The Great Pumpkin Show

Char and I went to The Great Pumpkin Show in Salem, New Hampshire. It was really fun, and there were a ton of pumpkins. There were two basic types: traditional eyes-nose-mouth pumpkins of various configurations, many of which could have been carved by anybody; and Artist Pumpkins. The technique here involved getting not carving through the pumpkin, but scratching away at the surface. In this way various amounts of light could be let through, resulting in a sort of grayscale effect. They would also shade in areas with a sharpie to make them blacker. All of the “image-like” pumpkins were carved in this way.

Many pumpkins were scary

Many were not

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A great example of the grayscale technique.

We visited on November 6th, so by then a lot of the pumpkins were starting to rot. Many were still fresh, but many were collapsing.

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Collapsing Bush and Scary Kerry

The flash makes things look pretty crappy. I tried about 5 different ways of setting my camera up to photograph the pumpkins, but really I needed a tripod I didn’t have.

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This is a huge pumpkin. The one behind it is average-sized.

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This had incredibly even tones

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Extra carving on the lanterns makes them glow

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Char did not like this one

The Uncanny Valley Strikes Again!

It seems that The Polar Express movie has fallen into The Uncanny Valley. Almost every review I can find talks about the “creepy,” “eerie,” and even “frightening” characters.

At this point, CG animators have to choose between trying to dig themselves out of that chasm or falling back to more cartoony representations, as in The Incredibles. Looking at the diagram of the Valley, it’s an awfully steep climb, so we’re probably going to see a couple more creepy movies with “doll-like” characters before producers and directors realize the technique is flawed.

New Laptop!

Today I received my new Alienware Sentia. I got it for the good screen (1280×800) and the availability of a dvd+- burner for less than a thinkpad x40.

Thoughts on the transition:
To move my data from my old Dell Inspiron 4100 to my new system, I actually just moved the hard drive from one machine to the other. I have a 7200RPM 60 gig drive, so it made sense anyway.

When I booted up, I ran kudzu and let it reconfigure everything. That got the sound, USB, firewire, and ethernet working. On the whole I was very impressed with how much was automatic.

Things I had to do manually:

  • I needed to add a modeline for the 1280×800 screen. I googled that in about a minute, and added it to the xorg.conf file. A look at the man page told me how to get the monitor to use that specific mode.
  • I needed to get custom drivers for the Intel 2200 BG wireless card. That took more like a half hour to figure out the installation process (you need to put firmware files in a specific place)
  • XVideo was totally washed out on the default settings, but playing with the brightness and contast in totem fixed that

And that’s it. I have wireless, video, sound, and I have to test cd burning, but that’s it. Under an hour of poking and my whole system is moved to a completely new laptop. I don’t think I could have done it any faster on any other platform.

uh oh

I apologize on behalf of the sane 50% of Americans to the rest of the world. We tried, we failed. We will get what we deserve, but the rest of you also have to eat it, and that’s not fair. Sorry.

ipod photo

Uh oh, apple released a new ipod today, looks like all you addicts will have to open your wallets again! I’ll give them credit, no other company could get people to spend six hundred dollars on a music player / teeny tiny photo viewer.

Stewart on Crossfire and the media

Jon Stewart appears on Crossfire, and launches into a scathing attack on political theater, partisan hackery, and damaging devisiveness.

Download the torrent, tell your friends. Everyone should see this.

Tucker Carlson: “We’re not here to confront you, we’re here to love you.”
Stewart: “I’m not. I’m here to confront you, because we need help from the media and they’re hurting us. … To do a debate would be great, but that’s like saying pro wrestling is a show about athletic competition. … You’re doing theater, when you should be doing debate. What you do is not honest. What you do is partisan hackery.”

Pricewatch becomes more perfect

Pricewatch.com has always been a great resource for finding cheap prices for computer hardware, but it always had a basic flaw — the cheapest prices are usually offered by the most disreputable vendors. So browsing pricewatch required a combination of correlating its search results with resellerratings.com to see if the person selling the item was any good.

No more!

Now pricewatch lists the positive feedback rating for every company listed. woo!