For dinner, I ate a huge chimichanga from Chronic Tacos and now I’m too tired to write anything interesting. The thing was massive and for once, myself and female porn stars had the same concern, “how is that going to fit in my body?” I managed to eat nearly the whole thing, save some fried bits off the end. I am going to regret this sometime tomorrow.
In the meantime, press this button.
Though filming for A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas wrapped nearly a year ago, the above trailer is the first footage that has been released for the third film in the series. I’ve been waiting months for this as I’m a big fan of the movies. Beyond the return of John Cho and Kal Penn, the movie features NPH (who I guess didn’t die outside that whorehouse), Danny Trejo, and Patton Oswalt. Let’s hope NPH has some more classic lines!
I managed to visit SIGGRAPH 2011 at the Vancouver Convention Centre today on day one of the exhibits. I only had my lunch hour available so it was a very short visit. I managed to do a quick look around and spent most of my time talking to people. It wasn’t nearly enough time to see everything. There’s a fair amount of swag to be had but I didn’t get nearly as much as I could have.
The first item you see above is a pen in the form of a Zombrex injection. This is from game maker Capcom and their game Dead Rising 2. In their game universe, Zombrex prevents an infected person from turning into a zombie. A dose must be administered once every 24 hours. The second item is from Bungie and it is a bottle opener. The most popular item of swag by a country mile is the Pixar Walking Teapot. The lineup for this thing was almost the length of the exhibition hall perimeter, which is to say it was massive. I’m going back tomorrow so if there’s a chance any are left, I might try picking one up.
I came home this evening and checked my mail. Look what arrived today! As I detailed in a previous post, I signed up to be part of the Colonel’s Club at KFC. This card allows me to get weekly deals at participating KFC locations without having to remember coupons. I feel quite honoured to be part of this exclusive membership. Though I will admit I am uncertain if signing up for this thing was either a good or bad thing in the long run.
If you live in Vancouver, this is an exciting week for those who have an interest in computer graphics and/or video games. SIGGRAPH is holding its annual conference in Vancouver. This conference is the most high profile for those doing computer graphics work. For the first time in its almost 40 year history, the main SIGGRAPH conference is being held outside of the United States and Vancouver was the lucky city selected. It is a testament to the Vancouver”s draw as a destination city and the important of the computer graphics work being done here both professionally and academically.
Though I work in the video games industry, computer graphics has never been one of my strengths. Other than some introductory CG courses I took, my understanding of all that shiny stuff is rudimentary. Like most of you, I just get impressed when I see the pretty pictures on screen. From a professional standpoint, conferences like GDC are much more relevant to me as they deal with the other technical aspects of gaming making. Having said, that I certainly jumped at the chance to receive a free pass to SIGGRAPH 2011. Through the fine folks at Autodesk, I got a free ghetto “exhibits”-only pass. This is the most basic pass and you can’t see any of the cool stuff in the conference theatre nor can you attend any seminars or courses. It gets you into the convention centre and you can stroll through the exhibits hall where vendors, schools, and companies have set up shop to get you to notice what they’re trying to sell.
Though the exhibits hall only opens on Tuesday, I went to register and get my conference pass today as it was the first day of the conference and I had time on my hands. I know I paid the low, low price of free for my pass but I got absolutely nothing else with it. At the printing station, they printed out a few things with my registration. One of them was called a “merchandise ticket” with a bar code on it. I saw all these other conference attendees walking around with conference materials so I thought maybe even my own ghetto pass had some free stuff with it. Throwing caution to the wind, I lined up for about ten seconds in the “merchandise” line. When it was my turn, the dude at the counter looked at my ticket and said, “Um, you don’t get anything with your pass.” It was kinda awkward but without missing a beat I said, “Ok then!” and walked out of the registration hall.
I regret nothing.
I’m looking forward to going back on Tuesday and strolling through the exhibits hall.
The US stock market took a huge hit today as many share prices nose-dived as people continue to worry about the US economy. Similar scenes played out in other markets worldwide. Apparently in June, Americans cashed out $23 billion in stock from mutual funds, heading to safer ground with cash, bonds, or gold. Despite all the panic, I actually bought stock today in the form of mutual funds.
Perhaps because I don’t know better but I see this as a great opportunity to buy stocks when the prices are low. Even a financial idiot like myself has heard of the strategy of “buying low and selling high”. Well, stocks are now lower in price across the board. You usually don’t want to buy shares in a company when the share price drops in isolation. For example, if a company announces they lost a ton of money in the last quarter, the share prices usually drop. It’s dangerous to buy into that company at that point because you don’t know if they’ll bounce back. Today, however, companies were hit through no fault of their own. The last time I checked, companies like Microsoft and Apple were both down at the end of the trading day. Their prices were down because they were caught in the market panic, not because of anything specific they did wrong. Again, maybe it’s because I don’t know any better but to me, this seems like a great time to be picking up stocks that are more than likely to rebound.
