The Abandoned Crown (click for full-res)
I don’t get to do as much 3D as I’d like. This was the last render I did and that was in March of ‘09!
It was to be a puzzle image for Puzzoodle. Don’t think it ever made it out there to the App Store.
Sphere: Related ContentCheck check. Testing testing.
Just blowing the dust off this old blog.
Various web sites I’ve worked on over the years.
Flash & ActionScript, PHP/MySQL, dynamic databasing, animation, ColdFusion, 3D, Photoshop, the whole toolbox.
Loan Officers Beware (company no longer in business)
Agent Gurus Network (company no longer in business)
Dayton Region Aviation Education Council
Sphere: Related ContentHasn’t been a lot of posting because we were busy with the new house and moving and sickness and all that good stuff.
Here are the cabinets in the new kitchen getting worked on. Sanded, stained and shiny.
A few years back I was contracted to create venue seating charts in Flash. Someone went out and shot all of the pictures for me and I created a front-end for selecting the seats for each venue and showing a photograph of what the view would be from that seating area.
Alas, the seating charts were up about a month and someone higher up the food chain of this newspaper site wanted a complete revamp and the seating charts were put out to pasture. So here they are. Bookmark the page and you will always have the seating charts available to you.
Ervin J. Nutter Center
Basketball – Wright State University Raiders
Hockey – Dayton Bombers
Concert
University Dayton Arena – UD Flyers Basketball
Fifth-Third Field – Dayton Dragons Baseball
Sphere: Related ContentMy 3D Portfolio: These are some composite shots of 3D work over the years. (click image for full-size image)
A blacksmith's forge and a visual design of moving digital information
Underground ruins and The Piano Clown
A Unibilt house model and a 'multimedia creation machine'
Been too busy to post here lately. We have a new house and all the busy-ness that inspires what with preparing a new house and packing the old. So, instead of a normal post, I’m going to post about what other people that interest me in the blogosphere are doing.
First up, Wil Wheaton has released a new book, Memories of the Future. Check out his post here.
Introduction to Memories of the Future
In August 2006, Brad Hill, an editor at Weblogs, Inc., hired me to write humorous reviews of Star Trek: The Next Generation from my unique point of view as an actor and a fan of the show.
I started at the beginning of the first season, re-watching episodes that I hadn’t seen in a decade or longer, faithfully recording and sharing the memories they released. Along the way, I came up with some silly episode recaps, and an interesting perspective on the first season, twenty years after we brought it to life. The columns were very well-received, and tons of readers asked me if they’d be collected into a book. I didn’t plan on it originally, but AOL cut TV Squad’s budget before I’d even made it to the halfway point of the first year, and I decided that putting the entire season into a book wasn’t just a good way to finish the season, it was a moral imperative.
A few months after I began working on this book in earnest, at the 2009 Nebula awards dinner, I sat at a table with David Gerrold, who is best-known for writing the original series classic The Trouble With Tribbles. (Fun fact: David wrote and sold The Trouble with Tribbles when he was 19. My wife Anne asked him how he had the courage to do that, and David told her, “Because nobody told me I couldn’t.” That’s so awesome, and everyone who is creative should commit that to memory.)
We were talking about all kinds of writerly stuff, and I mentioned to David that I was working on this book. As I started to describe it to him, I could see that he wasn’t into it, but was too polite to tell me why.
After a minute, he said, “You have to be careful with your tell-all book…”
“Ah, that’s why he wasn’t into it.” I thought.
“It’s not a tell-all book. I hate those things,” I said. “It’s more like you’re flipping through your high school yearbook with your friends.”
I called on all my improv skills and held an imaginary book in my hands.
“It’s like, ‘Hey! I remember this, and I remember that, and did you know that this funny thing happened there, and … oh God … I can’t believe I thought that was cool…’”
His face lit up. “That sounds like a book I’d like to read.”
