tangled sprites

rowers rowing past

2011-05-21T10:22:00.001-07:00

hut hut ho!

deintertubization

2011-05-18T01:15:00.001-07:00

I cut off the internet last week.

Well, not really. I cut off the web. I stopped checking websites I check everyday, even the news. And I quit listening to talk radio and stopped reading the pile of magazines I have a backlog on. After five days, I don't really miss any of it. There's more time to think, and I feel like I have more freedom to do thinks I want to. Like writing blog posts. Or getting back to some creative projects I had sidelined.

It's also very meditative. There's a lot more time to think about life and plan for things that will happen and how to do them instead of reacting to things as they come at you.

Trail running

2011-03-27T14:23:00.000-07:00

I've been running a lot for over two years now. Mostly along the bay and in neighborhood streets, both in the East Bay and in the peninsula. A couple times along beaches (Ocean beach and Point Reyes). It clears your head.

I changed it up today and went running on one of my favorite hiking trails in the Santa Cruz mountains off Skyline Rd (Blvd?). And no music and no timing. Much more refreshing, and a lot more green to see. And it was a lot more fun---about the running and not some goal. Although I ran out of breath a few times going uphill at altitude, I felt far better afterward than when running on flat ground, which I've been getting bored with.

But I need better shoes for this.

another

2011-03-16T23:51:00.001-07:00

I finished another revision on the thesis, incorporating another round of feedback. It took three weeks. The biggest timesink: changing one word that is in the title, as it appears throughout the thesis. Again, very anti-climactic.

I was more excited to go to the gym after emailing it out.

On The Four Hour Body Diet

2011-02-18T21:00:00.001-08:00

I have a bad habit. When I'm in a relationship, I tend to gain weight and get lethargic.

Or rather, I used to have this bad habit. A couple years ago, I started started reading about everything i ate regularly and realized how much I really don't know. And the same with exercise. While I was far healthier than many people on both fronts (diet and exercise), I'm probably an order of magnitude better off now than I was a couple years ago. All through a lot of 1) slowly reading and 2) slowly changing things.

This is about diet. Exercise is for another day. Slow change is for a third day.

I have been reading Tim Ferris' "The Four Hour Body", and after reading the section on dieting, I realized it was pretty close to how I was already eating. The key difference is that he advocates 1) cutting carbs like bread/cereal/pasta/rice/etc out and dairy like cheese/milk 2) having a binge day, once a week, where anything goes. So I made these two changes out of curiosity.

I'm not advocating this or describing it here, but wanted to make some observations.

Three days after I started it, my girlfriend told me I lost weight.

Now i really haven't lost weight, but I have been losing body fat, because i'm still weight training on a fairly regular basis. Here's my observations on the diet:

1) No milk in coffee is hard. I ignore this every other day.

2) I energy crashed the first two weeks. I then moved my anything-goes day from Saturday (when I'm usually with my girlfriend, and well, this isn't her diet) to Friday (when I'm at work with easy access to a lot of free/cheap high calorie food.

3) I've fallen into the habit of stocking up on things I have cravings for and then eat them all on friday. Even if i don't want to. Just to get rid of the craving.

4) Overdoing Friday has gotten rid of the energy crash

5) Making sure I had everything i craved during the week and making a point to eat it all in a single day is making me dislike these things--i.e. i have no temptation to eat them for the next week.

5) On weight training days, I still have pasta (whole wheat), milk, and something with sugar, and I usually eat potatoes with breakfast to keep sustained workout recovery going.

6) When someone brings homemade bakery to work, I indulge. Out of respect, yeah, that's it.

Today is friday. On the menu: two eggs--over easy, bacon, sausage, potatoes (breakfast), a quart of chocolate almond milk, an odwalla juice, a chicken sandwich with fries (lunch), half a container of trader joes chocolate covered peanut butter cups, bread and cheese, two bananas, a deep dish pepperoni pizza (dinner), a ben and jerry's ice cream pint, and a cupcake. A rough estimate is 6-7k. Because, well, you can't just have a bowl of ben and jerry's...

I don't even want to know how many calories that is, but it's less than I've had the last couple Fridays, and

1) I'm still losing body fat.

2) I have far more consistent energy (physical and mental) from day to day.

3) My junk food cravings are dropping to almost nothing.

I kind of dread fridays now, because I'm starting to dislike a lot of things I used to try (unsuccessfully) not to eat. I'd consider dropping the friday thing, except for the fact that it avoids my having an energy crash.

For the record, exercise levels during the month I've done this have been 10k running, one hour cross training, two p90x strength training workouts, 2-3 p90x abs workouts, and 3-4 hours of other outdoor things like hiking or kayaking, per week.

Through the Edge to Nevada

2011-02-15T22:19:00.001-08:00

Metablogging and Achirality

2011-01-26T20:50:00.000-08:00

I have started a number of blog entries and left them unfinished. There was a massive run of a lot of things, including, but not limited to, finishing the thesis (very anticlimactic, and that's all I have to say about that), a trip to O-Hi-O to visit family and friends, a well--needed vacation to the southern Caribbean (I might talk about that later), and returning to work. I'm writing this entry for solely meta-blogging reasons, to kick start some real writing back off again. It's been a while.

On another note, chiral groups preserve handedness, while achiral groups do not.

resurrect

2010-11-29T02:52:00.001-08:00

In the ongoing narrative of complaining-about-the-thesis-on-my-blog, I finished writing the thesis about two weeks ago. Then I started making some new figures, which ran over by a few days, and American Bird Day took over before it got wrapped up.

While visiting a state that is round on both ends and high in the middle, the cold air has been quite refreshing. Not much work has been done on this trip, but I realized the way of holiday life can be summed up, shampoo-bottle-style, as "visit. talk. eat. repeat." After a week here, I really miss getting work done.

No Magsafe for You!!!

2010-11-05T18:42:00.001-07:00

The furball is obsessed with unplugging the magsafe cord from my laptop. She has unplugged it about 10 times in the last half hour. In other news, two-year old figures just got updated to have better notation. Exciting, huh?

241 Addendum 2

2010-11-05T18:00:00.001-07:00

Another thought: Something tells that next near will be very different. Moving this aside will free up a lot of energy, thought, and irritation.

For example, writing these blog posts is about 1000% more efficient as adding new details to a thesis that has an audience of four people. Because this is creative and fun and that is not. Another that is, but that's a story for another time and place.

Back to that coffee…

241 Addendum

2010-11-05T17:57:00.001-07:00

Back to sucking up a lot of time: 250 pages of tenth draft rewriting is really inefficient. I'm realizing that I'm spending about 80% of my time reminding myself to concentrate and only 20% of my time actually writing or making new figure or new examples or whatever it needs to be that is going into this.

I'm going to go break all my rules and make some coffee after 5pm, so get today's work cranked out, since I gave myself a deadline.

241

2010-11-05T17:55:00.000-07:00

I have not written anything substantial here in a while. I have two entries going, that have been in progress for weeks, but the never ending thesis has been taking up a lot of time. Or, I should admit, sucking up a lot of time.

Rewriting material that I've rewritten about ten times before is exceedingly mind-numbing. Especially when it's about 200 pages of such material. But I'm now revising the final three chapters, which are revised from the papers they're associated with. Two of those papers have had about about ten drafts (with the eleventh drafts next up after turning in the thesis versions). The hardest part is that the mental concentration to stay focused on something exceedingly boring drains a lot of creativity out of the work. It would be much more fun if this were a first writeup, but so it goes.

There's two upsides.

Overall, the whole document was outlined in less than a week and then put together in first draft form in about six weeks. That was more fun. The revisions will come to about three months of work. There will be two more rounds of revisions after this, but they'll be significantly shorter. Overall about 4 months of work (the first draft was done part-time).

And the quality of this will be the highest of all the write-ups. Even the eleventieth-ninth drafts of the papers that get submitted to siggraph 2089 will still be constrained by page length, so some things will just be hard to follow. The thesis has the freedom to be arbitrarily clear.

I may or might start writing a bunch of nonsense here to keep writing momentum going for the next couple weeks, which is the final stretch. I planned some travel for Thanksgiving, so that's the ultimate deadline, as I'm not taking this with me. If only these things had real deadlines.

And I'm not proofreading this entry today.

And you an track the page length on facebook. Yeah, that's what those numbers I've been posting all year are all about.

