Welllllll, whaddaya know? You don’t have to be a coon dog or sheep to get screwed in Hellabama.*
General
I’m really excited about the upcoming Lord of the Rings movies. I’m hoping they don’t suck as badly assome of the others I’ve anticipated did.
According to a very good article on Wired, Weta Digital, the company responsible for the digital effects for LotR, has started building a wall of machines with the sole function of rendering the Lord of the Rings images. So far Jon Labrie, chief technical officer at Weta, has purchased 16 dual-processor SGI 1200 servers running Red Hat Linux. By the time the films are finished — the first one is due out by the end of 2001 — Weta will have 200 processors dedicated to rendering.
Don’t tell ME that there aren’t any good men left out there.
Unfortunately, due to the fact that the little bugger kept begging me for food until I fed him all the food in his food box, with no source of renewal in sight, my Seaman starved to death.
On a lark, I put the CD in my CD player, and this is what I came up with.
Confession Time: I like Smashing Pumpkins. I’ve liked them since the first Gish release, back in 1991. Granted, I think Billy Corgan is a prick, but I still love his music.
On that note, it appears that SP has released a totally new album entitled Machina II/the friends & enemies of modern music. This album consists of 25 new songs, and was pressed onto 25 vinyl LPs and given away with explicit instructions to be bootlegged and distributed across the Internet. According to fansites, this is the final album from the band.
Okay, in response to the hundreds of emails I’ve gotten —well, fine, the single ICQ complaint— I’ve changed the layout to fixed-width, and removed those “sucky white-on-blue links”. I hope you’re all happy now. All three of you.
And while you’re at it, go <A HREF=“http://topsites.markside.com/top/topsites.cgi?unx"
vote for my page on the E/N Top 100. You should do this every day, at least three times a day.
WOW! NASA is in the business of blow up dolls. Well, ok maybe just inflatable spacecraft. I think some guys at NASA have been reading too much sluggy freelance. But be warned, if you read the comic you have to start from day one and it’s highly addictive.
Okay, Useless Technology Update.
Although I’m pretty sure no one has it personally, keep an eye out; I need a copy of “Suzuka 8 Hours” for the Super Nintendo.
One of my little toys is a SNES Disk Backup/Rom Emulation system, that can do a lot of stuff, but not special chipset rendering.
So games like Starfox, Super Mario Kart and Pilotwings don’t work on it. But with a special auxilary card that contains the DSP chipset, it will play them just fine.
Someone informed me tonight that Suzuka 8 Hours has what amounts to an open-access DSP chipset in it. For all intents and purposes, this supposedly causes it to function like a DSP plugin card. I didn’t believe the concept at ALL , so I tested it with Super Mario Kart.
Now, SMK will lock up upon starting a race, when loaded from diskette. But I tried loading it from diskette while I had the game itself in the slot normally reserved for the plugin card (but not accessed in ANY way by the game ROM) and suddenly it worked.. it was a bit glitchy… but the system was getting minor usage of the DSP chipset in the Super Mario Kart Cartridge….
Minor updates today: moved those goofy ICQ things to their own goofy little box.
I also finalized my stupendous T-shirt designs!
I’m only making fifty cents off everything; be a sport and support my Mountain Dew habit.
I tried to get this for Unx today, but traffic was too heavy to make off with it. Sorry.