Space Odyssey

2005.05.30 - Monday

Finally, the BBC docudrama "Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets" is going to be showing here on the Discovery channel. Unfortunately, the Discovery channel seems to have given it the "American treatment", changing the title to "Walking with Spacemen" and replacing the fantastic BBC narrator with some American dolt who sounds more like he's narrating the Van Halen story than talking about future space exploration. See for yourself here.

I'm just hoping that we'll still be able to get our hands on the BBC version of the DVD here.

Star Wars: Summed Up

2005.05.28 - Saturday

Orson Scott Card reviews "Revenge of the Sith"

This is a wonderful Star Wars review that, despite being titled a review of "Sith", really touches on the series as a whole. It really does illustrate how much of a shame the whole thing is. If only George had simply come up with the story, and then let actual film professionals do the work. That's what happened with "The Empire Strikes Back". If only the whole series was as good.

Shuttle delays

2005.05.26 - Thursday

The Shuttle is heading back to its hanger to have the main fuel tank replaced for more fears of ice buildup. Apparently the new tank has a heater designed to prevent this from happening. Personally, I can't believe what an amazingly ingenious solution this is. I can see now where all of that money goes.

Seriously? A heater? That probably should have been one of the first things to go on the new fuel tanks after it was concluded that breaking ice crippled Columbia and led to her disintegration during re-entry. What the hell has NASA been doing for 2 years if they're only now adding a heater to the fuel tank? Granted, I'm no rocket scientist, but from a lowly mortal's common sense point of view, this just looks like another shining example of NASA's self-handicapping bureaucracy.

I can't start going off on NASA right now. Something like that is going to take time.

Gallery update

2005.05.25 - Wednesday

I've added one new shot to the gallery. It's a little ways down the page; the "Dead Like Me" shot with the train. Only one shot to go before the gallery is up to date.

Band of Brothers

2005.05.25 - Wednesday

I've started watching HBO's "Band of Brothers" series again recently, and actually forgot how good it really is. Maybe I'm just noticing more of the detail the second time around, I'm not sure. I seem to remember reading recently that HBO was working on a pacific theatre version of the series, which I'm sure will be just as entertaining. Still, for the most part, I'm glad that the world war 2 fad seems to have passed as far as television and films go. Spielberg showed everyone how to make a war film with "Saving Private Ryan", and at the moment there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of new ground to cover.

It's too bad the game industry can't follow the same path. Publishers keep commissioning new WW2 games almost daily, and developers keep churning out what is basically the same shooter game over and over. No one cares anymore. That ground has been walked over so many times it's now a muddy pool of sludge. Leave it alone for a while guys. Try making something new for once.

Revenge of the Sith

2005.05.24 - Tuesday

My thoughts on the latest and "final" Star Wars film couldn't be summed up better than with Star Slattern's review. The movie is God awful. "Sith" is easily the most disappointing of the new trilogy if only because this time, the dropped ball is much bigger, heavier, and falling from a greater height. It's almost criminal what Lucas has done to the franchise, and it fills me with sorrow to think of what real film makers could have done with such an idea.

I would say that if you removed Jar Jar Binks from "The Phantom Menace", that film is probably the best of the prequels. Still, you can see a pattern in the Star Wars movies that begins with "Return of the Jedi", when Lucas first began to have complete and total control over his creation, and ends with "Sith". With each film, the story and characters are driven by increasingly childish motivations, until eventually in "Sith", Anikan Skywalker is turned to the dark side because someone stole his toy. Darth Vader, reduced to nothing but a whining child who didn't get his way. It's a train of thought that only an eight year old can identify with, and the movie leaves people who are any older back at the station.

My advice would be to try and enjoy the original trilogy, and to forget that these new ones were ever made.

Jumping puzzles

2005.05.22 - Sunday

I can't stand jumping puzzles in shooter games. I don't mind them in things like Mario, or the few you'll find in Metroid games, because those jumping puzzles feel more acrobatic and rarely result in the player's immediate death if not completed flawlessly. I started playing "Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast" again this weekend and immediately became frustrated with the jumping puzzles. The game also has an annoying tendency to kill you if you get stuck in a closing door or have your toe mistakenly placed in an elevator shaft. I remember "Turok: Dinosaur Hunter" had the worst jumping puzzles I'd ever seen; dozens and dozens of consecutive jumps between platforms that were no bigger than the size of your feet, suspended above dark, bottomless pits. Yeah, great level design guys!

