Meshlab

MeshLab

On of my student pointed this out to me.  Great way to view and edit STL files.

Happy Madi Gras

Happy Haunt Season

Ok, this just made all the indescribable horror quite logical...ish

My wife and I have been posting trip reports from Japan on our wedding/marriage blog
http://www.nouveauromance.us/blog/

Great find!

http://www.4ad.com/features/2009/

quoted from betterpropaganda.com

To celebrate another year of quality 4AD recordings, you can now download a zip containing a track from each of the records they released in 2009, featuring Atlas Sound, The Big Pink, Camera Obscura, The National, Deerhunter, Tune-Yards, M.Ward, St. Vincent and more.

Well, the wedding is over and Christmas is almost here, or at the DLR it is here. So with that said...

Now Married

Eek! Only 12 days to my wedding!

EDIT: I have been trying to type this for a few weeks. Sunday the worst happened... I broke my screen on my Eeepc (stepping on it none the less, the fiancee was shocked about how calm I was when I heard the crack) to the point where I could see nothing, it was bad. Fortunately I came across many websites and forums that made it clear that I was not doomed. $40 and 3 days shipping later I have replaced the screen from following the directions from this website http://www.oshady.com/eeepc/ (only difference was in my hinges the design is different and had to just squeeze in to remove the last 2 screws holding the screen.
Now as soon as I get this done I need to get to the last details for the wedding... eeek! only days away!


I have to first say I have a strong appreciation for Knott's (Scary Farm) Halloween Haunt for year after year keeping me coming back, there have been some bad years but many more great years like this one.

Ok Haunt review time

Scare Zones

• Ghost Town: Great year in the town, lots of fog, and even more screams. It was good to see some of the old faces still around after all these years.
  5 out of 5
  
  
• The Gauntlet: Some new faces but still had lots of energy and scares. Though in some ways it seamed that there were less scares over all.
  4 out of 5
  
  
• CarnEVIL: What can I say.... Awesome and great, these clowns kept rocking all night long and were just evil in a good way.
  5 out of 5

MAZES

• Lockdown: The Asylum: This was a good update to a maze that had been top notch for some time. It was by far the best "prison" maze I have seen, just a tad better than Hellgate Prison at HHN USF, but did not have the "sexy gothic-ines" of the original Asylum. I was amazed at how well just a re theme to an existing structure worked.
  5 out of 5
  
  
• Terror of London: Wow, this maze was amazing! Great talent and great theming! Huge, long maze with many large rooms and lots of detail. A Gothic grave yard, a bordello with all the details on the walls, tables, etc. It even has the a boat on the water! I can not say how much I love this maze.
  5 out of 5
  
  
• Dia de los Muertos in 3-D: Another just outstanding maze, huge maze that featured something I had not seen executed so well since the days of "Lair of the Vampyre" and that is LARGE rooms. this maze only featured halls to connect the large rooms. 2nd, this was the best use of 3D since Malice in Wonderland. This maze was not a comedy funny maze per say, but it was not necessary a serious maze, it was just beautiful and fun. The only negative was at the end of the maze is a jungle area, the 2 monsters in this room were looking like they were more board that a 16 yr old in a elementary math class every time we went through. The rest of the maze makes up for this hands over!
  5 out of 5
  
  more to come when I have more time, so off to wedding prepping!
  

Yikes! It is almost October again...

So much to do...

• haunts (no Universal this year, after last years "ooh, lets soak you as you go through the mazes to the point that you need to wring out your clothes)
• decorating the parents house for halloween
  
• decorate our house :-P (like we have time for that... well, maybe....)
• finishing up getting the wedding ready to go (this one might just kill the two of us)
• and worst of all MIDTERMS...

anyway look back here for reviews of Knott's Halloween Haunt 2009 and Disneyland's Halloween celebrations in the coming weeks.

What a busy 2 weeks, comic con (best year ever), getting a phone call during comic-con to sign the last of the papers to finalize the purchase of our house, a frantic drive up to Downtown Orange to sign the papers a 7:00 in the morning followed by another frantic drive back to get to work and then the last 7 days moving both of our stuffs in. On the other side of things, school is returning to session 2 Mondays from now so there is still lots to do.



