Hi Guys,

I arrived safely and have been working for one and a half week now. I don't have my own computer at work, and my laptop isn't connected to internet. So I don't really had time to post on my blog.

But when I get home I will write a story and tomorrow I will post it on my blog.

Cheers

SexySammy

So this is my first time at the airport of Frankfurt and I'm sure it will be my last. True, a ticket Frankfurt-Jakarta is cheaper than Amsterdam-Jakarta, but that's the only positive thing that I have to say about it. The train ticket from Zwolle to Frankfurt (which only took 4 hours) cost me 92 euro and for those 92 euro I couldn't even sit The train was quite luxurious, it had a kitchen and tables. But not enough places to sit. I had to lean against a cushion attached on the wall. It wasn't that bad really, but for 92 euro I expect to sit and get my feet massaged by a stewardess, while an other stewardess gets me a drink.
I heard of plane-tickets for 19 euro from Amsterdam to London, how can you justify a train ticket to be 92 euro? At least on an airplane you know for sure that you will have a seat. When I return I will have to check how much an airplane ticket will cost from Frankfurt to Amsterdam

And since they don't have early trains from Zwolle to Frankfurt airport, I had to go a day earlier and find a hotel to stay in. But the hotels here are freaking expensive too. 215 euro for one night at the airport I asked if there was an alternative and the cheapest I found was a room for 90 euro in a hotel 15 minutes away.
I feel i'm getting ripped off in here. The hotel was not that bad, but definitely not worth the 90 euro. Apparently it is, since you are paying for the location, but that and the shower were the only good things about it. The television channels were all german. I couldn't understand a freaking thing. The breakfast was just bad.. The bread was hard and the milk was not cold enough. When I thought I poured in orange juice, I was actually pouring fanta

And then you have the airport. I have been in a few airports in my life and I must say for a western country this one really sucks. I've been to Singapore, Amsterdam, Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta and except for the latter all of them had free internet terminals. Granted, you couldn't hang behind the computer the whole day. There is usually a limit of 15 minutes, but still it is free
Here in Germany you have to pay to check your email, the fee is 21 euro an hour. I threw in 2 euro and 20 cents for 6 minutes and some seconds. Enough time to check your email, but these freaking Germans messed up the keyboard for you. I felt like I was on Punk'd, I couldn't find the Y-button, when I finally found it on the bottom left of the keyboard I was confronted with the challenge of finding the @-button. Finally after going through all the numbers I found it on the Q button, but how to activate it? It wasn't the shift button, cause that only capitalize the letter Q. After an other minute I found out to use the alt button. But not the left alt-button, no the right alt button. Gosh
I really thought Ashton Kutcher would appear with his camera crew and shout: You just got Punk'd! And for the first time I felt sad that he did not

Anyway, it's time to shake of this bad energy Even with all those irritating things on my path (sending me from Terminal A to B and then back again, and again... or having to almost strip myself), I still feel very excited and happy about going to Indonesia. It's going to be a great time. Luckily I had no problems with my luggage. It was 21,5 Kg, but not too heavy. I can officially bring 20 Kg, so I'm glad they didn't forced the regulations. I'm currently waiting to board the airplane. I can't wait to take off and leave this airport

SexySammy

Today I'm getting on the train to Germany, where I will take the plane to Indonesia tomorrow. I didn't wanted to hurry tomorrow morning and check in late. So I chose to take a hotel at the airport and do everything at my own pace.

I'm really excited on going. But I can't start with the internship immediately, because I don't have a working permit or business visa. I need a letter of approval from the immigration office and since we filed in the request a bit late it means I have to wait before I can get to work. When I get that letter I will go to Singapore to get a business visa at the embassy of Indonesia.

Anyway, I'm really stoked on going. It will be a great time. I hope to make a few YouTube videos about my time in Indonesia. You can check them in my Videos section or visit my YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/sexysammynl). I hope to upload a new video as soon as I arrive in Jakarta.

SexySammy

Hi guys,

Been a while since I blogged. I was searching for an internship in Jakarta for this september. And I have finally found the internship that I wanted from the start. I had an opportunity to work as a web developer, but I want to develop my motion graphic skills.

And today I got the email from a company where I can do just that, develop my motion graphic skills

I won't say which company it is yet. Cause there are some legal things to take care of first. But things are looking gooOOOoood

SexySammy

Note: I spoke too soon, just got an email. And from what I can understand is that the internship is for a period of 1 month

w00t I made the local newspaper

In my last post I spoke of a project I was working on. The project was a performance with the Zwols Symphony Orchestra. They had the idea to have me project some visuals while they were playing film music.

The performance was on may 17 and yesterday my mom noticed an article in our local newspaper. I have put the article online for you all to see. But it is in dutch. So I will make a translation when I have the time hehehe

Click here to go to the article

SexySammy

The FMX/08 was great. I'm sorry I haven't posted a day to day journal about the event. But I was just too tired after each and every day. And since I got back I'm focussing on this project that should be finished this saturday may 17th

I wish it was may 18 already.

