AMA Superbike Race

Victoria and I went to the AMA Superbike race at Sears Point on Sunday. We spent a good 5 hours walking the track, sitting in the sun, and watching the races. Here’s some pictures from the winner’s circle!

I hadn’t followed the AMA circuit before going to the race, so I had to make sense first of who was who and why this or that matchup were intruiging. Spies? Mladin? Didn’t really ring a bell until I watched the SPEED coverage afterwards. But that’s what I love about living close to the racetrack: we get four major national events each year (AMA, NASCAR, NHRA and Indy), and it’s so easy to say “You know what? I bet that riding this track at over 100MPH – on motorcycles! – must be quite a sight to see. Let’s go, it’s not that expensive.” So we did. And we had a great time. And now I know a little bit more about the Superbike competition

I also recorded over 50 minutes of video on my camera. You can download a clip of Sunday’s Superbike start. It’s 18MB, DiVX encoded. The video is 1920×1080 resolution and pretty damn cool, but unfortunately the bikes ghost quite a bit. Too bad, but such are the restrictions of the HDV format.

Happy Birthday Beyond Belief!

10 years ago today, Beyond Belief was released. How time has passed!

I knew that I wanted to make a Quake episode from the moment the game got released. I kinda had to, after all the Doom design work I had done before. And those were interesting times – the mapping and modding community was still in its infancy and a tight-knit group. There weren’t that many games to mod for, anyway – Doom, Quake and Duke Nukem. Quake was the only true 3D game. We’d hang out in the #Quake and #QuakeEd channels a lot, trash talk about various things and generally discover the exciting internet world that was out there. I’d clog up my parents’ phone lines the entire night, using a long phone extension cord that ran from my room to the lobby. It’s hard to imagine these days, but back in 96, talking to people from all over the world was something incredibly new and exciting.

Initially, I wanted to make two Quake episodes with 8 maps each, but eventually I settled on only one. Building these levels took a lot of time, and while I didn’t exactly kill myself with my university workload, I had other things going on in my life that also required attention. The tools weren’t quite up to par to what they are today – I made most of my maps in Quest. A very capable editor, but it lacked basic niceties such as shaded 3D view. All my levels were build in wireframe, and in the beginning I had to align textures by hacking the text file and manually typing in the UV offset. I’d compile the level, run it and see if the texture looked correct. If it didn’t, I’d count the number of pixels that I had to adjust for. Back then that was possible because the textures were low-res enough and there was no bilinear filtering to disguise the shapes.

[Read More]

I wonder what would happen

If I updated this blog regularly.

Einstuerzende Altbauten

Wenn in Kalifornien eine Autobahn einstuerzt, ist auch der Spiegel zur Stelle. Soviel schlimmer war der Verkehr heute gar nicht, weil viele Leute aus Angst erst gar nicht gefahren sind. Aber in den naechsten Monaten werden wir die Auswirkungen wohl doch zu spueren bekommen. Nicht, weil wir die Strecke oft benutzen – aber alle Fahrer, die sie benutzen werden halt ausweichen muessen.

Victoria und ich wohnen gluecklicherweise weiter im Norden und werden uns vor allem mit verstaerktem Verkehr auf der 37 rumschlagen muessen. Und spektakulaer unterhaltsam sieht der Schaden ja schon aus.

How about that local sports team?

So how about that local sports team? Them “Fighters” or “Warriors” or sumthin. Them’s gettin pretty good, don’t they?

Jamie is a big basketball fan, and he kept saying that we should all go to a game every once in a while. Because even if the team kinda sucks, there’s good teams visiting all the time to make it worth your while. Well, the Warriors do everything but suck this year. With baseball and NASCAR to keep up with I’m usually too “sported out” to care about the basketball playoffs, but I watched game 4 vs the Mavs last night and was wildly entertained. Way to go, Warriors!

Finch feeders…

Still attract finches! This is me trying out the zoom lens I bought for the camera and a few wild birds outside the house. The lens weighs over 300 gram, about as much as the HV20 itself! So the camcorder gets a bit front-heavy, and holding it steady to get a good picture is tough. A tripod will certainly help with that!

Here’s a 720p clip. The finches are somewhat blurry, the…uhm, the bigger bird looks better. Background noises courtesy of NASCAR and our five birds, which can talk up quite a storm!