And so it goes

I have finally realized that I have no business blogging, as I lack writing skill.  If that lacked eloquence and sounded a tad too blunt, it’s because I lack writing skill. I was going to start this post by talking about how some people simply operate on a level so far above us that you just can’t help but admire them, but then all my thoughts got jumbled and it faded away.

I have been trying to come to terms with a lot more than that recently, like working at a decent mature job that has hard long hours (note the lack of blog posts in two months), or having all these great ideas in my head that I lack the skill to make real.  I am losing my mental faculties and not dealing with it well.

This has somewhat stalled the MindCandy project, as we found out that the software we already paid for is incapable of producing BDCMF premastering output, which is required for a replication facility — no BDCMF, no glass masters.  So that means authoring a Blu-ray means we have to master from one of four available applications, three of which are too expensive, and a fourth that, while “cheap”, is buggy and unmaintained.  One of those options used to have a monthly license “rental” fee, but they recently stopped doing that and became outside our price range again.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, so I flexed some very old muscles and found an older version of something we’ll call “Canisters”.  “Canisters” is considered by many to be the gold standard for this sort of thing, so I guess I’m glad that I have the chance to look at it, except that Canisters is less of an application and more of a quirky scripting language, running in a quirky operating system, written in said quirky scripting language.  To compare and contrast:  In Adobe Encore, you define actions and playlists by using familiar concepts like, hold onto your hats, “actions” and “playlists”.  In Canisters, however, it is considered lucky if you can avoid building PGC’s by hand without the use of a hex calculator.

I am exaggerating, but only slightly.  What is NOT an exaggeration are the 360 pages of documentation I must consume to have any chance in hell of attempting to use Canisters — assuming the version I have access to is not broken beyond use.  There was a time, when I had my mental faculties (see above), when I was not only be capable of doing so, but would actually be relishing the thought of consuming all that information.   Those days are gone.  Somehow I have to come up with an alternative.

Tips for making your own demodvd

I responded to a pouet bbs post recently and thought that the information could help more than just the demoscene, so I’m reproducing and expanding on it here.

As always, some quick background so information below makes sense (if you’re already familiar with the demoscene, skip to the next paragraph):  I’m making a Blu-ray + DVD package called MindCandy Volume 3 that showcases 30+ Windows demos, which in addition to extremely high-quality video will include commentary by the original authors and other fun bits.  Demos are computer programs that showcase the author’s programming skill and creativity, and are usually awesome to look at and listen to.  Demos run realtime (they do not output their graphics+music to output files), which means you need a special capture program to “hook” into the demo and redirect its output to a series of bitmap files+.WAV or .AVI, and the best utility for doing so is kkapture.

Now that that’s out of the way, the question asked was how to get the most decent quality demo footage onto a DVD.  Having had a lot of experience in this area, here are my tips for doing so:

• Capture the demo in the highest res it allows.  Even if your target is 720×480/576, do it, because the resizing and anti-aliasing will result in less high-contrast transitions which compress better and with less artifacts.
• Never add filters in any step of the production chain, not even a sharpening filter.  All they do is cover/obscure picture detail, not enhance it.  You can’t create detail that isn’t there, so don’t try.  See previous tip.
• Preconfigure your graphics card to forced “quality” settings (on my GTX card I’ve been selecting 16xQ anti-aliasing and turning off all texture compression because my card has nearly a gig of vram).  Sometimes this bugs a demo; if so, go back and kkapture it again with more modest settings, but at least try the best settings.
• Resample down using the best possible resizer that is time-practical (ie. avisynth spline64 or equivalent — bicubic/lanczos are good but can result in ringing, so always inspect your results).
• Capture in real video rates if you ever want to display on a TV without dropping or adding frames.  This means you enter rates into kkapture like 60000/1001 (NTSC) or 50 (PAL).
• If you’re putting multiple demos on a dvd, make it one giant output so that 2-pass/n-pass encoding can spread the bitrate appropriately across all the demos.  Yes, it takes longer.  Yes, it is worth it.