TI Thesisdesystem

2010-10-17T02:35:00.001-07:00

Fast paced day. Wake, breakfast, exercise, planning, out the door, reading Dr. Silex's Lovecraft collection on the way to Treasure Island. Thesis distraction--I mean music festival--day one. Very electronic. Highlights: Phantogram (they were fun), !!! (also fun, I'm into playful music these days), Kruder and Dorfmeister (amazing electronic set), deadmau5 (a lot of fun to dance to, and an awesome stage show), and LCD Soundsystem. The latter was probably my turning point for going, especially since they're hanging up the hat, and I haven't caught them live before, using silly excuses like working on my thesis. A very enthusiastic crowd--it made me very aware of how much Toronto music fans stand around, watch, and do nothing, for the most part. A short, but very good, set. Long trip home, dinner, and off to make today's requisite thesis "result" before bed. A "result," for the coming week, is a single motion, analyzed using four different algorithms and making all the figures and videos that go along with that motion and those four algorithms. Tonight is running. The current top rule in the get-it-done game I'm playing with myself is that a new example has to be finished every day until they're done. There's a lot more than I thought I would need for it to be solid, but so it goes. I'll probably get a fourth paper out of it now.

Impromptu Albany Circus Characters

2010-09-24T13:02:00.000-07:00

Albany, CA, 2010.

whiteboard art history

2010-09-23T11:50:00.000-07:00

toronto, 2010. found on a whiteboard in my old office after the siggraph deadline had passed.

Music Switching

2010-09-22T13:15:00.001-07:00

I go through music buying-and-listening phases. I will suddenly stop listening to everything I currently listening to, start a new itunes playlist, and start buying new music. It's refreshing and absurd and nostalgic, because with all the moving I have done in the last decade, I start to associate music with times and places. Most playlists have names things such as "tronto09" or "eville05," meaning they have the music I bought while living in a particular place in a particular year. Here's a run-down of the current spree:

Lady Gaga is 80's Genesis. Yeah, that seems kind of absurd, but in my head, they're the same. Both are well written pop music. Have have many things I don't much care for. And each is written in a very different style, they're people who really get pop music and push its form around in interesting ways. Oh yeah, my having this is Tom's fault.

LCD Soundsystem: The only reason I started listening to LCD soundsystem has to do with mentions in print by both Trent Reznor and Stephen King (although they were made years apart). I picked up Sound of Silver while reading Under the dome, since King uses it as a soundtrack in an early part of the book. I once read a review that called LCD Soundsystem "electropunk hipster nonsense," which is about the best description I've heard. But it's fun. "You wanted a hit" is my favorite.

Weezer: They took off when I was in high school, and I was listening to them a lot during the blue album/Pinkerton era, so they're one of those bands whose music I buy without ever hearing it first. And "Tired of Sex" was covered by Wild Willy and the Wonder Weevils. Enough said about Wild Willy and the Wonder Weevils. I just picked up Hurley, and while it's really irreverent in parts, I really like it. It also has the obigatory "Viva la Vida" cover. Every popular band should cover Viva la Vida. Especially if they don't like it.

Aphex Twin: I bought two Aphex Twin albums about 10 years ago, and they've come and gone, but been regularly played, since then. I just picked up Selected Ambient Works 85-92, which is the best I've heard. It sets a certain mood extremely well. I think it's my new favorite music to have on while on public transit.

Brian Eno: Music for Airports. It's music for airports. I've been playing with Bloom and Trope, his iPod app collaborations.

Tom Petty: Feels very classic. New Order Joe was visiting in town, and laughed when I told him it was Tom Petty's "new" album (Mojo). It reminds me of David Bowie's Heathen, going back to what a particular musician does naturally, but in a fun way.

Also picked up: Jack Dangers, Nusret Fateh Ali Khan, Orbital, more Aphex Twin, Gorillaz, and new music by Meat Beat Manifesto, Marcus Eaton, and Trent Reznor & his Happy Fun-Time Band of the week. But I haven't listened to them enough to say anything meaningful yet.

ghost waves

2010-09-21T11:00:00.000-07:00

san francisco, 2010

2010-09-07T17:39:00.000-07:00

marin headlands, 2010.

Outside Lands and a Grey Whale, otherwise Known as Time Management

2010-08-30T01:41:00.000-07:00

This "phase" of this blog is turning into a reflection on finishing the phd thesis. It's actually quite anti-climactic; the real story is in everything else.

Last week I wrote an entry about Outside Lands, the two-day music festival held in Golden Gate Park. As mentioned below, I procrastinated on looking up a band name and didn't get around to posting it. Written in the past, it seems silly to post it as its own entry. And I make the rules here, so here's an "embedded entry:"

A week ago Friday, while perusing weekend happenings, I discovered this two-day concert called outside lands. I never make it to the whole show for these festivals; it's more of a get-back-into-what-the-rest-of-the-world-is-listening-to thing. And long days of music outdoors is always relaxing, whether it's classical (rare), metal (rare), or something in between (most things).

Al Green was amazing. He does things with his voice that few even try. Social distortion was fun, and their Johnny Cash closer was a great burst of outdoor energy. Furthur was unexpected, since I've never listened to the Grateful Dead. One of those random omissions; no real reason. The music was great, and they played quite a while, which was a great close to Saturday. Their cover of Time, was, of course, a fun surprise. Some of the best music was on the smaller stages. Favorites were Aterciopelados, from Bogota, and Beats Antique. Each was far more original than many of the headliners.

Empire of the Sun I should say something about. They were definitely…interesting. Costumes and danceable electronica and an interesting light and video show. But after the 5th song that was the same, I needed a reprieve. I once had MIchael Jackson's Dangerous on in the car while driving my mom, since I was paying attention to rhythm a lot at the time, and it seemed pretty mom-friendly. Halfway through she told she was tired of hearing the same song on repeat. It caught me off guard, but I expect this was the same effect.

That's that entry. Then I wrote this one, about a film I saw.

I rented Collapse the other night, since I was looking for a documentary that makes you think (about something other than quaternion math). A man collapsing as he studies collapse. I'm getting distracted away from movies a lot right now, since I have far too much work on my mind, but his emotional moments pulled me back in.

i really liked the talking head staging set in a dark room. It really tells you that this film is about him, and not so much about the story he is telling, although that gets your attention too. The story is a theory of the in-progress collapse of western society. Many points I agree with, but his expected conclusion I do not. Personally, I think some people will put up with hardship of a growing world with limited resources, while others will jump at the chance to innovate. The innovation is happening now, but it's crawling. When energy loss really starts to affect a lot of people is when it will take off.

After that entry was written, I rented The Man from Space, which was also really good.

Watching these is becoming a late-night mental release from the far--too-constrained mental efforts of rewriting the related work section of my thesis. It was long and rambling. I cut it in half in terms of length, and that's with more content included.

Two days ago, it occurred to me that the real reason putting a thesis into a finished form, instead of scattered bits of writing, is hard, is that it's boring me out of my mind. Finishing the related work had to be the worst, which I completed today. There's still a few references to add, but the structure is all the way it should be now, and it stands as I want it. That said, the creative work on this is long since done, so it's come down to time-management mind-games that I'm playing with myself to keep it moving.

A few days ago had one of the most fun time-management mind games. I ignored the thesis, I rented a car, and I took off to do four random hikes, without much of a plan. Surprisingly, I saw a whale breaching off of Point Reyes (it's not the season for it). I don't know that I've ever seen a whale, but I was endlessly fascinated by them as a child, and seeing one unexpectedly was really great.

The other excuse for the trip was to draw. Not to create drawings, but to draw. Having done it intensely in the past and having set it aside while I was in the "thesis trenches, " as I call last year, it was way overdo. They were fairly bad drawings, since it was more about the act of moving a pencil around on paper and picking and choosing what to show. Landscape gestures from the top of Mt Tam. I made a few more today. It's a mental loosening-up, in a way.

That all said, the next part of the thesis will move more quickly, probably taking a week, and then the revision will be half finished. Then there's some fun things to do.

And to make the context of this entry even stranger, it was written a couple days ago.

heat wave

2010-08-25T01:01:00.000-07:00

I have an unfinished post that is a week old, but I'm procrastinating looking up one word for it. So I'm going to move on until I deprocrastinate on that looking up that word.

