Eve

2003.12.31

It's new year's eve, and for many people that means it's time to get drunk and ring in the new year at some kind of social event. Thankfully, I live in Vancouver and won't have to listen to Blackhawk helicopters and fighter jets patrolling the skies. As much as I love airplane noise, there is something wrong about hearing it downtown, at least outside of Snowbird flybys.

Many people are also going to be making resolutions today. Some choose to create elaborate lists of dozens of things they would like to accomplish in the next three hundred and sixty five days. I'm going to stick with four things: stay working, buy a car, move out, and one other that I will keep to myself. It's doable, I think, so we'll see what happens.

Wouldn't you know it. I make a comment about the lack of snow, and it keeps snowing all day and all night. Too bad it's still pretty light.

Snow

2003.12.30

We don't usually get much more snow than this in Vancouver, and especially in Richmond. There has been the occasional freak year, but I don't think there's been a spectacular snowfall for a while. I picked up a Canon S400 digital camera today, which I used to take these shots. I'm slowly working my way through the manual, trying to learn all of the camera's different functions and settings. It will take a while, I think.

Christmas

2003.12.27

Well Christmas has come and gone, so hopefully everyone had a good time. My Christmas was pretty good. Had a nice relaxing day full of family, chocolate, movies, turkey, and presents. I got a Wacom tablet from my parents, which is fantastic. Christmas always makes me thankful for everything I have, and I hope you will take time to think about the small things as I do. You can turn on a tap and the water will never stop. Chances are you can fill your plate with as much of anything you want at dinner. You can play video games, watch hockey, go to work, and surf the Internet. Right now, life is pretty good.

Boxing day has been pretty boring, as I haven't really done anything. I didn't go shopping today, which is probably good. I've still got to get a digital camera, which is the last "big ticket" item on my list before a car. Maybe I'll go tomorrow, since the sales are on until the new year. I've still got a few computer chores to do, as well as a couple of things to take care of before I can completely relax. Still, it should be a good holiday.

The last few days before the new year arrives always seem to bring me thoughts of resolutions. I'll have a couple of them for 2004, which I don't think are impossible to achieve. I suppose we'll just have to see.

Nothing

2003.12.24

The celebration of 100 years of powered flight happened last week at Kitty Hawk. It was a miserable day, and the weather didn't cooperate with the recreation of the first flight. The replica aircraft rolled down the track, got to the end, and plunked itself into the mud. Not exactly news reel material. If I had been them, I would have used a couple of more powerful modern motors to ensure that the thing flew. The original design could only fly on a perfect day, when the winds were just right, and the odds of that happening on the anniversary were obviously pretty small.

Bush said nothing. He hardly said anything about flight at all, except for the expected comment about the Wrights being American. Nothing about anything, and certainly nothing about the space program. I was hoping along with everyone else, but I really didn't think he was going to say anything. I suppose we'll just have to depend on the Chinese for our space excitement for the next little while. America is going to find itself playing catch up pretty soon. I wonder if they'll give a shit when China has a base on the moon?

Lock On

2003.12.23

I picked up Lock On: Modern Air Combat for myself yesterday while I was out shopping for other people. I haven't had much time to look at it yet, but it seems cool off the top. I can tell I'm going to need a faster computer to get the most out of the graphics, but even on modest settings, the game looks really nice.

The problem with jet fighter simulations is that they're so realistic. People invest hundreds of hours into learning how to properly fly the planes, and how to properly operate all of the equipment on those planes. Personally, I don't have that kind of time, or I'd rather spend it in more useful ways. I just want to be able to do take offs, landings, and maybe blow some stuff up. The most involved I've ever gotten in a flight sim was learning how to use the ILS approach HUD in Falcon 3.0, which isn't a huge deal.

I wish someone would take a halfway approach to a flying game someday, but there doesn't seem to be a big enough market for it. The simmers will always bitch that it's too easy and simple, and everyone else will bitch because they don't know the first thing about landing an airplane. Oh well.

Shopping

2003.12.22

So today is the big shopping day. Hopefully lots of people are still going to work this week, so it's not too busy out there. I figure it can't possibly be as bad as the weekends. In either case, I'm used to it. My Christmas shopping always takes place between the 20th and the 24th, no matter what. Maybe next year it will be different, but since that's what I said last year, I highly doubt it. I don't necessarily mind being a late shopper, as long as I can still get it all done in a day or so. Once the shopping is finished, it will be time to relax.

Hockey practice tonight. I almost forgot! Sweet!

Return of the King

2003.12.18

So it opened yesterday. I have no idea when I'm going to go and see it. I know it won't be tonight, and it won't be tomorrow, so it will at least wait until the weekend. I'm going to have to do my best to avoid reviews, online discussions, and friends who can't keep their mouths closed. I used to like to read lots of information about movies before I went to see them, but not anymore. I think that going into a movie having already formed an opinion about it is a pretty dangerous thing.