And here’s the part people most people forget:

• If making a dvd, deal with interlacing because a demo at 24/25/30fps really sucks compared to a demo at 50/60fps, and the only way you’re going to get 50/60fps out of a dvd is an interlaced video.  One of the hallmarks of demos as an art form is the nature of having been created on a computer for a computer, and part of that art is a display rate of 50 or 60Hz.  Arbitrarily limiting a demo to a lower framerate when it was created for higher is just wrong.  If a demo is created specifically to look like film, that’s one thing, but limiting it because you want less data to process is a crime.

As for what maximum (not average!) bitrate to choose, you must always choose the maximum (9800), and even then you will find that some demos will have compression artifacts simply because there is too much picture information changing from frame to frame.  This is something I had to come to terms with for MC3 (we’re including a DVD of the main program with the Blu-ray for those who want to upgrade later).  The only way to make it better is to give the encoder less frames for the bitrate — meaning, if 30i or 30p footage has artifacts, feed it 24p.  The DVD and Blu-ray specs were tuned mostly for real-world footage at film rates, something that has made working with 720p/60 footage so painful.

While the above tips were windows-centric, they apply to any type of demo DVD you may work on.

Supercharging The Free Time

One month ago, I started work at my new job, a trading firm in Chicago. I live in the western suburbs, so I have to take a train in to the city. The train ride is only 35 minutes each way, but due to a bus hookup that I have to make, as well as my scheduled working hours (trading hours), I spend a little over an hour on the homebound train. All told, I spend 1h45m sitting still on a train each day. This is time I used to spend computing, which is why people haven’t heard from me in a while. 

With a new job comes some new pay, so I considered it an investment for my sanity to purchase a laptop for the train. All the time I spent waiting to arrive home can now be spent working on projects and answering email. For someone who commutes so much, and has The Combine™ at home to crunch HD video (more on The Combine™ later), I initially thought that I would grab a tiny Dell notebook; they have a supremely tiny 9” model for $300 that can run for hours on fumes. Less to carry, good enough for syncing email for offline review, and I could even surf if I had to (via USB tether to my smartphone). They even come with a choice of shipping with Ubuntu.

The only problem with that idea is that the #1 project I have to focus on, with a deadline no less, is MindCandy volume 3. MC3 poses some significant challenges for me:

• We have no dedicated DVD/Blu-ray author this time around (Jeremy is working full-time for Futuremark/Sony), which means I have to author it myself
• The footage is a mixture of 720p (main program) and 1080p (special features)
• The combined footage (special features + main program) is over 15 hours long
• We don’t have any graphical artist for the motion menus, which means I have to design/create/render them myself (if you want to volunteer then by all means please contact me!)

MC3 post-production is essentially a one-man show, as you can see above. And with over 2 hours a day LESS free time, I am understandably nervous about getting it done before the end of the year, as is traditional so that you can snag it as a holiday gift. So, I have to work on the project on the train, which means the laptop would have to run Adobe CS4… and would have to play back HD video, including 1080p… and be able to render 3D graphics for the menu work… and it would have to hold at least 300G of low-res proxy footage video data (the real video footage is over 2 terabytes). So the tiny notebook idea was out.

Hey kids, how do you take a normal laptop and turn it into a Blu-ray production powerhouse?

• Install nothing less than a Core 2 Duo
• Replace the 720p LCD with a 1920×1080 LED-backlit full-gamut RGB screen
• Put in a 500G hard drive
• Upgrade the RAM to 4G
• Swap out the DVD burner for a Blu-ray reader
• Shame the embedded Intel video controller and install a Radeon HD 4570 with 512M dedicated video RAM
• More power means more juice, so toss the 6-cell battery and install the 9-cell model

So that’s exactly what I did, taking a Dell Studio 15 that normally goes for $750 and injecting it with all of the above, then applying a magical 25%-off-anything-with-an-obscene-cost coupon. Final damage was around $1200. Yay Dell credit!

Here I am, laptop the size of a planet, and all I’ve done is write a blog post.

Man, this thing is heavy.

Back from Block Party 2009

It is a cliche to say “this year was the best Block Party ever” so I won’t even try to claim it.  But they have all rocked mightily in their own way.