We're having a very short heat wave, but hot enough that it threw off my writing routine today. I've fallen into a good rhythm of writing for a couple hours after breakfast, getting some exercise, than heading out to a cafe to write again for the afternoon. I've set myself an aggressive deadline, so there's occasionally a third stint of writing in the evening. It's probably the least rewarding piece of writing I've ever done, but also the longest. The combination of an aggressive time frame and a strict routine seem to be about the only way I'll get it finished though, so that's the time management game of the moment.

But I was sluggish through my morning writing. Then I drank about two gallons of water while exercising. I took a shower and still felt sluggish. Something was up, so I checked the weather. It said 96. I thought it was a cached value from the trip to Florida or something. No, it was 96. Being an east--coaster, the lack of humidity threw me off completely.

Unfortunately I don't handle heat well for mentally intense work, so writing went nowhere after that. After getting through one paragraph in a half hour and reading that the heat wave would last two days, I decided to toss it aside til the temperature drops. It's like day and night. The last time this happened, a cold front blew through dramatically to end it, and it was like suddenly drinking three cups of coffee. Experience tells me to wait, since that breath of fresh air will kick everything back into gear, and that'll probably get me caught up in a day or two.

Now, about rhythm. This more freeform, fun writing, just comes out fine. I think it's the entertainment value of creating it, while the "day--job" writing requires concentration on many more things, most of which have nothing to do with the writing itself. It's mostly concentration to say no to every distraction that calls out your name. Like the top of the door that just might need to be dusted, because cleaning that would be more entertaining than the day job writing. It really doesn't need dusted, and that next paragraph needs to be put together. Do that about 600 more times and you get to be finished!

This entry is lacking in much real content, but it really much more of a tool, to make Friday's writing resume. It's about rhythm. A light-hearted stretch between longer, less fun stretches that make you want to do strange things like dust the top of the door.

I am not going to go dust the top of the door now.

siggraph

2010-08-13T14:38:00.001-07:00

I went to siggraph for three days this year, rather than the full week. I tend to get exhausted at siggraph--it's non-stop learning, catching up with people, socializing, seeing incredible ideas, and sneaking in a few hours of sleep a night. I took a 6am flight down to see most of the morning sessions and decided that shuttles are still too much of a waste of time (it took well longer to get from the airport to the hotel than the duration of the flight).

There were two big topics at the conference I was interested in. The first is controllers for character animation, mostly in terms of walking. The big trend this year was the use of simplified physical models, especially inverted pendulum models, to plan and control the motion of more complex articulated characters. Having seen some of this work grow to maturity behind the scenes before it was published, it's nice to see a large portion of the field thinking the same way about a problem. In coming years, if the presentations become more concise and the ideas are generalized to more types of motion, this could start to have a big impact in the game world.

Fluid simulation is the other area that work that really caught my interest. Surface tracking is a big thing, using geometric processing steps interleaved with simulation steps. The detail looks great, although some approaches are somewhat conservative in terms of trying to keep things from breaking apart. There's also interesting work on adapting grid resolution and non-grid domains for specific simulation steps to increase detail.

The electronic theatre was great this year. Some years it feels gimmicky, but many more pieces were quite original this time. Some favorites are The Light of Life, Loom, The Lost Thing, Poppy, and Upgrades.

Emerging Technologies can be hit or miss, but there's usually one or two things that are really really cool. I only saw about a third of it, but a friend pointed me to a voice-responsive zoetrope from Disney, which was made using hand drawn expressions on ping pong balls. It has the right mix of hand-made originality, technical wizardry, and charm, which probably makes it the most fun thing I saw all week.

Of course, siggraph has parties. Since we started our own a couple years ago, I've become less interested in finding them as opposed to helping put one together. We handed this year's organizing off to UBC, who did a great job. The number of people doubled again, which is good, and quite amazing considering the small group on a patio that it grew out of a couple years back.

One final thought: The food choices near the conference center have significantly improved since two years ago, although I did end up on one walk with someone who stubbornly believed there had to be something good a little further away too. He was proven wrong, of course, but most people have to see downtown LA culture to believe it.

:-)

Deface Book

2010-08-10T14:02:00.001-07:00

I'm taking this blog off the Facebook broadcasting. I feel it's good to have it in public, since it constrains my writing, but I've come to have an odd behavior pattern with Facebook. Basically, I don't want that many people knowing what I'm thinking or doing on any given day, at any given moment. It used to be amusing, but now it's kind of strange. It might be that in a sufficiently large crowd, I'm always quiet. Hence how many blog posts have been written in the last year. So while you're more than welcome to read or not read it, I don't want to throw it at you.

But it's an overdue blog post, at a time when I'm spending a few days reorganizing a lot of life logistics to get a really really big project moving again and wrapped up. So there's a lot on my mind. And I'll write about it in coming posts. Or I won't. That's the beauty of the blog. I can abandon it for weeks, or months at a time. But it's always there waiting for itself to be revisited. Kind of like Lisey's story. I've been reading it in parts since 2006. It's probably one of the most-traveled books out there, in that it's been all over the world. I take it on every trip. Some trips I read it on, others I don't. It's actually quite good, but I'm enjoying it enough to _really_ take my time with it.

I might or might not write about running, tar balls, siggraph, oysters, lists, music composition, and the strange act of working at home for a while.

bubbles

2010-06-26T15:13:00.000-07:00

The Other Narrator

2010-06-12T12:16:00.000-07:00

More Trees

2010-03-06T14:36:00.000-08:00

As requested by Pete C...bad CG trees. Apologies to Patricio and Gonzalo.

"Look. It has the Sky. Mountains. Trees. Water. Grass. It has everything."

2010-03-03T23:05:00.000-08:00

tierra del fuego national park, 2005

used skulls

2010-03-01T22:44:00.000-08:00

san francisco, 2006

island

2010-03-01T01:17:00.001-08:00

yosemite, 2005

absolution ride

2010-02-27T20:49:00.000-08:00

banff, dec 07.

Blue Hour (IV)

2009-11-27T12:25:00.000-08:00

I'm thinking about Edward. I don't like his job. I wonder if he studies calligraphy on weekends. Calligraphy is fun. If you know calligraphy, you can put pretty notes in the banana packages. Oh yes, the banana packages in the luggage. I need to find the luggage. Then I will have bananas. Yes, then I will finally have bananas.

Blue Hour (III)

2009-11-27T12:20:00.000-08:00

They have no bananas? They have no bananas! No bananas today, but maybe bananas tomorrow. I'm going to drive to the airport. I'm going to pick up my luggage at the airport. My luggage at the airport has a bag of bananas in it. Edward sent them. Edward is a podiatrist in georgia. His hair is the color of strained peaches.

[repost from facebook]

Blue Hour (II)

2009-11-27T12:19:00.000-08:00

Yes, they have no bananas, they have no bananas today.

[contributed by THCIA]

Blue Hour (I)

2009-11-27T12:18:00.000-08:00

i walked to the store. i opened the door. i pushed it open. i looked at the security guard. his name is john. he plays dam jhat on thursdays. i picked up a basket. they didn't have carts. i need bananas. do they have bananas? i don't think they have bananas. oh what are those yellow things. i need bananas. i think those are bananas. let's buy some bananas.

[repost from facebook]

holland is a rhythmic hammer park (V)

2009-10-16T23:42:00.000-07:00

tired of sex (weezer)
entertain me (blur)
the rhythm of the heat (peter gabriel)
love etc. (pet shop boys)
symphony for saddam's significant other (pig)
midlife crisis (faith no more)
the future (leonard cohen)
colette shows him le ropes (michael giacchino)

spheres rotate in SU(2) with tap water bottles filled with elm leaves (IV)

2009-10-14T22:25:00.000-07:00

risen (kmfdm)
solid waste (meat beat manifesto)
scream (michael and janet jackson)
hallelujah (rammstein)
diy (kmfdm)
happiness in slavery (nine inch nails)
young cassius (meat beat manifesto)
cake and happy stuff (marilyn manson)
discipline (nine inch nails)

roger is red and blue, respectively (II)

2009-10-11T15:25:00.000-07:00

song 2 (blur)
thaeter (marilyn manson)
the rain within her hands (bella morte)
starz (smashing pumpkins)
revolution action (atari teenage riot)
the horrible people (marilyn manson)
today (smashing pumpkins)
get your gunn (marilyn manson)
reality (david bowie)
down to earth (peter gabriel)
i'm only happy when it rains (garbage)

under the moon (I)

2009-10-10T22:25:00.000-07:00

zero (smashing pumpkins)
cruci-fiction in space (marilyn manson)
marilyn, my bitterness (crüxshadows)
prologue (bear mccreary)
light (trent reznor kmfdm remix)
bloodsports (skold vs. kmfdm)
hau ruck (kmfdm)
the show must go on (moulin rouge)
eifersucht (rammstein)
crazy on you (heart)

Three Films and Passive Attention Spans.

