Carpe PM

Link of the Day The Web Cam Border Patrol

A lightscribe DVD burner arrived in the mail yesterday. I got it installed in a few minutes, but now I need to test the sucker out. I may hop over to best buy tonight to get some lightscribe blanks. In any case, it’ll be sweet to make DVDs of my short film that I’m working on this summer.

Our redesign codebase is going to be a three tiered object oriented application. I’m hoping that we can make it small and easy to manage. One thing that sucks is waiting for another person with admin rights to show up and configure this machine to work right. So, in the mean time I’m getting paid to merely write javascript. Oh well. It’ll be cool when the site is finished. I just hate how slow everyone is on this project. I made an entire flash web site by myself here in about three weeks, and we can’t get anywhere with this.

Link of the Day Multi-input touchscreens

I remember coming across that link during the winter. It would be sweet to be able to do all the stuff seen in that demo video. Be sure to check out the demo reel because it is the most impressive part of that site. Well, it looks like the “video guide” web site for the badgers is on its way to being approved and online soon. It’ll require flash 8. So, linux machines won’t be supported. Oh well, there’s plenty of windows and mac boxes around campus to make it easy to access the site. Another piece of good news is that we finally are on the way to convincing the bosses into allowing us to use a mod rewrite for IIS. The code base for the redesign can be much more organized as a result of having these “virtual” urls.

My aunts and uncles chipped in to buy my grandparents a pair of tower speakers. The ones they currently have are almost completely blown. I just got them in the mail to take up to door county for my grandfathers birthday. I took them out and tested them on our home theater. They sound absolutely incredible, and they’re about 40″ tall. The big bonus is that they only cost around 200 dollars for the pair.

Link of the Day MIT Party Dorm Room

It’s amazing what some people do to get a party going. I noticed this link today on Slashdot. I just saw X-men 3 and it’s merely okay. I give a C- for the plot and an A for computer graphics work. They killed three of my favorite characters from the series: Cyclops, Jean Grey, and Xavier. Then, the creators hint at another sequel? Oh well. No need to see any more X-men movies. I also saw Over the Hedge last week, and I recommend that to anyone who wants to see one of the best Dreamworks animations ever should go see it. It’s an amazing piece of work. The excessive use of depth of field is my most favorite part of the film.

I finished my flash project at work last week. We just have to go through a bit of the usual bureaucracy and we’ll have the site up on the web officially. I’ll be working with AJAX starting tomorrow. I’m building a news interface for the main web site’s redesign. I hope to have it mostly complete by the end of this week.

Link of the Day White House Correspondence Dinner Video

A huge weight is off my shoulders today. That’s right. I had my last final for the semester this morning. Now, I’m back to work on the recruiting site on Monday. So, I should have most of the programming for that done by the end of this coming week, leaving content as the remaining problem for the page.

As for the NSA phone analysis, I’ve got nothing to hide or worry about. Therefore, I see no problem with what they’re doing. The NSA doesn’t work for the republican party and certainly is not in a big brother conspiracy. I was talking with a democrat, and they were worried that, for example, the phone call database could be used to find out who donated to the democratic party. After thinking that over, I couldn’t care less if that kind of analysis was occuring.

As for the priviledged internet service legislation, deemed by phone companies and ISPS, I truly care about this. For example, I don’t want an ISP deciding not to allow my own content be available through their network. The internet is about freedom of information, and I see this as discrimination towards small business that is a daily normality on the net. Information is not to be governed. That smells of communism.

There you have it, my spur of the moment viewpoints on two similar subjects. If anyone’s interested, I could formulate some more and write a better argument. But hey, finals are over and I’m going on vacation for he weekend.

Link of the Day 3d web sites?
I have just two more finals left this week. The first two went very well, and I feel like I’m going to hit some good grades this semester. I noticed that Austen made some predictions on his blog. So, I’ll make some of my own for the coming year.

HD DVD/Bluray:

HD DVD and Bluray will both inherently fail. They are the beta tape format of today. DVD has just solidified as a format and replaced VHS. People don’t want to buy a new TV and a new player so they can view crisp 1080 HD. I believe that the market would convert if the HD format was something insane, such as 4000 pixel width. That would be detailed enough for me to justify purchasing into the format.

