brainwagon

A couple of week’s ago, my old boss from my days in the RenderMan group, Tony Apodaca stopped into my office with a bit of memorabilia from our shared past: a caricature of me drawn by Pixar artist Jeff Pidgeon that was used in the credits section of Pixar’s Typestry product that I worked on [...]

I’ve decided to pack up one of my geekiest projects, my Atari 2600 Enigma Machine and bring it to the Maker’s Faire in San Mateo in three weeks. If anyone has read my blog and would like to stop in and meet the lunatic behind these pages, I’d be happy to say “Hi” and discuss [...]

You can view the entire Nova episode The Great Robot Race on the PBS website. It is all about the 2nd DARPA Grand Challenge Race, where autonomous vehicles race across the desert outside Las Vegas. Cool stuff! Technorati Tags: Robots, DARPA Grand Challenge

I am not alone in my assertion that the good old days weren’t that good. “The idle chatterer is the sort who says that people nowadays are much more wicked than they used to be.”— Theophrastus

Most often when I link to someone else’s blog, it is because a particular article has tweaked some small bit of my interest.  These blog entries are often isolated, and the blogs that I link to often have a high noise to signal ratio.  It is therefore with some pleasure that I recommend Red State [...]

For some reason, today I decided to make a picture of the earth from space, using the NASA Blue Marble Next Generation dataset, some infrared satellite data (from today, no less) and my trusty homebrew raytracer. Ten minutes of work, and I got the image on the right. Not too bad, even if it doesn’t [...]

USA Today is running an article announcing the publication of The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. You can order your own copy from amazon.com. What’s really amazing to me is some of the responses: you can read some of the entertaining hate mail he’s received here. Perhaps it isn’t really very funny though: the [...]

Can the Apocalypse be far off? Buena Vista Games Inc. said on Friday it plans to release a PC video game based on the popular television show “Desperate Housewives” this fall.In the game, players take on the role of a new Wisteria Lane housewife, who can uncover or create new scandals on the seemingly idyllic [...]

I need to call in sick for work.  I’ve got nintendonitis. (via my wife) Technorati Tags: Humor, Excuse, Nintendo

It was announced today that Microsoft was facing a software crisis: their short sighted engineers only allocated space for a two digit total for the number of months late that Windows Vista will slip, and it is now feared that when they finally do ship Vista 119 months late, it will cause… Okay, okay, it’s [...]

Read the abstract of this patent carefully. A toy gas-fired missile and launcher assembly whose missile is composed of a soft head and a tail extending therefrom formed by a piston. The piston is telescoped into the barrel of a launcher having a closed end on which is mounted an electrically-activated ignitor, the air space [...]

Today I learned something interesting while surfing the web: that somebody had made a simple program that can be used to compile your own custom maps for Garmin GPSes. Since I picked up a Garmin Legend CX recently, I thought that would be a good thing to play around with. So, tonight, I tried to [...]

Sometimes coming to work at Pixar surprises you with odd sights. Today, it was this Porsche Carrera in our atrium, which had been modified to be Sally, one of the characters from our upcoming summer movie release Cars. My suggestion that employees should be given one (sans modification if it would reduce the cost, I’m [...]

Funniest…video…evah. Technorati Tags: YouTube, Game Violence, Video, Humor

I pride myself on being able to carry out calculations in my head that cause most people to go for the calculator. Need to calculate a 15% tip? Divide the total bill by 10, and then divide by 2, and then add the results. Easy. Sometimes while exercising on a bike I try to factor [...]