02/10/04 02:41 - ID#30733

French Ban Religious Symbols in School

Another Google News Quote - "The French National Assembly has overwhelmingly voted a ban on "visible" religious adornments in public schools."

I am sure this makes people really angry but I say, "more power to you secular government!" I would like to see an all out ban on religion in France, as a model of social evolution for the world!!! I would like to see Buffalo follow in the model.

Permalink: French_Ban_Religious_Symbols_in_School.html
Words: 72
Location: Buffalo, NY

02/10/04 02:36 - ID#30732

Atkins was Obese

I find this google news report to be really amusing in an ironic way. It must make all of those poor people in Buffalo eating six pounds a bacon/day with chicken wings for desert, feel really nervous. I know lots of people that follow to this diet here in Buffalo. I think the weight ocurrs because eating only protein requires more water in the digestion process and thus you lose water weight. However, I am not a nutritionist and could be totally wrong. It just sounds disgusting and dangerous. I wouldn't be at all surprised if we find out he was being financially supported by the meat and diary industry!

The following quote is from google news in a report about the circumstances around Dr. Atkins death.

"Dr Robert Atkins, creator of the famous low-carbohydrate diet, was clinically obese at the time of his death, according to medical reports made public today.

The examiner's report said that Dr Atkins had suffered a previous heart attack, congestive heart failure and hypertension, all conditions that are related to obesity."

Permalink: Atkins_was_Obese.html
Words: 182
Location: Buffalo, NY

02/09/04 01:29 - ID#30731

Republican PopUps

I just received my first political popUp. I wonder if this is going to be the start of a new disturbing trend in popUp windows.

It makes me sad the way that people abuse popUp windows. Its starting to ruin the internet. I know you can block them, etc but I really wish people would just stop using them maliciously, instead of us having to cut out a feature of the web to protect ourselves. I escpecially feel bad for the dial-up user who's connection can easily be overwhelmed by a barage of popUps that call for new popUps.

PopUps such as that one are particularly malicious in that when you click on them it send information (possibily a great amount) to their parent site, in this case republic-info.com.

The address it takes you to is

For those of you that don't understand what this is doing, it is sending you to their site but it is also sending information about what site the popUp add came from and the particular media is in the popUp window. It is probably also recording your IP addr, MAC addr, etc.

By the way the popUp add was "Paid for by the Republican National Committe Not Authorized By Any Candidate or Candidate Committee, 310 First Street, SE, Washington, DC 20003

Permalink: Republican_PopUps.html
Words: 229
Location: Buffalo, NY

02/08/04 06:08 - ID#30730

Mask With Hair

I was experimenting with some loft surface hair styling on one of the old masks. I painted the hair texture using an impasto brush in Painter and then made a bump map in Fireworks using a 1 pixel pencil and several differing shades of grey. Anyone need a digital haircut?

Permalink: Mask_With_Hair.html
Words: 53
Location: Buffalo, NY

02/08/04 04:21 - ID#30729

Machine Validated Vocal Performance

While at my little cousin's birthday party the other day, we were presented with an opportunity to play Karaoki Revolution for Playstation or some similar name. The user wore a headset and selected a character, name, and outfit and got on the virtual stage on screen. Then you sang-a-long with the tune and a motion captured crowd, which cheered you on or got mad depending on the machine's judgement.

Terry sang "Billy Jean" and I sang "Girl's Just Want To Have Fun." The machine picked them for us. My cousin, her husband, my brother, Terry and I sang three rounds in a competition and the machine validated our performance.

The whole time I was thinking about how weird it is that we found this activity to be totally normal yet I cannot imagine the situation with the machine. I can't imagine sitting around taking turns singing and voting on who is better at it. By the way Christina is the best, by far. She is a karaoke diva.

QUESTIONS:
So what about the machine makes the activity so normal and accepted? Is this the situaion for many other activities? Does the addition of a machine make it seem somehow logical and thus acceptable? Is it perhaps that we are slowly being conditioned to accept the machine as source of authority? Have we been convinced by Sony/Konami that its more fun with a machine, so that we can buy their products? Does anyone have any ideas about this?

Permalink: Machine_Validated_Vocal_Performance.html
Words: 250
Location: Buffalo, NY

Category: design

02/07/04 02:04 - ID#30728

HornDance

Z-Brush is the collest program I have ever used. It is a hybrid painting/3D modeling package that allows you to bring in obj geometry and turn it into a deformable mesh brush. Kind of like the mesh burhses from Maya PFX but with the contorl of Adobe Photoshop. Once the Mesh is in Z-Brush you can use varios tools to deform it and then export the geometery back into .obj or render it. For this case I exporte dthe geometry to an .obj file. Opened it in C4D, reduced the triangles by about 86%, put the remaining geometry into a hyperNURBS object and rendered using some shadowed lighting and the bhondoniNut Cheen shader.

I added some bones and some soft Ik and was able to re-pose the geometry to look like two object walking or one object stalking the other.

Permalink: HornDance.html
Words: 143
Location: Buffalo, NY

02/07/04 12:12 - ID#30727

First Nerve for Brain

This nerve is the first nerve for Chris Outlaw's Brain VR project. I thought I would post both the poly verison and the render for the two groups of people that would care (real-timers vs renderers). I will making some more and then reducing the geomtery. Currently it is 405 polygons.

Its kind of hard to imagine them without seeing them in his project. So we will have to see. The project involves the viewer being present in the brain of a riot police man during a protest march. You watch through his eyes and then judge, using the facts and feelings you are presented with. When speaking with him on the way to the Trinh Minh-Ha screening yesterday,, he said it was an experiemnt of mixing documentary and VR.

I hope he likes the nerve. I have a feeling it would look nice if it had a pulsing light texture.

Permalink: First_Nerve_for_Brain.html
Words: 154
Location: Buffalo, NY

02/06/04 11:39 - ID#30726

Masks for the VR Project

Here are the rendered verisons of the masks and their geometry for the VR project that I am modeling for. som eof you might have already seen them on the DMA 390 site but I thought I would add them here for the record.

Since these models were created Josphine had me change t hem a bit - they look more like China Dolls now but I like them like this so for now you can see this version.

Permalink: Masks_for_the_VR_Project.html
Words: 86
Location: Buffalo, NY

02/05/04 02:37 - ID#30725

Music Lower Middle Class

This is going to be underdeveloped but I will finish it at some point later today when I have time. I have thought about it for a while but only have five minutes before I leave for school.

The lower to middle middle class download music. Belonging to that income range, many of the people I know download music of the internet with some sort of P2P program like Kazaa or ?.

It is noteworthy that it puts them in a specific class I believe, directly in the middle of the class spectrum. They are the people that are wealthy enough to have a sohpisticated computer system and broadband internet connection but not so wealthy that buying retail priced CDs in mass quantity is no problem. It seems that the upward limit of the music downloading scheme are probably people in the upper middle and wealthy classes. At that point you are able to just buy CDs without monetary impact, so downloading music might not be worth the time.

Permalink: Music_Lower_Middle_Class.html
Words: 169
Location: Buffalo, NY

02/04/04 02:05 - ID#30724

Second Life Scripts

I spent the evening with Jesse in Second Life working on scripting. I need to get some nice scripts completed for my independent study with Josephine. Right now I am working on a virtual pulsing dicoball that when clciked on, offers to sell the user a disco braclet. Then if the user is wearing the bracelet, when you click on the ball it makes you dance.

Who know how it will go, but I think it could be the start of a sucessful disco business. I will post some pictures later tonight.

Permalink: Second_Life_Scripts.html
Words: 92
Location: Buffalo, NY

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