I had the Pleasure yesterday, just after going a block from our new house to come across a Tesla Roadster. I just happened to turn right in behind it and got this pic up the street at a stop light.

What a busy 2 weeks, comic con (best year ever), getting a phone call during comic-con to sign the last of the papers to finalize the purchase of our house,

This is a wonderful look and how the Mouse House used to be run and a look at how much different things used to be.

For those who can not make it to DCA and the Disneyland Resort, Disney has launched a new website for the BlueSky Gallery. This site offers a look into what is coming to DCA over the next few years in the form of interactivity, photos, concept art, and videos. This is a must see.

Here is a video that brings back some emotions to me.

Back some years ago, there was a themepark created outside the New Orleans area called Jazzland. I greatly enjoyed this park with it's fun themes and excellent rides. Eventuly the park ended up being sold to Six Flags and the name of the park was changed to Six Flags New Orleans. In 2005 Hurricane Katrina destroyed much of the park leaving little to be salvaged. Rummers say that there are investors wishing to take over the park and restore it to its prior glory, but only time can say if this will ever happen.

One of my favorite rides at the park was Jocco's Mardi Gras Madness built custom for Jazzland by Sally Corp. To the great thanks of Sally Corp. there remains video of the attraction. The below video includes footage of the ride itself and much of the atmosphere of the park, the last portion of the video includes clips of the park and Jocco destroyed by Katrina.

As a person whom has used lorem ipsum for years and frequently I love this.

http://www.theworld.org/?q=node/24087

Some pictures and report from opening day of Elephant Odyssey at the San Diego Zoo
http://themeparks.demonbird.com/reports/052309_elephant_odyssey/

Official Elephant Odyssey website
http://www.elephantodyssey.com/

The San Diego Wild Animal Park is holding there annual butterfly exibition. Butteryfly Jungle will be running from April 4th through April 26.

So this last week I went to the WESTEC show at the LA Convetntion center, just so happened (see top picture) that they were filming sceens from the upcomming Alvin and the Chipmunks 2 movie. Pictured below a view of the changing skyline of DCA.

It's a little late but happy belated Fat Tuesday

Audio books are rather expensive of an investment, but they do offer a convince to the listener of the added portability and the ability to read a book when driving. Just the other day I was doing some personal research and stumbled across a great website that offers audio recordings of books in the public domain in MP3 and OGG for you to freely listen to because the audio is also in the public domain. BTW when I told my fiancée about the site she was, to under state, quite thrilled and was the reason I felt it was worthy of posting it on here blog.

This wonderful resource for the audio book listener is
http://librivox.org/

Now do take note, not all the readings are equal. There have been some I have listened to that were amazingly read with character voices and all, but there have been a few where the individuals reading was not as "professional". The reason is simple and quite thrilling to me, Mr. Open Source here, the books are read by individuals like me, someone who is not a professional but a fan.


Well do enjoy.

BTW Happy New Year everyone out there.
the images have been a few of my vacation pics just for fun.

October, the haunt month...

Review time. This weekend included the first two themepark haunts for us and The Girls fist themepark haunts ever. We have a new addict! so lets begin.

Day 1:
This weekend the base of operations was the Candy Cane Inn located just in the corner of the DLR adjacent to the Timon parking lot, beside the convenience to access the park the hotel is just wonderful with its breakfast, which in a premium room is delivered to you, to the quality of the rooms themselves. Day 1 started with Halloween Time at Disneyland. Again parts of the park are covered in orange and yellow bunting and banners with pumpkins everywhere. The highlight still being the return of Haunted Mansion Holiday featuring Jack Skeleton and his Nightmare before Christmas pals. To me it did not seem that Disney did much in the way of additions to this years decorations, but to us it was just still good fun to fill the time till Mickey's Halloween Treat. Speaking of which... The DCA special ticketed event was again a lot of fun with festive music and lighting abound. I have 2 complaints though. The fist is that there was, like Disneyland, very little in the way of anything new, mainly the same as the last few years sans what seamed like more photo ops with disney characters, but even a removal of some of what had been a great addition to the event. what was misssing? The additional TOT thememing such as the large bat arch over the entrance to the classic (vintage) halloween decorations in the tower lobby itself. I do have to say that we got a whole lot more candy than ever before and it was even making my arm ache by the end of the night. (that part is not a complaint, seriously a lot of candy).

