RyanHarne.com

I used to be a movie buff. Now, I’m a has-been. It’s been more than a month since I’ve seen a movie in a theater. Realizing this, I broke the disastrous streak and saw The Incredibles while it lingered in the Dollar Theater for the last few viewings.

Pixar, you have done it again! The Incredibles is miles atop the quality of Finding Nemo, their last release. I had read an article in Wired about the trouble that designers and effects artists were hitting with the film production. The previous Pixar films had been focused on animals (Toy Story featured humans minimally); however, the texture and coating of animals (meaning, for example, fur or skin or scales) are far simpler to recreate digitally than are human features. Human hair - think of the endless ways a strand of hair shifts just from a jerk of the neck. Human movement - every wrinkle or crevice of the human body is forever dynamic in movement, a fish has a very harmonic motion in water and that is nothing like the moving joints of humans. The results I saw today were fantastic, incredible even.

While I ogled at the graphic work involved, the plot got better and better with each cascading scene. Oh, it’s so good. Certainly see this one for yourself.

It’s 60 degrees Fahrenheit outside right now and it’s March. This time last week we started having a downpouring of snow. ::sigh:: I can feel that ice age truckin’ towards us. We are overdue, in fact.

Ok, I am a total moron. Why? Among many reasons, I never realized that I have been receiving comments to this website. Somehow the upgrade from WP 1.2 to WP 1.5 did not save the preference to receive email notification of moderated comments, thus I had no clue they were being sent. Had I browsed around my WP area earlier, I would have known this, but only now do I realize my ignorance.

And to answer everyone’s questions or reply to comments in whatever order:

Stew: I made the file using a program called PhotoStich that is included with any Canon digital camera. It has countless file-saving options, one of them being Quicktime VR. It’s super easy to do and the quality with which the program pastes photos together is impressive.

Jeremiah: Your 30 seconds were quite more than that; there’s no use in being humble about it, although there’s nothing wrong with being humble about it. However, I chose not to use up my 15 minutes during my extra alloted time.

Laken: I’m sorry, other people aren’t having this file trouble so I’m not sure what to say. Try getting the latest version of Quicktime if all else fails.

Amogerone: Thank you for the driving compliment! And also I am working on getting my photographs posted again. The PHP involved is a bit confusing for me, but I’m working on it. I know how much some people enjoy them because they stayed for only moments at my homepage before travelling to the photos page…

Abigail: I have no problem with that proposal. There’s enough shrapnel in our meat supply already to fully armor Bradley tanks.

Again, I’m sorry about the delays.

As of this moment, I am now in a band. It’s been about 9 months since my last performance with a band and I’m very over-due. In fact, thanks to Allison’s guilt-inducing stares, I only picked up my guitars again a few weeks ago, after a multi-month sabbatical. Sincerely, I have really enjoyed getting back into playing for leisure; I had forgotten how much creative expression is possible with music. An amount that even words of a journal entry cannot emulate.

So, after the audition at Blue Ridge, I was “offered”, as they put it, a position as an electric guitarist in their big, collective, rotating band. This is going to be mondo exciting.

To celebrate or, rather, keep my promise to myself to get a tube amp, I went to Lynchburg Music Center with an old amp and old guitar that needed to find a new home. Ryan, the D.I.Y. lead singer, gave me a straight trade for a Fender Hot Rod Deluxe. And it sounds… good.

Quite an instrumentally sound day, no?

Regarding my post yesterday about a projectile launched into my finger, a staple mainly, here is a wonderful shot of the wound after nearly 20 hours of “healing”.

Please learn from mistake. Admonition!

I purchased the new The Mars Volta album today. I even listed to the 33 minute track straight through. It is very nice. They have a similar sound to Coheed & Cambria, but Mars Volta has less of a mysterious allure and more of a sonic wonder to them. “Sonic wonder” or something like it. The album is great, anyways.

This day has been explosive. So explosive, in fact, that I can’t help spatter my verbal goo all over this keyboard. Eeewwww…

My explosive nature came to life at work. I needed to hang up a piece of paper on my wall using a stapler. Simple enough, right? Of course! So I grab my stapler, look for a release button on the bottom, notice no such button, thus I begun to pull the two main arms away from each other. The tension is a bit more than I anticipated, so my left hand grasps the bottom, and the right on the upper, and with a gentle increase of force I pull. My arms quickly open the stapler up with a moderate POP sound. Unfortunately, though, I felt an immediate surge of pain.

You see, in my engineering genius, when grasping the upper portion with my right hand, I had inadvertently put my index finger over the stapling piece. The POP sound wasn’t actually the two arms coming apart so I can use the stapler vertically, but rather the sound of a staple being projected… into my. finger. You know, the worst part about a staple embedding itself into your finger isn’t the fact that it’s in there, and it’s not the fact that you have to pull it out. The WORST part about a staple in your finger is the pain that rushes through your nerves the instant it is removed because that area now has a hole about it that is quickly being refilled with all sorts of fluids and bloods that your body can whip up at the spur of the moment. That is so painful, so very, very painful. Let this be a warning to you, and a lesson; I’d do a series on stupid things I’ve done, but I have a feeling we’ve all been there at some point.

But the rest of my explosive day came together tonight. OS X 10.3.8 had been giving me trouble. You non-tech people can zone out now, by the way. Actually, it wasn’t OS X, but rather my wireless router. After updating firmware, checking settings, changing this, doing that, I was getting nowhere. I contacted the brightest minds that I know of, but there were no successful steps in the forward direction on this problem (and that’s not to sound disrespectful to the people who helped me, but rather me giving grief to the *cough* Netgear *cough* people who come up with horrible firmware updates). Finally, Nik, an Apple Campus Rep for VT, gave me the cure-all idea. And it cured all of my computer issues. All of them. And I rejoiced.

And now I go to bed because I am tttttthhhhhiiiiiiiiiiissssss tired.