2009-09-07T19:20:00.001-07:00

I have not been watching many films at all this year. Here's what I've seen, up to this weekend:

Watchmen
Star Trek
The SIGGRAPH Evening Theater
Mary Poppins
The Day the Earth Stood Still
The Black Hole

It's now September.

The first question is why so few? I have a very low passive attention span this year. I'm liking passive things in small doses. In contrast, I saw many tv episodes early in the year, although that has fallen completely away in the last few months. Why the low passive attention span?

My active attention span is way up. I'm writing a lot and coding a lot to finish a certain degree by next spring. I'm also working on a number of personal projects (such as that in the last post). So I have a very high active attention span right now. Every time I approach something passively, I start to get ideas for my own projects and just want to break out and go work on my own things. Even Mary Poppins was watched over the course of three days.

The next question is where's all the new great stuff that I really want to see? Up (which I have been rightfully chastised for missing on a number of occasions)? Slumdog Millionaire? No Country for Old Men? The Curious Case of Benjamin Button? Etc. The first reason they're missing is the theater. It takes a long time, is socially isolationist, and costs a lot. I like to watch things from midnight to 2 in the morning on days when I have absolutely nothing else to do. The second reason is the fluff factor. I've also read about 2 novels a week for the last few months. And they're all fluff novels. Some were good, some were atrocious, but they were all light reading. A break from the mental intensity of making things. Good films don't always have that fluff factor. Great films really make you think. Something tells me I'm going to be doing a lot of catching up when I have time to think about a year from now, after this degree thing is (hopefully) done.

This weekend I was rather sick. I watched three films:
Sicko
Knowing
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

All were great fun. Only the first had a real emotional arc to it, which caught me by surprise (I was not a big fan of Fahrenheit 911 as a film, which has nothing to do with its political message, but that's another story). But the last 45 minutes really take you for a ride and tell a story that you want to see through to the end. Knowing is scifi fluff. I like scifi fluff when I don't feel like thinking. See the list above. It's fun to watch. Knowing had some amazingly well put-together disaster sequences. And I cared about most of the characters, except for one glaring exception. But a better ending would have removed the last two sequences. They're pretty, but weaken the emotion of the ending. Harry Potter has the problem the previous Harry Potter had, but no so dramatically--it feels like spliced together episodes. Some great acting and production design, and some really bad acting that was quite fun. But pieces and parts don't fit together. And they never even name one of the major villains. Definitely a piece of something rather than a thing in itself. I still like the third film the most (Alfonso Cuarón) for it's quirkiness and self-contained-ness.

Popcorn for Trolls

2009-09-05T00:55:00.000-07:00

"Three billygoats want to cross the bridge to join their billygoat friends, who are having a popcorn party. But first, they have to get past the ugly trolls, who guard the bridge. Everybody knows that. But what people don’t know is that trolls have feelings. Why can’t they have popcorn too?"

Every summer, Chris L's partner, Jody T, runs a drama workshop for kids where they make art, put on plays, and as I understand it, do lots of creative things for a couple weeks. Another friend, Mark H, helps her run the workshop, and last year he started a trend of making a video based on what the kids do. Chris and I help by making animation, mostly using the kids drawings, because, well, it's a lot of fun. We just finished this year's video, which is both a short film and music video set to a cover of the Gershon Kingsley song "Popcorn." Chris did the troll-under-the-bridge scenes, and I made all the popcorn and balloon effects and did some music remixing.

don't

2009-06-30T00:41:00.000-07:00

kevin quain suggests sorting your itunes playlist by title and filtering by the word "don't" to find out everything that itunes doesn't want you to do. here's what it told me:

don't blow your top.

don't come around here no more

don't download this song

don't give up

don't look back

don't lose my number

don't push.

i must have downloaded the third song a couple times.

2009-06-20T15:39:00.000-07:00

the last post is an outlier. i have thought often about deleting it and have avoiding writing anything here as i've contemplated whether or not to do so. i don't think i will.

it's a time of deep work, making a number of things.

out, brief spot.

2009-06-05T00:07:00.000-07:00

Patrick's ex-girlfriend confronted him again tonight, after the police have REPEATEDLY told her not to contact him. He really, REALLY hates to bring his personal life up on his blog, but he feels the the social pressure that will result is worth it. DO NOT CONTACT ME AGAIN.

solar hot water

2009-05-28T01:09:00.000-07:00

My landlord woke me so his contractor could inspect the blocked up fireplace on my floor. He's having a solar hot water system put in.

What amuses me is that the contractor was doing his best to convince me that it was good for the environment, without having asked what I thought.

This has me wondering how many people believe that solar heat is not good for the environment.

why am i here?

2009-05-23T00:35:00.000-07:00

Blogs and Facebook and Twitter. They're interesting. I put a lot of one-way stuff on them. People reply to facebook the most, twitter next, and here rarely. Accessibility? Or having it put in front of you more for the other two places than for here, where you most likely explicitly check. It affects how you use them. This, and another work-centric blog, have become more self reflective, but in a deliberately filtered way. They are thoughts that might be interesting to someone else, but are more relevant to me. The act of publishing them coerces me into being more organized than I would be in my journal. Half the reason to write is to deliberately reflect; the other half is the act of writing. It keeps your chops up, as they say, whoever they are. Facebook and Twitter writings are more specifically for the entertainment of others. Perhaps it's good not many have found their way here, as it would change the nature of the text.

In all cases, you're hearing from a deliberately managed character, of course.

why are you here?

2009-05-22T00:03:00.000-07:00

Uncommunication is a wonderful thing. So much can be said while so much is not being said. And so much can be said by not saying what is unsaid while something else is being said.

Daybreak

2009-03-28T18:54:00.000-07:00

Battlestar Galactica ended the way I always wanted to see a show end. But we rarely shows end this way. It took it's time. It had all the action and excitement. But then the writers gave a resolution to all the characters that still needed one. We find out where they are going, if not knowing their later stories.

The shot of Ron Moore reading National Geographic was self-referentially priceless.

candleholder cake

2009-03-18T16:45:00.000-07:00

just a quick note of thanks to folks by the names of mark, chris, and maya for the discovery of candleholder cakes!

improv coding with an audience

2009-02-27T21:23:00.001-08:00

occasionally, i have had to write code with an audience. i have long since known that it is not a strong part of my skill set to do this by improv. betty edwards, in her book, "drawing on the right side of the brain," argues for the philosophy of right-brained vs. left brained thinking. in computer science terms, left brained thinking is your sequential, logical side, which steps through things one piece at a time. right-brained thinking is your parallel processing side, which processes everything at once and just "sees" things. when i am writing a paper, i am using my left brain, since i am trying to logically anticipate the reader's response to each sentence i write. I want to write a sentence that makes them think about things the way i want them to so that what i am saying is clear. when i am drawing, i am using my right brain. there is almost no conscious thought. i play with what i see and just run with what's intuitive to make a picture. i have no idea what time has passed or what music i am listening to, if any.

when i first learned to code, i thought with my left brain. i thought through things one line at a time and made sure each line worked to say whatever it needed to say so that the computer could compile it into voltage differences that allow it to go do something useful with itself, if we hook up our circuits right. i eventually started to think of code with my right brain, however. i think of it now as a concise mathematical statement that needs to work on its own as a whole. each line is not separate; they intertwine together to make things say what they need to say as a concise entity.

when i talk to an audience, i am analytically watching their faces and listening to their tone of voice to see how they respond, and i adapt my level of detail and redundancy of statement based on their reactions. it's very left brained.