The Girl and I getting some ERT on A Flick's Fun Fair ride


Day 2:
Knott's Scary Farm Halloween Haunt 2008
Like I had said this was The Girls first year to ever go to a theme park haunt and oh what a year. This years haunt featured 13 haunted mazes and of the 13 there were 6 brand new mazes. The event itself was great, not too crowed and the weather was just perfect maybe a bit windy at times but nothing to complain about.

Now for the reviews, I will rate using a scale of 1 is bad to 10 is what I really like :-P this list is not in any order at all.

Labyrinth: This maze is a new for 2008 and replaced Lore of the Vampire. For the two of us it was our favorite. The maze is not scary and does not offer much in the shape of thrills, it is just beautiful. If you grew up watching movies like Labyrinth, the dark crystal, the last unicorn, etc. this maze is for you with its Gothic fantasy feel. The maze even featured fauns, one of which is rather short and makes the scene. As a side, I so really wanted to just spend some time in the last room waltzing to the music all night. We did after going through the maze a couple of times waltz just outside the exit and for some reason really creeped out some of the park guests who thought that we were a couple of the talent that escaped the maze.
Scariness: 5
Visual Theme: 10
Sound: 10
Talent: 9
Overall: 10 (it just had style) :-)


Slaughterhouse: Again another new house. I had expected the worse from this one, a gore fest i was expecting. It was actually good. The talent at this years haunt was at its top and made what could of just been gross and boring rather entertaining. When you first enter the queue there are guys holding signs protesting the slaughter and eating of people much like PETA protesters (i mean no offense to animal rights). This automatically put a novel spin on the mood of the maze and it continued throughout. The sets were mainly narrow halls with mainly gore type details but there were hidden gems such as one room where bones were glued all over the walls in what appeared to be random locations there was some arranged in pretty pictures of fish and stuff. The talent here was so good that they even creeped out The Girl.
Scariness: 7 (the layout makes it hard to get a good scare on, the halls are just too narrow)
Visual Theme: 5
Sound: 8 (what does metal have to do with a human slaughterhouse?)
Talent: 9
Overall: 8

Cornstalkers: This was a gem of a maze. There are people out there who said that it was killed by the fact that you could see out side the park cars driving by and the rides inside the park over the low walls. Yea, this did knock the total imersion but the layout of the maze and the talent were tops. The maze, new for 2008, is in a location where past mazes and scare zones suffered this one rocked! The fact that you were wandering through a corn feild that had more twists and turns, nooks and cranies, etc. than any maze I have ever been throught made me hesitant on every steep i took.
Scariness: 10
Visual Theme: 8 (the outside interferance did hurt what was otherwise gorgous American Gothic)
Sound: 10
Talent: 10 (this maze had some of the best skilled tallent ever, the setups even got me, alot...)
Overall: 9

Alien Annihilation: This was not up to Knott's past alien themed mazes ie. Alien Encounter. But it was in 3D. The first time through this new for 2008 maze left something to be desired but the second time, with 3D glasses, WOW. The talent did a great job whith what they had and with the glasses on it made a lot more sence as to what they were doing and made there
Scariness: 5 with out glasses 8.5 with glasses
Visual Theme: 3 with out glasses 9 with glasses
Sound: 8
Talent: 9
Overall: 8.75

Quarantine: The 2008 movie maze was stunningly beautiful but it came down to this. The maze felt like a Universal HHN maze. This is not a bad thing per say. The entire maze looked gorgous and felt authintic, the talent played there roles perfectly. But there was just the feeling that you were walking through a horror movie and you knew how it would end.
Scariness: 6 (maybe a bit creepy but seemed campy horror to me)
Visual Theme: 10.5
Sound: 9
Talent: 8
Overall: 8

Lost Vegas: Well, it has its humor but I never have cared for it too much, I think The Girl liked it more than I. It just seemes to meh. That and I get the "Viva Las Vegas" song stuck in my head.
Scariness: 6
Visual Theme: 5 with out glasses 6 with glasses
Sound: 7 (now i have the song stuck in my head just thinking about the maze)
Talent: 7
Overall: 6

