I experienced a tragic racist situation at Wilson Farms today. Below is my letter to Wilson Farms recounting the situation. You can respond in the forum on our site, as well as, send your thoughts to them - here is the contact information.

Phone: 1-800-522-2522
Web:


Snail Mail: Wilson Farms]
6363 Main Street
Williamsville, NY 14221

To Who It May Concern,
Today, I went to Wilson Farms on Elmwood Ave at Auburn to buy a gallon of water as I have almost everyday for about 2 years. I wish I never left the house. Outside the store was a black homeless guy. He apparently was told by the Wilson Farms Manager Ken Kensek (or something close to that) that he could noo wait outside because he was "bad for business." Then the manager dragged him inside by the shoulder in a very "I'm gonna lynch you kind of way." and said he was going to have him arrested for trespassing. Although, I feel this is kind of harsh, that is not even the situation that really offended me as a customer.

At that point, the black homeless man pleaded with Wilson Farm's Ken Kensek? not to be to not be arrested for trespassing outside and then Ken told him, "here's the situation . . if I ever see you again I AM GOING TO CRACK YOUR HEAD OPEN WITH A BASEBALL BAT." Then the black man said, "ok, ok, just don't call the police." Followed by the manager saying, " DO YOU THINK I'M KIDDING, I'M GOING TO BREAK YOUR SKULL." I find this to be disgusting and totally unprofessional.

I was shopping at the moment and ran out to tell my friend who was out of earshot. I came back a couple minutes later, not sure what to do.

I decided to return what I bought in protest of the unfair racist treatment and coproral threats against this man. Ken was not immediately visable to I returned the products to the cashier and loudly stated why.

The people behind me also left their goods. I am going to start an all out boycott until there is some sort of formal reprocussion for Ken.
Lastly, I would like to point out that I am the webmaster of the new a community forum that is just starting this week in order to report on neighboorhood news in the Elmwood Strip Community of Buffalo, NY. I am also a professor at Canisius College, and thus have many venues for spreading this information if you ignore this situation.I expect a formal report as to what reprocussions Ken suffered for his unprofessional and downright illegal behavior in your store.

Sincerely,
Paul Visco

While avoiding homework during a lightning storm, i went and visited Saja in There. It is a really pretty place made up of weird baloon like trees on floating sky islands. My avatar looked kind of sad though. I took a picture for the record. I fyou click on the image it will open another larger image face closeup.

Today I decided to purchase professorV.com in order to put up a bunch of my tutorial work and student examples, etc. Then I found out someone already bought it. I am so mad, really who would have thought that even professorV.com is already taken.

To make it worse, I don't even want anything similar because people will inevitably go to the other professorV.com and think its me. Here is a picture of him. We have nothing in common. His web site sucks. I just want to get mixed up so I am going to cut the idea. You can click on his image to check out his site and see why I feel this way.

It seems like the wirefusion thing is going to work out afterall. I am really quite excited about it. SOme of the models looked really professional. I will display them all here when it is done. In the mean time I decided on my VR project. A VR rendition of Wario Party.

I missed everything today. I had a run in with too much work and never was able to manage a ride to the actual facility. Anyways, I spent the day productively reading and teaching myself all there is to know about the new bodypaint interface in Cinema 4D and wirefusion. Wirefusion is great but in the end I realized that the VRML exporter in Cinema 4D just doesn't cut it. Like no PLA for one. Looks like I'm going to stick to maya or go ahead and write a plugin.
Even crazier still I actually met Mr. Jesse Forrest Fabian in Second Life. Unfortunately, I forget to take a snapshot of the moment. We built , we smoked, we laughed.
This site seems to be going the way I want it to I just need to have more time to add more features and promote it. Winter break will be here soon. I am actually thinking of turning this into my thesis project somehow. Its a tie between this and VR and VR is just to damn elitist for me.

Well after all that I just heard the startup chime and I think it was a postive outcome for the computer surgery.

While in the middle of updating the site and working on some wirefusion stuff for my class, my brother stopped by in need of a hard drive upgrade for his iBook 500 mHz. It came with a 10.0 GB drive but he needs more space for a movie he is working on. I decided to give him my old drive figuring it was a snap to replace. Well, it took about 4 hours so far and the drive looks like - well like this picture



So here we are with his computer completely taken apart.

I spent a lot of time working on the code this weekend. There are lots more features. You can now upload images to our server. The page then gives you the address of the image and the code you would need to display an image in your journal entry. It also gives you a thumbnail and a way to delete the images stored in your directory.

Now you can also stay logged in thanks to cookies when you are updating your journal and you switch to view your journal. There will be many more features in the next month. Hope you enjoy.

I discovered that my tongue is bigger than anyone at my house right now. . . I hope that counts for something!!

For once I am truly disapointed in my students. Not the intro level ones either. Its my advanced class. I am so upset at the lack of effort my advance students give. They are seriously not trying and I am not sure why. Maybe they are overwhelmed by the possibilities of 3D design. However, I think that they are just unorganized. Some of them have projects that are really well thought out and well designed. For example, this one guy modeled an original iron toy train and another made an airplane that is a replica of a biplane - a couple other nice ones too. As for the others, I am especially sick of people coming to class without their homework and expecting that I do it for them or worse yet tryoing to do it in class while I explain something new, they will never get jobs once they graduate.

You may ask why am I writing this. Well, I got this offer for my students to create some 3D web presentations for the Wirefusion site. I think this is a pretty big honor and yet I am kinda of nervous accepting with the kind of crap some people are handing in.