When I was younger and childless, I had tons of free time to write long party reports.  I don’t have that luxury any more, so I’ll summarize my Block Party experience in many little bite-size chunks:

The ride to/from BP with Virt and Necros exceeded my wildest dreams.  I don’t normally suffer from rampant fanboy-ism, so I kept it cool, but I did pinch myself once or twice.  I got a lot of answers to some game industry and musicology questions I’d been meaning to ask for a long time as well.

Gargaj was a very welcome addition to BP; big thanks to Jason for flying him over.  His talk on how to bridge the gap between the North American and European demoscenes was enlightening, especially with what the main fears of a party organizer are (here, it’s “will we get enough money to do this properly”, whereas over there it’s “will someone else take over the party when I’m not looking and turn it into a gamerfest”).  He also took time out of partying to help me with me compo entry, and helped keep me on track when I was starting to go nuts from exhaustion.

Speaking of which, I brought a Tandy 1000 and coded an intro completely at the partyplace, bringing only a PCjr assembly book (for graphics reference) and my old CGA rotozoomer routine.  I coded a scroller (and spent way too much time optimizing it when I should have gone for a new effect) and submitted it to the oldskool demo compo.  Phoenix / Hornet entered as well.  Unfortunately, there weren’t enough entries to hold the oldskool demo compo, so those entries were rolled over into the wild compo, where Phoenix won 1st place and I won 3rd out of nearly ten entries.  While I’m happy Hornet won two out of the three places, I am somewhat disappointed that some of the other entries didn’t.  I spent about 18 hours on my entry, but there were some really awesome hardware entries (a hardware NES/SNES tune player, an implementation of Milkdrop on an FPGA) as well as creative ones (complete foley and soundtrack on Turkish Rambo!) and I feel all of those were much better than mine.  They deserved to place and/or win instead of me.

1am Saturday Morning, Virt and Necros and The Fat Man were jamming in the demo lounge.  In case that isn’t awesome enough a thought for you, Fat Man was jamming on some little nearly-toy hardware, and Necros was using Ableton on his laptop (literally using his laptop keyboard, which has one octave and a 40ms delay!).  In case that wasn’t surreal enough, there was the experience of Virt playing (on a piano keyboard) one of Necros’ tracked tunes back to him.

Jason pulled his usual trick of packing a ton of information and context into a presentation that he barely prepared for.  When I prepare for a talk, I spend about a month getting ready.  This is how he gets ready:

Instead of gaining weight at the partyplace, I lost 1.5 pounds.  Crazy.

The entire mobile blogging thing is just too clunky without a full-size keyboard, so I don’t think I’ll be doing that again.  And cell-phone pictures generally disappoint.  Still, if you’d like to check out some pics, here’s my Block Party set.  Don’t forget to check out Jason’s Block Party Set (much nicer).  Val has a Gallery too.

If I remember more (I’m a bit rushed at the moment), I may go back and edit this post to expand it.

Blogging on the move at Block Party 2009

I’m headed off to Block Party 2009; hopefully I can see some of you there, and maybe meet some new sceners.  I am going to try to enter the oldskool demo compo, but no promises.  (I am a very slow coder, because I am overly paranoid careful.)  This year, I’m part of a four-man party bus with virt, necros, and Ubik — a #traxing good time should ensue.

This year, I’m going to join the 21st century and attempt some mobile blogging.  I recently got a Blackberry Curve, and it has this newfangled internet connectivity and positional stuff, so I’m going to try to use it.  I’ll be taking pictures (automatically geotagged, of course) and posting them to my Flickr photostream, and I’ll also be updating where I am and what I’m doing on hopefully a sub-hourly basis on my Twitter account.

So, let’s recap how to follow me:

MobyGamer’s photostream

MobyGamer’s twitter feed

God help me.

Learning to let go

There’s a happy ending in here, so don’t cry for me Argentina.  Also, it rambles a bit.  These conditions should come as no surprise to those who know me.

