Home Work Part 1

Hasn’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.

Dayton Area Venue Seating

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

Schuster Center

Victoria Theater

Composites

My 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'

Just Busy

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.

Domino’s in the Pumpkin Patch

Locusts Avoid the Death Star

Doctor 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!

Full Article Here

From Wired:Brain Scan Technology

This 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.”

Unity Founder Interview

Interview with founder of Unity (amazing middleware for iPhone development), Nicholas Francis at Games Industry Biz.  Catch the full article here: United We Stand.

Nicholas Francis: Over the past few months things have been really good for us – I think we probably had about 17 or 18 people back then, while we’re 44 people today, just from growth and sales.

The iPhone thing took off amazingly, we hadn’t really expected that – I think the development costs were recouped in 36 hours, and in the first four days we made more than what we made in 2005… okay, we didn’t make a lot in 2005, but still. And in the first month we made more than we did in 2006.

By now it’s about 80 per cent of our revenues or so, so it’s just been completely amazing. We recently announced that it’s the most-used iPhone middleware – although because people don’t have to let us know when they release a game, we don’t actually know how many it is…

But by the thread on our own forums alone, where people have posted their releases, we counted 258 titles – but probably a lot more, but we can confirm 258 – which is really great.

They’re not Tesla Trees but they have some power.

Scientists have discovered that the bigleaf maple tree actually generates a very small current of electricity — in the millivolt range. But they also built a custom converter that stores it and produces 1.1 volts.

True, not a lot. But that is enough to run low-power sensors and such. And that alone is enough to trigger my imagination: how about low-power motion detectors for your yard? Or forests that generate a more sizable voltage, add water here, power the house over there… and I won’t even get into the far-fetched regions of my imagination.

The Huffington Post article

UPDATE: Apparently my geekiness got the better of me on my post title. Here explains the reference to Tesla Trees.

Strange But True: Steve Used For Teaching

This will be the third year that my story Glow will be used in the classroom of Phillip Parago at Acadia Junior High School in Winnipeg. At the end of the quarter each year, Mr Parago plays the audio of the story (wonderfully narrated by Dan Nachtrab) to his classroom and gives them an exercise of explaining what the story means to them.

Says Phil, “In terms of what we do in class — we use the audio version of Glow and listen to it many times in the classroom. I use it at the end of my short stories unit and have the students do a writing assignment. There are a number of specific questions they are asked to answer but most importantly, they are to develop a sense of meaning from the story. This is what I truly love about Glow. They are to take all of the pieces and synthesize them into a deeper understanding. The beauty of it, is that it is very different for every person. I love reading their papers.”

I love the idea of how the story is used, and it’s a great shine to the ego. Here’s to hoping that Mr Parago has a very long and very successful career — and doesn’t get burned out on Glow before then.

Here is a link to the audio file.