Release..

March 26, 2003 General Comments Off

I just put the last updates for MacOS X into NeoEngine, and 0.5.0 should be out sometime today. Very cool.

Polish chicks and their doughnuts..

March 23, 2003 General Comments Off
    Yeah, so Kasia and her little sister Agata called me up this morning to beg me to find directions to the nearest Krispy Kreme store for the place where they were at in Michigan. In my usual fashion, I delivered. =)

Stupid kid in the Mazda commercials

    I hate that stupid kid and how he can’t talk right. He keeps saying, “Zub zub” all the time, when he’s supposed to be saying “Zoom zoom.” You’d think they would have fired that little bastard and hired a kid who can pronounce simple words.

Realsoft 3D

    I downloaded the demo for Realsoft 3D. I’m probably going to buy it in another week or two, but in the mean time I have up to 30 days to evaluate it. I’m trying to start modelling a GEGL.

Boyakasha!

March 15, 2003 General Comments Off

Friday is the best day to watch television. Cameron has cable and HBO now, so I go over there to watch Bill Maher’s show, then Da Ali G Show. Both of these are the best shows I’ve seen in a long time. Ali G is, at times, about the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.

On forgetting to log out

March 14, 2003 General Comments Off
    Somehow, I failed to log out on one of the computers in the ex-Linux lab at school. Perhaps I accidentally selected some checkbox that makes advogato remember me via “cookie technology” or something. Anyway, it’s clear that I have accidentally failed to log out, because Cameron is writing this section of today’s entry, and I am nowhere to be found. I sure am glad that Cameron isn’t the destructive type, because he could really be wreaking havoc with my account right now. In fact, he’s such a nice guy that he’s going to make sure to delete that cookie right after editing this journal entry. Thanks, Cameron! I owe you a beer!

Linksys wireless network card troubles

    I got this 802.11g draft wireless PCI card from Linksys, but it only appears to work from Windows. I contacted Linksys support offering to write the Linux drivers myself for free if they would provide me with suitable documentation on the chipset, but they refused to. I’ve written to them again asking for my request to be forwarded to some upper management, but I have doubts that I will get the docs I need.

Hacking..

    I haven’t done much hacking recently because I’ve been pretty busy with the viola. More on that below. Someone asked to have NeoEngine modified so you can set a global path for dynamic modules to be loaded from, so I committed that they other day, but then I got to thinking that that was stupid, so I just finished replacing it with some code to do multiple search paths. I made a new singleton object, NeModuleManager, that you request modules from rather than creating them yourself, and it also ensures that you don’t try to load the same module multiple times.

Concerts

    Peabody Symphony Orchestra had a concert recently that was conducted by Leon Fleisher. We played Mussorgsky Night on Bald Mountain, Prokofiev Piano Concerto No.2 with Alexander Shtarkman, and Rachmaninov Symphony No.2. I thought it was one of our sketchier performances, because we had a lot of rehearsals moved or cancelled because of the bad weather and stuff, but everyone who went to the concert kept saying they thought it was the best PSO had ever sounded. Personally, I think a lot of people just thought so because Leon Fleisher (aka, God) conducted, but maybe I’m wrong.

    Sel Kardan asked Yi-Ping and me to play in the Peabody Preparatory Faculty concert the other day also, so I did. They were doing Bach Brandenburg Concerti 3, 4, and 6. I had been having a really bad day already because my quartet got in a fight the night before, and I had the worst concentration all day. I made so many stupid, stupid mistakes during this concert. I felt really bad.

Mikhail Kopelman and the chamber music concert

    On the mornign of Wednesday, March 5th, my string trio had a lesson with Mikhail Kopelman, who was formerly the first violinist of the Borodin Quartet and then the Tokyo Quartet. He’s a great guy, and and fantastic violinist. We played the first movement of Schnittke for him, and it went really well. We had a great lesson.

    That night was a chamber music concert of mostly faculty, but also with Mikhail Kopelman and a couple Peabody students. It was a really, really excellent concert. It opened with the Arensky piano trio with Keng Yuen Tseng on violin, Michael Kannen on cello, and Marian Hahn on piano. I had never heard Mr Tseng perform before, and he was really excellent. He’s a shockingly small man. I bet he’s as short as Valerie. Then Mikhail Kopelman, Letitia Nyirjesy, Marias Lambros, and Michael Kannen performed Tchaikowsky’s Andante Cantabile from his D major string quartet. The original Borodin quartet played this at the funerals for both Sergei Prokofiev and for Joseph Stalin on March 5, 1953. Following this, Victor Danchenko and his student Igor Yuzefovich performed Prokofiev’s Sonata for two violins. Then we heard Prokofiev’s Overture on Hebrew Themes performed by Edward Palanker, clarinet, Misha Rosenker and Letitia Nyirjesy, violins, Maria Lambros, viola, Michael Kannen, cello, and Marian Hahn on piano. Finally was Shostakovich piano quintet Op.57 with Mikhail Kopelman, Misha Rosenker, Vicki Chiang, Alan Stepansky on cello, and Boris Slutsky on piano. That rocked the house.

