For the last few months, I have been moving all over the place. First, I moved from West Philadelphia to Center City. Then I moved home to New Jersey, with my dad. Now, finally, I am back in Philly (Cheltenham, specifically) and (hopefully) settled.

At first, moving around was new, unique and fun. Every month I had a new setting, a new start. But it quickly became tedious to move all my things in boxes, unpack them, only to have to pack them back up again in a few short weeks. Just when I had started to settle, I had to move again.

A similarity can be drawn between that situation and my projects at DDA. I can never settle down on just one project; at DDA, I am always bouncing between 3D modeling and animation, Flash ActionScript coding, and Flash animation projects. Unlike moving, however, bouncing between all these different projects keeps things fresh, fun and exciting. Whereas living in one place and settling can be peaceful and relaxing, sticking to one project, for me, would become boring pretty fast. That’s why I’m glad DDA is so versatile in its projects — where else in the Philadelphia area can one guy do 3D animation, 2D animation, Flash coding and so much more?

The weekend has come and gone, and despite the beautiful weather, I found myself mostly indoors. I’ve been cleaning up my stuff which, since I had moved back home, has been all over the place. With the help of my brother, Aunt and Uncle, we’ve gotten it pretty much squared away. Between that, getting a computer set up for my dad, and helping my girlfriend move back to college, however, I didn’t really have a whole lot of time to enjoy the weather.

Now I’m indoors at work, imagining sun, surf and sand. In reality I am researching ways to create my own water in Lightwave 3D. I found an interesting tutorial for simulating water effects in Blender. It goes really deep with it too, talking about particle types, particle physics simulations, and even base viscosity equations for different types of simulated liquids. It’s at least worth a shot, I think, to create realistic liquid simulations in 3d.

Next weekend is an extended weekend,  with DDA being closed next Monday for Labor Day. I’m definitely looking forward to that, and possibly getting a last visit in to the beach before the weather turns Fall.

Due to recent craziness, I’ve had to move temporarily from the place I had just moved to (in Philadelphia) back to my dad’s place in New Jersey. It’s not just over the river, either - it’s all the way east, by the shore.

My brother and I spent all day yesterday driving, loading a U-Haul, driving again, unloading the U-Haul, and driving one more time to drop the U-Haul off. After ten sweaty hours of work, we drove right over to the ocean and jumped directly in. I haven’t been able to spontaneously decide to do that since I lived back there, almost 6 years ago! (Well at least if I had, it would have been as spontaneous as driving an hour to get there, as opposed to 2 minutes.)

This morning I drove in from there, and I was expecting a horribly long commute, but to be honest, it wasn’t so bad. There wasn’t much traffic, and while I did get a bit lost finding Route 1 South in Trenton, (thanks to Route 1 Business being in the way to confuse me,) I had left almost a half hour earlier than I needed to, I still managed to make it with ten minutes to spare. Basically my commute now is only 15 minutes longer than it was from Philadelphia!

Although moving again was such a last minute thing, and I only asked for Tuesday off on Monday (so basically the day before I had to take off,) David and Elizabeth were totally understanding and supportive. Since I started at DDA over a year ago, I’ve really been floored by how much they care about us employees here. I think that kind of support is really lacking in the managerial structure of a lot of businesses, because they don’t find it cost effective or “necessary.” David and Elizabeth, and all the people here, definitely follow the philosophy that happy workers are good workers. And they’re right! The awesome work environment we have is directly correlated with the care and support we are able to show our clients and their advertising, marketing or design projects. Whether you need illustration, design, animation, video production, scriptwriting, website design or any number of other things digital, know that Dynamic Digital Advertising will be there!