Jimmy

This is beautiful:

A few months ago NASA held a contest to name the new wing of the International Space Station. They allowed anybody to submit whatever name they wanted, but said that they wouldn’t absolutely commit to naming it the winning name if they didn’t like it. So, Stephen Colbert, in typical fashion, called on all his fans to vote for his name in the contest. And he won. (Let nobody say that Stephen doesn’t have a load of very loyal fans!) This, as is well imaginably, created a little bit of a problem for NASA: the name won and it would be…unpopular for them to just ignore that fact, but always talking about “the Stephen Colbert” wing of the ISS does present some odd issues (is NASA endorsing a sudo-politic figure? Etc. Etc.).

So what did NASA end up doing? Well, they didn’t name the new ISS wing after him…but they did name a treadmill after him. Win! Literally. Everybody wins. Stephen and all his fans who voted for him get something on the ISS named after him, but NASA gets to call the new ISS node “Tranquility,” which is more in line with the names they give other space-faring vehicles, anyway. (Although I’m sure every Firefly fan out there is very disappointed that the #2 winning name, Serenity, didn’t get chosen by NASA either.)

And that, folks, is the story of how Colbert (and the Colbert Nation) pwned NASA, and how NASA pwned him (and them) right back.

I hope this made your day a little bit better like it did mine.

Cheers.

-j

I’m looking for something, and I’m losing hope of finding it. I’m talking about the new Friday evening Fox show from self-professed feminist Joss Whedon: Dollhouse (some spoilers from the first several episodes below), and what I’m looking for is the strong, in-control, smart and sexy women we’ve come to expect from Joss in such ground-breaking (and cult-follower gathering) shows as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Buffy, Willow, Faith, Dawn, Anya, Dru, Tara, etc.), Angel (Cordelia, Fred, etc.) and Firefly (who can forget Zoe, River, Kaylee and Inara?)

So far in Dollhouse we’ve seen a great deal of former Faith actress Eliza Dushku being sexy, but not a lot of the other things that Joss’ female characters usually are. Especially in-control. I understand that she begins to become self-aware, and I would be happy to be proved wrong about being disappointed in not seeing ANY strong and/or in-control and/or smart women on the show (OK, the women who runs the “Dollhouse” is probably all of those things, but she’s, well, bad. Where’s our fearless heroine who will save the day in the end?) but my faith is rapidly slipping away that it will happen anytime soon (e.g. in time for it the stick in people’s minds that Joss Whedon has created another show full of strong females). I think I see where the show is going: Echo begins to remember past her mind-wipes and probably takes down the Dollhouse, but…I don’t know. If the show goes the way of Firefly, we’ll never get to see that last part and all we’ll know about the world of Dollhouse is that it was a world where the only moderately strongish females were bad and all the others were helplessly enslaved to their male “handlers,” who show varying levels of concern for their personal well being (ranging from utter disdain to confused pity).

I was hoping I was wrong and that at some point Joss would show exactly why he calls himself (and everyone else calls him to a sometimes sickenly hero-worshiping degree) a feminist. But then I started watching Stage Fright (third episode, I think), in which the visuals were graced with an over-abundance of footage of a very scantily clad pop star performing. This alone did not shock me (anyone who watches CSI or any popular media today is bombarded with such imagery 24/7), no, what annoyed me is that this was coming from the one person I had come to trust wouldn’t do such a thing unless it was really relevant to the story. And I don’t see that in this case it was. It was just sexual objectification of women for the sack of entertainment, and that I don’t think any true feminist can engage in.

I find the Dollhouse story mildly interesting and I intend to probably continue watching the show, but I am very disappointed in Joss and in Eliza. I at times liked Faith better than Buffy while watching BtVS and I think she is one of the most amazingly strong female characters ever to grace our TV sets, and I think Eliza was the perfect actress for the job. What she’s doing playing Echo, I have no idea.

Cheers.

-j

I’ve been having fun in my 3D Animation II class so far this semester and I’ve just (or almost) completed the modeling phase of the first project: a model of a wind-up toy. Here’s a still image of part of the model (the final animation will be lit with an ambient light in addition to the spotlights, so it will be possible to see the entire model. For now this is all you get. *grin*)

I’m really proud of the textures I was able to pull off in this model. I have fairly low confidence in my drawing abilities but was pleasantly surprised by how well the flower petals came out, and the image only took something like 10 minutes to make in Photoshop (although getting the petals to that shape–arguably a large part of how well they look–took several hours of modeling in Maya). The leaf texture, however, took me almost 2 hours to make today. Lots of time notwithstanding, I’m really happy with how this model is turning out so far. I think I have a good handle on how I’m going to do the animating, too, so I’m really pleased with this project!

Cheers!

-j

From the wonderful folks at XKCD:

And yet geeks kinda run the world anyway. Scary, huh?

-j

I’ve thought for a while that we know time travel will never be possible because nobody has ever visited us from the future. It’s a fairly simple argument once you get your head around it, but I think (hope?) it logically holds up.

Anyway, today I had the sudden thought that that might not be true after all and that things we explain away as “alien encounters” might actually be people from the future visiting us. This would explain why: a) these encounters almost always display a level of technology far above what we currently have, b) why sometimes these “alien spacecraft” seem to appear and disappear at random: if it’s people traveling through time they would appear and disappear in our 4 dimensions at what seems like random times.

Of course, this theory presents some interesting questions, like the age-old question of how traveling back in time can affect your current age: if this theory is true and a lot of (or all) “alien encounters” are actually just people from the future time-traveling, how have they affected and changed their own time by the fact that we’ve seen them in our time?