Here it is, David. I hope you enjoy it. (Additional fun fact: David Gerrold suggested me for the role of Wesley. If he hadn’t done that, I don’t know that I’d have ever voluntarily worn a pumpkin-colored sweater.
Despite that, though, I’m extremely grateful to David for convincing Bob Justman and Gene Roddenberry to take a chance on me.)
Volume One takes you from the pilot to Datalore. Volume Two will take you from Angel One to The Neutral Zone. During our journey together, we’ll certainly be going where no one has gone before, except those times when we go 20% to the left of where the original series went and talk about stuff a whole bunch without actually doing anything … but that’s part of what makes the first season so much fun to watch, especially knowing how greatThe Next Generation eventually became.
Put on your shoulder pads, set a course for 1987, emit an inverse-tacyon pulse into the heart of the anomaly, and engage! By Riker’s beard, you shall be avenged! (Um, as soon as Riker’s beard shows up, next season.)
Namaste,
Wil Wheaton
Pasadena
June 2009
Next, Neil Gaiman is in China. See here.
I’ll be travelling around China, but will definitely be giving a talk and doing a signing in Chengdu in about 11 days, and then I’ll be in Singapore for the Book Festival with the lovely Amanda Palmer (who will also be playing a gig there). And apparently signing for everyone who comes to the Singapore Festival whether they have tickets or not.
And John Scalzi’s book Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded, his collection of essays from a decade of his blog, Whatever, will be released in trade paperback edition.
I’m sorry, I lost interest in your message after the first paragraph and couldn’t be bothered to finish it. No doubt it was very clever and devastating and if it makes you feel good, please consider me abashed or chagrined or whatever it was that you intended me to feel after reading your brilliant, scintillating words. In the meantime, allow me to congratulate you in your decision not to breed, as clearly a person of your qualities represents a full stop on the genetic paragraph; the evolution of your line need go no further.
Please feel free to respond, whereupon I’ll be happy to ignore you again in greater detail.
Bye, now.
All of them above, inspirational, witty and wise. You should check them out.
Sphere: Related ContentDoctor Claire Rind, a biologist and robotics expert at the University of Newcastle, England. Dr. Rind wanted to design a collision-avoidance system for cars. So she decided to investigate the collision-avoidance system of locusts.
Locusts have fairly simple eyes and brains but still manage to fly in dense swarms of many millions without bumping into each other.
She made locusts watch Star Wars while monitoring the reactions of their visual systems. Dr. Rind discovered that locusts have special neurons that respond specifically to looming objects – or objects moving straight toward the locust, like on-screen spaceships.
Then Rind and her colleagues translated the locust’s neural processing to a small robot with cameras for eyes and had it zoom through an obstacle course. The robot was able to avoid collisions 91% of the time!
Now a team of neurobiologists, engineers, and designers is working on an automatic collision avoidance system for cars. The so-called “Locust Project” uses the knowledge gained from Star Wars-watching locusts. One day your car may be able to avoid collisions with the speed and accuracy of flying locusts!
Sphere: Related ContentThis article peaked my interest because I use a (obviously) very advanced method of this in my story Siege Therapy.
From the article:
Scientists are one step closer to knowing what you’ve seen by reading your mind.
Having modeled how images are represented in the brain, the researchers translated recorded patterns of neural activity into pictures of what test subjects had seen.
Though practical applications are decades away, the research could someday lead to dream-readers and thought-controlled computers.
“It’s what you would actually use if you were going to build a functional brain-reading device,” said Jack Gallant, a University of California, Berkeley neuroscientist.
Full article at Wired: Brain Scans Reveal What You’ve Seen
From Siege Therapy:
“This is not a mind reading machine, Doctor Planck. This machine gives us the data we need to extrapolate how his mind works. We have spent weeks reading his patterns while controlling his stimuli. We show him a dog and record the pattern. We show him fire and record the pattern. After all of these baseline recordings are gathered we can see patterns to his, well, patterns.”
