Category Archives: Link of the Day

Win a signed Ray Harryhausen DVD set

Those lads at BoingBoing pointed their readers to a contest to win a signed Ray Harryhausen DVD set. Cool! Don’t surf on over there, I’d like to maximize my own chances of winning. 🙂

One of the great perks of working Pixar is that occasionally you get to meet interesting people. Ray has stopped by twice in the time I’ve worked here, and was kind enough to sign a copy of his book for me. Little could I have imagined growing up and watching films like The Golden Voyage of Sinbad that I would later be able to meet such an inspiring legend in the film industry.

Don’t just sign up for the contest: FPS Magazine is a pretty cool website, and even includes articles about a little film that I worked on and you might have seen.

Addendum: The shot that they at the top was a particularly difficult one, but typical of Brad’s choice of camera angles: very, very low, with a quickly moving camera. This is one of the cases that RenderMan has difficulty with.

InformationWeek Weblog

“If you’re getting into open source because you see it as a career path, you’re doing something wrong.” It’s not that Linux creator Linus Torvalds thinks open-source programmers should work for peanuts (he doesn’t), but rather that they should be properly motivated. Call it software with a soul, if you like. Only the truly passionate need apply.

InformationWeek Weblog

As I type this there are 41 comments, and it seems like I disagree with all of them.

Perhaps the subject of a future podcast.

Jumping on the Bed Stories…

Apparently over in Lisa’s world, her little one took a header off the bed and bumped his noggin. All seems to be well (phew!) but it put me in mind the story of my little sister (now, not so little, with four boys of her own). When she was little, she used to like jumping on the bed. My dad would hear her bouncing, and of course come storming back to her room and open the door. Upon seeing him, she would launch herself into the air, and Dad would catch her, scold her, then give her a hug and a pat on the butt, and send her on her way.

This happened probably dozens of times, until one day when Dad wasn’t quite so coordinated.

She landed flat on her butt.

And after that, she didn’t jump on the bed so often. 🙂

Apollo Guidance Computer Replica

While chatting with Tom over lunch, I was reminded of a guy who built his own Apollo Guidance Computer Replica. Tom was the guy who got me to write an emulator for the PDP-1 (he wrote one as well) so that we could run the original Spacewar! on a PC, so this was right up his alley. He hadn’t heard of it before, so I decided to put up this link.

Enjoy this step back into retro computing.

The Hipster PDA

I’m 40 years old now, and I’ve realized two things:

  1. I’m much wiser than I was when I was 25, or even 35.
  2. My raw talent, ambition and enthusiasm only carries me so far.

Toward that end I’ve made some changes in the last couple of years. I’m exercising, I’m trying to keep more regular sleep hours, and I’m trying to become more organized. When the Palm Pilot first came out a few years ago, I bought one, and tried to use it. After a month or two it sat unused on my shelf. It was just too much of a hassle to keep it up to date.

My friend Tom keeps a “poor man’s PDA”: a small notepad and a pencil. He’s constantly jotting down little notes to himself which get acted upon in seemingly random order. Not a bad idea.

Over at 43 Folders a similar idea, The Hipster PDA was presented, with some additional hints. I’ve used stacks of 3×5 cards during long weeks of debugging to keep track of individual action items, discarding them as they are processed. I’ll probably try this when I’m back to work (on Monday, sigh, vacation almost over).