Sonoma Heat Wave

It’s over 100 degrees in Sonoma…and our AC unit is broken. Fun

The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins

God bless YouTube. Sure, they are still trying to figure out how to convert their popularity into profitablity without scaring away their user base, but they bring us easily accessible gems like this Leonard Nimoy obscurity. We had it on the Legend network a few years ago and were scratching our heads, now I can finally watch it again!

What The Hell?

Hillendrand for Arcado? You’ve got to be kidding me! Way to shaft a player that the club slowly and steadily developed and who was starting to get real results. Well, Victoria and I are going to the game tonight…not sure I wanna go now ;(

dotXSI4Maya Plugins

These files are (hopefully) outdated with the release of Crosswalk, but there had been a lot of people asking for compiled versions of the Maya .xsi plugins every other week, since Softimage could only offer the source code and that code was a bitch to compile and link. Hopefully these two compiled plugins will make your life a bit easier!

Download dotXSI4Maya for Maya 6.0.
Download dotXSI4Maya for Maya 7.0.

Siggraph 2006

August 1-3, 2006 – Boston Convention & Exhibition Center

At SIGGRAPH 2006, Softimage will be showcasing the tools and technologies that empower artists to create the world’s most compelling 3D character performances.
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And don’t forget to register for our user event, taking place on August 1st at the Seaport Hotel, which will include a look back at Softimage’s twenty-year history of 3D innovation, presentations by Marc Stevens from Softimage and Matthias Worch from Factor 5, a sneak-peek at upcoming technologies, and a few exciting surprises. Registration opens July 10th.

I suggest you register, last year’s event was full! I might post more details as they become available – if Softimage only do half of the stuff I’ve heard the whole event will be very cool!

Siggraph 2006

Getting serious now finishing my Siggraph stuff. I’ll be in Boston all of Tuesday (Aug 1st), doing the user group (and assorted Softimage parties) in the evening. I don’t know yet exactly what material I will show at the user group, but you should expect everything that was shown at this March’s GDC session – and maybe some extra stuff as well. Looking forward to it! It will be a hectic schedule, but fun nonetheless.

Montoya And NASCAR

Well, this will be interesting. I grew up on Formula 1, and I grew tired of Formula 1 before Montoya even entered the circus. It just became so painfully obvious that in F1, races are never decided on the track – they’re decided in qualifying and on the pits. Nothing against a little pit strategy, but it’s almost like there’s “No Passing!” signs posted along the entire track. Oh, and as soon as two cars touch they fall apart and the drivers are out. Not all that much fun to watch, no?

So to see Montoya get into fulltime stock car racing (and NASCAR in particular) should be fun. Passing aplenty, bumping aplenty. Not enough road courses for my liking, but it sure will be interesting to see how that goes. In the meantime, I will watch the World Cup Final

Killer Tadpoles From Hell!

A while ago I posted pictures of my little frog tank at work. I picked up some tadpoles off the side of the road, they grew into cute little frogs, and the 11 I now have are still going strong. They are slowly growing and currently between 1 and 2 inches big.
Enter the Sonoma Creek. Last Tuesday Victoria and I were passing a bridge and I noticed some movement down there. “Look, there’s fish down there!”, I said. Big ones, too, idly floating in the warm water. But something didn’t seem quite right, and a second (and third) look revealed the truth: those were bullfrog tadpoles. Half-foot long tadpoles with bodies as big as golfballs. Tadpoles that could swallow my 2 month-old frogs in one gulp. If you’ve been growing up in America this might not be news to you, and I’ve certainly seen my share of tadpoles in the last 30 years. But growing up in Germany I’d never seen anything that came even close in size! I haven’t been able to go back yet to take pictures, but maybe I’ll do so this weekend.

Lecker Mittachesse

Immer noch (mal wieder?) genial Das waren doch noch Zeiten, wo man nur “Duschhaube” sagen musste und jedermann lachte automatisch!