Jasba and Gillian

Posted by rae in friends
at 3:28 pm on Sunday, 29 February 2004


Jasba visiting the basement

Last night we had Jasba Simpson and Gillian Lee over to yak and generally get to know. Jasba and Gillian have both worked with Luisa at CTV recently, and they are really cool people.

Jasba is very much into running a mod of NeverWinter Nights, and Gillian and I had a long conversation about SCUBA diving at the CTV Christmas party.

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Cool new anime

Posted by rae in entertainment
at 10:58 am on Thursday, 26 February 2004

AppleSeed is being remade, and it looks gorgeous! more info is on the movie’s website.

“Innocence” is the name given to this sequel to 1995’s Ghost in the Shell, which was the Wachowski brothers’ inspiration for the Matrix.

Both of these show the current state-of-the-art in the blending of computer imagery with hand-drawn animation. It really is breathtaking, especially the AppleSeed trailer. I recommend taking a few minutes to watch it. it loads up quickly if you have a good connection.

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Long discussion going on down there..

Posted by rae in web site
at 10:14 am on Thursday, 26 February 2004

You may not have noticed, but a long discussion has broken out a few postings down. This link will open the posting on its own. It’s mostly a discussion amongst Iain, Jeff K and myself about the respective virtues of Macs and PCs.

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Late night last night..

Posted by rae in Reid
at 9:06 am on Thursday, 26 February 2004

I’m doing contract work for enTrac in the evenings and on weekends, so I’m burning at both ends. Last night I drove over to Mark’s place at around 1:30am. We swap hard drives so he can bring my work into enTrac the next morning, y’see.

However, I have to get up at 6:30am in order to get into work at Alias at a reasonable enough time that I can get back hom by a reasonable time. My life seems to be bound by reasonable time.

Fortunately, the enTrac work should shortly be over. But there are many home projects waiting for my time after it’s done. The Media PC needs to be finished, for one thing. After installing a new (IDE) hard drive and reinstalling everything, I have yet to get the remote control or the TV input working. I had the TV part working before, I just have to re-investigate how to do it. *sigh.

Following up on my head-gouging story :-) I’m happy to report that it felt a whole lot better on Sunday when I risked taking a shower. I didn’t want to take one too quickly because, well, my head hurt a lot and I thought it might re-open the wound when it got pounded by hot water. Now it’s pretty much relegated to bruise status.

Got the latest episode of Smallville off of Mark last night. We didn’t tape it through some mischance. Looking forward to watching both it (although Mark rates it as +0.5 on a scale of -4-to-+4) and Enterprise, which I taped last night. Have to remember to actually watch Joan of Arcadia this Friday, so I don’t have to download it over the internet or something. Does anyone tape Joan?

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Gouged my head!

Posted by rae in Reid
at 10:39 am on Monday, 23 February 2004

I took Ronnie to his swimming lessons on Saturday morning, and managed to gouge me head on the overhead cubbies above the benches in the change room. Now, at first it was no big deal; you know — where you press your hand hard against the hurt spot, squint, grit your teeth and try to avoid swearing in a room of 9 year-old boys, sounding like someone in the Flintstones: “Razzin! Frazzin! Grubben! Zummen!”

But then the blood started pouring down my forearm and dripping on the floor. So this was not just a small gouge. Just great. I had to go get subs on the way home for Ronnie, Michael and Gordon too. I was hoping it wouldn’t bleed for too long so we could get going. At the same time, I wanted to make sure Ronnie wasn’t freaked out by seeing his Dad with blood pouring down over his head. So I kept up constant chatter, telling him how head wounds tend to bleed a LOT, so this wasn’t unusual. I walked over to the sink in the bathroom and put lots of warm water on the wound, but only managed to splatter blood all over the sink. What a wonderful sight that was!

I ended up going to the first aid station, where they had some helpful bandages that I could press hard against my head. I had to pay for the bandages by giving them my name and address. They also checked my pupils etc to make sure I didn’t have a concussion or anything.