i am very bad at improvising code in front of a class. so i write my lecture notes, as everyone does. and then i rewrite them as i think about what questions students might ask. and i plan a couple lectures ahead to let things "gel" in the back of my mind, so that i have a better idea of how well they will work before presenting them. of course, smart students ask me questions that catch me off guard, which might head down the road of a different explanation but i steer things back to where i was going, regardless. not out of a sense of correctness, but because i know full well that if i head down another path, the right-brained/left-brained battle will stalemate and either my communication will break down or my solution will be wrong, or more likely, both will suffer. richard williams, in his book, "the animator's survival kit," shows a newby animator (the author) asking an experienced animator (milt kahl) if he listens to classical music while he works. turn the page. milt expands in size tenfold, and says "of all the sssstupid #@$#$@$#$ questions iiiiiiiv'e ever heard!!!! iiiiiiiiiiii never heard such a f$%$%#$%$#%$ stupid question! i'm not smart enough to think of more than one thing at a time!!!" that's me writing code from scratch. that's also me communicating to an audience. and animating too. they don't mix and match at all well.

as to the music question, i sometimes have it on, but i usually have no idea what's playing; it's completely blanked out of my thinking. the only time i found music to be specifically useful was when animating some fire in one of these movie films that comes out every now and then. i had my fire animation, some reference footage, and the adjacent fire shots playing on screen together, with nin's "burn" on repeat. it worked, helping to get the feel of fire out of jos's discretization of the navier stokes equations. the emotional feel of the music and shot were different, but the emotional feel of the music and fire motion were the same. that's rarely the case.

i recently had the opportunity to improv code with an audience. i was way way off my game. i learned a lot from it though, in terms my personal limits. sometimes i really am only smart enough to do one thing at a time.

Rasterization vs. Ray Tracing and the Size of your Data

2009-01-30T21:03:00.000-08:00

We all learn about rasterization and ray tracing in introductory computer graphics classes if we are computer graphicists. But, at a fundamental level, what it the difference? Teaching computer graphics has made me think about these things again. As an exercise, challenge yourself to write pseudocode for each algorithm in exactly 4 lines. Then keep reading.

I asked a number of graphics PhD students to do this tonight, and they dove straight into details about projecting triangles and computing viewing transformations, etc. But there is a fundamental difference at a much higher level that interacts with the way we make data to affect the computational complexity of these algorithms. My 4-liner versions of the algorithms look like this:

Rasterization:
for each shape:
for each pixel:
if the shape is visible in the pixel:
compute the color and draw it in the pixel

Ray tracing:
for each pixel:
for each shape:
if the shape is visible in the pixel:
compute the color and draw it in the pixel

These look almost exactly the same. We're really just swapping the order in which we iterate over data. But renderers, in practice, have to process a _lot_ of data. Way more than we can hold in memory, in the case of film quality scenes. And performance is tied to data locality, since data locality lets us avoid having to move stuff in and out of memory a lot, which makes things really slow. That constant on the memory transfer is big.

In either algorithm, we have to make an image, so we bite the bullet there and keep the image data around. It's also of fixed size and usually fits in memory, so it's not much of an issue. Shape data grows without bound, however. My experience in film production tells me to be careless about the size of your shape data until it becomes a real problem for other people, because artist time is really really really expensive and processor time is just expensive (until you hit your memory limit, where it becomes a constant multiplier on the next artist down the pipeline). So we push the size of shape data over the limit of what fits in memory on a regular basis.

Rasterizers deal with this by only processing each shape once, throwing the current shape data away at the end of the inner loop and ignoring global appearance interdependencies. Shapes are expensive to read in (we're accessing disks here), but it's O(n) in terms of how many times we read in shape data.

Ray tracers usually have to read all the shape data multiple times, since a lot of it has to get tossed out of memory _for each pixel_, since many shapes will often push memory limit bounds all on their own. And then ray tracers figure they've taken the performance hit already, so why not try to solve some of the global appearance interdependencies while we're at it. And now we have brute force solutions to the rendering equation, if we have good BRDFs. O(n^recursion depth), if my big oh is right (my math is bad on Fridays). Yikes. So we do things like bounding recursion and probabilistically killing recursive calls to keep this under control. Even if we completely ignore global appearance interdependencies, we have O(kn), where k is our number of pixels.

And when n is big, as it is for high-quality algorithms, that can mean days or weeks instead of minutes.

Are points and vectors (and normals) different?

2009-01-29T14:18:00.000-08:00

I'm teaching a computer graphics course right now. This is an expanded version of an answer to a question posed by both a student and a very smart ta:

Are points and vectors different? We teach coordinate free geometry in our graphics course, so we say yes. The idea doesn't always sit well with people with a strong math background, as opposed to a geometry background.

It really depends on your point of view of the world. In graphics, we need to be careful about how we transform things, to make sure we transform them correctly.

From the mathematical vector space point of view, all points can be represented as vectors, with the implicit assumption that they have an origin at zero. So yes, points are vectors contained in a mathematical vector space.

When we transform geometry, we need to make a distinction between locations in space (points) and directional offsets with magnitude in space ("vectors"). It sort of overloads the terminology a bit, but the direction with magnitude does not change as we translate around, while the location does--this is why we make the distinction. This is all part of the coordinate free geometry point of view. It says that we establish points and vectors as separate entities and make them behave differently with transformations. Then, define the basic operations between them to keep the difference straight. So a location plus an offset in some direction with some magnitude gives you a new location. Normal vectors give you yet a third way of transforming things.

When you write code, you have two choices: make the distinction or don't. If you don't make the distinction, you have one 3-component data type usually called a "vector." And then, whenever you transform stuff, you have to make sure you transform it the correct way, so your code has to keep track what geometric thing you have stored in that vector. So you have to do some kind of type checking and make sure you get it right whenever you write new code that deals with transformations. Something like

if v is a vector:
v' = transformAsVector(v)
else if v is a point
v' = transformAsPoint(v)
else if v is a normal
v' = transformAsNormal(v)

Keeping track of what v is gets way more tedious when you are adding point-vectors to vector-vectors, and so on.

If you make different data types for points, vectors, and normals, you can write one transform operation that does this checking internally or through c++ operator overloading, and you never have to think about it again in your code. And if you implement operations like p+v = p correctly, you don't have to keep track of what geometric thing you have. Geometric algorithms do a lot of point-vector algebra, and keeping track of what's what inside your geometric code is tedious and bug-prone. And you get one line of code to transform something:
v' = transform(v)

We teach the CFG point of view because you need to know the difference to do geometry correctly, it can make your geometric derivations easier to think through, and it can make your code significantly shorter, easier to read, and a lot less bug-prone.

There's also another level to CFG that recommends encoding the space of the coordinates with the point and compensating for spatial difference inside, for example, the point + vector operation. This is rarely implemented (I have only seen it done in the paper below), since most geometric algorithms deal with all their data already in the same space.

In my code, I break one CFG rule. I allow point + point addition. Adding two locations is geometrically meaningless. I have some data filtering code that I want to be type-independent. The filtering, when you think about it, is really doing barycentric combinations of points. But then we're back to the question of "should the filtering code do type checking to call a barycentric combination operation when it encounters points instead of scalars or vectors?" Then the code gets hard to read, and it requires me so hunt down whatever I named the barycentric combination operation when I wrote it two years ago. So points can be added to points, and we still get to write a simple smoothing filter as:
s[i] = 0.5 * s[i] + 0.25 * s[i -1] + 0.25 s[i + 1]
(s is a point sample).

About CFG: A Coordinate Free Geometry ADT. Stephen Mann, Nathan Litke, Tony DeRose. 1997

consumer 3d

2009-01-02T16:09:00.001-08:00

I have been pleasantly griping to a number of people lately about the lack of 3d animation software that is approachable to non-professionals. What's interesting is the variety of responses I get back. Academic researchers always point to their favorite paper that has a sketch based interface, but these usually only solve part of the problem (by nature, as they are research projects). Engineers working on 3d software seem to be of two generations: the older group thinks people who want to use it will learn it and that's that. The younger group of engineers knows better, since they had to learn what the older group built, and they know it is not at all easy to learn. Surprisingly, animators seem to argue against the need for it, supporting the notion that you need professional training to be an animator.

Think of apple's ilife software. Pretty much anyone can make something cool with it without any training and without the manual. If you want to go professional, you can buy final cut pro or logic or aperture or whatever the fancy version of photoshop is called. But it won't make you a professional. You still need training to learn the professional skills. Why not for 3d animation? As it stands, you need training just to learn how to look around.

It's a tough problem to make something like this since you have to safeguard people from making bad animation, but the variety of opinions on the idea is interesting. These aren't all-encompassing claims about the groups of people mentioned and certainly do not apply to everyone, but they are trends.

