I was stuck on thinking of new things to program or try out today. So instead I fired up the open source blender on my laptop and ran a tutorial to make a 3d render of a mug.

(e:paul) helped me run through the basics of compositing and using blender. So I ended up making these purple velvety metaballs to go alongside the mug, cushioned on a field of stiff AstroTurf (and with the obligatory "hello world" text).

I watched him play with a trial of Cinema 4D and he made a model of a vase in about a minute.

The output here is dumb but it was ridiculously fun to do something new on the computer. Scripting something here with Python could be interesting. The interface in Blender is confusing but I also don't know the language of 3d compositing.

I'd like to try animating it, on Terry's mega Warcraft machine.

We took (e:terry)'s mom down to the tropical temperatures of the botanical gardens last Monday. I have more pictures of the plants there than I'll ever need. Here are a few that I probably haven't posted before, besides the orchids.

Full of turkish coffee and the obligatory drunk dancing (e:mike) show.

It's an amazing museum in Pittsburgh, dedicated to classic bikes, mostly cruisers from the 1950's/60's. It's a little west of the Mexican War streets on the north shore, in an old industrial area. Ironically probably the least bike friendly section of Pittsburgh I've seen.



You can tell it's kind of like the basement at Rick's but somehow they found some money to arrange them very nicely.

The random rare bikes they had were insane. They had a 5 seated tandem from the Monkees, a mountain bike with a single sided fork, a bike someone rode literally around the world, and this street-legal fiberglass tricycle car that allegedly got 100mpg in the 1980's.

The weirdest part of the whole museum were the non sequitur jokes scattered around the building. For example. there was a baby doll in a cage with this sign attached.







Or this dummy in a trunk.



Or this neon hippie-bike-part-dance-party room. Which starts blasting this eurodance song "God is a woman" as soon as you walk in.

We went over to the hotel my family was staying at for a festivus celebration and some Christmas cookie decorating.

The designs stayed pretty abstract.