the things we think but do not say

It’s only a few weeks away now, but I’m turning 30 and I’m really not sure how I feel about the whole thing. Something about being at a certain place in your life at this time, or something about doing meaningful work as a grown up… To be fair, I’m pretty happy with almost everything about my life, where I am, the things I’m working on and such. But to someone who was the perennial kid, being 30 is so unavoidably, adult.

I grew up being the youngest child of four and it’s a place I’m still pretty comfortable being in. That inevitably meant that I grew up surrounded by a lot of adults, with me being the precocious youngster. I just can’t get away with that anymore! Here I am, this lumbering man who reads non-fiction self-help books, who brings ear plugs with him to drum and bass shows. I don’t even have time to play video games properly now.

Getting into a good new juicy video game these days is like trying to pick up skateboarding after you’ve passed sixteen: impossible. I don’t have all that time I used to have. I miss losing hour after hour shooting mutants in the face. If I’m not going out for dinner with other couples or working on projects after hours, I’m then just trying to find time for a nap.

I’m a fully functioning grown up now…

Damn my adulthood.

Can a movie assume it’s audience has too much intelligence?

I saw Syriana at Logan theatre here in Chicago. The seats were super cheap at $3 each. I watched it with a mate that had just seen it three days prior and I think he said, “Man, there’s so many things that make more sense now.”

I like crappy Summer blockbusters as much as any movie fanboy might, but I do like being treated like an adult and not have everything spelt out for me. But Syriana seemed to be so full of implication, inferrence and plot hinting snippets that I spent entire thirty minute blocks thinking to myself, “I have absolutely no idea what is going on.”

Is it obvious that someone is speaking Farsi and not Arabic? I mean come on, throw me a freaking bone here fellas!

The movies tells the story of the complications around oil trade in the middle east but is about as complicated as it really is. In real life. Part of the reason I go to the movies to get away from all the complications of real life. Argh!

I think if my mate saw it once more, he’ll get all the nuances and he can tell me what I missed. Till then, read the reviews here.

I do a fair bit of shopping over the internet and there’s often a part in the check out process near the end that asks, “do you have a promotional code for your purchases?”

I usually just ignored this bit and carried on entering in my Visa number.

But then one day I noticed that if you do a search for “promotional code” and the name of the internet retailer, you’ll often be able to find one. I’ve saved 20-80% from all sorts of things from my getting christmas presents to domain name registration and even when finding out my credit score.

There’s hundreds of sites that just deal in coupons and codes and offers. In fact, I often got to Lifehacker.com for all sorts of tips like this. It’s a great place for ‘getting things done’.

I’m so close now. I can almost taste it.

I’ve had a long time pipe dream to design some t shirts, make a few and then one day see someone out on the street wearing it. That would be super cool.

So after years of talking about it and being sick to death of my own crapness, I’ve finally got some head way with the dream. And as anyone who works in a creative field each day, it’s surprisingly hard to find time to work on your own projects outside of the work day.

My process so far:
Get the idea out of my head and make a napkin sketch.
Do nothing with it for about a year.
Talk it over with friends and get excited.
Do nothing again for about a year.
Make a prototype print with a test screen and an old GAP t shirt.
Do nothing again but wear my own t shirt for about two more years.
Get sick of wearing my own idea.
Take my napkin sketch and talk it over with some friends, a lot.
Take the sketch into Illustrator and draw a rough mock up of the shirts.
Write the story behind the idea.
Get excited.
Discuss the logic and the thinking behind the designs and check that it’s not a bunch of bollocks.
Talk things over with a few internet t shirt makers and get their advice on how they did it.
Talk at length about whether I should make the screens and print the t shirts myself, or find a printer to do it.
Realise that I don’t want to print the shirts myself per se, but want to design the shirts and then have someone else print them.
Find a local screen printer.
Make final drawings for printer.
Order my first twelve shirts from printer.
See my shirts for real and get super excited.
Think about making a web site myself to promote the t shirts, then soon realise that I’d be rubbish at it.
Find a designer who can create the website and get behind the thinking.

