Void

Yes, I'm aware I have not posted anything for at least a month, I'm also aware this is my second post about how I had not posted for a while. My laptop was broken (fried GPU, and lucky me it's integrated into my motherboard) for almost a month from November-December, and it then broke again about a week ago, and I never started posting in the time it worked. I plan to resume regular posting once I get it back, which will hopefully be in about 2 weeks.

Killing Just to Save a few Bucks

Yesterday morning, Black Friday, as Wal-Mart employees tried to hold sliding doors back against a crowd of near 2,000, an employee was trampled. Multiple employees were holding the doors against the unruly crowd right before opening time, but the crowd burst through the doors, and in the process threw all of the employees back, and one to the floor. As the crowd ran by the employee struggling to breathe, other employees tried to get to him to help him. The man taken to the hospital, and died an hour after the crowd first came flying through the doors. Full Story

Is this what the American life has become? Groups of people willing to kill just to save some money on a Friday morning? What must other countries who already think we are unbelievably greedy be thinking of us now? I hope people realize that a person's life is priceless, and that destroying one to get a better price on something is an unbalanced, heartless decision. My heart and prayers go out to the family of this Wal-Mart employee. Bless them Lord.

Glow!

Glowing stuff seems to look nice most of the time. Therefore, it is nice to be able to make some. I just made some simple glowing spheres, and put them in a dynamic simulation so I did not have to worry about positioning them myself. The only thing I had really trouble with in this scene was parenting a lights to each of the dynamically translated objects. But thanks to the varomix on the SideFX forums, I was able to solve my problem. So I was able to create a decent quick animation, and a higher quality frame from it with global illumination.

Animation: http://vimeo.com/2133774

Frame: http://flickr.com/photos/heydabop/3000358717/

Obama Halloween Candy Analogy

Happy Halloween! And what's Halloween without one of the scariest things known to man, politics! The other day I heard an analogy of Obama's "spread the wealth" plan, with Halloween candy, so here it is.

A group of children has been trick-or-treating for almost two hours and they are getting tired, but they have bags full of candy for their work. They come upon a house, and knock on the door. The man who answers it asks them how much candy they have gotten. Excitedly they show him all their candy, saying they have been working hard for it, and they cannot wait to get home and eat it. However, the man, instead of giving them more candy, asks each of the kids for half of their candy, so he can give it to all the kids who did not go trick-or-treating. The kids of course do not like this idea, and quickly run away.

New Hard Drive

I decided to buy a new hard drive after I had run low on space, which I define as less than 10GB of free space, on my old drive. This would be second upgrade to my laptop. My last upgrade had been from 120GB to 160GB, both SATA 1.5Gbit/s at 5400RPM. (My 160GB would have been 3.0Gbit/s, but thanks to the lack of technical knowledge of HP's tech support, I was not sure if my computer could take it.) So this time I figured I better get more than I think I will need, so I will not have to upgrade again during my computer's lifetime.

After looking through prices of different manufacturers and their hard drives, I decided to go with a Western Digital (A somewhat biased decision) 320GB 7200RPM SATA3.0Gbit/s with a free-fall sensor (WD3200BJKT). (HP was able to tell me what I wanted to know after the second try this time.) Because I may drop my laptop one day, and the sensor only cost a little more compared to the one without. After ordering my hard drive online from provantage.com, it took only 3 days to arrive at my house.

Using a 2.5" external enclosure, I copied the contents from my old hard drive to my new one using Norton Ghost. However, while doing this I assigned the new drive's letter as H: in Vista, which turned out to be a dumb move. Once I had finished copying my old drive, I shut down my computer, took the old one out, and put the new one in. I turned on my computer and Vista boot up, but once it had, I ran into trouble. Vista would load almost nothing after its initial start, as everything was stored on C:, according to Windows, and I had marked my new drive as H:. I then spent the next three hours digging through my brain and futilely trying all I could think of to change the drive letter as it was assigned in Vista. I knew how to do so if I was given a command prompt, but I couldn't get one as Vista would search C: for explorer.exe and cmd.exe, and C: wasn't there. I finally decided I would try to copy my old drive again, giving Vista no knowledge of the new drives existence. I switched the drives in my computer and again copied my old drive to my new one using CloneZilla. When I started Vista with the new drive in again, it worked perfectly.