For many collectors, librarians, and historians in the field of computer preservation, there is a line between “productive” and “OCD hoarding complex”.  I wouldn’t call it a fine line — it’s pretty broad — but a couple of measured steps in one direction and you can easily travel from museumland to crazyville.  My collection, for example, takes up about seven bookshelves (software) and about 700 cubic feet of space (computers/hardware in the basement and crawlspace).  I usually have three or four projects around me at a time, and so my work area is usually always quite cluttered.  For my current state of project completion, I consider myself right on the line:  If I acquire more stuff, it will progress from “cute little stockpile” to “life-threatening”.  If I let go of some stuff, it will migrate down to the happy state of “collection”.  But as a collector, it is against the fiber of my being to let go of… well, anything.

There are several things that tug at the heartstrings of a computer historian.  The most common is the occasional report of a large collection that was junked because the owner (or widow) didn’t know what they had.  Those are frequent enough (and geographically distant enough) that it’s easy to develop a callus.  Less common are when collections are offered directly to you, but you don’t have the space/money/time/permission/health/etc. to accept them.  Even less common are reports of collections that have been lost not due to negligence, but rather some sort of unexpected disaster (ie. fire, flood, etc.).  All of these royally suck ass, for lack of a more eloquent colloquial euphemism.  But the absolute worst is when you’ve done everything right — found assets, stored them properly, tagged and cataloged them — and circumstances dictate that it is you who needs to give them up before they have been fully processed.  And that time finally arrived for me.

I decided to let go of arguably the golden nugget of my collection:  My cache of Central Point Option Boards.  The personal aftermath of this decision surprised the hell out of me, as I actually feel… better about the entire experience.  (I lack the psychological knowledge to self-analyze why that is; suggestions welcome.) Why did I let them go?  So I could attend a demoparty.

Let’s talk about demoparties.

One of the things I look forward to most in life (other than family events, of course) is attending demoparties.  Europe is maggoty with demoparties (if you look hard enough, you will find at least one every weekend), but here in North America they are few and far-between.  The most amount of major NA demoparties we have had in a single year is two, and that was last year!  (And that won’t be repeated in 2009 because NVision will not occur this year.)  And because NA is so big, it can be a significant financial investment to get to one if you don’t live nearby.  Luckily, Jason Scott — probably at significant personal detriment — has committed to putting on no less than five annual large demoparties, which he both organizes and hosts.  This year is the third one, and although it isn’t as big as some Euro parties, it definitely has the correct vibe, which is a major accomplishment for being so far away from the demoscene nexus.  It’s got a room away from the convention that hosts it all decked out for coding, watching demos, meeting with sceners, listening to demo tunes, etc.  There are compos (including a true wild compo) in front of an audience of at least 200 people.  There are many scene in-jokes floating around.  There is booze of exotic varieties, ranging from home brews to salmiakkikossu (salmari) and a lot inbetween.  About the only thing missing is a bonfire — which is admittedly very difficult, since most NA demoparties are inside convention centers, hotels, or schools.

I mention the demoscene stuff because it is one of my first loves — and the Option Board is another.  In fact, my involvement with the Option Board (is this starting to sound dirty?) goes as far back as 1987.  I became so intimate with it (yeah, this is starting to sound dirty; my apologies) that I began to develop a sense for what settings to give the software based on the publisher of the game I was trying to copy before I even looked at the disk.  Even today, I use Option Boards in my hobby work, sometimes even transferring difficult disk images to overseas colleages who are more adept at cracking than I am, so that they can be dismantled and released into the wild.

So.  I love demoparties and I love my collection of Option Boards.  I lacked the money to go to Block Party this year.  I could sell the Option Boards, to get the money, but I hadn’t properly archived them yet (meaning, put up a web page about them, describe them and their usage, trivia, etc.), which is something I usually spend months doing — because I am anal about stuff like that.  I was stuck.

So how did I resolve these two diametrically-opposed objectives?  I cheated. I decided to perform a best effort at a quick documentation and archival process, and then sell them.  For a single weekend, every spare moment of time was spent scanning manuals and other materials, copying software, taking photos, and writing up a small history of the boards and how to use them.  All of this was organized into the Option Board Archive, which is now available for your leeching pleasure.  In an age where the DMCA is used for repeated abuse, the Option Board is a historical curiousity: A product marketed specifically to break the law (if you used it inappropriately), so I am glad to have had the chance to make my contribution to the world of Option Board history.  And as for the boards themselves, they are on their way to their new owners.  Two of them are going to a computer history museum in Germany; another is going to the KEEP project in France; the other three are going to private collectors with an active interest in using them to further their vintage computing hobby.