Right Chris?

Sorry for the lack of a post yesterday. I couldn't get online in the morning. Figures.

Red Vs Blue

2003.12.16

I came across Red Vs Blue a couple of weeks ago and loved it! Basically it's a 19 episode cartoon series created entirely using Halo, a first person shooter video game. One of the players acts as a camera, and the others act out the scenes by performing mostly head nods. Voices are added later.

The story is wonderful and hilarious. Anyone who's played capture the flag in a video game will get it. I actually loved it so much that I ordered the DVD, which is pretty amazing.

Samurai

2003.12.15

Went to see The Last Samurai yesterday with Chris, and it's amazing. The movie is far from perfect, and the visual effects pretty much suck, but it's still fantastic. There's something to be said about the "Japanese experience", as my friend Ono put it, especially the Samurai. Devoting one's life to the perfection of even the simplest things is a concept that is almost totally alien to us now. A lifetime of such discipline is probably even repulsive to most Westerners, if not most of the people on the planet. It seemed to work for the Samurai however, who were the deadliest warriors on Earth centuries before Europeans became truly dangerous. If it weren't for the gun, they still might be.

I might post a full review of the movie later on. For now, just go see it.

Oh yeah, regarding Saddam's capture...FUCKING WICKED!!!!!

Trek

2003.12.12

If you visit Trek Today you'll find several news posts confirming that Enterprise is not in danger of being canceled. The only thing this says to me is that the network executives have taken notice of the show's low ratings and actually are considering canceling it. They wouldn't be saying "the chances of Enterprise not getting picked up are small" if that weren't the case.

It's about time!

I went to a Christmas and Grand Opening party for Atmosphere Visual Effects last night, which is a new company here in Vancouver started by some ex-GVFX guys. Lots of people there from pretty much everywhere, and it seemed to me to be a pretty good success. It's always nice to see the folks from GVFX again, having spent a good deal of time with them over the past couple of years. Everyone seems to be in good spirits, which is a wonderful change from the last few months of GVFX's life. Hopefully everyone is enjoying themselves and much as I am.

Moving Up

2003.12.11

I'm graduating to green belt this weekend in my martial arts school. Four months at each belt level seems to be a magic number, because I find myself itching for new techniques to cover after about three and a half months. It's still always good to practice the old stuff, of course, but you have to keep your mind interested. Everything you learn from white belt to the last brown belt lays the foundation for your black belt training. It's only at that point that you really start to use the techniques, and start to spar with grappling, throws, and groundwork as well as punches, kicks and blocks.

Personally, I'm most interested in getting really good at groundwork, throws and kicks. If you're ever going to have to defend yourself, those are the things most people aren't going to know how to stop. Almost anyone can stop a punch if they know it's coming, but they're not quite sure what to do if you grab them, and one second later they've been slammed to the ground. The throws hurt when we practice them, and we practice on mats, and know how to do proper break falls. Execute almost any throw from blue belt and above on a average person, and they will not be getting up.

That's the theory, anyway. It'll take a while before it works in practice.

Aliens

2003.12.10

My good friend Chris has been talking about potential alien civilizations lately, so I thought I'd put in my two cents, again. His analogy describing SETI is pretty accurate: humans searching for radio signals as a sign of alien communication would be like a person searching the New York skyline for smoke signals as a sign of human communication. No one is going to use radio to communicate across space. Using light is a possibility, but still too slow. Personally I think they're using we still think is impossible, like a "quantum radio" that uses the principal of quantum entanglement to send messages anywhere in the universe instantly.

Even if we were to find evidence of aliens, what would we do with it? I believe in the idea that any alien race we could contact in this time frame would be so advanced that communication would be impossible. It would be as difficult for them to contact us as it would be for us to try and engage in a meaningful conversation with a mosquito. Even if they wanted to contact us, they probably couldn't. It works both ways as well. Humans would have as much chance of comprehending these aliens as a mosquito does of comprehending us. Perhaps a better thought to consider is: why the hell would a human ever want to try and make contact with a mosquito?

The bottom line is that aliens probably don't care about us, assuming they even care enough to know we're here. Contact with another alien race that's close to our level of development, or was when the radio signals were sent out, it next to impossible because they would be so far away the signals would have deteriorated to an unrecognizable state. We aren't going to make contact with aliens for thousands of years, maybe hundreds of thousands. It's too bad, but it's probably true.

Perpetual Motion

2003.12.08

I saw a somewhat interesting program on Discovery yesterday that seems to be worthy of a post. It was a documentary on the idea of a perpetual motion machine, the people who believe it can be done, and the scientists who think it's impossible. Indeed, the idea of a machine that powers itself, and might even be able to generate power, is a little hard to swallow. You're essentially talking about a machine that is more than 100% efficient. Seems impossible, even in theory, but we've heard people say things like that before.