I think that I’ve found that designer and I think that things are going to work out great.

Man, it’s so close now…

Watch this space.

I use MS Outlook to take care of almost everything related to schedules, events, correspondence etc, but I can’t let anyone else see what’s up, unless they work with me. And ss my life gets more complex I’m starting to need a shared calendar for my life outside of work. Primarily a calendar to share with my girlfriend.

“Is dinner with the Berman’s tonight or tomorrow, dear?” And “Can you tell me when do you leave for Newark again?” comes up a lot.

My girlfriend is much more organised than I and the thought of using a fridge-centric calendar is just too “suburban-mini-van” for me. The problem is that I don’t spend most of my day when I’m organising my life near the fridge.

So, where to find a simple, web accessbile, sharable calendar? Well, I think I found one. (In fact there’s at least a few other apps like this.) 30 boxes is a dead simple idea. Display the next 30 days with a very simple graphic treatment and allow people that you choose to view your schedule. Then invite someone (your girlfriend for instance) to 30 boxes and have them add things to their calendar. Right now, we’ve got it so my items overlay on her calendar, and her items overlay on my calendar. And we can makes edits whenever we’re connected. Perfect.

It’s still in beta (like everything else. GMail is still in beta you know) and there’s a few things I’d like to have added: import my contacts from Outlook, import my events from Outlook, import my notes from Outlook, etc etc.

There’s one really nice touch inbuilt into 30 boxes which makes me feel that it’s extremely hip to the connected lives we live thesedays. You can add detail to each of your contacts so that whenever they make a new post on their blog, or post images on Flickr, they show up as roll over text on those days on my calendar. This is just a clever way to leverage some of the masses of data out there floating around.

Give it a try.

I’ve been in Wilmington, Delaware this week working on another health care project. The client is great, the work is great and I even got to wear scrubs and that poufy hair net thing.

I’ve been to this part of the county twice before and I went back this time assuming that there’s basically bugger all to do or see here. I was right and wrong at the same time. It turns out the best part of Delaware is that it’s only 35 mins away from Philadelphia. Go Phillies!

Did I ever tell you about the time I got broken into? It happened just around Christmas 2004 and at the time I was living in a lovely part of Chicago and only a few months into my lease with a new room mate. My previous roomy is a good mate of mine and he moved out to live with his girlfriend. My new room mate I discovered on craigslist. That right there might be a red flag in some people’s books, but I really needed a room mate to help with the rent. She also had two cats. No biggie I said.

On first glance, she is a perfectly normal woman. Sensible and highly educated. On first meeting, you’d never think that she would become a complete liability or someone that would reset your idea of an idiot at all.

My room mate plans on going on vacation near the holidays and being considerate and thinking of me, she arranges for someone to come and feed the cats and change their litterbox. How thoughtful. Well, on the day that she’s ready to leave she realises that she hasn’t actually handed the keys over to her friend the cat sitter yet. So rather than wake me up and make me pass on the keys (still thinking of me!) she decides to mail them.

In an envelope.

With a return address.

And a note explaining that she’ll be out of town returning in a week.

Brilliant.

So of course, I don’t know that any of this happened until the next evening when I walk in with my girlfriend and find the whole apartment ripped apart. It took me a minute to even register that I’d been broken into. I then call my room mate to let her know what happened and see if she’s lost anything. And it’s then that I hear about the ingenius plan of mailing the keys. I have to explain that keys can and will get intercepted in the mail if you just put them in an envelope and hope for the best.

But I’ve been saving the best bit till last.

On the night in question, in middle of the kitchen floor amongst the tossed pots and pans, was a huge pile of cat food, literally spilling over from the bowl.

Since the thieves had all the relevant information they needed to rob me blind, namely that the house would be empty, they also knew that they cats would not be fed for a week, since they were in possession of the keys that would have let the cat sitter in.

Those thoughtful sons of bitches.

The cats would have been the innocent victims in all this.

