Move your clocks ahead one hour! Congress decided that two weeks earlier would save us tons of oil - so it’s today, not in two weeks. Both my Windows XP SP2 and GNU/Linux Fedora Core 6 automatically updated on time, so your computers should be fine as long as they’ve gotten updates since 2005. (I think that’s when Congress did it)

Enjoy - don’t be late today!

My flickr photos rated by # of views - #20, #40, etc….

The majority of my photos appear to be clustered together in the 100-200 view range because you will notice the decrease in the difference across twenty rankings. In other words #20 - #40 is a roughly 150 view difference while #40 to #60 is roughly a 50 view difference.

#20 - 444 Views #40 - 274 Views #60 - 223 Views #80 - 189 Views #100 - 175 Views #120 - 165 Views #140 - 156 Views #160 - 148 Views #180 - 141 Views #200 - 133 Views

Recently, someone created Conservipedia, saying that Wikipedia has a liberal bias. Its proof? Idiotic things like the fact that some of the articles are spelled in the Queen’s English (honour, colour) despite most users being American. This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.

Another proof it gives is not idiotic, just misguided - Wikipedia, like a majority of the world, lends credence to the Theory of Evolution. Frankly, as a Christian, I’m sick and tired of this whole Creationism movement. All it succeeds in doing is making Christians look like conniving morons. We can’t get schools to teach in the Christian God creating things, so we created “Creationism” that teachs that some Diety created the world and everything. I think people would be less vitriolic towards the whole thing if it just went outright and called it for what it is - the Christian God.

Just got a book today that I ordered from Amazon.com - “Inspired 3D Short Film Production”. As I watched the DVD of shorts that came with the book and thought of the dozens of ideas swirling around in my head, I came to terms with the reality of computer animation - the animation step itself, it pretty trivial with respect to the rest of the process. In other words, in a good animation package like Blender, the animation is actually the relatively easy part. The hardest part is making the objects, giving them textures/colors, and rigging them up with bones so they can be animated. After that, animation is relatively easy. Relatively easy because, it’s still pretty hard to create convincing animation. However, making a good model in the first place is tough. It takes the Blender character animation book until page 82 to finish up a character of moderate difficulty. Of course, the process gets fast with time. I was able to model the budgie a lot faster than I was able to model my penguin and Raul Domingo. However, it still takes a fair amount of time to model a reasonably nice character.

Since about my Senior Year at Cornell I’ve been shooting in RAW. When I got Photoshop CS 2 I was so happy with all the new features they added to make the workflow so efficient. It really eliminates the “raw is more work” complain that most people have. Recently, as I was reading a book on raw workflows, I realized that, ever since getting CS2, I’ve still been doing things horribly inefficiently!