The Happening, Prince Caspian

Watched the Happening over the weekend, and let's say, there needs to be a 5 mile keep away warning. It was absolutely pointless to watch, and it is up there with crap shows like Mimic and Sound Of Thunder. The premise of the show was really good, but the ending is utter crap. Something like The Mist - where the main part of the show was pretty enticing, but the ending. OMG. Was BAD. Someone should do a skit of people knocking their heads into windows after watching the show. I know I wanted to scoop my brains out.

Prince Caspain, OTOH was a different beast altogether. Now the first show had awesome effects, but I wasn't really in love with the story. Caspian though isn't as magical as the first (I'd compare it to HP1 vs HP5) - but this did not sully the taste of the film one bit. In fact I thought it gave the show much more down to earth flavor. Throughly enjoyed it. Excellent story, and the effects don't seem to be the major driving point. It really touched my heart though, and I did leave the cinema feeling a tad sad at the ending. My only nick was that there isn't enough Aslan! During the standoff of Aslan VS the bad guy, I was really hoping he'd magically transform into a burning lion and like burn everything away. :P This is a PG rated film after all. In fact there was a lot of slashies, but no blood. Definitely a kiddy show. Ah well he did return with a pseudo LOTR trees vs humans ending.

It's up there with Ironman - the OMG it's awesome I don't mind watching it again kinda show. I think I may pick up the first dvd just to rewatch and re-live the show again.

Watched Hulk 2

Can't say I liked the film, effects and all were alright, but the plot.... what plot? And there wasn't enough smashy going on. Not that funny either :(

Ah well. Let's hope speed racer will be better :)

Alvin

Adelaide - Melbourne Road Trip

Quick post. It was a long weekend - Queen's Birthday, so a bunch of us took a nice drive down to Melbourne.

Pics here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/GallenWolf/MelbourneRoadTrip

I'm on OSX! Psych!

I'm kidding! I saw this website a real long while ago, it's a total facelift for XP to have the look and feel of the mac. Given I'm running Virtual Box, I though I'd try it out. But first, I cloned my XP installation (Virtualization FTW!!!) - hence I have a safe spot should I screw up.

It's a 30 odd mb download, and installs pretty fast. When I boot up xp in vbox now, which is rare since I do save-states, it boots up all pretty and white :) One wonders if that is the same screen you get on a real mac.

GW

Adelaide Zoo!

Well, seemingly I actually went out on a Sunday. So no gaming today, but lots of snapshots and had a great fun time doing lots of processing at home.

Today I set my D40X's color settings to Vivid+, from the usual setting of nada. Can't really tell much on the LCD, but back home, whoa, uber saturation! It's very nice for all the greens - I get the kind of saturation and kick that I like, but it over enhances the blues and warm colors. I now need to de-sat or pull down the blues, and some times the warm colors as well, else they are a mish-mash of near-solid colours.

Is this better? I'm not sure, I need to do more shoots, but overall I am very pleased with the results. I much rather decrease saturation than pump it up, but this also does have it's own drawbacks like sucking out areas of color where you DO want it there.

Anyways:

Pictures here!

Barossa Valley

Visit the Barossa Valley today, it's about a 40 minute ride from Adelaide. It's the home of many many wineries, but it lacks sufficient amount of Houdini to make me love it. J/k!

Click here for pics!

Cold...

It's bloody freezing this morning, so cold, I didn't even get out of bed to make breakfast! Weather reports like the lows are about 10 degrees C, so erm. Not good. Breath was condensing just by exhaling (outdoors only thankfully).

I recently got a soft shell (from Mountain Hardware!) for use during home-work-home wear, it's doing really great, no need to wear more than a t-shirt under. It's at work my fingers are freezing off! Damned fingers. Time to hunt for gloves.

Alvin

Indy 4 and Ironman

Just watched Indy 4 oh.. half an hour ago. It was a blast; no complaints. Catch Ironman if you get the chance; it's a full out hour of laughs!

