A Crazy Cat's Life

I love Snopes.com . It's a website that is devoted to finding out whether urban legends are true or not. Well, I was just flipping through their "What's New?" section of the site when I came across this picture: Yes, it was true. It was a real title on a real TV broadcast . Got to love it.

Just a couple of more pictures of Loki and Monkee. I found out that Darren's niece enjoys seeing them so here's to you :) Loki Monkee

Whoohoo! In today's New York Times, there's a nice little article about the opening of NHL training camps yesterday . All I can say is "it's about freakin' time!" Having a year away from hockey was depressing. This year, however, we're not going to buy tickets to the Devils. We just can't afford them. You figure, it's $20 for the nosebleed seats, $10 for parking, $10 a person for food, not to mention the cost of gas...well, it's too much for us. We're so much farther away from the Meadowlands now (about 45 minutes) that it really isn't worth the trek, especially with gas prices the way they've been. Darren's company does own a pair of season tickets so he'll try to wrangle a couple games out of them (plus they're the good $90 seats). What we are going to do instead is get the NHL Center Ice package through our cable company. It's a bit pricy, but it's about the same price as me and Darren going to one gam...

Man...remind me to never use particle effects in a 3D animation again. In my Computer 3D Animation II class, we got our first project: make a flying logo for the Bergen Outlook (an on-campus media group thingie). So I made a nice logo that included the standard BCC logo but instead of drawing out the flame, I decided to use the fire particle effects to give it a nice "real looking" flame. Well, last night I finished all the modeling and got the animation ready to go. All I had to do was render. By the time I left class, it was rendering at a rate of 1.5 frames a minute. This is a 10-second long animation which means 300 frames! I left the computer running around 6pm and figured that by the time I came to school this morning it would be done. Ha! The damn computer froze at 50 frames. So now, I'm rerendering the whole thing but this time using five computers to render. I've been here over two hours and it's only up to frame 75. It's going really slowly...