Killer Clown College: With glasses, with out glasses, it is just total fun. The sound track is just twisted fun. The art design is just twisted fun. The talent is just twisted.
Scariness: Scary...? I think so, if I was not having so much twisted fun.
Visual Theme: 9.9 (there is some blah spots)
Sound: 10 (such a great sound track)
Talent: 10
Overall: (2 x pi) + 3

Club Blood: First time through was ok second time with less people, wow. This maze is new and is located in the second warehouse behind the Asylum. To get to it you have to go through the Asylum. The fist 1/3 involves waking through the back steets of some city (the props were from the old Kingdom of the Dinosaurs intro) from there you enter Club Blood with its standard Vampire rave. Some how you end up in a hospital setting where they are harvsting blood from humans, much like in the last Blade move. Finaly you end up in the materity ward where little deamons are born. Confusing yes, fun yes, modern vampires yes.
Scariness: 7.75 (it has moments)
Visual Theme: 10 (detailed and all but felt random)
Sound: 8
Talent: 9
Overall: 8.75

Asylum: The last year for this maze and the tallent went full bore! Creepy and disorentating. This maze can not be comfortably done after Labyrinth. :-P the maze has so much chaos (the good kind) that puts you into a panic state nervous at every movement.
Scariness: 9
Visual Theme: 9
Sound: 8
Talent: 9
Overall: 9

The Doll Factory: Still creepy in every way. The sets are unnerving and so is the tallent.
Scariness: 9.5
Visual Theme: 9.5
Sound: 9.75
Talent: 10
Overall: 9.75

Black Widows Cavern: The mine ride is a hard one to scare people on, but this years talent got it right.
Scariness: 7
Visual Theme: 7 (it's a hard one to do right)
Sound: 8
Talent: 9
Overall: 8.75

Pyromanics: Everyone sing along "...were pyromainiacs, we are crazy to the max..." Oh wait that Animaniacs... oops. The themeing is minimal but at least the talent has got it down.
Scariness: 8 (they get so good scares in as you go zooming by)
Visual Theme: 3
Sound: 6 (metal for this one too?)
Talent: 9.5
Overall: 8.75

13 Axe Murder Mannor: Last year for this one too. The mannor is getting old and is starting to show its age (is that a bad thing). Well it is time for something new but the tallent was not giving up with out a fight! Way to go at making the maze still creepy and cookie. if only the second half was ever any good.
Scariness: 7.75
Visual Theme: first half 10 second half 3
Sound: 8
Talent: 9
Overall: 8.75

Well that was Knott's in a nutshell.
Sunday was a quick trip over to Disneyland and DCA to get a ride in on Midway Maina and the House of the Future before Hanna Montana turned 16 and took over the park.

Today is monday and I am beat.

Last week I purchased an EeePC 900Xp. This is a sub-notebook (maybe, though I would not call it, a Ultra Mobile PC, UMPC for short) made by Asus. The 900Xp features a 900MHz intel centrino processor (I know, AMD rocks but I did not get an AMD system!) 1Gb of ram and a 12Gb SSD (Solid State Drive, think hard drive) and shipped with Windows Xp. Though these are not the greatest specs but for the price, just over $500 USD, in a package no larger than a hard bound book who is going to complain. My concerns, which are the reason for this entry, was the ability to use MasterCam on the Eee. Would these lower specs be able to run such a complex program? How about Vegas, the video editor?

Yes and Yes!

First I installed Vegas, one thing to note the Eee does not have a CD or DVD drive, these drives have to be plugged in via the USB ports. Not having an external drive at the time avaiable I took the following approach.
1. On another system, a desktop in my case, I made an ISO image of the Sony Vegas install CD and copied it onto my USB thumb drive. Once copied I plugged the USB drive into the Eee
2. A program I really like is called Daemon Tools It allows you to "mount" an ISO image as a local drive.f
3. Using Daemon tools (dowloaded and installed on the Eee) to mount the ISO of the Vegas Install CD, as soon as I said OK the auto run on the "Virtual CD" kicked in and the install went smoothly.

