Time just flew by today. I searched for freelancers for a couple of hours in the morning. I found a couple of bad ass dudes, so mission accomplished. However, the amount of horrible horrible artwork out there is just mind blowing. I mean, people were doing better 3d stuff in the 90s, and I’m not kidding.

Just to be clear, I’m not talking about the *talent* of these freelancers. I’ve always hated that word by the way because nothing in this life ever came easy to me. So I can pretty much say without a doubt that I’m a talentless person. Now, these guys are horrible because it’s like they are living in a vacuum. It’s like they are totally isolated from what other people are doing out there. There are all sorts of forums/websites that artists hang out on and even if you’ve only been to one of them you’d know that you should study more and work on your art before trying to find work as a freelancer; something which I don’t believe will happen for most of them, unfortunately.

While I was searching the web I made some notes on what freelancers should do, so I’m going to talk about that for the next couple of days in the hope that it may be of use to one or two of my twenty visitors.

The second part of the day was split between searching for some ready-made crash reporting software and scene texturing, lighting and rendering. The scene stuff went well; although, I must say, it takes a shit load of time to do that stuff (and I have a tiny 100GHZ farm).

I’ve found some really nice stuff with regards to crash reporting software (it’s basically a system that sends info to the developer about where the program crashed). It seems Google and Mozilla rolled their own solution called Breakpad which seems nice. Microsoft, as most of you know, have their own thing going with crash reporting. It’s not free but I don’t know how much it costs. Here‘s a nice link that contains all kinds of toolkits in addition to crash reporting stuff.

Finally I’d like to mention two fantastic programming articles that I read today. This one is about over-engineering, and this one is about automated tests. If you’re into programming, you should definitely read these.