I'm glad games seem to be moving away from jumping puzzles, however slowly. In truth, a lot of these annoying nuggets wouldn't be nearly as annoying if developers would focus more time on improving the "feel" of the jump in a first person games. Most of the time, it's just so hard to figure out exactly where you're standing, or how far away a platform is. There's just no excuse for having a bad jumping system in this day and age, since it's been done well before. Oh, and another thing. If the character can jump in the game, then they should be able to grab onto ledges and pull themselves up! Come on people, it's not that hard!

Fibre Optic

2005.05.20 - Friday

Yesterday everyone at Atmosphere got the chance to learn, from the horse's mouth at Panavision, how digital cameras actually work. I'm not talking about the digital cameras you buy at Future Shop, I'm talking about the ones they use to shoot television and films; big, expensive, HD digital cameras. During the discussion about some of the cameras in the near future, our "teacher", for lack of a better word, briefly mentioned what will be possible in the future with fibre optic networks.

Fibre optic networks aren't new, really, but they also aren't wide spread. For the last decade or so, a lot of the major telecommunications companies have been building their fibre optic networks in the background. Today, for the most part, they're just sitting there, unused. The day will come however, maybe sooner than you think, when these networks reach a certain saturation point and can essentially take over all of the data transfer that's currently happening on more traditional wires. When that happens, and every home gets wired with fibre just as they're wired with phone lines today, it will, in our teacher's words, "change everything".

We're talking bandwidth. Huge amount of bandwidth. Enough to stream dozens if not hundreds of HD resolution channels into every home. Television will no longer exist, for all intents and purposes, as internet access will have become so fast that a person could watch any stream they want, originating from anywhere in the world, completely online. By the time this happens, it won't be so far fetched to think we'll have razor thin displays capable of incredible image quality be as standard as a television is today. Maybe homes will be built with digital paper walls, touch sensitive and completely configurable. Don't like the colour of a room? Simply change it. That sort of thing isn't even exciting compared to what will be possible with the sheer amount of information that our civilization will be able to move around.

Consider that today, from a camera point of view, a typical HD channel is extremely compressed. They compress it as much as possible, as much as they can before you'll notice. Even today's HD cameras are capable of recording images of unbelievable crispness, and the ones on the horizon are even better. There is no reason why, in the future, an image displayed through your television or right on your wall can't be completely indistinguishable from reality. If you could bring someone from today into the future and see one of these displays and the data it will be showing, they wouldn't be able to distinguish it from a window.

It will happen. Maybe not in five years, or even ten, but it will happen, and I'll live to see it.

More E3

2005.05.19 - Thursday

I've never been to E3, but it seems to me, at least from a news point of view, that the show is pretty boring after the press conferences are over. Unless you're amazingly interested in a particular game, there aren't going to be any other surprises or big points of discussion. I don't really have an interest in watching 50 in-game videos from "Call of Duty: Another Boring Expansion", but that's what's served up on all of the gaming news sites once the big press shows are over.

I'm not sure they can do anything to change this, or even if they should. From what I can gather, once E3 actually begins, all people do is wander around the show looking at the flashing lights and hot girls, until they find out about some party or another, and go to that for the rest of the day, evening, night, and morning.

All I'm saying is that it would be nice if the show didn't follow a template every year. If you aren't actually there, it's boring as hell.

BC Liberals / E3

2005.05.18 - Wednesday

Thank God the Liberals are back in. It's too bad that the NDP won so many seats, but it's not exactly surprising. I'll be interested to see how the STV vote turns out. In general, I'm going to try and keep the politics to a minimum. It's not that I don't care about politics, it's just that there are much more interesting things going on in the world.

Speaking of which, Nintendo's E3 conference was once again the best of the three, even if what they had to show wasn't as interesting as Sony's offerings. Have you watched the Sony conference? Ugh! It's two hours of boring tech demos, graphs, pie charts, and computer programmers and engineers with monotone speaking voices.

The technology is exciting, but the people who developed it are not.

Revolution

2005.05.17 - Tuesday

What looks like publicity art for Nintendo's next console, the Revolution, has emerged out of E3 today. The design of the system is awesome. I figured that Sony's Playstation 3 would win the aesthetics competition, but their rounded silver case doesn't even come close to matching what Nintendo has come up with.

Of course, the downside to having such a small, sleek system is power. We'll find out for sure later today, but it's sounding more and more like the Revolution will be a distant third in the hardware department. I'm not sure how Nintendo is planning to deal with this. I'm not a person who thinks graphics are all there is to games, but from a real world point of view, you have to at least keep pace. What the PS3 is going to be able to bring to the table in terms of graphics is going to be amazing. I'm not sure what Nintendo is thinking, but we'll see.