On the use of actors in video games

    I’ve been interested recently in how video games are using actors. I recently discovered some of the actors who are in Grand Theft Auto 3 and Vice City. For example, Joe Pantoliano (The Matrix, The Sopranos, Memento) is in GTA3 as Luigi. He’s a pretty big name actor now. Look at those movies he’s been in. Vice City has such people as Ray Liotta (Blow, Hannibal, Goodfellas), William Fichtner (Heat, plus lots of movies I’ve never seen including Black Hawk Down, Pearl Harbor, The Perfect Storm, Armageddon, Contact), Tom Sizemore (Heat, Natural Born Killers, and a lot of other big name movies), Dennis Hopper (do I even need to list his movies??), Burt Reynolds, Luis Guzmán (Punch-Drunk Love, Boogie Nights, Traffic), and tons of other people. You get the idea. These are some big name people, not small-timers.

    The curious thing about Vice City is that they have all these actors of such repute in their game, but they don’t market this at all from what I’ve seen. You’d think Rockstar would be going around bragging about the fact that they have people like DENNIS HOPPER in their game. But no, they don’t. Perhaps they just want to let the game speak for itself without extreme hype. Curious, that.

    In contrast, there’s another game coming out soon that, for some reason, has been sort of lumped into a certain type of category as the Grand Theft Auto series, and is also making use of actors. It’s Postal 2, and it’s actually making use of one actor that people may have heard of: Gary Coleman. After reading some interviews and stuff, it seems that he is their big selling point on this game. They are really trying to hype up the fact that Gary Coleman is in their game. GARY COLEMAN.

On the suckiness of Postal 2..

    I bet Rockstar is really insulted that people sort of treat the Postal games and the Grand Theft Auto games as being similar. The only thing similar is that they’re both trying to be funny, but that’s where the similarity stops because they do it in totally different ways. For example, Grand Theft Auto does it well and fairly intelligently, and Postal 2 aims its humor at the sort of sense of humor 13-year-old boys have. It looks like probably one of the worst games to ever be made.

    Descriptions of Postal 2 say how the game is about “The Postal Guy” (who doesn’t have a name, so they just call him that, which is stupid) doing boring mundane daily things, like picking up stuff from the market for his bitch wife and killing everyone he sees on his way to do this. I think there’s a mission about going and getting Gary Coleman’s autograph. This sounds like the lamest fucking idea for a video game ever.

    The guys who work at Running With Scissors sound like total idiots, too. When describing their physics engine, one of them said: When you shoot someone they respond as they would in real life, they fall! Great. That really sounds amazing. Nobody’s ever thought of that one before.

Tripping to Philadelphia

March 14, 2003 General Comments Off
    I went to Philly on Monday with Sookyung to visit Mr Iizuka. We decided to rent a car because we figured it would be cheaper than taking the train. I wanted to just go and get back as early as possible and turn the car in on Monday, but Sookyung wanted to visit her friend in downtown and keep the car overnight, so we did that. She’s the one who rented the car and everything, and it wasn’t costing anymore to keep it overnight, so it was no big deal to me. I predicted trouble, though. She dropped me off at home, then parked the car and went to her place.

    The next morning we were supposed to meet at 10:00a to return the car, but Sookyung showed up saying that the car was gone. As it turned out, she parked it on St Paul Street in a place she shouldn’t have parked it and the car was towed. Fortunately, the place it was towed to was only a couple blocks away so we just walked over there. It cost $192 to fish it out of the tank, plus another $11 or so to use a credit card to pay. We didn’t have time to just go to an ATM machine and get the cash because we had to return the car on time.

    Philadelphia was very nice, in my opinion. We ate lunch at some place called, simply, Wok that was somewhere around 15th or 16th Street, a block or two in some direction from Spruce. Sookyung’s friend lives on Spruce Street around 15th in a really nice apartment. The whole area is really clean and overall much, much more beautiful than Baltimore.

On going to Pennsylvania too much

    Last week I went to Pittsburgh to do an audition at CMU. The audition went okay, but we’ll see what happens soon I think. If I had expected to have more time, I would have tried to get ahold of Michelle, who goes to, or went to, CMU.

On gently spooking Kasia’s little sister..

    I made an AOL IM account over at Cameron’s place tonight and found Kasia’s sister online while she was supposed to be studying physics, so I started sending messages to her. Of course, she didn’t know who I was or how I obtained a video clip of her dancing at a Halloween party in a not-quite sexy way, and she stopped talking to me as I began asking her questions about physics.

    Kasia was nowhere to be found.