The bottom line is that perpetual motion or not, the world is going to have to come up with a new energy source in the next 100 years. Fossil fuels will run out, and nuclear power isn't really an option. Until we get fusion reactors to an energy producing stage, you'll probably start to see a lot of solar and wind power systems being developed. Still, if we could build a machine that produced energy essentially from nothing, it would turn the world upside down. Since the entire world economy is built on top of oil and other controllable energy sources, a sudden introduction of free, limitless energy would destroy one of the foundations of our entire civilization. Entire countries and systems of government who depend on their oil power would be instantly meaningless.

The perpetual motion guys think that's why their work is shunned, obstructed and ridiculed. They could be right.

To the Moon

2003.12.05

Over the past few days a number of people have sent me articles about Dubya's upcoming speech at the Kitty Hawk ceremony. They're all convinced that he's going to announce some kind of new, ambitious goal for NASA. A new Moon mission, or even an eventual Mars shot. The problem with all of this is that it's hard to believe it until you hear it.

Even if Bush announces what everyone is hoping he'll announce, the buck might stop there, literally. Convincing the rest of the government to spend tens of billions of dollars on space programs these days isn't exactly a cake walk. It's going to be a long road before anything serious happens, and that's before you've even started to convince a largely ignorant public that space flight is a worthwhile expenditure.

I'm not saying there's no reason to get excited, I'm just saying we've heard it all before.

2D Animation

2003.12.04

This post is going to contain a very big rumour and lots of hearsay, just to let you know.

For a while now some people have been speculating that 2D "Cel" animation is either dead or dying as far as feature films go. First of all, this is blatantly untrue, since spectacular 2D animated films are still coming out of Asia every year, but never mind that for now. Recently, pretty much every 2D animated feature film produced and released in North America has been a flop. Titan A.E., Lilo and Stitch, Brother Bear, Sinbad; the list goes on and on. Warner Brothers went as far as closing down their entire feature film animation division, and Disney is on the verge of having to do the same. Their reasoning for such brilliant business maneuvers? Chances are you'll find a quote that goes something like this: "Insufficient public demand for traditionally animated films has forced us to..."

Here's a news flash for the corporate execs: public demand for shit movies is down across the board, traditionally animated or not! If Disney and others would stop churning out such bad movies, expecting people to go see them simply because it's an animated feature and the main character is voiced by some currently popular movie star, maybe they wouldn't be in the situation they find themselves in today.

The last animated Disney movie I enjoyed was Tarzan, and even then it wasn't as good as The Lion King or some of their more ancient work. Pixar movies, for example, aren't good because they have fancy 3D graphics. Kids and parents don't give a shit about how cool the translucency of Nemo's fins is, they're just watching a story, and a fucking good one. All of Pixar's movies are told FLAWLESSLY, because they don't rely on gimmicks, rushed production, or big name actors. Pixar releases a film every 3 years, instead of every 6 months, and believe me, they're not spending the time on rendering. Months, even years, of story and writers meetings constantly improve the script and composition of the film until it becomes the storytelling masterpiece that Pixar has become famous for.

Once The Incredibles is released and Pixar is free from Disney's clutches, it will be interesting to see what they do. I heard a rumour the other day that Pixar will produce a 2D animated feature, which, besides being an amazing film I'm sure, will be a slap in the face of Disney animation executives and the final proof that it's the story that makes the film, not the medium.

If it's true, I can't wait!

Country

2003.12.03

My Dad made a comment the other day about how he didn't know I listened to country music. I suppose I can understand that, since I don't usually listen to it unless I'm by myself or with someone who doesn't mind. I didn't start listening to it until a few years ago when I started dating my ex-Girlfriend Haley. I suppose it just grew on me. In any case, I find most country music to be very good at either putting you in a good mood or churning up some old feeling of regret or sadness, more so than other forms of popular music. Game music certainly doesn't do that, and more film scores or classical pieces allow for too much interpretation. Well, sometimes.

I still find it mildly amusing when some city dwellers sneer when I mention that I like country, and proceed to turn up their Britney Spears CD. I guess there really is no accounting for taste.

Andromeda

2003.12.02

I'm into my second week at Andromeda, and so far things are pretty good. Everyone at the office seems cool, the environment is pretty comfortable, and the work is actually somewhat interesting. I suppose I'll always find space ships interesting, but I can live with that. The catered breakfasts and lunches are fantastic, and will be hard to give up once the season moves completely into post and principal photography stops. For now, it's nice to come into a production office instead of a visual effects house. I'm still not used to seeing Kevin Sorbo when I go to work; it's just a little strange. The same goes for the rest of the actors, especially that super hot girl who plays "Trance" on the show.

Oh yeah!

I'm extremely busy these days, and don't even have time for posts sometimes. I was out until 2:30am on Sunday night at a Karaoke joint with some friends. Good times, but not good for the sleep pattern. Between things like that, martial arts class, and hockey, I have next to no time. Being busy is great though! I'm loving it! Canucks game on Saturday! Woooo!!!