Note. Due to the limited SSD space of the Eee you may find it advantages to install to an external hard drive or SD card. In the situation of Vegas I installed it onto the same portable external hard drive that I keep the raw video that I will be editing in Vegas. The concern about this process slowing down the entire system or just Vegas is nominal.

For MasterCam Version 9.1 I did the exact same process as above with the exception of, just for novilty sake, I installed it to an SDHC card. Honestly I can say that the Eee runs MasterCam better than many "low end" Desk Top PC's and even many "Mid range" PC's that cost twice as much.

Side note. The Eee has a native screen resoultion of 1024 X 600, it's a wide screen. The standard for most users of MasterCam or Vegas are 1024 X 768 or higher. The Eee has VGA output that does support the 1024 X 768 resoluton. Inside MasterCam there is little to no adjusting needed to see everything, vegas on the other hand does feel a bit cramped and the video preview is just a little postage stamp unless you pull it off. Oh well, that is the sacrifice that you make for extreme portability.

Now about MasterCam X2 MR2...
This was a true bugger to install and in the process I learned a lot about the Windows operating system.
Note! you will need a lot of free space on the C:\ drive. I acutally had to remove some of the larger programs on the C drive just to install MCamX, I did put them back after I was done. It was because of this need to have some space that I learned about windows internals. One is that the Fonts folder, more so after installing Vegas, is huge.

Side Note 1. Did you know that you do not have to have a font for installed for windows to use it? That's right. To use a fontv(not installed, consider you just downloaded it) in an applicaton, preview the font by doubble clicking on it. While the preview window is open you can use that font in your application.

So I grabbed a big bunch of the fonts I knew I would not use every day and placed them in a folder on the D:\ drive where I had space. Another space killer is the folder C:\windows\Downloaded Instalations. This folder is where Windows keeps the entire instalation files for incomplete installations. The other is the folder where all the windows updates are kept, EVEN AFTER they were installed! Why? the folder is c:\windows\installer. Oy!

Side Note 2. When a program is installed usualy it is extracted to the system temp directory which is usualy in the root hard drive ie. C:\. In the case of MasterCam X there was not enough room to complete the installation once it had completed the extraction. Easy fix, right click on the My Computer Icon on the desktop and select properties. the system properties dialog will open up and you will want to select the tab that labled "advanced". At the bottom of the window there is a button labled "enviroment Variables" click it. At the top there is the display of where the TMP and TEMP variables point to, for the install just change them to somewhere with a Whole lot of room, like an external drive of a 4Gb SD card.

Once you have everything with plenty of space the install should go as normal, I used the .EXE for MCamX off the Mastercam website and just copied it over to my external hard drive. To note though is that I made serveral attempts to install MCamX to either SSD partition and to the SD card and all failed. The only place I was able to install to was my external HD, go figure.

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BTW the system is now a dual boot of Ubuntu for the Eee. This install was way too easy and did not involve any partitioning or the not. This time around I decided to install Ubuntu from inside of windows. Honestly I used the tequniques above to accomplish this goal. First I dowloaded Ubuntu for the Eee ISO image. Mounted it using daemon tools. When the auto run pops up it asks if you would like to do a Windows Install. By selecting this option Ubuntu will install into a folder of your choice, in my case onto an SDHC card, and will use the MS boot loader to load into grub/Ubuntu. If you decide that you do not want Ubuntu on you PC any more then it is uninstallable via the Add/Remove programs inside the widows control panel.

The nice thing about using Daemon Tools to install software (or in this case also Ubuntu) is that it is "Green" because you are not using a CD-R or DVD-R once and then disposing of it like an old AOL disk.

Ha HA Ha...
I had to post this, not my normal stuff but just classic.


and...



um...



there are more but, well lets stop here. Well one more... Possibly the best. :-P

img_0047

Summer fun!

Saturday the girl and I decided to take a jaunt over to Disneyland for the sole purpose of Dancing. For those who do not know, every Saturday night in Disneyland at the Carnation Gardens they have a live swing band playing all the classic big band swing hits. We will come back to this later.

