The past couple of months have been pretty crazy and exciting.  My brother decided he wanted two bachelor parties.  In the first one, we went river rafting down the American River.  Rafting was a lot of fun and it was nice to just get out into nature and away from the computer.  The second bachelor party was in Las Vegas.  Vegas was fun but I don’t think I could stay there longer than a few days.  It’s pretty draining staying up late all the time, drinking, and spending lots of money.  I came back a poorer man.  After my brother’s two bachelor parties of river rafting and Las Vegas, he got married and decided to give me a new sister-in-law.

My niece turned one year old last week.  She’s just about the cutest thing on two legs…except when she poops.  Speaking of poop, I stepped in some the other day with my bare feet. Stepping in poop isn’t exactly my ideal way of starting a day.

Work has been pretty challenging and exciting.  I get to do something new everyday and it’s really neat seeing the work that is being made.  We definitely have our work cut out for us over the next year.

After work and the gym, I usually have about 2 hours of free time before going to bed.  A lot of this time is spent trying to work on personal cg projects.  Progress is slow but at least I’m getting work done.  I also spend a good chunk of my free time trying to answer all the emails I get about about advice on school, getting a job, complements on my work, questions and feature requests for cvxporter, etc.  Speaking of feature requests, I get a few of those a month. I implemented the first few feature requests but I had to stop after that.  I made that exporter in my free time, which is not a lot these days. Looking at the download count, I see that it’s been downloaded over 9000 times.  Do you know how many donations I’ve received?  One.  That doesn’t really inspire me to spend my free time updating the exporter.  Only Jody was nice enough to click that bright orange “Donate” button.  Thanks, Jody!

I’ve been having a hard time working on personal projects the past few days.  This is how I feel:

This is my Spore creature, Frank.  As you can see, he has a very large suctoped to help him get around.  Watch him dance here.

I read this article here the other day about future technology as predicted by Ray Kurzweil. It had some really interesting items to discuss.  Highlights include:

1. Within 10 years, Dr. Kurzweil explained, there will be a drug that lets you eat whatever you want without gaining weight.
2. Solar power will be cost-competitive with fossil fuels in just five years, and that within 20 years all our energy will come from clean sources.
3. In 15 years, your life expectancy will keep rising every year faster than you’re aging. And then, before the century is even half over, you can be around for the Singularity, that revolutionary transition when humans and/or machines start evolving into immortal beings with ever-improving software.

While some of these seem far-fetched, he does have a really good track record for predicting future technology.  Number 1 will result in the bacon market exploding.  Number 2 will result in not having to go broke every time you fill up your tank.  And number 3 basically says that as long as we don’t get hit by a bus in the next 15 years, we’re all going to live forever.  Sounds fantastic.

Lately, I’ve being wondering through the lands of Hyboria in Age of Conan.  It’s been pretty fun hacking and slashing with Jigglybits, my Dark Templar.  On my latest adventure, I ran into a soldier with no pants:

Poor Balthas, he has no pants! I’ve been playing for a about a week now and it’s pretty fun.  If anyone picks up this game, I’m on the Stormrage pvp server.

That is one big burrito.  I must find the place that makes this burrito.

Today was a pretty big day:

The auto industry puzzles me. Over the last 3-4 decades, cars have remained relatively the same. You could take someone from 50 years ago, teleport them to the present day, show him a car, and he would probably say, “Yep, that’s a car.” Sure, cars have fancy gadgets like MP3 players, GPS navigation, and electronic dashboards. I’ll even give the industry credit for adding useful things like anti-lock brakes and catalytic converters. But in the big picture, cars haven’t changed. I recently saw this news article titled Six New Technologies Will Help Manufacturers Reach the 35 MPG Goal (Without Hybrids). This caught my attention a little bit because I in fact already have that technology. It’s called a 1996 Honda Civic. My car is over 10 years old and it gets better gas mileage than most cars available today and apparently better than most future cars not yet made. Now I’ll admit that a Civic is considered a small economy car, but it is 12 years old. Let’s compare this to the computer industry.

Take someone from 50 years ago who worked on a computer that looked like this. If you showed that person a modern-day computer, they wouldn’t know what you’re talking about. 12 years ago, I was rocking a Pentium II ~200 MHz machine. Since computing power doubles roughly every 1.5-2 years, we have computers that are exponentially more powerful and exponentially smaller. A computer from 12 years ago is no match for even an iPhone from today. So why is it that my car from 12 years ago is more efficient than most cars available today? I’m no car freak, so someone’s bound to tell me about all this other junk that’s available in cars these days, but my day-to-day use with cars has not changed my entire life. Why is that?

So apparently, the plastic that my water bottles are made out of, called polycarbonate plastic (not to be confused with the carbonite that encases Han Solo) contains a chemical called bisphenol A.  A quick search on bisphenol A reveals such lovely facts as “it can act as a synthetic estrogen” and it is an “environmental estrogen.”  As much fun as having a surplus of estrogen sounds, I think I’ll go buy some of those stainless steel drinking containers.

And now, kittens bobbing their heads.