theSchap's Blog

Rice is fucking magical! I don’t think there is anything rice can’t do. Hell it can blow birds to pieces, and that’s pretty cool. I had my phone in pieces, for days, giving air a chance to get in there and evaporate things. I put my phone, fully assembled, into a bag of jasmine rice for less than a day and it has made a full recovery! The screen is no longer too dark to discern any kind of detail. It is back to it’s 320×480 vibrant goodness! Game on!

My living iPhone

The iPhone survives the perilous depths and “contents” of the toilet bowl. Now all I need to do is jailbreak it again and I’ll have my phone back!

My battery showed up today, which is way ahead of schedule. I’m glad I didn’t pay for any kind of expedited delivery. I took off work a bit early, because I was way too anxious to see if my phone was a brick or not to be very productive.

So here was my phone.

iPhone in pieces

I got everything together without much trouble. I then crossed my fingers and hit the power button. IT’S ALIVE!!! But it’s dark, very very dark. So dark I can barely see the little apple logo as things load up. Things get started and I hear the familiar sound of new email/messages being received. I give my wife a call and she hangs up on me! Leaving me to think my phone is going to drop calls. Apparently she hit the wrong button so the phone still works.

It’s still fully functional, but I likely won’t be able to play any games on it. I reset everything back to factory settings, and load up a backup. I’ve read in several places that this “darkness” can be caused by water still in the phone. So, I now have my phone submerged in jasmine rice. The rice will absorb any moisture still in the hardware, and I’ll just have to wait and see if my phone makes a full recovery.

Rice Phone

What does that mean? Well, Breakout is a game that made its debut back in 1976 on the Atari. Since then it has been remade in all sorts of different ways that can be found and experienced for free via a simple Google search.

PTC has a version of their own up, compliments of the Johnson Center for Simulation. It was created by Doug Koellmer and myself to bring prospective students to the PTC website. Doug was responsible for all the programming. He developed a physics engine for the core of the game, and created a level editing tool that made making new levels very fun and easy. I created all the artwork in Flash and found the sounds and music through a variety of royalty free outlets on the webernets.  Most of the sounds were tailored in Audacity, a very powerful and free audio editing program, to better represent the game.

Do you want to play it! Hell yeah you do! Check it out by clicking the banner below. Have fun, come back and leave comments and suggestions. There are several other classic game remakes planned for PTC, so let me know what you think and I’ll keep it in mind for upcoming titles.

PTC Breakout

Johnson Center for Simulation website: www.johnsonsimcenter.com

Doug Koellmer’s website: http://dougkoellmer.com

As the name implies, this is a hospital approach concept for an animation I’ve been working on for a few months. The area has been abandoned, and the sun is setting. I focused on lights and reflections.

Sunset hospital approach.

No, it’s not a real game, well at least not one that I’ve played recently. My iPhone is not in a very good place right now. Actually my iPhone is in pieces on my desk in front of me as I wait for my new battery from www.ifixit.com. A ruined battery is often the result of dropping an iPhone in the toilet.

Yes, I dropped my iPhone in the toilet… as I was using it. I was playing Sunday Lawn. I brought my phone up to my face, it slipped, passed cleanly through my legs and Kah Plunk…. Because the bowl was filled with… waste, I quickly turned my phone off, and ran it under some water. I figured, I submerged it in water, and whatever else, what can running some water over it hurt? Plus toilet water is gross, I wouldn’t want to put it back up to my face without knowing it’s been cleansed. I shook it off, and set it on the counter to dry. I checked back later and noticed water under the screen, and in the camera well, so I decided to expedite the evaporation process. I opened my phone up, mostly to dry it out, but also because I love taking stuff apart, and just let it sit until today. When I checked on it today everything seemed dry. I put it back together, hit the power button, and it remains in blackness.

So now I sit here, with my phone in pieces, the battery extracted, and just waiting for the new one to arrive. The battery is completely dead according to my voltmeter so all I can do is hope the rest of the hardware isn’t fried. My wife won’t let me take the battery out of her phone to see if that will revive my own, but I don’t blame her. The cost of an iPhone without a service plan is pretty steep. So if this doesn’t work my wife will have a backup battery, and I’ll be getting myself a trac phone or something. Sad times.

I’m getting pretty close to complete with this environment concept. I still have some details, and such to flesh out, but I think It’s coming along fairly well. Feedback and comments are appreciated.

Approach on a hospital.

Here is a second set of hospital concepts. Trying to get a more modern feel and pushing the design to be something more interesting to look at as opposed to something that is completely functional.

Hospital Building Concepts

Here is just another take on the hospital. Thought it would be cool to have an ambulance in the wall.

ambulance in hospital wall

Here is my first take on the environment outside the hospital. It’s just doesn’t have the right mood to it.

hospital exterior