Jose Drew a Duck

Yep, Jose was learning Flash and at one point was doodling while resting his brain. He drew this duck. Then I made the duck’s wings flap and beak move. What fun!

Of course, once one has a duck with flapping wings, one must make the duck fly around. Thus clouds and other accessories were required. But once things get longer, you really start to need some music. I poked around and there was the Polkacide version of the duck dance.

Once there was music, then the animation needed to be much longer to match, more ducks were required, and the whole effort had to tell a story of sorts. Far too much of my life later, this is the result. I may still tweak it a bit — there are some dead spots that would be good to fill in — but on the other hand I’ve wasted far too much of my life on this dang thing already.

I haven’t been able to test the loading screen on a slow connection, so I really don’t know if it works or not. It’s supposed to give you the button to start the animation when it estimates the download will finish in time. If anyone out there can tell me if it works, that would be cool.

Um… that’s all there is to it, I guess. Hey, John! Can you give me permission to use this music?

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24 thoughts on “Jose Drew a Duck

  1. That is not a duck. That is THE duck. As in, what the duck. In the most complimentary sense of the phrase.
    No part of your life was wasted here. It was just a little ducked up.

  2. The quack was the work of yours truly, as are the wheezing sounds and the flapping sfx. The jet sound I built up from white noise.

    [As a rather long aside, when Apple shipped OS 7.0 oh, so many years ago (it was a huge deal at the time), one of the available system sound effects was a duck quack. To this day I swear that that is the quack by Joe Shoopak that I recorded for a lesson while I was working at Educational Systems. Apple had a sneak peek of the lesson that they used as part of the marketing blitz for a line of (very) low-end computers, built with the school market in mind. The two quacks were indistinguishable, though I never compared the binaries.]

    As far as blimp/zepplin, I asked Jose for a blimp, but the pointy nose (which might never show up in the frame) is on the pointy side, suggesting a rigid frame.

    I woke up this morning with the song still playing in my head. I suspect it will be there for a long time.

  3. Had I been logged on using Firefox on my glacially slow 24K rural dial-up connection, I would now be cursing you roundly, as Firefox has the annoying hangup of not allowing links on a page to go anywhere until all (or at least most) of the elements on the page have downloaded.

    However, I’m on Opera at the moment, and it’s more accommodating of such slowness.

    What has happened is that Opera has declared that the page is fully loaded, and all that shows up above the text in your post is a big sky blue square. I guess that your script protecting us rural dial-ups from wasting a lot of time is working. Some time after NaNo is over, I can check whether Firefox gives similar results.

  4. Carol Anne – As far as Firefox is concerned, the animation should be about 1 KiB, the rest of the loading is handled internally by the animation itself and should be invisible to the browser. I’m not sure why Opera gave you a blank rectangle, unless you don’t have the Flash plugin installed, which is surprising. I was fiddling with the html that links to the animation, but that was long before you posted your comment.

  5. Apple.Mac
    “We’re sorry but we can’t find the HomePage you’ve requested.
    Leider können wir die von Ihnen angeforderte HomePage nicht finden.”
    And so on …
    There can be only one conclusion: a denial of service attack by the terrorists opposed to the memory of Mr7K. Fortunately, good has triumphed over evil once again and MR&HBI is back on line.

  6. Happy Mr7K Day!
    Hi Jer, we know you working hard on your writer/actor/programmer triple threat of a career, but what about entertaining the masses of Muddled Ramblers?

    What’s up with the Eels? Will the diverse parts of this gripping story be brought together into one big pile of conclusion?

    Will a new poll go up before the arrival of MOH100001?

    When will MuddledU open its ivy covered doors?

    When will we here more about your 2008 presidential campaign? Your strategy of pacing of the sidelines while the other candidates peck each other to death seems cagey enough, but will you introduce your kung fu brewmaster veep before the Iowa caucus? As a back up plan, has your campaign contacted the Stephen Colbert camp about a possible joint ticket. Granted the not-for-sale party by laws would require him to give up his Doritos endorsement money, but there still might be middle ground.

    Your thoughts?

  7. Hello All Pervious MOHs,
    Whether you know it or not, whether you’re an egg fryer, a hutster, squirrely or otherwise, you a part of a pervious tradition at MR&HBI.

    Cheers!

  8. Jer,

    You have my permission to use the music. Of course, Legal Permission isn’t mine to legally give. Nor is Spiritual Permission, as that isn’t me playing trumpet on that track.

    Fear not: I’ll be sending a link to your work to the rest of the band. You’ll either get Official Permission, or contacted by a lawyer…

    Yeah, right. Thanks for the exposure.

  9. That’s why I asked CAN you give me permission, rather than WILL you. I had my grammar hat on. I’m curious what the band thinks, as it really doesn’t match the black-lederhosen-and-shaved-head-with-metal-spikes image.

  10. Oddly, to put this on YouTube, I will have to convert it to a format about 50 time larger for a smaller frame size and lower quality, and the buttons embedded in the animation won’t work.

  11. Same computer, same browser, connected on dialup at 41K rather than 24K, and the thing plays just fine. I was astonished that it took no time at all to load.

    It’s hilarious.

  12. Pingback:

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    Speaking of Flash… « Muddled Ramblings and Half-Baked Ideas

  13. Aaaannndd….. many years later I wanted to look up the video for a class project, and all I get is blank space where it should be. Can it be found on YouTube somewhere?

    • YouTube won’t accept it because it’s a Flash animation, rather than a video played by Flash. Long ago, Flash was not just a video player. I’ll poke this episode with a stick and see if I can figure out what’s wrong.

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