3D Class

The class went pretty well yesterday, yet pretty tired because of the standing and focusing for 4 hours. I had 2 classes: 3 hours of Maya class, 1 hour of PhotoShop class. There were 3 kids in my Maya class, two 18-year-olds, and one 13-year-old. And guess who is the best among the 3? It was the 13-year-old ABC. He seemed to have lots of knowledge of Maya, even knows about putting joints to make animation. I'm not good at animation, but good thing I still know something about it since I learned it from Academy of Art University. I printed out online tutorial for them to practice at first, and then assigned them different objects to model depends on their levels. The last PhotoShop class was really easy. I had 9-year-old triplets in that class. They already know what they're doing for the class, so I didn't have to teach them anything. I just needed to respond them some technical questions which were the only things I could answer. I learned a lot from these kids by watching them use Photoshop to paint. Awesome kids. However, I feel like teaching 3D is the easiest job I've had these years. Not much stress comparing with working for game company and trading company.

3D is my excitement

When I was at our CPA's office today, someone called me. A little art school in Rowland Heights needs a Maya Instructor urgently because their instructor is in a hospital now. I left my information to this school a few years ago, I almost forgot about this. The lady told me I will need to teach 6 kids (from 9-year-old to 18-year-old) from 1-5p every Sunday. Even though I've never taught 3D before, I thought I would be able to make some extra cash for my Asia trip, so I took the job. I headed to the school directly after I finished my errants at CPA's office. Looked at some 3D works the students did, some of them are actually pretty good. Those 18-year-old kids can model a high-poly machine gun. Only 1.5 days to prepare. I went home and prepared some materials for the kids to work on. I looked through some concept art from Warhammer, I got excited. I so want to 3D model them! And then I looked at my online portfolio, I felt like it's time to update it. When I was about to forget my passion for 3D, it just came back like that without a sign.

Terms for Import/Export

Learned many abbreviations/terms I've never heard before by doing this business. I would like to share them:

- B/L: Bill of Lading; a document issued by shipping forwarder, showing that the goods have been received on board.

- CL: Commercial Invoice; a document shows the value of each products, needed to do customs declaration.

- CO: Certificate of Origin/ Country of Origin; a document states where the goods were made, needed it to clear customs for international trading.

- FOB: Freight on Board; goods are placed on board of ship/flight

- ISF: Importer Security Filing; a document states information for the goods being sent, only required for USA shipments.

- MOQ: Minimum Order Quantity.

- PI: Pro-Forma Invoice; a document that us broker issued to customer to show the items and the prices customers are buying from us.

- PL: Packing List; a document states where the goods are contained in certain container.

- PO: Purchase Order; a document that us broker issued to manufacturer to show the items and the prices we're buying.

Tools

Since Dad started to use Gmail. We started to share some tips with each other on how we can use google's free tools to make our work more efficient. Dad came across to Google Calendar, where we can get to know each other's schedule by simply just clicking on the "Calendar" button on the top of the gmail interface. I started to upload some files onto Google Documents. These free tools come in very handy. Labels and Tasks are good things to have in Gmail as well. Also, some Gmail Labs are nice plug-ins to have. I have the following Gmail Labs plug-ins that I found it very handy:

-Create a Document: This allows me to create a word/excel file from Google Documents interface.

-Google Docs previewed in mail: No need to download the file to view the docs anymore.

-Inserting Images: I haven't really used this one yet, but this lets you to have an image in the email body.

- Mark as Read Button: Yeah, sometimes I don't like to read emails that have nothing to do with me. (This is a bad habit though, I might want to remove this function.)

- Signature Tweaks: I like my signature on the top of the attached emails.

- Undo Send: This saves my life a lot, but too bad we can only undo it within a few seconds.

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