Looks as though my method of figuring out which Congressmen are gay is correct. Just look to see who is working the hardest to restrict gay rights. For example, Senator Larry Craig. He pleaded guilty to basically trying to solicit sex in a men’s bathroom. He’s now claiming that he wasn’t guilty and he plead guilty to get people off his back.

Sorry buddy, but that’s pretty weak and it’s hardly a good defense. After all, if that’s true then you are admitting to perjury and that, in and of itself, is enough to end your career. That WAS the charge brought against President Bill Clinton in the 1990s.

Alberto Gonzalez has resigned as Attorney General. The guy who Bush said wasn’t going anywhere is leaving! I haven’t been able to to catch the news at all today as I was in training, but I saw a little headline on Tv in the lunchroom! I am so curious to find out what caused this to occur. I am even more curious about what he’s sitting on. What did he do that was worth pushing him out. Even more strangely, people seem to be abandoning ship like rats. You know that old saying, (paraphrasing) “you know the ship’s going down when the rats flee”.

Sales have been low however. Read about it in this fine newspaper.

I’m glad the weekend is fast upon us…..

WTF is this world coming to? From the digg “horny nerd” files, comes this website: http://www.moanmyip.com/.

Interesting things I learned on this site are how web servers and websites see me. Here’s what it says it thinks it knows about me:

YOUR OPERATING SYSTEM AND BROWSER Linux / Safari YOUR USER AGENT INFORMATION Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.5; Linux) KHTML/3.5.7 (like Gecko) YOU CAME HERE FROM http://digg.com/security

I think it’s interesting that it reports as Linux Safari when it clearly knows, from the next line down that ti’s Konqueror. I know that Konqueror and Safari share KHTML/Webkit for the backend, but I think ti’s strange that it shows up as Safari in one field and Konqueror in the next.

This Penny Arcade comic sums it up perfectly.

In the world of computer generated cartoons and images, we have a very awesome trick we can do which cannot be done in real life. We can have unlimited Depth of Field. If you aren’t a photographer or involved in filming, you probably have no idea what that means. Well, in real life lenses cannot have everything in perfect focus from the front of the scene to the back. This is controlled by the f-stop. The bigger the f-stop, the more everything is in focus from front to back, the bigger the depth of field. Although, the f-stop is expressed as a fraction, so technically it is smaller numbers that are in higher focus. For example, f/2.8 will have your main character in focus and the rest of the background blurry. This is very useful in photography to force the viewer to focus primarily on your subject while having the background just provide some color. For a landscape image, a photographer may use f/11 to make sure that a large portion of the image is in focus.

What makes mytoons.com so awesome is the fact that they truly do care about their users. Due to what I wrote about my experiences with my “Shrodinger’s Cat” video on their site, I’ve had their lead web support guy email me and we’re actively working on the problem right now. That and getting the comment on my blog from the President is pretty sweet. I’m very happy with this experience as it shows they truly care and are truly working towards having the best animation site on the net. It’s like being in involved in an open source project where they accept your constructive criticism as input towards improving the product instead of something that needs to be swept under the rug.

Here I spoke about how a problem had caused Nick’s hair to look blue. I was using some transparency effects on the hair to let it fade away like real hair. (I was following the hair tutorial in “Introducing Character Animation with Blender”) However, I am using ray tracing for transparency to have good looking transparency in glass and other things. So I also have to use it for the characters.

On my system, running Fedora 7 and Compiz causes the computer to refuse to exit Gnome. I always have to go into a terminal and shut the computer down that way and it’s extremely annoying. So I’ve decided to run KDE as my default desktop instead of Gnome. We’ll see if I can rekindle the fire I used to have for KDE or if it will annoy me enough to drive me back to Gnome.