I have wasted my entire Sunday getting the webcam to work. We now have one indoor and one outdoor cam. I will leave them outdoor one on as long as the computer is on and the indoor one to spice it up. SHould have set it up for the party. Oh well, next time I will get a projector and really geek it out as Aaron said. I think it would be fun.

It was such drama to get the files to just be a live feed and not FTPed. I just didn't want to waste my servers bandwidth so I tried to do it locally by serving it off the supercomp.

The problem being that I have windows XP running most of the time and it sucks. So anyways, I was able to get it all to ork with a javascript work around. I guess now everyone will get to live life on elmwood via the cam. At least until the mega icecycles come and freeze the cam solid.

Matthew was saying how we should get a more all weather cam. I just laughed, I don't think they make any electronics that live up to Buffalo winter weathering.

So I guess I should get to some homework befor ethe weekend is up. I heard back from UB about modelig instead of programming for VR and its seems to be a go. I am really excited about it. I love modeling in 3D and I never get to do it anymore now that I spend all my time on these lame web projects.

It is almost time to start adding new features. I am looking for other artists interested in displaying their artwork, poetry, prose, and sound/video projects. I have one more presentation at UB and then the rest of the semester is projects, so hopefully you will see some results.

I am so stressed out. I just found out the the independeent study I requested at the beginning of the semester, and never heard back on, was excepted. I found this out while registrering for next semster. I looked at my schedule and it said I am enrolled in 16 credit hours. Imagine how distressing this is having to complete a semester's ammount of work in a month. I seriously feel like I am going to puke.

Anyways, so I asked at my job to see why the situation with becomming full time is next year and they said there will be a position but that they have to conduct a national search. This is expected but it makes me crazy considereing how I have alterned my life continuously for the possibility of a job that I am techincally highly qualified for.

It also means I have to complete 13 credits plus my thesis in one semester. I gues it sounds possible but I am also teahcing two full courses and an independent study in addition to this.

I think if I did not get the job in the end I would be quite devastated. Not because I couldn't find another job, as I am really knowledgeable and skilled in my field but that I spent a year living on the edge of being human in order to jump through the hoops required for it. I would feel like they stole a year of my life.

Moreover, I am beginning to physically alter from 20 hour days. My skin tone has changed, I am in near constant pain from sitting and I don't really smile anymore. Mayeb I should just hold off and not care about the job and stretch school out.

Sorry it took so long to get you the STL files. Our class only meets once a week so I had to wait until I saw the students in order to request a test file. Then I had to adjust the file to make it to correct some inconsistencies.

The renders of the file are below. The is non-colored. I didn't think the dimensions printer could do color. I wasnt sure about the sizing so I left it up to you. Just scale proportionally till it fits. We saw on the Dimensions video that the Catalyst software can do this.

If not please feel free to email me and I will send you a resized copy ASAP. Thanks for your time.

Crab without water-like film

Crab with water-like film

I have been extremely busy catching up with installing linux for my VR art prject. It has been an insane tedious process. I finally got the wireless to work which was seriously a miracle in itself. It took about 4 days of non stop tinkering. So finally I am untethered and awaiting the new hard drive to make the switch complete.

I also got a chance to visit Nonna. She seems to be doing good but her legs are really hurting her. While there I got lots of pictures from the old family albums and scanned them.

This is my post from Suse Linux. The site looks nice from here except for the color bar in the update section. Otherwise I would say it looks nicer than on Windows or Mac. So I am stressing out so much. I have decided I hate VR. And not virtually, I really hate it to the point it makes me sick. I find it to be a time consuming piece of crap for rich white people to contemplate what relaity is. I really have no interest in adding to the noise of it.

To make it worse the only way to export my models is with another proprietary software plugin costs like $600. I have no interest anymore as I am fully satisified with 3D on a 2D interface. At least untill VR is truly more immersive. Stereoscopics just isn't enough for me to find it compelling. But now I am stuck for the semester and have to make something of it. Ihave tried to justify a socially meaningful piece but it is quite ridiculous. Everything is either already done or far to pretentious or menaingless to warrant my time. I was trying to think of something along the lines of freign language aquisition with VR but why not just visit the place and the people in real life or in a book. So then I thought well a room for translation. But then video phone is better.

And then I though dance hall. It would be great a place to dance with people from afar in a fantastical way but then I realized how contrived it is to use the interface and that I cannot detect full body movemnet which makes it lame. Who wants to dance with one hand.

Here some up coming things that will be on the site:

1. We are going to do video interviews on the street of what people want in an elmwood community site. One, we find out what people want. Second, the idea being that once we get video of them up on the site with their responses both they and all of their friends and family will visit the site.

2. We are also launch the cloth banner contest where people will be making visale banner around the neighborhood and entering them into a contest for the same publciity reasons.

