Last week was incredibly busy, mostly due to a very intense (but suprisingly fun) work schedule. After many hours of effort by our wonderful development team, I'm very pleased to announce that Graspr.com has officially come out of "Beta" status. As of last Thursday at 6AM PST, we went live with a bunch of major site updates that will hopefully put us more into the public eye. Graspr.com now has a completely new look and feel; a look and feel that I personally designed...and am still working on. I'm very proud to have my work on display, since this is one of the first times I've ever had any large-scale professional work published for many people to see. Also, we launched our online editing studio - the "remixing studio" as it's lovingly called - which allows people to do very casual video editing right on our website. Simply upload some video clips to your account, hop into the editing studio, and start mixing and mashing your clips together by adding fancy transitions, subtitles, slides, and music. The editing studio is part of our initiative to build a collection of on and off-site tools that will hopefully make the creating and sharing processes much easier and more enticing for our users. Finally, on the marketing side of things (which I am not as knowledgeable about) we spoke to several major press sources to declare that we are, in fact, out of our beta mode and officially launched as a more complete competitor within the how-to videos field. For more information on all of this stuff, you can view our blog entry related to the new site updates here. Also, an official press release on our launch can be found here. =)
So that was work. Work was crazy. What about the non-work related sphere of my life? In general, the last couple weeks have given me two fairly awesome weekends that have pushed me a few steps closer to feeling more at home out here on the west coast. Being the kind of person who often feels the need to "get out of the house," I decided to do a little exploring after July 4th. I'm very big on exploring. As a result, I ended up hanging out at this place called Capitola beach. It's a pretty chill little town that carries all the amenities a beach town could ever ask for - surfers, coffee bars, restaurants, a pier, you name it. Overall, it was very quaint and had a nice California vibe to it. I wanted to relax a bit by myself and take it all in at my own pace, so I made the trip solo. I took my art pad with me, and basically just sat out on the beach and drew people for a few hours. It was great.
Here are a few quick pics from the trip:
Capitola's beach was really cool, although it was a little crowded due to the July 4th weekend traffic.
My essential beach stash. It's just about everything I could possibly need for a beach trip. The only thing missing from this picture is a frisbee. =)
A couple guys I practiced drawing. I was really diggin' the whole skateboarder/beach look.
In addition to the beach-drawing segment of the trip, I found a great coffee bar that served awesome coffee-flavored things and had free-wifi. I stayed there for a bit and did some work. A nice place to work, if I do say so myself.People were actually very kind when they saw me drawing. Even if the drawing I was doing wasn't very good, they would still take time to say they liked my drawing, and that they thought it was cool I was drawing people. Although, I would personally try to be as stealthy as possible for the people that I was actually using for reference. It was a great exercise, and I'm definitely planning on doing that sort of thing more often, since drawing from life is one of the best ways to improve your figure drawing skills.
Last weekend, I also had the opportunity to do a couple of fun things. For starters, I decided to brave a 1 1/2 hour line at the Apple store in Palo Alto to get one of the new iPhone's. I've had an old Nokia cell for about 5 years now, so I've been waaaay overdue for a new cell. Needless to say, I'm heartily enjoying all of the capabilities that the new iPhone has to offer. I've made good use of Google Maps, GPS, and the speaker phone. I've also browsed the Internet, and uploaded my entire iTunes library to the phone, which I may or may not use as a replacement for my iPod in some cases. I'm also getting a kick out of being able to create custom ringtones. So much fun. =)
Here's a comparison of my old phone to the new iPhone:
My trusty brick phone was a trooper. He will always hold a special place in my heart.In an effort to continue meeting people and be involved in local activities, I went out to the Stanford campus to play Ultimate frisbee on Sunday afternoon. It felt awesome to get back to doing something athletic, and I met some great folks in the process. I'm going to hopefully be playing with them on a weekly basis from now on. Ah...Ultimate frisbee. How I love thee.
Anyways, that's about it for now I think. I'm gunning for another art update sometime this coming weekend, so check back soon. =)
Peace dudes.
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