I finally got home, with the subs, but looking a bit of a horror. Luisa took a picture of the fresh wound, but I think I’ll spare you from it. It’ll be up in the family pictures at some point.

It’s still a bit sore now, two days later. But I expect it will be all gone by the end of the week.

There now, aren’t you glad you read my blog? :-)

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Michael’s leg is healing well..

Posted by rae in family
at 4:53 pm on Friday, 20 February 2004

Michael went to the fracture clinic today and they told him that his bone is healing faster than expected, so he will be able to change to the small cast off a week early. This is good news — that huge honking cast is a major pain in terms of mobility.

I think once he gets the smaller cast, which will allow him to bend his leg at the knee, it will be almost like not having a cast at all; more like a bug boot. Then again, his knee will not have bent for weeks, so it will likely be sore and stiff for a while.

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PowerPC poised to lead?

Posted by rae in hardware
at 12:15 pm on Friday, 20 February 2004

X-bit Labs has an article titled “AMD Displays Athlon 64 FX-53 Microprocessor” and in it they state that:

Due to a very complex design, AMD™’s Athlon 64-series chips cannot boast with really excellent scalability in terms of clock-speeds.

I find this interesting, in light of the fact that Apple and IBM have said that the G5 has a lot of room to increase speed. Intel can crank the speed of their CPUs thanks to their long pipeline. However, they may be hitting the limits of that as the length of the pipeline also has a negative impact on performance when branch prediction fails, stalling the whole pipeline.

So it seems to me that the PowerPC has the brightest outlook in terms of performance increases over the next year. This is a welcome change from the past!

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TV Torrents

Posted by rae in entertainment
at 2:06 pm on Thursday, 19 February 2004

A while back, David told me about a new TV series called “Joan of Arcadia” [at least I *think* it was David]. So when I was browsing a list of TV torrents recently at SuprNova, I tried downloading the first three episodes of Joan. I was so impressed, I now have the first 15 episodes.

Not only was I impressed with the show, but I was impressed with the quality of the downloaded episodes. They were HDTV rips, although they must have been resized because the dimensions were odd — something like 640 by 360? But even so, when we played the shows on our TV in the living room, the vidual quality of the show was way better than VHS tape, that’s for sure. :-) I espect that the quality would not be so great if we could play them on an HDTV set, due to the compression and resizing.

Does anyone else download TV shows from torrent sites? Personally, I view it as not a whole lot different than time-shifting, in terms of how “evil” it is. I would feel a little less evil if the commercials were left in instead of being edited out though, strange as it may sound to be requesting commercials!

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Michael’s at school now..

Posted by rae in family
at 1:47 pm on Thursday, 19 February 2004

Michael’s life is returning to a more normal state these days. He’s spending half-days at school and we’re hoping he’ll be there all day Friday. The half-days so far are so-so, really. Most of his classes are on the second floor, and there is no wheelchair access at all, so he can’t attend them. The teachers had said they would send runners downstairs with handouts, assignments, etc., but for the 2 half-days so far, that hasn’t happened. Hopefully this will improve somehow, or else spending entire days at school won’t be a productive use of Michael’s time.

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A day without phone or internet!

Posted by rae in family
at 6:14 pm on Tuesday, 17 February 2004

Yesterday Luisa phoned Bell to complain about the noise on our line. I had thought the noise was caused by the DSL modem and a bad filter somewhere in the house, so I was of the opinion that Bell couldn’t do anything about it. However, the Bell tech who arrived said he had found a problem and that he would have to disconnect our service for about an hour. This was at about 9am or so. Well, after a few hours of disconnectivity (around 11:30am) Luisa got impatient and phoned Bell (on her cell, ‘natch), only to find out that the “call had been closed”, which likely means that no further action would be taking place. As it turns out, the tech moved our line to a new connection (a “new pair”? Maybe relating to twisted pair?) and put in a call to have a rover connect up the other end. Well, the rover never connected it up, so we were without phone service until about 4:45pm today.

We’re all good now, and the phone line doesn’t have any static any more, so maybe something good came out of it all. We’ll see if the static stays away..

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