The Twilight Report

Newest member of the family

2006-03-06T18:57:00

Meet Chaco the newest member of the family. It's the new Mac mini with an Intel Core Duo processor. I like the remote, it's a nice touch. There are only six buttons on it, as per typical Apple design principles, but to skip through songs in iTunes or to play a DVD you really don't need any more than that. I don't like the fact that most vendors aren't shipping native Intel or Mac OS X Universal binaries yet. The emulation for PowerPC is quite good, I've had not problem at all running older PowerPC binaries, but it is super slow. The Mozilla Foundation isn't shipping universal binaries of Firefox or Thunderbird yet, (wtf?) and I don't like Camino, so I spent a few hours last night compiling Firefox as an native Intel binary. I can forget about running Photoshop on it though. Until they start selling more powerful macs with Intel and Adobe releases a native Intel version I will be utilizing my G5 a great deal.

2005

2005-12-31T20:23:00

2005 was supposed to be the year that Decepticon's attack Autobot City on earth (as chronicled in The Movie. I took this as a sign that it was time to quit my job at The Company and go back to school and study computer graphics and distributed computing and maybe one day get a job at Pixar. I still think even being a "lowly" system administrator at Pixar would be a fun job. Being a software developer for the rendering farm would be awesome.

Appropriately enough, last Thursday, the last Thursday of the year, I went to the MoMA with e and they had a special exhibit on the art of Pixar. Most of what they showed was models and sketches that were made before anything gets done on the computer. Seeing the artists' names and countries of origin clearly labeled by each piece, one is reminded that computer animation is not just a form of entertainment, but also an art form. It's fascinating to me, because I have always been passionately interested in the interaction of expression and technology.

Highlight had to be seeing the early sketches of the Edna "E" Mode character from The Incredibles, who has been my favorite Pixar character since I saw the movie because of her energy and humor. I had one of her quotations engraved on the back of my iPod to remind me that "I never look back; it distracts from the now." In the gallery e told me she was her favorite character, to which I responded, "really? Me too."

Anyway, 2005 is coming to and end, and Unicron never attacked Cybertron and as a result, the Decepticons were not driven off as was for told in The Movie, and I'm not going back to school, just yet, but I am on my way back to Australia. (many more words and things...)

Cold December Day, Bright Blue Skies

2004-12-14T17:08:00

Well, my little trip down to New Jersey on Sunday was great. I visited my friend, and fellow camera geek e. I showed her all the most important things about PhotoShop that I learned from the Color Digital class that I took this summer. We went pretty fast, but I think she picked up enough for it to be useful for her. At the very end, I watched her work on this photograph:

Photograph By e

She took it while she had been in Israel this year, and I think it's a very good photograph and it gives me a warm fuzzy because she did the color and contrast adjustments using the techniques that I had showed her.

I was going to make a print of this so that I could put it up somewhere, but I asked for her permission first, since I would want anyone to check with me before reproducing one of my photographs or putting them up on the web or anything like that, but she said I could do anything I wanted with it so here it is.

Ever have a whole bunch of things that you need to get done, but you get psychologically road blocked by one of them? The completion of the one does not really bar you from completing the others, but for some reason you can't wrap your mind around the others until you get it taken care of? Well, that is sort of how I felt this morning. No longer!

At lunch today I used the $8 coupon at the cafeteria that The Management gave everyone in our department as a "thanks." I got the most expensive item I could find to make sure that the total was at least $8. Total cost to me: $0.55. Feeling that I have milked The Company for as much as I possibly could: Priceless.

On the way out I snarked a slice of apple pie. They were giving them away to celebrate our strategic alliance with Apple Computers. A friend of mine worked on the resisters in the new G5 computers! This is among the many reasons that I would love to have a G5. Given my current economic realities, that is going to have to wait.

New Dac Console

2004-10-09T19:40:00

The New Dac Console

I'm rather pleased with my money saving prowess at the moment. The Company gave me a new notebook for work this year, which allows me to use it in "double head" mode, which means I can in effect use two monitors to increase the size of my desktop. Although usually quite stingy, The Company has managed to give me something to make me more efficient for a change. So props to them.

Anyway, trouble with any new technical toy is that I get used to and then addicted to them, so I've been wanting to setup my primary workstation at home as a double head machine. Plan One was to buy a Mac G5 and get two flat panel monitors. Price Range: Astronomical. Plan Two was to buy a graphics card for my (currently) primary workstation Tanagra which had two output ports. This was a much more reasonable plan. Even an expensive card with that requirement wouldn't be more than $300, and the cheapest I could find on NewEgg.com was about $150.

What I settled on was Plan Three, which involved salvaging the graphics card out of my Alpha Starscream, and putting it in Tanagra. I actually needed to put a different graphics card into Starscream anyway, in order to get her to run in 1600x1200 mode under Windows NT. I already had a 19" monitor, which has a dead pixel in the middle of the screen, but that is only noticeable if you look at it real closely. Total cost was Zero.

Systems

One day I do hope to get the G5, but it will have to wait until I have the extra capital on hand, or maybe when I can justify spending money on my photography "business."