3. Then the next plan is to buy a bunch of digital voice recorders (i need a grant for this) and have people go around recording interviews, events, witnessing unjustices, etc on elmwood in and organizing them into a online audio database with a visual represenation of where the recording occured. I am thinking 3D with Java (no plugin) but not sure yet. There will of ocurse also be a low bandwidth seachable text database of the recordings. I am thinking of making a check out system so that anyone can get a voice recorder from a storefront for a rental fee or free and then bring us digital content. We could also accept tape, CD, etc nd transpose it. Its kind of like indy media with a virtual map and audio content.

4. The journals will still be free and available as they are a great source of recording personal information and bringing people to the site.

5. The summer will hopefully see the first stage of the wireless arm of the network. Where we move elmwood strip off the internet and onto a local intranet convered by wireless technology. It will still be mirrored on the internet but I want to see it off the grid at some point. I would also like to see an old game console and cell phone connection to the site. So that people without computers can still access the data by means of another electronic interface.

The other day at UB I was having an open conversation with some adjuncts about teaching as adjunct professors. We were discussing how we work really hard and get paid very little. I assumed we were all talking about similar figures when we said very little.

Some of them had been attending the DeLanda seminar at Canisius and commented on how beautiful the Canisius Campus is and asked me how much it costs to attend. I said I wasn't exactly sure but somewhere around $25,000. They were astounded and responded with you must make so much money. I laughed and then we started talking about our salaries. It turns out they make about $3600 to teach a class while Canisius adjuncts up until this year only made $1800 (since the union tried to form $2300). Let me mention that the adjuncts at UB with whom I spoke are new adjuncts and have not been teaching for years. I thought to myself well, I am not technically an ajunct. I mean my contract says multimedia specialist and get paid a lot more than if I was an adjunct teaching two classes each semester because I tutor students 10 hours a week in the web lab. But when you multiply the UB rate times 4 classes a year I am getting paid only slightly more than if I was just teaching the classes at UB with no other responsibility.

I have to say in defense of Cansius, that the work environment is significantly better. I have an office, my contract has been renewed 3 years in a row. There is serious hope for me becomming full-time once I complete my MFA and the staff and other faculty are extremely nice and a pleasure to work with. My classes are also smaller than at UB. One class I teach has 12 students while the other only has 16. So really I am not that upset with my pay and situation at the time. I am, however, a little disillusioned with this new letter I received from Herbert J. Nelson - Vice president for Academic Affairs at Canisius.

I was wondering what happend with the Union at Canisius. I hadn't heard anything since the pay increase. I do, however, remmeber receiving some letters from Canisius that made me feel like I should not join. I guess other people did too, so the union tried to charge the school with an unfair labor practices charge. Somehow, it fell through. According to Herbert Neslon, "the charge was, of course false and without foundation." Yet , I do remember feeling that I should not join. I wish I still had the original letter. At the time, I even had a talk with a full-time tenured faculty member in my department who told me to distance myself from it ASAP - or at least that is what he would do!
This week I received a letter from the Union asking me to sign up again (which I find to be really unorganized) , however, I also received a letter from Herbert Nelson explainign that Canisius has never intimidated anyone about this union issue and then closing the letter with an intimidating statement and now I am conflicted with what to do. What should I do?

Today I took part in a lecture about video game violence. in case you didn't knwo I am 100% against violence in video games. I thisnk its a lame excuse that we want to do thisngs we can't do in real life. what about magic for magic sakes and not just killing. Where are the kids that want to use magic to turn into squirrels and dance on rainbows.
As for ultra violence, two thisngs stick in mind. The game postal where you mission is to get some milk from the convenient store while gas, matches, chainsaws, knives, and machine guns get in the way of innocent civilians carrying out their lives and the new America's Army game which is made by the government and trains you to be a soldier. Whats really sick is that the government cam up with rating system to keep violent games away from kids but this one and all its gory killing amazingly slipped by with a 13 and over rating. Here is my favorite the fragmentation grenade.





What's weird in thiss next screen shot is they gave the bad guy terrorist a pretty big package. I thisnk that's weird homo agenda for some army 3D modeler.



There are lots more screen shots and even videos at


Check it out.

Note: Screen shots are exactly 666 pixels high. Coincidence or work of the devil - you decide!!!

I just learned two new 3D come in 3D. One of them is one of the best applications I have ever seen in 3D. It is an earth browser.



It allows you to actually browse the earth in 3D and zoom in on things as small as a car. This is the campus where I first started speaking German in at Northern Arizona University.


You can zoom out from car to space in about a second. I believe this whole thing works by applying sattelite photos as a texture to topigraphics data, plotted as 3D lanscapes. Here is anothe rphoto of where Matt, Terry, and I went hiking in Las Vegas

Here is a photo of the same mountain zoomed out a little. It is circled in red on the right. The red circle on the left s where Terry's parents house was. You can zoom in right up to the car out front.