Hmm.

-j

Hey look, planets in other solar systems. It’s actually pretty cool, isn’t it?

Also, the Democrat running in the Alaska senate race has pulled slightly ahead as more votes are counted. I have no idea how many votes are still to be counted, but this race is still all up in the air, just like MN-Sen.

Cheers.

-j

Yesterday I described my room a bit and today I thought I’d post some photos of it. It’s sad because when I took these photos I had my Dell laptop and Western Digital External Hard Drive out of the room to watch Lost on the living room TV but you can probably still tell that I have a LOT of electronics in my personal living space. *grin*

My “computer corner” (note the void where my Dell laptop usually sits, actually I can manage to fit both the Dell and the MacBook on that closer desk):

My bed and new MacBook (plus, on the left there, the cool $60 alarm clock that I bought that arrived and doesn’t work *sad*):

Close-up of the MacBook of Love (um, yeah, I unplugged my external hard drive without ejecting it and the mac got mad at me, that’s what the error message is there):

Anyway. That was fun.

Cheers.

-j

Ack! I haven’t posted yet today and now in 5 minutes I’m going out to a movie with my family until after midnight!

So, here’s a random fact you might not have known about me: I now have 4 computers in a room 22-feet long (my room is kinda cool in that it’s 6×22 feet). I haven’t set up a space for my new MacBook down in my “computer end” of the room yet so I’ve mostly been using it on the other end of the room on my bed by the window, but that means that since I was watching Lost off of my external hard drive this afternoon and had all the wires assorted with that spread across my bed, plus all the computer equipment (one 3-year-old Dell laptop and two 7-year-old HP desktops) on the other end of the room my room has become quite the tech-central.

Mind you I am so totally not complaining about this, but it does make moving around the room interesting as I try not to trip over any important power cords (as opposed to those unimportant power cords, I guess) or kick my external hard drive into oblivion (note to self: back up the family’s photos off that drive as one of my school friends just had a WD MyBook die on him….).

OK. That was 5 minutes longer than it was supposed to be and I’m running late!

Cheers.

-j

I’ve only used them for less than 2 hours since I set them up this afternoon, but these speakers have already earned my undying love for good sound quality at an amazing price (I have yet to make a ThinkGeek purchase that I dislike, actually). I don’t generally do product pimping, but these are some darn good speakers.

That is all. It’s past my bedtime now.

Cheers.

-j

ETA (noon 10/30): on the topic of my love of ThinkGeek: I got the “I’m Blogging This” t-shirt that you see me wearing in the picture on this site from ThinkGeek and a while back I sent them a screenshot of this blog for their “customer action shots” section and they posted it! This obviously means I’m famous. Or something.

You’d think that with the lack of sleep I get on school nights (5-6 hours when I don’t have an exam or big project due the next morning), that I would love weekends and the chance to sleep in and relax, but alas, ’tis not so. The adrenaline that carries me through the week lets down once I get 9-11 hours of sleep during the weekend. It’s really quite sad (/sarcasm). That’s part of the reason that I haven’t posted in several days, despite the seemingly endless list of interesting possible topics (the fact that we’re somewhere between the top of the cliff marked “recession” and the bottom of the canyon marked “depression”; the presidential debate on Friday; Tropical Storm Hurricane Kyle; Sub-Tropical Storm Laura; etc.). The other part is probably pure laziness. Anyway. Life’s going pretty well in my neck of the woods. I weathered the first round of exams in all my classes pretty well. Not totally where I want to be grade-wise, but I think I’ve struck a nice balance between not doing very much school work at all (at least it doesn’t feel like very much, it’s true that I enjoy most of my homework so it probably doesn’t seem like that much) and getting good grades anyway. I’d say that’s a pretty big WIN. I’ve found out how most of my professors grade at this point, and will be making adjustments to my levels of caring about certain types of assignments accordingly. (Example: one professor puts far more weight on the class exams and far less weight on the homework assignments than I was expecting, so I’ll have to work harder on the exams and in theory don’t have to worry as much about the homework.)

I suppose if I spent less time analyzing all my professors’ grading matrices and more time on actually doing their assignments I might get the same grades, but given the choice of analyzing the screwy school system I chose to subject myself to and actually 100% subjecting myself to it…I’ll chose the former every day. And this model has gotten me really good grades, so I see no reason to change it now.

All that being said, there is that C++ program that really isn’t going to write itself and which is due in…26.5 hours. It’s not a huge program, but it does involve writing several different functions and also has several Extra Credit opportunities appended to it, so if I want to take advantage of those it might be a good idea for me to turn to my hard-working Linux box (most of the components of that comp are 7.5 years old. It’s a good little, albeit slow, Ubuntu installation) and start coding (I use my Linux computer rather than my Windows laptop for a couple of reasons: 1. installing a C++ compiler on the Linux box was really easy: “sudo apt-get gcc” [or something to that effect] while it seemed really confusing on my WinXP comp, 2. my laptop’s harddrive is getting pretty full and I’m trying not to install anything more on it [besides music, which is about a quarter of the drive at this point and is Very Important to me]).

Someday I’ll post about how my iPod is the only thing that allows me to survive this life of mine, but…I guess I just did.

Anyway. I’m not dead (4 days without a post, I’m sure everyone was really worried [/sarcasm]), and soon there might be a post about my views on transportation. All of it. It might be a long post.

Cheers!

-jbh