2008-12-03T09:50:00.000-08:00

left, right. center slides.
depth and flatness self-contest.
a world emerges.

the internet is no longer a series of tubes

2008-11-18T19:56:00.001-08:00

but is it back to being a big truck?

on the nature of questions and steps in the routine of advancement

2008-11-01T01:01:00.000-07:00

up left right forward
up forward up left up right
up back up up up

517

2008-10-30T02:38:00.001-07:00

sleep
eludes
and
hides

warmth
arrives,
my
warmth
departs

taking
aim,
morning

Palinese

2008-09-28T08:28:00.000-07:00

"It's very important when you consider even national-security issues with Russia. It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right next to, they are right next to our state."

"What I think Americans at the end of the day are going to be able to go back and look at track records and see who's more apt to be talking about solutions and wishing for and hoping for solutions for some opportunity to change, and who's actually done it."

"Show me where I have ever said that there's absolute proof that nothing that man has ever conducted or engaged in has had any effect or no effect on climate change, I have not said that."

"Let me speak specifically about a credential that I do bring to this table, Charlie, and that's with the energy independence that I've been working on for these years as the governor of this state that produces nearly 20 percent of the U.S. domestic supply of energy, that I worked on as chairman of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, overseeing the oil and gas development in our state to produce more for the United States."

"It is for no more politics as usual and somebody's big, fat resume maybe that shows decades and decades in that Washington establishment, where, yes, they've had opportunities to meet heads of state ... these last couple of weeks ... it has been overwhelming to me that confirmation of the message that Americans are getting sick and tired of that self-dealing and kind of that closed door, good old boy network that has been the Washington elite."

In Palinese, up to 5 distinctive thoughts are typically strung together and the english teachers be damned because...they instill a discipline, and discipline is not for freedom, and freedom to say that your words are juxtaposed and free from discipline and the liberty of that, the liberty of the american people, is to be able to communicate your preferred ideas by using a tent, a tent with a screen, and stuff the thoughts of relevance inside, and create a termination clause that reveals something of emotional regard regardless of the interior of the prior metaphor, for you know that you are not free unless you have the freedom to speak your own mind. Oh yeah, and Russia's right there.

Battlestar Galactica

2008-06-17T10:03:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, TH and I started watching Battlestar Galactica. We're a few episodes into the third season, and I'm starting to thinking it might be the best written show I've watched on a regular basis. It used to be Deep Space Nine, then the X Files, then Lost (which many would argue about after a year of button-pushing). And I'm pretty picky with what TV programming I'm willing to watch, since I gave up "watching tv" in the traditional sit-down-and-see-what's-on sense about five years ago. But in terms of telling compelling stories with characters you believe in doing things you believe in, it is light-years beyond even the other excellent shows I mentioned. I'm been thinking about why, since I have a bad habit of analyzing everything. TH says I need to know everything about everything. But to answer why, I think it's in the mistakes. Real people with good intentions make some really bad decisions quite often. Why do we still fight wars, see genocide, let people starve, destroy the environment for cash, etc.? It's not that the old folks "in charge" are bad people. It's usually well-intentioned bad decisions. Miyazaki plays off this all the time in his films with the very ambiguous "villains." By identifying with the villains, you feel the pain of what they do far more than you would if they were your typical "bad guy." BG writers know this. Most of the time, the human protagonists are those doing the most horrid things. And it makes it personal, and it sucks you in. You want them to come out ok, but like the real world, they come out scratched and bruised. So despite space travel by "jumping," characters who consort with manipulative mental antagonists and dialogue that includes the word "frak," you just buy right into the world.

black and white

2008-04-21T08:16:00.000-07:00

I hearby declare 6AM as "Insane Kittie Hour."

Autechre

2008-04-12T22:57:00.000-07:00

Some shows are shows to be seen. This is one to watch in your head, with your imagination. An hour of abstract rhythm and timbre that heads right and then suddenly trips and turns left, adding and subtracting and building to all-out frenzies interspersed with just enough breathing room. Even with the complete lack of light, for me it's one of the most visually amazing acts to see, as the music feeds the imagination while guiding or pulling it on an hour's long journey.

rat wins!

2008-02-24T20:36:00.000-08:00

rat wins!

week of drawings

2008-02-05T19:54:00.000-08:00

Here's the highlights of a fairly decent week of drawing. One afternoon in anatomy class and one evening in open life drawing. I haven't posted any of these in a while, and a massive pile of drawings has accumulated in the past few months. Staring down the pile as I was gearing up to go through them and toss and save, I realized how short-lived they will be, as they're on newsprint. Motivated by that thought, these will at least see the light of another day. :-)

These are drawings of the torso musculature from class. Excessive labeling to help my remember what is what.

This is a gesture I liked. I'm usually sloppy with them and use them as exercise more than anything else, but this has a nice stylization. It reminds me of some character icons from a film I was close to but did not work on.

And a few more from open life drawing.

It's always fun to find open life drawings that I like after the fact. I haven't been thinking about the drawings themselves much lately so much the act of drawing. Subtle exaggeration was my personal exercise for the evening.

Is creative software too precise?

2008-02-03T22:20:00.000-08:00

I had a conversation last week with MM about the downsides of creative software and he brought up an interesting point. First, I'll note that he's coming from a creative background and has only recently added computer tools to his mix. He's been trying some painting software, and finds it sort of bland to work with because of its over-predictability and lack of interesting response.

We design creative software to give users exactly what they specify, but this isn't really how traditional media works. I'm going to use drawing as an example, since I draw frequently (MM used watercolor, which is more extreme).

Some drawings are destined to be rigid, precise studies that are created with the goal of realistically matching the appearance of the subject. Others are scribbles quickly jotted down to remember the shape of things. Some are refined, clean illustrations that communicate a concept. Others are loosely drawn figures where only a few important features are rendered with precision. It seems to me that the majority of today's artists see the latter as far more interesting. These approaches leave breathing room; that is, room for personal expression of the subject and greater freedom for the artist's style to come through. My own work, when I am at my strongest, feels like a dance. The drawing instrument is precise only when needed, and the way I partially relax my arm and hand comes through the rest of the time. This is different than how anyone else does it.

The media also comes into play here, and this is the big thing MM brought up. Every surface you create on, every marking tool you use, has a certain precision to it. More interestingly, it has a certain imprecision. The imprecision is your dance partner, in a way, as you create. This can be the paper, the pen, the conte, the water and pigment mix, or even the ricketiness of the easel on which you're working. These all introduce forms of imprecision. As a computer scientist, I'd be tempted to say that one of the benefits of software is that this can all be avoided. But is it good to avoid? As a creative person, your dance partner takes you in new directions and spawns new ideas as you work. An unintended line from a crease in the next sheet of paper might lead to part of an imaginary setting. A line that doesn't quite follow the actual subject's form can lead to an exaggeration study. Watercolor pigment that spreads in a particular way can lead to a style of mark--a symbol--for representing something with partial abstraction.

Does this mean that this imprecision is always good? No. Sometimes we need to avoid it. In my case, by working slowly and being careful. I'm always more careful with eyes, unless I don't have the time. Then they become quick, broad marks that leave most of the content to your imagination. In software, maybe it's good to look into creating imprecision in a controlled way. Something to put in place that can be turned down or off as desired. I've seen it in some features of 3D software, but it's missing all over the place in most of the tools we use day to day. Maybe it's hard to design in a way that is predictable and controllable. In the places I have seen it, it certainly is hard to work with.

numbers stations

2007-12-03T23:51:00.000-08:00

Last night I discovered numbers stations. I've had a compilation of them on almost non-stop since then.

Reminiscent of a mix of ice cream truck music and the voice of a demon counting down your days, they have this odd back-and-forth quality to them that is quite musical in structure. A 4-disc compilation, The Conet Project can be downloaded for free: http://www.irdial.com/conet.htm

The structure sort of tugs you off balance, as though you're looking over a near-vertical cliff, standing at the edge. A calm and rigidly structed recitation of single digits, intermingled with simple, calming melodies and the ambience of short wave radio.

Excellent music to work too. Up there with Björk's Drawing Resraint 9 score. Like that score, I know a number of people who would absolutely love this and a number of people who would absolutely hate it. I like it enough to spend this time writing about it.

Mid-90's Meat Beat Manifesto without the bass, vocal, synthesizers, and percussion.

