Dave Kellam

PTHiTunesNotifier: a little utility that will show you the track information in an overlay box when the song changes in iTunes. It also has the option to display the track info all of the time.

I’ve been listening to The Streets a bit lately, it’s good stuff. The website is alright too, the nice grungy motif and all.

One week of exams wasn’t too hard to deal with, it kept me away from the site for a bit though. I made a couple of posts but just realized today that my hosts upgraded some packages which caused moveable type to break. The forums at Moveable Type helped my figure out the problem.

I ended up going to the midnight showng of The Two Towers last night. I really enjoyed it, although it seemed a tad longish. That might have been a sideeffect of watching the extended cut of the Fellowship of the Ring earlier in the day. I can’t say whether it held relatively true to the book or not, I haven’t read it in a few years. It stood up well as a movie, or at least as the second movie of an epic trilogy. It’s a challenge to make a good movie from a story when you don’t have a beginning or ending to work with.

The most mindblowing part for me was Gollum. Here’s an article detailing some of the processes used to capture and animate the character. Having just finished up a graphics course and being more aware of the problems facing 3D modeling, I was astounded. Gollum looked very real, not quite like I envisioned but not that far off.

Who wants to write an exam at 9 in the morning? Who wants to be awake? Apparently, a lot of people do. I guess they wake up before noon everyday. The one thing the books don’t tell you about this time of day is the cold. Sweet Jesus is it cold. In the wee morning hours that I’m accustomed to, there’s a least some residual heat left from daytime. Or maybe not, and maybe the books do tell you about the cold. Books.

I should probably get a little more studying accomplished in the next hour or two. It’s time for computer graphics: OpenGL, the rendering pipeline, vector spaces, ray tracing, all that jazz.

Earlier today, I read this review of a Snoop Dogg concert in Edmonton (it might have been two) and found that it didn’t make much sense. I went back and reread it just now, it still doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. That doesn’t mean it isn’t funny though. My theory is that if you’re name is Fish Griwkowsky you can get away with writing whatever you want.

If you don’t rock out to Self Esteem by the Offspring, you’re a liar. That goes for the rest of Smash too. It doesn’t seem like a good study album but I’ve owned it for a long long time, so it doesn’t seem intrusive. Put it on the stereo and take a trip to back in the day.

Last summer I had my bike stolen, right off the front porch. I called up the police and told them about it, they never found my bike. However, they were nice enough to put me in their telephone directory. So, whenever they’re looking for money to host some event or produce a brochure they call me and many others I imagine. Policing is a business too. I imagine they pull a lot of people in too, the ones who feel guilty about something. Maybe they’ve tagged every occasion that I haven’t given them money, so that when I reach a certain point of non-compliance they can arrest me for something stupid and get the money that way.

An article outlining a prototype for a tornado in a can. It’s used to pulverize whatever goes in; diapers, chickens, jellyfish. I know if i had one i’d be throwing everything in it. Here’s a diagram from the patent office that shows the machine in greater detail.

Here’e and article detailing one of the few remaining companies that press vinyl in the states (and the related thread on slashdot. There are some insights into the resurgence of the medium, most of it fairly obvious; movies and djs. I picked up a record player this summer, as a result most of the music i’ve paid for this year has been on vinyl. When you can pick up albums like Ziggy Stardust for a dollar, why would you bother going out and buying the cd? You own the album, so you can grab the mp3s and make a copy on cd legally. And there is of course the album art on records; so much better (and bigger).

Just finished giving the links section a quick once over. Culled out a bunch of deadlinks (I hadn’t looked at it in awhile) and updated the stylesheet. Still need to update it with more of the sites that I visit semi-regularly, but that’ll take a bit of time.

On a side note, I love BBEdit. A text editor that codes things depending on the file and allows you to open/save via FTP? I can open up templates and such, hack away at them for awhile, save and have the changes take effect right away. Whee.

That title is probably a mistake, google’s going to run buckwild. Anyway, free porn from the Modern Humorist.