About one in ten hip hop concerts are truly great and thankfully last nights show with Dilated Peoples, Little Brother and Defari, was one of them. The last show I saw was when MF Doom played in Chicago and while I love the Metal Fingered one as much as the next fanboy, the show I saw epitomised all that I hate about hip hop concerts; everyone and his grandmother on stage for 3 hours and the headliner act is no where to be seen.
After that experience, I was just about sworn off seeing live hip hop again.

That is until last night. Everything was on time, the sound system was loud and clear and the acts were so alive.

Little Brother, featuring Big Pooh and Phonte but missing their producer 9th Wonder, opened and performed a very compelling 45 minute set with cuts from their new album, The Minstrel Show as well as a couple of tracks from their debut LP, The Listening. The highlight was seeing ‘Slow it Down’ performed tounge in cheek as an old soul act with syncronised moves and all.

But all this was just a teaser for the main act, Dilated People. While I’ve listened to their first LP, The Platform, to death, I’ve only casually checked the next three albums, including their latest, 20/20. While the lyrics are definitely more braggadocio than thought provoking, Dilated do know how to put on a show; you would have had to been on Nyquil to not rock your head to it. MCs Evidence and Iriscience were on top form, rapping their little hearts out for their rabid fans and to us in the front rows. At one point they reminded the audience that the back bone of hip hop is the DJ. And so they should since Dilated People’s ace in the hole is DJ Babu from the World Famous Beat Junkies. While only given a few minutes of solo scratching, he showed everyone why he’s a multiple ITF and DMC world champion. (I just noticed on his bio, that he also produced the ‘Super Duper Duck Breaks’ vinyl on Stones Throw.)

For and hour and a half, Dilated dropped all manner of bangers from ‘Back Again’, ‘You can’t hide you can’t run’, ‘Worst comes to worst’, ‘No retreat’, and ‘This way’. If there was a formula to running a good show its have a crowd that knows all your lyrics back to front and only play tracks that everyone can shout along with. Simple. For me, the high point was hearing my favourite Dilated track of all time, ‘Work the angles’ which produced one of those ‘this is why I still love hip hop’ feelings. Damn it good to jump in time with a couple hundred other fans.

This week has been nuts. Without getting too geeky, I’ve been rendering my face off for the last two weeks straight and I finally see the end in sight.

But for those that are technically interested, I’m running 3d Studio MAX 7 with Brazil 1.2.55 as my rendering engine. Both work really well together and Brazil is very nicely integrated within MAX. Brazil has an amazingly fast Global Illumination solution and some higly optimized material pipelines. I’m also using Rhino3d to mesh my models into polygons as I’m thankfully getting fully built STEP models from Solidworks. Rhino is an excellent modelling package but I’m mainly just using it as a mesher. I managed to upgrade my displays from a pair of 20″ Dell UltraSharp 2001FP to one bad ass 24″ wide screen Dell - UltraSharp 2405FPW. It’s freaking sweet.

The scenes I’m rendering aren’t particulary complicated in terms of geometry (a typical scene has around 200k polys) but it’s been the materials that have been making me stay until 10pm every night. Almost everything is transparent or even worse, partially transparent in places and fully opaque in others. And of course, everything has to look real pretty. There’s no animations here thank god, just a huge number of really high resolution images output at 3000x2250 pixels.

I’m not at liberty to say what project I’m working on, but I can say that if I have to render another slightly transparent vessel holding coloured liquids again, I’ll eat my optical mouse.

The best part of the experience so far has been the extensive use of a remote rendering service I know of down in Alabama. Who would have thought that in the heart of the south in a super advanced remote render farm housing over 700 processors or about 3.3THz (yup thats Terahertz) for anyone to jump on and use. It’s basically a huge warehouse full of hundreds of PCs and tons of air conditioning. Amazingly enough I can control all this power through a very simple web interface, effectively multiplying my ability to produce rendering many times over. A quick shout out to the boys at Respower, “What up Early!”.

And what’s the best soundtrack for global illumination? Public Enemy, natch.