The mainstream gaming battle will be fought between Sony and Microsoft. I've already decided that I will buy one of these two companies' consoles in addition to the Revolution, but I'm not sure which one yet. So far, the PS3 looks to be the best choice to me, but there's still a year or so before it comes out, so that's plenty of time to make up my mind.

E3

2005.05.16 - Monday

Tomorrow, E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, unofficially begins with the pre-show press shows that will be put on by Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. It is through these shows that we'll be getting first glimpses at the Playstation 3 and perhaps the Nintendo Revolution. With the next Xbox already out of the closet, it will be interesting to see what Sony has lined up.

As for Nintendo, who knows. They seem to be trying to position themselves in a self-made bubble, where they will never be number one again, but instead can make just enough money to continue doing whatever the hell they want to do. At this point Nintendo's next console, the Revolution, is a mystery to everyone. Nintendo claims it will change the way people play games. I don't know what that means. People have speculated that it means everything from a controller that tilts, to full blown stereoscopic graphics, and everything in between. There will be some kind of wireless network support, and Nintendo has registered a patent that has something to do with "positioning the camera". Most of the gaming sites are having better luck reading tea leaves than they are trying to figure out what the Revolution will be. Maybe we'll find out tomorrow.

I wouldn't hold my breath.

Babylon 5

2005.05.15 - Sunday

Over the past year or so I've been re-watching Babylon 5, and just this morning finished watching the final episode. It really is a great show, and only seems to get better with age. I've watched the series all the way through three or four times now, and each time the characters seem to have more weight, more meaning, more significance.

Everything about Babylon 5 has now become timeless. The sets and costumes don't seem to evoke a certain 20th century decade, and neither does the dialogue. The effects are out of date enough that it no longer matters how old they are; like the original Star Trek series or Star Wars films, you just accept them and move on. Even the story, ripped straight from "The Lord of the Rings", about and ancient evil and the struggle to defeat it, will never age or tarnish. Even more shocking is some of the dialogue towards the end of the series. Speeches and conversations that seem to get closer to the meanings of existence than anything else in any other series, delivered through characters that you can genuinely believe exist.

Maybe I'm reading into it too much, but I don't think so. I'm more convinced than ever that Babylon 5 will still be as good fifty years from now. How many shows can you say that about?

Gallery is up

2005.05.14 - Saturday

I've got the new gallery up at last. There are still a few more shots to add to it; a couple of "Stargate: Atlantis" shots as well as some "Dead Like Me", but for now it's good enough. Let me know what you think. Comments are always welcome.

Heavy formation

2005.05.13 - Friday

Okay, so maybe it's not a "heavy" formation, but I'd say it's relatively so, considering that we're only used to seeing smaller aircraft fly together.

This is some kind of ceremonial fly-by for Zip's last flight. I'd call it more of a celebration, since we don't have to see airplanes with those God awful colour schemes anymore. Whoever designed that should never be allowed to work again, and whoever approved it should be killed.

Revenge of the Sith review

2005.05.12 - Thursday

Sith-Boom-Bah!

Now, to be fair, I've seen a few positive reviews of the next Star Wars movie, written by people who admit that the first two parts of the new trilogy are shit. However, these reviews were also written by people who love Star Wars, so I'm a little more inclined to believe them than I am to believe this guy's view.

He seems to be the quintessential movie critic, interested only in movies about real life, possibly because he doesn't have one of his own, instead of movies about space empires in distant galaxies.

I'm reserving judgment until I see it.

New Website Design

2005.05.12 - Thursday

Obviously, I've redesigned the site. There wasn't really anything wrong with the old design, but I felt that it needed a change. Also, the old site used frames, which I've eliminated here. Actually, Sarah showed me how to setup this site using using templates, so now it's super easy to change design elements on the fly. You just have to tweak a couple of master files, and the changes are instantly updated on every page you have.

God, I remember creating my first website using Tripod's horribly limiting page creation tool. After that I moved into straight Notepad, which was just a horrible experience, but at least I could do whatever I wanted. I'm so glad that we have modern website creating software suites. I would never, in a million years, want to go back.

Making websites using Notepad is like trying to paint with cooking oil and food colouring. What I don't get is why some people actually like to be "closer to the code", talking as if they have a special relationship with it. We aren't talking about God here people, it's a piece of software. I don't sit around wishing I could manually program my 3D scene files. I want the computer to do as much of the work as possible. That's the whole point of why we invented machines in the first place.

I'm still working on updating the parts of the site that have to do with my work. Believe it or not, I've actually been doing something during the last several months! In the next month or two I'll be uploading a new gallery and resume. I'll get to work on a new reel some time in the future. No rush at the moment.