After feeling like an idiot by making a simple, but problematic mistake when coping my drive, I was ready to benchmark my new one against my old one. I had already benchmarked my old drive using PC Wizard 2008 and HD Tune, running both twice. I went ahead and benchmarked my new hard drive in the same way. All HD Tune benchmarks were done with Windows running in safe mode, to minimize other programs using the disk. I have posted the results below.

I have been using my new drive since the 24^th, and I am very pleased with it and have found no problems, except the ones I caused. The speed increase is noticeable in everyday use, and having double the space I used to have is very liberating. Thank you Western Digital and provantage.com

Old:

HD Tune 1: http://img411.imageshack.us/img411/4142/1sthdtunebenchmarkwdcwdqa3.png

HD Tune 2: http://img367.imageshack.us/img367/9448/2ndhdtunebenchmarkwdcwdrs9.png

PC Wizard 1: http://img243.imageshack.us/img243/5872/old1ee5.png

PC Wizard 2: http://img367.imageshack.us/img367/4854/old2qv6.png

 

New:

HD Tune 1: http://img119.imageshack.us/img119/7852/1sthdtunebenchmarkwdcwdde0.png

HD Tune 2: http://img119.imageshack.us/img119/8168/2ndhdtunebenchmarkwdcwdav9.png

PC Wizard 1: http://img243.imageshack.us/img243/2391/new1ys3.png

PC Wizard 2: http://img367.imageshack.us/img367/8379/new2on3.png

Happy National Mole Day

From 6:02AM to 6:02PM today is National Mole Day! Some of you may be wondering why it is only 6:02AM to 6:02PM. Well, this Mole Day is not about the moles that dig up your yard, it is about the moles that make up matter, and a mole is approximately 6.02 x 10²³ atoms or molecules, depending on which you are measuring. So, if you write the date as time then month then day, you get 6:02 10/23, which is like 6.02 x 10²³, this is why National Mole Day only lasts from 6:02AM to 6:02PM. So to celebrate, go get some concentrated sulfuric acid, H₂SO₄, and sucrose (sugar), C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁, then put them together and make some solid carbon!* I won't go into detail why this happens, for I don't entirely know, but sulfuric acid will combine with water, and since sucrose has twice as many Hydrogen atoms as it does Oxygen atoms, just like water, it's like carbon and water. The sulfuric acid will rip the water from the sucrose, leaving separated carbon and water. The water will then boil off as steam, for this reaction is very hot, and the carbon will become a porous piece of solid carbon. So there is your simple, incomplete chemistry example.

 

*I suggest that you do not actually go and do this. In the event you go and do this and end up hurting yourself or someone else, I cannot be held responsible in any way. If you do this, then you do so at your own risk. Again, I am not responsible in any way at all for anything that may happen if you do this. This includes, but is not exclusive to, causing you or another being harm, or any property damage that may result.

Folding

Objects abilities to fold up are usually taken for granted, as it has become very common for an object to fold up. Scooters fold up, computers fold up, puzzles can fold up, a few trailers can fold up, glasses fold up, some flying discs fold up, ironing boards fold up, knives fold up, tool sets fold up, tricycles fold up, tents fold up, and I think you get the idea. Nevertheless, this next item is still surprising to me. It is a good idea, and I am surprised it was not thought of sooner; Microsoft has developed a fold up, wireless computer mouse. It folds up to 60% of its original size to save a little space for portability, and then one can un fold it to get a full sized desktop mouse. I do not see how that little of a size difference could matter, but someone will buy it.

While writing this article I did find a fold up mouse from Japan, so Microsoft isn't the first to do it, but theirs will probably be used more, and I think it looks more comfortable, and looks better.