The score to discs is a collection of off-kilter sounds meant to convey a certain feeling, and this seems to be a more purist form of it.

Yesterday I was going through my junk mail folder, and found a message in jibberish that was almost visually poetic if you could get past the absurdity of what it was on the surface.

SNOW!!!

2007-12-02T00:18:00.000-08:00

It's that first real snow of the year. Not the first time flakes come down, or the first time a few stick to the ground without melting. But that first magical snow. The snow that feels warm even though it's blistering cold and blowing right in your face. The kind of snow that calls for a hot chocolate when you get inside. The kind of snow that makes you want to take a walk outside at 3 in the morning watching in blow around, turning even piles of litter into mounds and waves of peace. The kind of snow that sticks to your hair and freezes in place. Snow that brings hope and turns the darkest time of year into the brightest.

this is earth

2007-11-24T03:01:00.000-08:00

an implication of earth, a shade of earth, a joke told about earth, a speaking of earth's life, or maybe just a spin on the old wheel of chance.

discs

2007-11-19T13:24:00.001-08:00

I made an abstract animation yesterday, called "discs." It still has a few tweaks to go in the compression and sound mix, but until then, here's some stills from it. They don't bring out the motion, which was much more the focus, but these are some kinda fun static frames.

shapes

2007-11-15T11:17:00.000-08:00

I've been talking and thinking about shapes a lot lately. More in an abstract sense than in the literal meaning of "shape." Here's a couple That were doodled a few days back. TH added a lot of the detail work to the top-left shape. And Neil Young was playing in the environment, so that got doodled in a bit too.

burst!

2007-11-05T00:53:00.001-08:00

just a quick burst of color! a one!

siggraph papers countdown widget

2007-11-02T17:39:00.000-07:00

I was stumped on something for a moment, so I started this new Dashcode thing and made a Dashboard countdown-to-the-siggraph-deadline timer. Hour correctness is set to Pacific time, but it'll tell you how many days are left correctly. :-)

Here you go.

And I got un-stumped while I was working on it!

crowd on a carpet square

2007-10-12T10:47:00.000-07:00

Nuit Blanche ("The New Blank") had an installation of a carpeted sidewalk, see (secretofthesyncope.com), from which you could take a piece of carpet home with the aim of photographing it and uploading it to a growing collection. You'll have to scroll through the next button to see it on their site, since whatever script generates their index seems to be curfuddled, but the local household creatures seem to be intrigued by it.

Natural outdoor light

2007-09-20T13:29:00.000-07:00

Autodesk has a great article/tutorial on natural outdoor lighting. It's fun because it collapses a lot of observation into a short roundup for those of us who are too focused on being too busy elsewhere to notice what we see everyday.

Speaking and Rats and Posters, Oh My!

2007-08-15T21:31:00.000-07:00

I just returned from what has to have been the busiest SIGGRAPH I've ever been to. I gave a talk on the last morning (how to chop vegetables when making Ratatouille), which was really well attended, considering the 8:30 time. A co-author was giving a talk in another room at the same time (hand tracked gestures to animate cameras and simple motions); he also had good attendance. We had a couple posters up as a result of the sketches and posters being clobbered together. They didn't seem to be all that rewarding for us as authors, in that we got very little feedback. They seem to be more unidirectional in that, as attendees, they're convenient to browse outside of presentation times when the area isn't crowded. Lots of parties, caught up with lots of friends. San Diego is also and amazing place for siggraph. The climate and atmosphere and location in the city all mix really well. And the conference content at both SIGGRAPH and SCA had a really nice variety and more novel ideas. Motion capture technology is all over the place. Pretty soon you'll be able to make you're own motion capture zombie films using only the camera in your laptop. Now to finish digesting all the information...

Abstract Swirly Things

2007-07-09T08:33:00.000-07:00

Michel Gagné has a section on his website that describes the fun animation of flavor in Ratatouille. Traditionally animated motion graphics reminiscent of Fischinger. :-)

rat a too ee

2007-06-29T10:24:00.000-07:00

Ratatouille opens today, somewhere close to you. A few years and many long hours in the making, it seems to be grabbing the imaginations of those who see it and pulling them gleefully along for a couple hours and leaving them full of wonder and that mythical thing called stuff. If you see it, enjoy. Don't forget, leave your ping pong balls at home. :-)

Recent sketches

2007-05-20T12:20:00.000-07:00

Back into at the life drawing monkey business. It's a serious stint this time, as opposed to the intentionally experimental, all over the place drawings from the holidays (below). These are the better of the recent sketchbook drawings, as I try to gain a bit of control over the unforgivable gel pen. Larger drawings are catching up, with proportions still all over the place. Model names smudged for privacy, copyright me. don't redistribute, yada yada yada...

Make Your Own Gourmet Topless Pineapple (R)

2007-05-14T14:36:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, a friend and casting director of peeps related a handful of absurd farm market anecdotes. Among them was the tale of the gourmet topless pineapple, a sales pitch and a lie that has stuck in my head and developed into a recurring joke.

An improvisation, a three minute shooting schedule, and a couple hours of final cut later, we have a culinary documentary. Here it is on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_-lJ6RBcHQ

irritable maya dox

2007-04-21T09:32:00.000-07:00

i just started playing with maya 8.5 and was passing though the api dox when i found this little bundle of happy-programmer joy:

"To do so would require computing the inverse of the local to world space transformation, and I have just been busy telling you we don’t know how to define that transform in general."

Editors??

water under the dwej

2007-01-23T12:58:00.001-08:00

Fingers banging against the keyboard, cleaning up the mess left behind by the namesake of the old Americans. "Let's talk." This and that and that and this, profound and necessary but not relevant here. A walk to the kitchen, and a stall. A stream of water across the floor. A few more steps, deep in puzzlement. A large puddle of water. "We have water." Questions and puzzlement and puzzlement and questions. Phone calls and neighbor conversations. The start of The Mop Bucket. Arrival of the Kay Enn. Explorations and sawings and diggings and pumpings. Mop mop mop. Corrosion? Broken seal? Mop mop mop mop mop. Streaming and inching become running and puddling. Mop mop mop. All the while, explorations and much deeper puzzlement by the Kay Enn of the Dwej. Many more moppings, you know the repetition. Alas, a main has failed. Those in Morocco fare not well. We're keeping up. A promise from the big Tee Oh of arrival in a few hours. Splishing and splashing and mopping and squeegying. And even sweeping. Pause. Lettuce, hot peppers, lemon-soaked apples, and blackberries, under red wine and extra virgin. Play. Puddles to ponds, running to pouring. Verification of water spillage. The water off. Then back on, with the next powers that be to in "hours." Mopping and mopping and moving and stacking. More powers that be, diagnosing with a promise of the fourth powers of being arriving in a day. Stopping, accepting, und schlafenzeit.

a flattened face and unfished forms

2007-01-20T15:09:00.000-08:00

pikk a tjurz! good, bad, and ugly!

draw rings

2007-01-06T22:56:00.000-08:00

here's some fully lit, rendered 3d images from life drawing night this week. i've contemplated posting some online for over a year now. the irony is that i'm choosing a time of complete sloppiness, intentional mistakery, and experimentation. but it's fun. laugh, cry, moan, and be awed.

or trump your mother's purple mink jacket and collide into the sphere of your noggin.

The Dwej

2006-12-26T15:43:00.000-08:00

Dude. We live in the Dwej. D.W.E.J. Dovercourt-Wallace Emerson-Junction.

http://www.toronto.ca/demographics/cns_profiles/cns93.htm

bag balm

2006-12-25T19:11:00.000-08:00

Bag Balm!

For bunches, caked bags, cuts, sore teats, chapping, and inflammation!

Strikes into the milk glands allaying irritation, relieving congestion and softening the tissues. IT heals the skin troubles and makes the teats soft and pliable. A few applications relieve the worst cases. Bag Balm is soothing, healing, and penetrating.

For sore teats and hard milkers, apply the balm one hour before the night milking and one immediately after the morning milking. For bunches in the bag, first use warm water with a cloth and when dry apply the balm with fingers and rub well with the palm of the hand for 15 or 20 minutes. This should be done night and morning.

For veterinary use only.