The reason for the photo is, when we got to the resort, the girl had not seen Aladin and hearing that it's days were nearing an end and we had some time to kill before the band started playing I would take her to the show. While queing for the show this very nicely kimono attired cupple passed by in the next section of the queue at which point I snaped this picture. The girl and I were determined that after the show we would go up to them and ask if we could get a picture of/with them. Wouldn't you know it when the show let out they were long gone. Oh well... Sill having some time we went to my favorite Disneyland Resort restraunt Tortillia Jo's, ate our food, went to the car to get our dance shoes and night attire and headed to Disneyland park. As we approached the turnstiles to our suprise was the same Japanese couple that we had seen earlier just entering the gate. We rushed right in and got our pictures with them, had a nice little chat and had a warm international feeling afterward. I just wish to say a thank you to them for just being so cool!

Back to the dancing. The saturday night swing dancing has been a staple of Disneyland since 1955. All sorts come to dance here, everything from turists that know how to dance (or not) to regulars that come every Saturday. Some of the regulars even come in full attire of the time. Zuit Suited and all. If at Disneyland on a Saturday night take 30 minuets and watch a set, it is great fun. The girl and I had a great time dancing, even though we were the only two east coat swingers there, everybody else was west coast swing we did pick up some good moves but nothing beats a good series of arch turns into sneeky peet and a skin or to back in to a closed posisition or a cuddle. :-) As a side we also felt that a waltz was needed just for fun measure, even though we were dancing it after the music had ended and everyone was leaving. Cinderelia and Prince Charming had nothing on the two of us!

For those who do not know there is a great website for watching TV shows and movies call Hulu. I have been visiting this site since it was in it's private earily beta mode. The reason I am mentioning it now is because they have just added the first season of Jackie Chan Adventures to their very large libary of shows. The JCA shows can be found here http://www.hulu.com/jackie-chan-adventures Hulu has other great series such as Firefly, American Dad, American Gothic and many more. What seperates Hulu from other video sites is the ability to offer many of their TV shows and Movies in 480p (high res) quality.

Eek, that summer weather is... well... HOT!
Ride Review Time:
Recently the Disneyland Resort added an all new attraction to the Disney's California Adventure park, Toy Story Midway Mania (not to be confused with Florida's Toy Story Mania, only difference is queue, a bit longer track, and the name). This last weekend the girl and I took a trek to the park to experience the ride. One word, addictive! Seriously this ride is highly addictive. I honestly think that this is got to be the future of all solid "D" ticket rides. The 3D effects were very well done and thankfully lacking the "Cheesy 3D Ticks" that many 3D movies resort to. One aspect of the ride that I have seen lacking in other peoples reviews is the fact that the Spinning of the ride vehicles is rather thrilling (not extreme) in a family fun way.

As many people have pointed out the facade is brilliant, the Victorian theme so loved on Main Street USA caries over wonderfully over on the Pier and will offer a great backdrop to the Wonderful World of Color show that will be seen in 18 months. <- it has been reported that we can expect to see new (major) additions coming to DCA in a schedule of aprox 18 month gaps.

I have to say that this is the first new thing to come to the DLR since TOT that I feel is in the quality of themeing of Tokyo DisneySEAs' attractions and full family fun factor of well... 20,000 leagues at DisneySEA.

Back in November I purchased an additional external USB hard drive, over the weekend it decided to start just randomly dropping off line. Silly me, it was not backed up and fearing that I was going to loose many (very many) files (and memories) I tried to back it up... too late, the hard drive would not stay on line for more than 5 seconds before dropping off for a minute or two. Solution! I had heard the forum rumors of putting a hard drive in the freezer and then it would work for awhile. I tried this and it worked for a little while but not long enough to collect my files off of it. The next step was only logical. put the hard drive in the freezer... plugged in! That is correct, after letting the drive chill for a few minuets, I plugged it in closed the door and copied 360GB of data flawlessly.

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On a side note, two weekends back the girl and I went up to Las Vegas to watch the Cirque do Soleil show "O". This is by far the most beautiful theater and show known to the modern man. If ever in Las Vegas and can afford, a better use of money than a slot machine or card game, go see "O" and as always I also highly recommend Mystere.