I decided to spend the evening getting back into the maya groove. I am finally switching from Cinemea 4D, although I like C4D better and think the workflow is more user friendly, productive, etc. I cannot deny that right now maya is the business for graduating students. There seems to be a lot of feature improvements for version 6. I am excited about teaching. My biggest dilema is whether to introduce NURBS or polygons first. I really think that I might go with polygons, first of all because everyone seems to want to be a video game designer and second of all because everything gets reduces to triangles at some point anyhow.



The advance of NURBS is that they are more fun and faster to build with, in my opinion. I usually start of with NURBS surfaces or SubDs and tehn convert to polygons somewhere before texturing or export. Tonight I just used the polygon tools to build some books. I am thinking about making it into a lesson plan and having students t o make different books, etc.

For those of you that don't udnerstand what polygons are, here is a picture of what they look like, they are basically the building blocks of many 3D models.



Here is what happend when you set up lights, scan in some textures, draw out a bump map, and put it all togther into one image.



Is anyone taking the "Cyberporn and Society" class at UB. I decided to take it because my thesis advisor is teaching it and I would like to see what he is liek in the classroom but I need a ride on fridays.

I can't stop thinking about he war. It is making me crazy that it is still going on. I guess it will go on forever all over the world or until we are overcome by a stronger power out east.

I found a nother war blog. I have to say that I love the idea that soldiers are actually reporting on the war. I wish they could all do it. I am sure american ones are censored. This is the journal of a british troop but its a little old now. February to May 2003

I was looking for an interesting elective at UB and came across this course - Basic primate gross anatomy learned by dissecting and making comparative observations of various species of primates. (Students register for lab of their choice and are automatically registered for APY 345.)

Has anyone gone to livejournal the last couple days. I am so glad this is not me.

Temporarily Unavailable
LiveJournal is currently down due to a massive power failure at our data center. We'll provide updates at /powerloss/ as they're available.

Our data center (Internap, the same one we've been at for many years) lost all its power, including redundant backup power, for some unknown reason. (unknown to us, at least) We're currently dealing with verifying the correct operation of our 100+ servers. Not fun. We're not happy about this. Sorry... :-/ More details later.

Update #1, 7:35 pm PST: we have power again, and we're working to assess the state of the databases. The worst thing we could do right now is rush the site up in an unreliable state. We're checking all the hardware and data, making sure everything's consistent. Where it's not, we'll be restoring from recent backups and replaying all the changes since that time, to get to the current point in time, but in good shape. We'll be providing more technical details later, for those curious, on the power failure (when we learn more), the database details, and the recovery process. For now, please be patient. We'll be working all weekend on this if we have to.

Update #2, 10:11 pm: So far so good. Things are checking out, but we're being paranoid. A few annoying issues, but nothing that's not fixable. We're going to be buying a bunch of rack-mount UPS units on Monday so this doesn't happen again. In the past we've always trusted Internap's insanely redundant power and UPS systems, but now that this has happened to us twice, we realize the first time wasn't a total freak coincidence. C'est la vie.

Update #3: 2:42 am: We're starting to get tired, but all the hard stuff is done at least. Unfortunately a couple machines had lying hardware that didn't commit to disk when asked, so InnoDB's durability wasn't so durable (though no fault of InnoDB). We restored those machines from a recent backup and are replaying the binlogs (database changes) from the point of backup to present. That will take a couple hours to run. We'll also be replacing that hardware very shortly, or at least seeing if we can find/fix the reason it misbehaved. The four of us have been at this almost 12 hours, so we're going to take a bit of a break while the binlogs replay... Again, our apologies for the downtime. This has definitely been an experience.

Update #4: 9:12 am: We're back at it. We'll have the site up soon in some sort of crippled state while the clusters with the oldest backups continue to catch up.

Last night the neighbors came by with their friends. We actually liked everybody for once, which is rare for the three of us. Two of the girls work at Scotch and Sirloin. They really played it up so we are going to go eat there. Everyone I have ever talked to about it, seems to have loved it. My parents even went on their first date there.

Believe it or not, they do not have the internet at their house. I can't even imagine what that is like. One of their friends had a celphone that can email pics. I told him about the site, so maybe we will see a new jorunal soon.

I am so sorry I have been unreachable. It is a due to a series of unfortunate connection problems that have taken me off the grid. You can always email me though my journal until I am re-interlocatable. I have a temp number that lilho knows for you hodown.

I was talking to (e:soyeon) and giving her instructions to come over tonight so we can catch up, etc and I told her we live at 444. She that that is the korean equivalent of 666.

If you haven't ever tried painting on a computer you have to check out Corel's Painter. There is a gallery of stuff made using it and free demo download here You can also use it to easily add painterly effects to photographs. The paints are so real they blend perfectly for each medium and some can even drip, etc. There are oil paints, crayons, markers (which similuate getting dirty and bleeding), watercolors, chalk, and many more.

It is beyond fun, especially if you have access to a drawing tablet. A small one costs about $90 and you can get them at compusa or online. Wacom is a good brand but there are cheaper ones I think. The drawing tablet makes it more interesting because depending how hard you press the stroke of the brush is bigger or smaller. You can also erase with the eraser side of the pen.

Here are two example paintings I made but unfortunately, I only had a mouse that time, so the brush strokes are all the same width. It is still very fun, I would almost say therapeutic.

These ones are called Wheat One and Wheat Two and are inspired by wheat fields and basket weaving.

The site and Buffalo went from green and 70 degrees to grey and snow. (e:matthew) said its like living four seasons in one day.

I totally reporgrammed the media upload system. It is super fantastically portable now. It can even insert html code instead of the tags and has a bizillion options for directory definitions, not as an option on your journal, but if you were using the code on another site and just wanted to upload media, as well as, have it dynamically encoded for you. Long live PHP. Pretty soon, everything will be super portable including me, lol.

While searching for picture from Iraq on the net, I found this picture of "British Soldiers." I wonder who they are posing for?