Departing Dark Sides of Sleeplessness

2006-10-15T13:52:00.000-07:00

Recounting from an email:

"An email floated out at work this morning that two tickets to the sold out Roger Waters (from Pink Floyd) show were available from someone's friend who couldn't make it. In my morning delirium that hadn't yet recovered from Sunday night's lack of sleep and last night's impromptu-movie-induced lack of sleep, it didn't even register mentally with me. Delete.

An hour later BW walks into my office and asks if I want to go. Sure I said, sufficiently motivated in that a show like this might never happen again, and despite the price, so he arranges to buy the tickets, which the prior owner made a trip in to work to drop off. Says a lot for the usefulness of in-person conversation over email.

Left work a little early and skipped dinner to drive down to Mountain View. No opening band. Seats were center of the second section back, not bad for last minute.

First set of the show was an assortment of Pink Floyd songs and Roger's solo stuff. Lots of fun graphics and fire and video and a giant inflatable pig with the words "impeach bush" spray-painted on its butt and some other assorted stuff. A particularly cool presentation for this anti-war song "Leaving Beirut," the whole backing video was presented as a graphic novel with drawings telling the story that the song is about.

Fifteen minute break. Trader Joe's new kind of granola bar is too damn sweet. Not buying those again.

Second set of the show was The Dark Side of The Moon from beginning to end. 'nuff said. I'm not the world's biggest Pink Floyd fan, but it's incredible music to hear live. Especially for being 33 years old.

Encore was three The Wall songs, including Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2 and closing with Comfortably Numb."

Coupled with an inpromptu birthday trip for CH followed by a seeing of Martin Scorsese's The Departed (which was excellent) and two late nights of movie making, Friday night reached a point of tiredness that threatens your walls of reality. The perfect time to see Michel Gondy's "The Science of Sleep!" Walls of reality beaten shattered and turned inside out.

NP: "Death of a President D.I.Y." Atari Teenage Riot, "Little Lies" Fleetwood Mac, MOSH "Eminem"

Images

2006-09-12T23:45:00.001-07:00

The image collection groweth:

http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/~patrick/quinine/im

Burning Cord

2006-09-12T23:45:00.000-07:00

Tied up in your Maya frustrations?

Cords might make your minute!

But alas, they burn....

http://web.mac.com/jflaszlo/iWeb/culture101/themanmaybeburningblog/6051166E-2E24-41C5-9015-307FDF09CCAB.html

New Order Joe

2006-08-30T23:50:00.000-07:00

"Hey Joe, what'cha doing?"

http://web.mac.com/jflaszlo/iWeb/culture101/Poi-fection.html

2006-08-16T16:41:00.000-07:00

Hum Hey Hum Hey Hum Hey Hum Hey
Hum Hey Hum Hey hum Hey Hum Hey

Innocuous

2006-07-17T10:36:00.000-07:00

Innocuous:

This is what you are.

Everyone else knows you're lying.

laceration

2006-05-24T11:21:00.000-07:00

The First Peep Death: Laceration

The first in a series of five short films that I found. They were apparently produced under extremely severe budget constraints and with complete software overkill. Someone has it out for these poor purple concoctions of chemical schploodge.

YouTube

Small mov

Big mov

snow coffee snow

2006-03-03T15:04:00.000-08:00

snow snow snow snow snow snow snow snow snow snow snow snow snow snow snow snow snow snow coffee snow snow snow snow snow.

not enough art

2006-02-02T03:38:00.000-08:00

i'm beginning to think that art, by nature, is self destructive.

you create and create and find yourself getting somewhere only to find that somewhere has gone somewhere else. hopefully we recognize this. i think we do far too rarely. how do we tell?

excellent question and i have no idea what the answer is, only pseudo profound statements claiming nonsense ideas to fulfill some ambition of creating an interesting blog post. so as s.k. said of the trip up the tower, stop now, or be lead where you want not to be lead.

creation leads to pseudo-sentience. the creation becomes artifically self important in our minds and only by destroying it time and again do we find what it wants to be. at some point, touch by nature [1] kills more than it creates.

we become what we create. is this good or bad? i don't know. i think, for the self, it is a healthy form of growth. i think, for the created, it damages. it moves from being what it is to being what we are and that divide breaks down and the created becomes the murk in between.

perhaps creation should be done both ways. creation with self projection to find ouselves so that we can move on to creation without to create what wants to be created.

creation of what wants to be with rejection of self to destroy preconcetions and cyclic incestuous self dilluding manifestations of selfish self. to find where we ought to be and not where we are.

lo! hahr! and ak-analleka!

how do we fix it? step back once in a while and destroy it and bring it down to nothing to find where it has gone while we were high on where it was.

alle ist die scheisse.

np: "drowning man," u2

[1] heisenberg. i had to put an academic style citation for sake of absurdity. go drink some nitro glicerine.

guns and safety devices

2006-01-07T10:04:00.000-08:00

i was at an ohio wal*mart with my brother while home for christmas and such. he needed to buy boating flares, saftey alert beacons that shoot off sparks to warn people you're in trouble and to call for help. he had to show his id and have the salesperson get them out from behind lock and key behind the counter.

turning around to leave, they had various kinds of gun ammo sitting on the shelves where anyone taller than 3 1/2 feet could probably reach.

um????

nature

2005-12-13T23:34:00.000-08:00

how arrogant do we have to be to pretend humans are the only part of the world? and to underestimate ourselves through intentional ignorance?

lost

2005-12-10T17:06:00.000-08:00

where am i today? sometimes you know you're in regression--needed regression, for a few days. it's sort of the mental equivalent of sleep. intense creative energy comes and goes and in between you take in the energy of others' creativity. i spent the afternoon finding new and old music that i have never owned to turn sideways what i hear to change (in a small but significant way) what is around me to find somewhere new to start. and i watched two great films i once dismissed.

ironically, this last spurt of creativity on my part will come, at best, to very little. it might bring something from its two-year existence on a hard drive (actually 4) to the consciousness of an obscure corner of an obscure corner of graphicsfolk (already an obscure corner in itself). is it great? no. it's limited by what it is. but i don't see it going any further. which i can't say about much i've made.

sony

2005-11-29T10:38:00.000-08:00

i bought a cd yesterday. i double checked to see which record company had produced it. i did this last week too. i guess some matter of trust has disappeared, regardless of who claims what.

the bear would be extremely disappointed.

np: bjork, "bath", _drawing restraint 9_

romulans

2005-11-25T23:58:00.000-08:00

apparently, if you live in toronto and actually watch tv, i can be seen in a commercial for _star trek nemesis_, airing sunday on citytv. i'm pretending to wait to buy coffee along with another dgp grad student, a romulan, some starfleet woman, and a couple other random folken.

in reality i had already bought the coffee. it's sitting on the counter just out of view. i was discussing the film _chicken little_ with the other grad student while they videotaped.

np: elephant talk, tony levin band.

you own "march of the pigs." we recommend blondie.

2005-11-23T22:16:00.000-08:00

more itunes curiosities:
if you say "i own it" to the offspring, the recommendation list quickly seems to assume all you listen to is punk.
if you own one obscure nin single, they recommend every other obscure nin single.

np: peter gabriel "diy" (from _plays live_)

browser title bars

2005-10-31T09:37:00.000-08:00

attention browser-designing folk...

so this address bar thingee...it's broken! for some inexplicable reason, i still like to type out the full name of websites i want to visit. i use bookmarks as reminders of things to look at later, if i'm sufficiently bored (aka never), rather than as a list of commonly visited places. it's sort of a filter. if i can't remember the adddress, i probably don't care.

so why is it that whenever i start typing a website address for a site that i only explicitly visit once in a great while (e.g. "www.goo )" it wants to autocomplete it with something like "http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=address+bars+are+broken&btnG=Google+Search?" maybe because i've accessed the website many times via the search box and so on. at any rate, it's fairly difficult for me to get to a site's front page. at least difficult enough to trigger my "computers are so $@%@#ing stupid" response. granted, it's only pressesing the delete key, but still...

ok, enough of that ranting for now.

now

2005-10-13T21:10:00.000-07:00

it's never too early to get started on your midlife crisis.

beside contentment

2005-07-16T00:02:00.000-07:00

on this bright and sunny day in fashionable e-town, i find me myself and i awake and away from rest inside, considering the whys and whats of where we are.

some pieces of our lives fit mesh and mend well into who we are.

some tear scream break and dismantle every last shard of our own being, leaving us with but a thought. me myself and i, what is this?

why what when and how? where is it going? how is it?