VirtualBox on Ubuntu

Only a few apps left on Windows that I absolute want to use - my mp3 player's incredibly useless transfer program, and Eve Mon, one of the tools I use when playing eve online. Hence, the dual booting. This ensure of course, max performance and compatibility, but rebooting sucks.... especially since you can't have your mp3s playing whilst rebooting. Anyways...

My vfx super was using VMWare to run H on his Mac Book Pro, which works very well, with a minor hit to the screen redraws. So thought I'd give virtualization a go. My last fling with VM Ware wasn't too exciting. Virtual Box OTOH is just so simple to install and setup. All I had to do was create a virtual disk, and then create a new box that used the disk. XP was installed in under 15 minutes, and by installing some "Guest Tools", I had access to my graphics card setup in minutes. What's best, sound works on both XP and Linux at the same time, so Eve mon will be able to beep me when training events occur, and I'm still got my MP3 active.

Happy happy! Now, if only I had the resources to get a nice, fast lappy hehe :)

New Houdini Videos!

Been doing LOTS of Houdini in and out of work; every wednesday is Houdini day at RSP, where a number of peeps interested in Houdini hang out during lunch time to listen to presentations of H. Which is usually like, me, my fx super, my fx lead, and one other comper using H. Which is cool. Especially the last session which utilized some CHOPs. My fx super was demonstrating using chops to create camera moves from the mouse, and I had this really nifty demo of turning Houdini into a real time shooter game. A lame ass game really, but it showed the flexibility of H.

I'm also teaching Houdini classes on Mondays, so long as my work schedule isn't crazy (soon to be, I hear). I was quite surprised at the interest.

Oh yeah, H = Houdini, M == Maya.

In anycase, this post is about some of the new videos I got on my YouTube channel:



Some of my stuff is not rendered, so I'll upload once I get 'em.

Cleland Wildlife Park

Visited the Cleland Wildlife Park after a great breakkie at Serves You Right along Unley Road. My colleague and I didn't know there was a public bus up to the park (only runs 3 times on weekends though), so we took one from the central bus station.

Unfortunately it only gave us a short stay at the park, about an hour and a half? Not enough to soak up the park. Only managed to visit the Kangaroo areas, and skimmed through the other parts. We really wanted to take pictures of Koalas, but no luck finding them in the time we had left :( I'm probably coming back again.

Here be the pics! They're quite special to me, so I'm putting 'em into their own folder.

There is another Zoo, Monarto Zoo like 70km away, I'm going to try to go there soon. In there though, are like African Safari type critters, so I'm thinking of getting a long lens :( 55-200 VR? Sigh.

I have got to get the nice ones up into Flickr... gah...

More photos!

Forgot about my "everyday" camera, the crap sub-vga res pixel grabber on my phone. Got a whole bunch of pics from LNS peeps to Adelaide snaps at http://picasaweb.google.com/GallenWolf/IphonePhotos

More soon! Hoping to visit the Monarto Zoo this weekend. That's like a Safari or so I hear :)

Alvin

Dun dun dun! An update!!

Erm yeah. Been awhile. Work is going well, nothing to report.

Highlight of this post would be the new album I've created on Picasa Web for my pics in South Australia. Visit this linky:

http://picasaweb.google.com/GallenWolf/SouthAustraliaPics

Other news... tried to install Ubuntu 8.04... and failing miserably. Updates do not work, and installing from the DVD gives me a Grub Error 15. (?!!!?) In anycase, 7.10's been pretty ok. Mic's not working (hate linux sometimes...) - but I've got my XP well and running! Eve is installed, so all is good :)

Moving to linux?

Been setting up my USB drive as my main boot drive now, to boot up to Ubuntu 7.10 - was trying the 8.04 beta before, and it killed my install for some unknown reason. It's been quite a while since my last reinstall, and I think the new nvidia drivers aren't working out for me. I have to use an older set, which doesn't seem to affect Houdini's performance. Which reminds me, one of the reasons I am attempting the switch is to try out the HDK.

