Well, I’m filling up my space time with programming and animation.  Here’s what I’m currently up to with animation.  First of all, there’s " Sugar" . I have the script and most of the props complete for the animation.  I got a little frustrated when I was working on Nick’s armature and started working on programming and some other projects.  I intend to get back to Sugar very soon now and finish it up by the end of the year.

Recently, a coworker of mine showed me the website Hello Kitty Hell.  This is a website created by someone who’s wife sells Hello Kitty items.  If there is a young girl or, occasionally, woman in your life who is into the Hello Kitty Phenomenon, you doubtless know how much crap there is that can be branded with Hello Kitty and her various companions.  Well, you probably haven’t seen many of THESE products.  These are, as far as I know, REAL Hello Kitty items and all of them were featured on the Hello Kitty Hell website.

As you’ve no doubt heard, the US will be discontinuing Analog TV transmission in February 2009. They’ve actually already auctioned off the analog spectrum (and I’m not too happy about who ended up buying it, but that’s for another post). So, if you have cable TV you don’t need to worry about this and if you have satellite TV and you get local channels via satellite, you also don’t need to worry. If you currently get the nice, free, over the air (OTA) channels, then you need to worry - unless you have a new HDTV. But, for some reason, I don’t see the HDTV crowd overlapping with the OTA crowd. If you bought an HDTV, I assume it was to watch your cable or satellite provider’s HD sports package or HD HBO or HD Discovery Channel (which is beautiful, by the way). So you probably need a converter box.

The plot twist at the end is awesome, but so is the programmer’s debate going on, especially since we were talking about this at work this week. Another great xkcd from Randall Monroe:

I found a Wordpress theme that I mostly like called Hal 5.0.  I think the top image is a little over the top, but the overall theme is ok.  I edited the font size up from the default - the font designer must have amazing eyesight.  I also added in tag listings into the blog posts.  Overall, I’m much happier with this look than with the previous one.  I still think that, someday, I’ll make my own theme so I can be completely happy with it instead of finding one that’s good enough on the Wordpress site.

This theme is really annoying me, mostly because it’s a fixed width theme.  That means that the theme doesn’t expand if you expand your Window or have a wide screen monitor.  Mostly, it means annoying things like this blog post title.  As you can see, it cuts into the metadata such as the date/time.  Also this theme doesn’t support tags.  So you may see some strangeness as I change themes.  I couldn’t find any that I truly wanted and, in the end, I think I’m just going to end up making my own theme.

Time to empty out my quotes from my AIM profile again, here are the latest:

“My vagina is always better than a white girl’s” - Mai

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Guest on Colbert Report: “Yes, you learned very well in Sunday School.” Colbert: “I teach Sunday School Mother F-cker!”

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“[Operating System] Open Solaris is good for diversity” “What? That’s like saying that schools should make sure they have enough Ginger Kids to keep diverse” -LugRadio

And it is hilarious!  So Dan finally got around to updating the blog I created for him on my server.  He gave it a pretty witty name “I Bring Nothing To The Table” which is a great pun on our last name.  (Although I recently found out he saw it on a T-shirt, so, while still cool, is not worth as many cool points as before)  If you read nothing else on his blog, you MUST read this post in which he gives his British friend some tips on Americanisms.  It is one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard come out of Daniel’s head.  So go and check it out and laugh out loud…

I’ve been very happy until now with drqueue. Developed by Jorge Daza, it’s a very nice render farm management software with a nice GUI. It worked relatively well for me for “Jose’s Dinner” and " Schrodinger’s Cat". However, there were two big kinks in using drqueue. First of all, Windows support was so sketchy it might as well be non-existent. So my most powerful computer was left out of the render-pool. Second, with the latest iteration, it no longer works on BSD computers. I tried for a few nights to make it work, but to no avail. So I turned to FarmerJoe.

As you know, unless you’ve been living under a rock, the US Government (USG) wants to give us all rebate checks to spur the economy along.  All you have to do is file your taxes and you’ll get up to $600 if you’re single or $1200 if you’re married.  What hasn’t really been publicized in the mainstream media, however, is the drastic measures the USG is willing to go to make sure you spend your rebate and to help the economy.