As an example of this happening, I encourage you to look back to the most recession that started around 2008. Stocks back then took a major hit as the value of many, many companies went south. It’s interesting to see that a lot of companies hit share price lows all around the end of 2008. For example, here’s the five year chart for EA. You’ll be able to find many more graphs with the same looking data. Had I been able to buy a significant amount of shares in companies at that time, I would have realized significant gains since then. A majority of those companies rebounded from those lows. They certainly didn’t get back to where they were but the important thing to notice is that the shares went back up. The recession overall was bad but at least to me, it seems like there were opportunities to be had.
I didn’t want to take a huge risk today, so I kept my experiment to well under $5K. I split my purchase between two funds. One was an index fund and the other a US equity fund. I know there’s risk with anything to do with the stock market but I just can’t see this going too wrong for me. Perhaps those have been famous last words that have been spoken too often. Only time will tell.
I’ve had a custom 404 page up on my web site for several years. I did it as I thought regular 404 pages were so plain. You can see mine here. It looks quite dated, though if they keep making Toy Story movies, it won’t be too bad.
There is one site who actually embeds a video into their fancy 404 page. You can see it here. Top notch work! If only I had the skill and effort to do the same. Plus, I don’t own any guns.
In a previous post that I wrote several weeks ago, I detailed the increased activity at my previous employer, United Front Games. As you may recall, I worked at UFG for about as long as two shakes of a lamb’s tail (or about two months) before Activision cancelled True Crime: Hong Kong and caused many layoffs. As many people suspected, the recent re-hiring of several laid off UFG employers was because another publisher had picked up the rights to the game. This week, Square Enix announced that it will be publishing the game, though what its final name is unknown except that it won’t be called True Crime: Hong Kong.
I am happy for UFG as they really needed some good news. Having just one title shipped, Mod Nation Racers, before encountering this huge setback, they really need to get back on track again (no pun intended). This is great news in general for the games industry in Vancouver. We really need every local studio to come out with some awesome games and build back the good vibes we had just a few years ago.
Though this is definitely a positive thing for UFG, there are some questions that still remain. I am sure some of these questions will get answered in time, while others will be kept a mystery. Like I mentioned before, Activision will retain the True Crime IP, so what will SE call this game? How much of the game will need to be redone? How many of these changes will be driven by Activision because of IP concerns and how much of it will be SE driven because they want more creative control? How much money did Activision demand from SE? In general, what are the business terms of this deal? Knowing Activision, I bet they probably didn’t let this go for a shiny dollar. When will the game be released? How many more people will UFG need to get this game done? I don’t expect them to re-hire everyone who left but what will the eventual new team size be?
In the next few weeks and months, it will be interesting to see which of those questions will be answered. At the very least, I’m just glad the game will be coming out now.
I played tennis for the first time this year today. That in itself is both good and bad. Bad in that it took me this long into the year to get some tennis in. The less than spectacular weather certainly pushed that date far into the summer. It was good though because today was fortunately a great day weather-wise to be outside and stroking some balls around.
Perhaps old age is catching up to me since one of my right hamstring muscles got messed up during tennis. I didn’t feel it until I got up from post-tennis re-hydration activities. I basically limped home. When I finally got home, I stretched it out a bit and the pain went away almost completely. It started to tighten up and be painful hours later. I think I’ll be ok but I need to stretch it out more the next time I play.
Getting old ain’t fun.
I was at Ikea this weekend to buy a new lamp for my desk. The old lamp had a cracked base and was no longer usable. While in the lighting section, I saw these LED lights that were cycling through different colours. As I am drawn to shiny and colourful things, I immediately went over to take a look at them. They were designed for accent lighting and they came in strips of four, round pads of four, and in a flexible strip. I wasn’t sure if I knew what I’d use them for. I also couldn’t see where the packages for these lights were on the shelf. Last but not least, the store was closing. So I decided to just leave this for another day and just paid for my lamp.
After getting home, I did some research online. People were using these lights to light up dresser drawers, on the underside of glass desks, under kitchen cabinets, and mounted behind flat panel TVs. The lights all looked great but it was the TV setup that had the most relevance to me. I returned the next day to Ikea to pick up the four strip pack. It was impossible to figure out where these lights were being stored even though the Ikea web site stated there were about 50 still in stock. I asked a sales associate about these lights. It turns out these lights were stolen from the shelves so often they had to keep them in the warehouse area. The only way to get these lights is to pay first and then have your order brought to you at the pick-up counter. Oh by the way, they’re not cheap either. At $40 CDN, these are some pricey accent lights.
Anyways, with lights in hand I brought them home to mount behind my TV. After a minimum of effort and some cable management, I was able to mount all four strips behind my TV. Two strips were placed on the side and the other two on the top. The video above shows the lights cycling through all its colours. You can also make it stay on one colour. A colour wheel on the control knob gives you fine control on the what shade you want. Here’s what the back of the TV looks like now:
I think it looks quite nice and I’m investigating the possibility of putting these in the kitchen for my cabinets. You can back light anything now!