Games... well since I'm playing Eve-Online at the moment, works great. I finally got the linux client to work. I had to turn off the "Occlusion Queries", else it'd just load up and hang :( Thankfully I can just switch to a terminal and kill the wine process. Else, it's working pretty well at the moment. I can't really play it seriously though - Eve University is currently at war, and I'm quite distracted by attempting to learn the HDK - so I will be sitting this one out.

I also installed Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory and ET: Quake Wars yesterday... took me a bit to figure out all the permissions, but they run flawlessly. Indeed, I may pick up Quake Wars if I see it :P Wolf:ET was the last FPS shooter I was playing, and ETQW is just a real big step up. I do miss the fact that the weapons and teams are not WW2. In another words, I spent more or less a bloody good part of saturday fragging :)

Other games I installed included Torus Trooper - I only tried the Linux version which was a very nice addition to my games menu. There is a windows version, so do try it if you have time. BZTank is nice, but quirky tank FPS shooter. Nexuiz - an open source FPS - er yep I was installing a lot of stuff yesterday lol.

Still got lots of pictures I've not yet processed. We'll see when I get in the mood for 4gbs worth of raws :P

Woo! Internet access!

Moved into my new place a day ahead of schedule. Finally! Unlimited internet access! Woo!

Nothing new, apart from the fact I had subway today (duh). Erm. Tastes the same. Even with the new flavor type of Chicken and Bacon Ranch (?). I guess dressing and vege choice just makes it taste the same. Hmm..

Ah well time to unpack the clothes, then back to some Houdini-ing before bed :)

Cold in Adelaide

The weather seems to be taking a cold turn. Today it's so cold, when I went out for lunch, it reminds me of my 12am walks back home to my LA flat. i.e. freezing. Not as bad, but close. Thankfully I brought along my winter jacket, so it should stave off the cold for the few minutes I'm outdoors. Indoors at work, it's pretty cold, but I also got a light jacket for contingencies. Can't believe some still wear Tees!

I'm somehow (very oddly) getting bouts of insomnia for the last week. Not fun. Been trying to sleep at 12, but lie tossing at turning till the sun comes up. It got better today, so hopefully by next week I can be fully acclimatized. Laundry day tomorrow =)

GW

Works starts

I start work today at Rising Sun Pictures in Adelaide. Lovely place, lots of talented artists, and of course, back to full time Houdini-ing :)

Went out to Chinatown with a few colleagues today, and I'm still not really used to the serving sizes here... ordered a bowl of pork & prawn dumpling noodles, and it's huge. Like double the size back home.

Yesterday, I had a burger for dinner at CoffeX, along Rundle. The bloody thing was easily twice the height of a Carl's JR burger, and tastes just so much better. But then again, Carl's JR generally sucks anyways. Not even going to bother to compare the fries. I'll see if I get the mood for more ebil food - I wanna try out how's Hungry Jacks. The supposed equivalent of BK.

Thank you! Whoever you are!

Was looking at an apartment today, and got kinda lost, so I ended up walking in an unknown neighborhood somewhat lost, clutching a piece of paper (my map :P) Suddenly, a car pulls up, and the nice lady inside asks if I am lost, and needed any help. I have a relative good sense of where I am, so I thanked her, said I should be fine, and we went on our way. The thing is she definitely was not on the same route as I was; she had to make a U-turn into another road. Thank you whoever you are for taking the time!

Touch down!

Keeping this post short - internet access is rather expensive in my current residence... it's actually cheaper to rent a car :P In any case, I caught a minor cold on the flight over, and slept it off last night, and a good part of today.

Weather here is hot... really hot... I guess this is the so called "Adelaide Summer". Thankfully, it doesn't seem as humid as home!

It was really really quiet yesterday, being Sunday in the CBD, was kinda worried as to the lack of people :P But today's all hustle and bustle.

Going to be finding apartments and getting used to the public transport system. Can't wait :)

My handphone is still connected, but I may not carry it with me 24/7 - probably leaving it at home most of the time. Email me if you want my new local number. Cheers!

Live from Terminal 1!

at the time of this post I'm in the boarding lounge awaiting my flight to Adelaide, Australia. I'm feeling both excited as well as already homesick...gah wanna write more but it's my turn to board. More after I touch down!