I can’t see a downside to this:

• I get to go to Block Party, on my own terms (I’m paying my own way — my attendance is not conditional on any obligations.  That means a lot to me.)
• I got the damn things archived and documented
• I get to see other vintage computing hobbyists enjoying the boards
• My family gets to see some more clutter go out the door

Life is good.

So does this mean I’m going to start liquidating everything I have, to achieve a zen-like state of higher conciousness?  Um, hell no — at least, not before I’ve had a chance to archive it all properly.  2010 will be the year of the soundcard museum, mark my words.  Now where did I put those Interwave cards…

PS:  I saved two boards for myself.  I’m not that crazy.

Editing HD On a Budget: Cost of Entry

Blu-Ray Disc (BD) is expensive to produce.  As previously ranted by a good friend of mine, the minimum cost to produce a BD is a whopping $4600 — $3000 for some licensing cost that goes who-knows-where, and $1600 for a sanity-defying mandatory AACS encryption procedure.  And this is before you press a single disc.  (If you’re wondering why content producers were rooting for HD-DVD to win the format war, it’s partially because of licensing fees like this, plus lower manufacturing costs.  The cost of entry was much lower compared to BD.)  Needless to say, we have to be very careful how we produce MindCandy 3, because these licensing costs automatically take a giant chunk out of the resources we have available.

And what are those resources?  I’ll describe our budget thusly:  Dan and myself put up the initial capital in 2000, with the hope that we would at least make it back, as well as some extra that would fund a second volume.  That second volume would sell, which would make just enough for the third volume, etc.  The goal from the beginning was to try to have the project generate the money it needed to keep going for as many volumes as possible.  When we found ourselves with a little extra, we donated it to scene.org, or sponsored some demoparties.  When we found ourselves a little short, we did everything we could to keep costs down.  This is no different than the reasons why people organize demoparties, really;  for example, Scamp wants Breakpoint to be successful enough so that, instead of losing 10,000 euros, he can break even and put on another party next year.  The goal is equilibrium.  For the first two volumes, we achieved it.   Now, with BD having such a giant up-front cost, that equilibrium is in jeopardy and forces us to look at alternative ways of producing volume 3 so that we don’t run out of money before it’s ready!

There are many places where money goes in the production of any end-user product, but they tend to fall into the following buckets:

1. Development
2. Pre-Production
3. Production
4. Post-Production
5. Distribution

Luckily for us, some of these buckets have no cost other than our personal time.  Development and Pre-Production are all organizing and research, which we do for free because we like doing it.  Thanks to the demoscene community, Production also has no cost as long as we get permission from the authors.  Post-Production involves a hardware and software cost (storing, editing, mastering, and authoring the footage onto media), and Distribution is a setup fee, a per-item manufacturing cost, and shipping costs.  (We also budget for the free copies we set aside to everyone who authorized their demo to be included, provided commentary, donated time or materials, or helped us out in some other way.)

The Distribution cost, thanks to the ass-tastic licensing I mentioned previously, is relatively fixed.  The Post-Production costs, however, are not, and this is where demoscene sensibility comes into play:  How can we make the best of what we’ve got?  What can we pull off, given the limited resources available to us?  It’s time to make a demo — using budgets!  A budgetro, if you will.

In a later post, I’ll start diving into the gritty details of how we’re able to edit HD footage at less than 1/100th the cost of how production companies normally edit HD footage.  Stay tuned.

The Next Big Thing

As some followers of a certain thread on pouet might have guessed, the MindCandy crew has started production on MindCandy 3.  This time around we’re mixing the familiar with the unfamiliar:  We’re revisiting the PC — specifically Windows  — but unlike any other demoscene project, we’re doing it all in HD.  That’s right:  MindCandy 3 will be Blu-Ray.