SexySammy

Well, yesterday was my first day at the FMX. At first I didn't really knew what to expect, but it turned out to be great. I attended a lot of presentations about VFX, which is something I want to learn more about. It really opened my eyes on where the professional level is at the moment and what kind of difficulties they come across.

The first really eye opener presentation was from DuranDuboi Studio. They worked on movies like "Asterix and the Olympic Games", "Hitman", "His Majesty Minor" etc. As a student it's really fascinating to see how a professional post production studio works.

The presentation that followed them was the company "L'Est". As I understand it they coordinated the different post production houses that worked on the VFX for the movie "Asterix and the Olympic Games". The presentation also showed some of the problems that VFX brings. Directors think that everything can be fixed in post production. One of the examples he showed was when they work with blue screens to extend a set. In some shots they had to go into post production because the shot showed a little bit of the blue screen, just a little corner. This could have been easily avoided by just moving the camera, the set extension didn't brought anything extra to the shot. I thought it was a bit weird that directors don't really care about those things even though they know that it cost them more money.

The presentation I liked the most was given by Glenn Entis (Chief Visual and Technical Officr, Worldwide Studios, Electronic Arts). He gave a personal view on 30 Years in CG. So why was this such an eye opener to me? Well, I have a thing for giving presentations. I'm quite shy, but I do like giving presentations. It's scary to stand in front of a lot of people, but so satisfactory when you do a good job. Giving presentations is not what I want to do for a career, but while I'm still at school I want to be better at it.

Glenn Entis keynote blew away all the other presentations that I saw up till that point. It was a bit like the keynote's I see Steve Jobs give on the internet, who I also find very inspiring. Now, when you read this, it may seem that the presentation was crammed full with animations and all and that I enjoyed the keynote more than the content. But that's not the case. The keynote was quite simple, but instead of using a lot of text, he used a lot of images. Images that were there just to support the things that he was saying. His text was short and clear. His background was just black, which worked so well on that big screen. Cause the projector didn't filled the whole screen, so using black as a background gave the impression of using the whole screen and also put the focus more on the items displayed on screen.

But let me talk a bit more about the content hehehe. Well, one of the points he made was. You can't give fun without having fun. So when his team worked on "Band of Brothers" he let the team play with tin soldiers. This brought the fun back in the team and was also a cheap and quick way of setting up the levels. Making fun and doing what you the things you love is something that you should strive to achieve.

Alex Laurant keynote was also impressive to me, simple and clean. He talked about his move from film to the game industry. How people think that games will turn into movies, but that they are wrong. Games are the new media and sometimes more complex than movies.

I'm gonna stop now, cause I'm quite tired. I had no ideas that watching keynotes would be so exhausting. But the brain is active all the time, it's like a sponge, absorbing all those wonderful stories, analyzing what's been said and then getting inspired in a creative way. A lot of brain processing is going on. Yesterday I felt so tired, that when I got back in the hotel I fell a sleep immediately. I'm writing this in one of the conference rooms during a break.

I'm pretty sure tonight there won't be a lot of writing.

SexySammy

Well, we just safely arrived in Stuttgart-Untertürkheim. It took us about 6 hours to get here, but then again we stopped a while in Enschede to get some things at Jeroen's place.

We were only stuck in traffic for a while and now I have Amy MacDonald's song stuck in my head ~ "Where we gonna go, where we gonna sleep tonight" ;P

The song was quite fitting cause we weren't sure if the room that I booked was available. I booked the hotel quite late, last friday night , and all we got was a standard email that our request was in progress and that we would get a confirmation within 24 hours. Well, that confirmation never came and on the day of arrival (today) I thought let's just try to call them and ask if they got the reservation. But I couldn't reach them and only got a tape saying their opening hours are from monday till friday. But luckily we got the last room

The hotel we are in is 7,5Km from were the FMX is being held. Check the FMX website to learn more about what it is about. Cause to be honest I don't really know what to expect out of it. But I'm sure it will be interesting

SexySammy

Aarrgghh.. I guess they have really found me, cause they started spamming me like crazy today. I quickly made an IP ban thing, but when I googled for some black lists I came a cross this article.

Which convinced of why IP banning is useless, so I need something else to defend my blog with I hate SPAMMERS

PS: From now on I won't post the emails you leave behind, I scrambled the emails with javascript so that spammer-bots can't read them, but you never know do you. These SPAMMERS are a bunch of parasites

So I had my first real SPAM message on my blog Which means I have to add some security features. I'm thinking of logging the users IP and if I think you are a spammer you'll be added into my ban list

On an other note, I'm also thinking of upgrading the blog with some AJAX features. If you check my archives list you'll see some fancy animated javascript when you click on it Well, just be sure to keep checking the blog, I'm sure you'll be seeing some changes soon.

SexySammy