Nintendo Wii:

The nintendo Wii will most likely win the new console battle. The company already has a number of game titles ready for the console, and playstation 3 is another xbox 360 expensive mess when it comes to pricing. I really don’t care what happens in the console arena at the moment, because it doesn’t impact a student’s life.

Wolfgang Peterson:

Finally, I predict that the director Wolfgang Peterson will continue to make movies that lack soul and emotion. His latest film is called Poseiden, a remake that is not even worth mentioning. There is no character development, and a disaster movie needs exposition for the audience to care about what is happening. The one thing I dread the most is the plan for Wolfgang Peterson to direct Ender’s Game, one of my most favorite science fiction novels. Wolfgang did a good job with Das Boot in his early years, but he is making worthless stuff such as Troy now. If only I could get Orson Scott Card’s attention. In other words, I wish I could direct the film. Getting kids to act old would be a ton of fun and a lot of hard work. I hope Wolfgang retires before he ruins science fiction films.

Link of the Day Beautiful Aerial Photo Blog

I’ve spent most of my day studying for a final exam. I still have one more week before the finals commence. I made a sweet test of motion graphics for the video on the recruiting site at work, on Friday. The test site is up, but I won’t post a link until it is finished. It’ll be much more nice when ready for the general public. The athletic department is in the process of buying domain names for each sport. So far, we hit one bump in the road for this, but we can hopefully get all the domains we need soon enough.

These aerial photos are incredible. There are some wonderful locations to shoot film. I especially love the shots from Ireland. I finally got around to fixing the issues with PowerDVD and ObjectDock on the windows desktop here. So, Windows is a bunch of eye candy atm. I also got around to installing the rss reader I use at work. I’m counting the days until the last final is over with. After finals are over, I’ll probably pull an insane work week so I can get the majority of the recruiting site done before June comes. We are also redesigning the ugly uwbadgers.com to actually be a nice web site. The t-shirts I made at zazzle are still in very good shape. I’ll throw them in the wash this week some time and see what happens. Finally, I have plans to make some short films this summer.

Link of the Day Project Offset

The recruiting web site is coming together at work. It’s still not ready for the football coaches yet because I have to put together two videos and make three pages to give the coaches an idea of what we are doing with the site. I hope I can build it so it will be viewable from even a DSL modem, but flash gets pretty intensive in bandwidth needs when making something that’s meant to be media based. I still have some problems caused by actionscript’s poor language design. Hopefully I can iron out the issues before calling those sections of the project complete.

Project Offset is an incredible game engine that sets a new standard in 3d lighting. It must just be that computers have gotten fast enough to render beautiful lighting in real time. Check out the videos that they put up. The dragon doesn’t look as good as the older demos they made, but I bet they’ll put something incredible together when all is said and done.

Link of the Day Meet the Robinsons

I ordered three of my t-shirt designs from them, and they turned out absolutely wonderful. They arrived in the mail today. I have two black shirts and one gray shirt. The gray one has stunning colors. The black shirts both use white color, but they aren’t as rich white as I imagined they would be. And, I had to use a sharpie on one of them to separate the pieces of a hand vector I had created for it. Other than the faded white look, the black shirts also came out nice. I give zazzle an 8/10 for the quality of their products. I’ll post some pictures of the shirts, and comment on how they look after a month’s time.

The bumper sticker is still in the mail, but it should be here before the end of the week. I can’t wait for all those crazy people in town honking their horns at me. It should be fun. I just hope it doesn’t take a turn to violence.

Here’s to all those liberals who think Bush is trying to take over government. What a ridiculous belief. I decided to help increase their paranoia. This will be my first bumper sticker to ever go on a car. Luckily, it won’t go on a new one, but one that’s almost dead. And some say that I live in the heart of 20 square miles surrounded by reality. Time to stir things up a little.

Link of the Day Zazzle

Well, I’ve setup an account at Zazzle so I can finally make some t-shirts I’ve been wanting to make for the last few years. My typical username is what you’ll want to type as a subdirectory of the link of the day above. For those in the know, there you go. Otherwise, I can send you the link to the products I’ve put up, if you need it.

I love long weekends or at least weekends that seem long. Easter Sunday was great. The food is always the highlight of the weekend. Ice Age 2 is a decent kid movie. It has some wonderful animation work too! My respect to the guys who worked so hard on that project. It was better than the first Ice Age movie, without a doubt. It’s made about $147 million in the US.