Oh, we’re going to make a DVD available as well, don’t worry.  In fact, we’re tossing around the idea of including the DVD in with the BD, so that there’s only one package to get and you can enjoy the BD when you eventually upgrade your hardware.  Nobody gets left in the cold, and the demos get the proper treatment they deserve.  And it’s one hell of a treatment; thanks to kkapture, we’re able to get clean and pure video from most demos, 60 frames per second, at 720p.  For those who hate interlacing artifacts, this is the fastest progressive video specification HD supports. For some demos (like Into The Pink), the video exceeds what most 2008 machines are capable of.

Work on MindCandy 3 actually began before MindCandy 2 was finished.  In mid-2003, a good friend of the project, Steinar H. Gunderson, worked with us to create “demorender”, which did exactly what it said it did:  Hooked DirectX 8 and 9 calls to grab the data from a frame, dump it through a VFW codec, and then continue, all the while faking the timer so that the demo would be fed a constant timebase.  We were able to capture around 50% of the demos out there when ryg announced kkapture in 2006 and we found that, right off the bat, kkapture did everything our tool did.  We weren’t ready to begin MC3 at that time — and farbrausch is, well, farbrausch — so Steinar contributed the source code of demorender to ryg to fill in a hole or two in kkapture (I believe it was in .wav writing or something but I’d have to check the sources to be sure).

Fast-forward to 2008, and we start to get the MindCandy bug again.  We were in the middle of tossing around ideas to cover, when Blu-Ray finally won the HD format war, and we took that as a sign that that’s what we should target.  The first MindCandy, which was in production from 2000 to 2002, came right at the cusp of the DVD revolution; it was the right product at the right time, and as a result, it did well and the demoscene gained some new converts.  We’re at another cusp:  HD video.  We’re excited to work in that medium and we hope that we can live up to the standards set by MC1 and 2.

While the www.demodvd.org website will remain and start to get updated as we get rolling, I’m moving the Developer’s Blog over here, because this space is an actual blog and not some Python code I slapped together.  I’ll tag them appropriately, for those who want to follow only MindCandy development.

Because part of capturing HD material is making sure you have an HD monitor, I have one now.  Unfortunately, I can’t stand how my 1920-wide window displays a 640-wide skinny little blog in the center, so I will be checking wordpress.com every week to see if they have a theme available with a flexible width that doesn’t royally suck.

Parsing Life

Not a lot of information from me lately, mainly because I’m working on The Next Big Thing (formal announcement in a few weeks, although if you’re familiar with some of my more public past work, you already know what it is) which is taking up all my hobby time, and also because I’m having a difficult time dealing with life at the moment.  Life itself is doing quite well — it’s me who is having trouble parsing the input properly.

I don’t have it in me this time to pick a single topic and expand on it, so here are loosely random thoughts and observations.  They’re personal, so at least I can say this is a true “log” entry.  Those with better things to do, leave now.

Block Party 2009 is all systems go, and I have tentatively scheduled a road trip with two ’scene acquaintances.  If it works out, I will essentially be in a state of shock and awe the entire trip, as I idolize these guys.  Because of The Next Big Thing taking up my time, I was illogically concerned that there would be pressure on me to deliver something at the next Party even though I would have no time to prepare for it.  I have been reassured by various people that, yes, it really is okay to just sit back and enjoy the party.  I haven’t done that at any demoparty — every party I’ve been to, I’ve either given a talk, entered a compo, or helped run the thing (in one party’s case, done all three).

I may still set up a machine and start coding, but this time it will be to relax.  I suppose it is a sign of our times that true relaxation can be obtained creating technology, as opposed to merely interacting with it.

(topic change!)

I joined Weight Watchers December 1st 2008, and in the 5+ weeks that have gone by I’ve lost around eight pounds so far.  I am trying to lose 10% of my starting weight by the time Block Party rolls around, and another 10% by the time my 20th-year high school reunion rolls around.  I don’t know which god I pissed off to gain this double chin, but I hope to appease him/her/they/it before I have to venture out in public.

(topic change!)

My parents are currently on a trip to Egypt, their first time, and they have visited the pyramids, the Sphynx, and rode
camels.  This is a lifelong dream vacation destination for them, and while I have rolled my eyes at previous destinations (for example, middle-eastern destinations in the middle of, how should I put this, *uncertain political climate*), I have to say I’m really happy for them this time.  They’ve gone to more conventional places too (UK, Germany, France, Belgium, etc.) but this trip is the quintessential “I’ve always wanted to do that” vacation.

