Dave Kellam

I have a graphics course this semester, basically OpenGl/C programming. I don’t have a whole heck of a lot of experience with C. Throw in the fact that I haven’t compiled a C program on a mac yet. At some point I installed the mac developer software but never really started playing with it. I’ve been experimenting a little bit, trying to get things to compile, et al. There’s are really good tutorials at NeHe, they’re worth checking out if you’re interested. It’s aimed at Windows coders, but there’s example code for most platforms. There’s even beginners code for project builder. It’s a learning experience.

On an unrelated note, I was having trouble getting Stuffit to expand some large .rar files. You can find some command line software here, it worked for me just fine.

It’s been awhile since I’ve done much of anything for the site. I guess that’s relatively obvious based on the lack of front page posts. Now that I’ve had my summer hiatus, I should be able to get back on track.

School has started again for me; here we go year three. The last week or two has seen the return of friends and the party life. There has been something going down pretty much night recently, it’s been a lot of fun. I just did a little redesign, I have a template waiting in the wings, but I’m not sure I like it. I’ve gone back to the text only front for awhile, so I can return to the writing.

I have a creative writing course this semester, which should be a lot of fun. It’s basically a group of twenty people who like to write sitting down and discussing each others works. And we all end up with a credit for it. I’m back at Golden Words in the capacity of staff writer. So between that and the writing class, there should be lots of fodder for the written section. There’s a link of for the photo section as well, which I believe is current up to about the end of august.

I’ve been watching a few movies, going to a few concerts; fairly standard. This past week has seen me plow through season three of The Sopranos, attend Danko Jones and The Dears in concert and check out Soderberg’s new flick Full Frontal. My opinions? Season Three was great, I await the new episodes. I enjoyed Danko Jones, it was intense rock-out fun albeit I was a bit tired. The Dears were ok, I’m not a huge fan. But I got to hang out with them afterwards, they seemed pretty cool. I’ve read some bad things about full frontal, I have to disagree. Then again, I enjoy books and movies that are fragmented, self-referential, self-parodies. That’s exactly what it is and I can see why some people probably didn’t like it.

I’ve had a tough time trying to get this one bin/cue vcd image burned. Everytime I tried to mount the image or burn it in Toast, the program would crash. After searching high and low for a solution, I found VCDGear, a great utility for converting between file formats and so on; I converted the bin/cue into an mpg. Unfortunately for any non-Windows clients, the only software available is command line (it’s not really all that difficult to use though). There’s a decent program out there to watch vcds called MacVCD — there’s some places it could use improvement.

With the playing of the VCD down to a science, you’re probably ready to move onto VCD creation. During my search for the clues to extracting video from video cd’s, I came accross two solid VCD/SVCD creation sources: here and here

Ben has a new design/layout up. He makes good pictures. He was around during the Suffocate heyday; another reason I should revive Conform.

The beginnings: a bottle of scotch and the sudden decision to reorganize your room is an interesting combination. It keeps me semi-productive (except for the computer breaks).

Next: Some webdesign feelings are in the air. I’ve rearranged the room, so it’s that sort of mood. I have a semi-finished design sitting on my desktop, waiting for more.

Lastly: There was something else that was the reason for this post but I can’t remember it. Go figure.

It figures that after thinking about it for months, I finally give in and switch over to mac, only to have them release a bunch of new models a month later. For the price I paid three or four weeks ago, I’d have dual processors, ddr ram instead of sdram, another drive bay and the possibility of it holding four harddrives instead of two. Them’s the breaks I guess, it’s a bit of shame though. Regardless, I still love my new computer.

I just finished reading an interesting article on blackjack from Wired. If you’ve ever played at a casino before it’s worth checking out. I played once a couple weeks ago and ended up leaving the table with $70 more dollars than I arrived with. I was quite pleased with myself, although it’s small potatoes in comparison to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

An older article outlining the similarities and differences between hardcore GBV fans and Trekkies. Good for a laugh if you’re a fan of one or the other.

It was nice to have a day off yesterday, I actually set about accomplishing tasks rather than vegitating. I have a bunch more photos up, although I did manage to forget the month of March. I’ll change the sidebar link to the photo section when I get a few minutes, I moved it onto a subdomain and started using a different system.

I went out and saw Signs. Shyamalan is becoming a modern day Hitchcock; a master of suspense. It’s one of those movies that will have you on the edge of your seat, you keep expecting things to happen. He’ll build up the tension, let it fall away and then scare the shit of you. I really enjoyed it and would recommend watching it a nice dark theatre instead of watching a pirated copy on your computer.

The remainder of the evening saw me take in The Reverend Horton Heat at a pub downtown. Honestly, I had never really listened to any of his music before but I’m tempted to get some now. It’s sort of an odd show to witness, and old guy with a guitar backed by a big mouth bass and a drum kit. They proceed to belt out rockabilly songs with a punk feeling to them. The show was high energy and high intensity but I felt pretty lethargic and had trouble getting into it.

The plan was to get my computer and return the website to past glory. Not to be outdone by the box, my work schedule turned into nine straight days. Now those are done and I have a day off tomorrow. That means I’ll get some time to sort through photographs, play around with photoshop on a mac and so on and so forth. Maybe I’ll get around to updating Moveable Type and moving it over to MySQL. We’ll see what time permits. All of that may be a tad ambitious for one day.

Here’s an article from abcnews outlining reasons for legalizing the use of drugs in the US. Their main points revolve around the costs of maintaining a drug war and all the dirty money that drugs bring in. i.e. legalization means cheaper prices, less crime, less corruption; drug users are generally harmless. Take someone who just smoked a bowl and someone who’s completely trashed, hand them a baseball bat and tell them to have fun. The drunk person is likely to start smashing things, while the high one will probably just look at the bat and start laughing.

Drugs and prostitution, you could make much the same arguments for the legalization of both. My views are that both should be legal and talked about. People should be informed about the consequences of their actions and have the right to make their own decisions (after reaching adulthood of course). People will always be able to find drugs or prostitues (the world’s oldest profession), so we may as well take the money away from the criminals and put it back into society (via the government).

It was a scheduled day off today, it wasn’t really all that eventful; relaxing though. I decided to start watching Sneakers around three in the morning yesterday. I thought it was pretty well done, it still holds up as a ‘hacker’ movie years later. I think in part due to the all-star cast: Redford, Poiter, Kingsley et al. It’s worth checking out.

This evening involved watching The Seventh Seal. It’s rated up there as one of the greatest films of all time; many people being aware of the chess match with death. I liked it and will probably have to watch it again to offer more opinion. There’s some dark comedy elements to it, a form of humour that I always tend to enjoy. There are many philosophic underpinnings, mainly relating to the nature of God/Satan, death and so forth. It’s pretty wild. I watched the criterion disk and have to say that they did an amazing job restoring the film.

Almost forgot, I also flipped between and The World According to Garp on television this aft. Kind of watching which ever one interested me at the time and doing some dishes. I’ll say my preference leaned in the direction of Garp, but I kept flipping back for the action sequences in Robin Hood.