only need 4 or 5 hours sleep a night, but intend on getting 8 anyway. 8 is the magic number (3 is not so magic in this case!).

So this is what I’ve discovered so far, feel free to share your experiences and discoveries in the comment section below. I’m interested to hear!

Quotes cited from: http://www.apa.org/topics/sleep/why.aspx

3 things you wish you had known 2 years ago

Glenn — Mon, 09 May 2011 07:50:57 +0000

I follow a lot of the big internet marketers, and over this last year or so I’ve heard a name crop up which they have all been talking about. A name which seems to have made an impact on a lot of them of them. Such a name that I had never heard of before but I’m starting to wish I’d discovered him several years ago as I wonder how my life could have been changed from what I’ve already learnt from this amazing dude.

I am of course talking about the legendary Jim Rohn, who sadly passed away on December 5th 2009.

Since discovering him I’ve looked for every video I can find on youtube of him. I’ve listened to some of his audio books. I’ve tried to absorb everything he’s said because it really is pure gold.

So I’d like to pass on a few bits I’ve learnt to you in a hope that maybe if you’ve never heard of him you might just think about looking him up and maybe it might change your life too.

1. It’s not what happens that changes your life’s future, It’s what you do about what happens.

So many times I hear people blame their failure to do something upon some outside force. Hell, even I’ve done it in the past. People are too ready to make an excuse. We have to realize that we are in control of our own reality. You see, the same wind blows on us all, your destination is not determined by the blowing of the wind but instead the set of the sail. You can change what happens in your life by altering your response and reaction to people, things or events.

2. Don’t wish it was easier, wish you were smarter.

How many times have you come up against something challenging in life, such as a difficult task at work, and felt like giving up because it was too hard. Some other people could do this task though with relative ease. It’s the same task but different people see it differently. This is because different people have different skill levels. They know more and so the thing that you’re finding hard would be easier for them. So instead of complaining how hard something is, start reading the books!

3. It’s not too expensive, you just can’t afford it!

This one is a big paradigm shifter in my mind. It follows along with something else Jim Rohn says; Some valuable things in life are put on a higher shelf because they’re worth more, and in order to reach the higher shelf you have to stand on the books you read. A rich person and a poor person can walk into a classy department store and look at shirts, the price for one shirt is the same but the opinions of each the rich and poor guy regarding how expensive it is are different. Things of value are put on a higher shelf for reasons. It’s not too expensive, nothing is. You just can’t afford it! So it follows on that to afford it you need to read the books and learn how to afford it. Learning new techniques to earn money and extend your riches.

There are of course plenty of more amazing things Jim has said over his time and I bet I could write a book on them all describing how they’ve affected me and my personal opinion of how the world could be a better place if we all took that kind of learning to heart.

So I’m interested, what are your favorite Jim Rohn qoutes and principles? Comment below!

Achilles Land

Glenn — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 23:56:03 +0000

The above video is a time-lapse I recorded while I made my first Matte Painting. It took about 7-8 hours in total and was all done in one sitting. Talk about extreme mental state of flow!

This kinda stuff really inspires me to make more like it, and I did but I’ll release that here in a couple of days.

Interestingly the church you see on the cliff in the image is actually where the whole thing started. I went to this kentish village called Biddenden once and was taking random pictures (as you do) and one of them was of this church. I don’t know exactly what happened next to inspire me to make some art of it, but whatever it was I just knew it would be kinda cool so I turned on the screen recorder. And wha-do-ya-know!

The 8th Habit – Stephen Covey

Glenn — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 21:30:08 +0000

I’ve recently been reading ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’ by Stephen Covey, and I must say it’s an amazing read. I haven’t completed it yet, I like to take time to digest every bit of it.

It really challenges you to explore the workings of your mind and make the right changes to become a better person. Changing the core of you, working inside out. Chop a tree at it’s roots kind of theory.

Well anyway, I searched online for Stephen Covey videos and found a few video series’ on youtube, and so I’m going to share them here for you to watch because I firmly believe they will change your life.

10 Most Amazing 3D Artpieces

Glenn — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 16:46:47 +0000

While browsing the intertubes I’ve come across some fairly awesome 3D art. Time to compile it all into a top 10!

16 Inspirational Quotes

Glenn — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 00:30:33 +0000

Here are 16 Inspirational quotes that I’ve gathered over the past few weeks. They inspire me and make me work harder for my dreams. Hope they do the same for you!

“You get rewarded in public for what you practice intensely in private.” – Tony Robbins

“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you stop to look fear in the face. Do what you think you can’t do.”

“The greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change his future by merely changing his attitude.” – Tony Robbins

“if you don’t dream you don’t achieve anything” – Richard Branson

“It’s not that some people have willpower and some don’t. It’s that some people are ready to change and others are not.”

“A person can succeed at almost anything for which they have unlimited enthusiasm.” – Charles M. Schwab

“Those who have cultivated the habit of persistence seem to guarantee insurance against failure” – Napoleon Hill

“Real difficulties can be overcome; it is only the imaginary ones that are unconquerable.” – Theodore N. Vail

“Don’t wish it were easier, wish you were better.” – Jim Rohn

“Unless you change how you are, you will always have what you’ve got.” – Jim Rohn

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” Alice Walker

“We can have more than we’ve got because we can become more than we are.” Jim Rohn

“Keep your face always toward the sunshine – and shadows will fall behind you.” Walt Whitman

“Successful people do what failures wont” – Tony Robbins

“Empty pockets never held anyone back. Only empty heads and empty hearts can do that.” – Norman Vincent Peale

“Discipline is making the choice between what you want now and what you want most.”