(topic change!)

I am, amongst other professions, a Solaris administrator.  Not to break my arm patting myself on the back, but I’m a pretty damn good one; I may not be ready for Sun’s kernel group, but I understand the big picture (of all *nixes, not just Solaris) and can pick stuff up pretty easily.  Not to break the other arm, but I am also a fairly nice guy who likes to help and teach people.  Most of the time this results in a clean conscience and no worry lines on my face.  Unfortunately, it also means I leave myself open to being the departmental crutch.

Case in point:  Yesterday a fellow Solaris administrator came up to me, handed me a CD with Solaris bits on it, and asked me to mount it somewhere so he could read it.  I stared for a few seconds and just blinked, suppresing the rising urge to say something caustic.  Let’s review:  He is a Solaris admin.  He administers Solaris servers.  Every Solaris server comes with a CD/DVD drive.  And yet he just barged into my area, and told me to mount a CD somewhere so that he could read it.  When I regained the ability to speak politely, I asked him why on earth he was coming to me with this request.  He replied, looking somewhat irritated, that he doesn’t have a sun workstation under his desk to read the CD with.  Ignoring the fact that I don’t either, let’s continue:

“You’re a Solaris admin.” I replied.  He stared blankly.

“You administer Solaris machines for a living.”  More blank stares.

“Walk to any of the nearly one hundred machines you administer and put the CD in.  Better yet, put it into the exact server that needs the data!”

This is one of the more egregious examples of simply not thinking.  Others (from multiple people, not just this admin)
include:

• Asking me what the syntax for a unix command is (online documentation has been standard on every unix system for decades)
• Asking me about basic networking (ie. netmasks) or security (ie. ssh) concepts that should have been a requirement for them to obtain their job in the first place
• Requesting older/unsupported versions of drivers/patches/utilities when updated/supported versions are freely available

I don’t understand this phenominon, if it is one.  I can’t believe it’s just laziness because, in most instances, taking five
seconds to use your brain and do things properly takes the least amount of time!

(topic change!)

My wonderful wife Melissa just started her last semester in the radiography tech program she is in, and by mid-year, she will hopefully have her first job as an x-ray technician.  While she started down this path because we badly needed the money, she has found unexpected benefits in rejoining the workforce.  She has made new lifelong friends, gained
self-confidence, and generally reaffirmed her appreciation for life.  The last nine years of my career haven’t been that
rewarding in a while.  I’m envious, but very happy for her.

And hey, the extra money can’t hurt :-)  By this time next year, I hope to be going to demoparties under my own power for a change.

NVScene 2008 Seminars Online

After a few months of editing and collaboration with Temis / nVidia and Bunny / Demoscene.tv, I’m happy to announce that the footage I shot of the NVScene 2008 seminars is finally online.  Every one of them taught me new things about the demoscene and making demos, even though I’ve been following the scene on and off for nearly two decades.

Some of the highlights include Chaos and Navis debating whether or not scripting tools or pure code is better — in both Chaos’ talk and Navis’ talk! — and some of the “why didn’t I think of that!” forehead-smacking moments of iq’s talk on making 4ks.  There is a very high-quality showing + explanation + hidden parts of Linger in Shadows, the first interactive demo for PS3; and both pixtur and Preacher give interesting insight into how they design demos and where they get their ideas.

I’d like to thank many people for helping me accomplish all of this:

• Jason Scott for getting me out there in the first place
• Polaris and Radman for giving me places to sleep
• iq for donating his Adobe CS3 prize to me (I edited the videos with it!)
• Jeremy Williams for lending me his HD cam after it was clear my DV cam wasn’t going to cut it for the bigscreen presentations
• Navis and the Demoscene.tv crew for both allowing and encouraging me to shoot in the partyplace
• and OF COURSE temis, gargaj, gloom, steeler, and anyone else who had anything to do with creating NVScene in the first place — I will never forget it

My time at NVScene 2008 remains vivid in my brain and I don’t think I’ll forget it as long as I live.  I can’t thank everyone enough and I hope to see you all again, maybe even with a production of my own.