Tonight we took my in-laws to Brix Steak and Chophouse in downtown Coeur d'Alene. For the first time, I had the opportunity to eat a Kobe Beef burger, and let me tell you—it was a treat. It comes with some kind of special mayonnaise and "onion jam," which I was assured was quite good. Those of you that really know me (probably not many of you) know I don't much care for condiments. Except for barbecue sauce, but I digress…
The burger was, simply, delicious. We'll certainly be going back there for more of those. Lorien also had one, and we have absolutely no regrets about choosing a burger over the many delicious steak cuts available. It was quiet, and there were only a few other people in the restaurant. This may be due, in part, to the early hour in which we dined. The wait staff was friendly and knowledgeable.
I strongly recommend that you eat a Kobe Beef hamburger if you have the chance. Even if you're a vegetarian. You'll understand.
As you can see, I've got the texture mapping applied correctly now. I started writing a camera class to handle the viewport, frustum, and orientation but it's not quite usable yet. I also have to create some real images to use, and not just the placeholder 9-wan image that is being distorted.
I just received an email from a "consultant" (which probably means he works for our competitors) hurling accusations at the company I work for about us allegedly cyber-squatting a domain that is a derivative of one of our competitors (probably the one he works for), and saying that we are "mean-spirited and unethical."
Unfortunately, he "forgot" to check his facts—the domain in question isn't registered to us at all. We don't have any control over it. He sent paragraphs of drivel about how evil we were and how he wouldn't recommend us anymore in his "articles."
He stated he was a long-time user (duh, we sent him NFR copies from version 8 to version 10 of our software), but he never paid for the software anyway. He calls on us to issue a "public apology" to our competition and return the domain to them.
What a retard. He'd have saved a lot of embarrassment if he'd checked his facts first!
Today I had a cow-orker create a chamfered rectangle in 3DS Max (it's extremely simple, the chamfered box is a primitive object with its own button) and save it as a .obj file.
I wrote some code to import the format and display that instead of the simple cube that I hand-coded to get started. Anyway, the new object looks awesome—way better than the perfectly square edges of the old model. Enough chatting, see for yourself:
Old model: 12 vertices, 10 faces
New model: 104 vertices, 204 faces
I just picked up a bag of Pistachio Crisps (notice the friendliness to the English!) at Costco on my way home. I can't keep my hand out of the bag—they're terrific!*
*Warning: May contain nuts.
Today is Laura's birthday. I met her at college in 1994, which seems like a lifetime ago. She lives in Sweden and has two lovely children now. Happy birthday, Laura!
I had a lot of quiet spare time at home today, so I thought I'd work on my OpenGL Majiang program. Here's where I'm at:
Today I added multisampling to get rid of the worst of the aliasing, I computed all the surface normals and added diffuse and ambient lighting, and set up the specular and shininess attributes of the different materials I use.
I've also been working on some new textures, so when I get around to rendering the whole game I'll have a good bunch of images to mix things up. It took me a couple of hours to track down some old Chinese fonts, toss out the bad ones, and create new images for the tiles. I'll save the rest of the work for next week.
Last night I watched Eegah, another goofy 60's movie about a caveman and his love for a teenage girl. It also had her boyfriend, a squishy-mouse-faced teenager that sings and plays the guitar. Every once in a while he inexplicably breaks out into a song.
The basic premise was the caveman lives in the hills, captures the girl's father (although it may also be called a "rescue"), and she and her boyfriend go out looking for her in his dune buggy, which is just a stripped down car. She is taken by Eegah the caveman, meets his dead preserved ancestors, shaves his beard off, and escapes. The caveman follows her (and her dad and boyfriend) back to town and terrorizes people in search of her. Finally the police shoot him multiple times and he dies an ignominious death face down in a backyard pool.
I give this movie one empty seat, for the one word (Eegah!) I understood from the caveman.
PS. Eegah the caveman was played by the same guy that later played Jaws in James Bond films.
I just finished watching The Magic Voyage of Sinbad. It's a Russian Sinbad movie, but you could probably just abbreviate it as a Russian Bad movie. It starts out with Sinbad returning home with nothing but a magic harp. He finds his home town changed, the merchants rich and everyone else poorer than ever. While playing his harp by the sea he is visited by the daughter of Neptune, who hears his lament. She promises to give him golden fish if he cast his net for her. Sinbad then makes a deal with the merchants who refused to fund his voyage to find happiness: if he catches golden fish then they give him everything they own. If he doesn't catch them, then they can have his head. They fall for it, and lose everything. Sinbad has his cronies hand out everything to the people, but they're still not happy. To top it off, now that all the riches have been doled out, there's nothing left for him to fund his voyage. Hearing his whiny crying, the daughter of Neptune again helps Sinbad by turning the fish into real gold.
Thus funded, Sinbad leaves his home town and his true love in search of happiness (ironic, isn't it?) Sinbad and his crew sail around the world looking for the bird of happiness, but never find it. They finally decide to go home, and during a terrible storm Sinbad sacrifices himself to Neptune to save the crew. He plays his magic harp for Neptune's court, and is asked to marry one of Neptune's daughters. He picks the princess that helped him earlier, but with the secret agreement with her that she would help him escape to his home and his true love. She does, and promises him that she'll never see him again. He escapes by riding a seahorse faster than Neptune's chariot, which was chasing him.
I give this movie one egg-shaped empty seat, for the woman-bird of sleepiness that Sinbad did find.
I have been annoyed for a long time with an error message I get when connecting to my *NIX desktop via FTP. I run vsftpd. My *NIX box is on two networks, a local and an external network. When I connect locally I see the problem, if I go outside to the public network, everything is fine. I thought I didn't have a firewall exception for the ftp-data (tcp/udp port 20). Turns out that wasn't the right solution. It was my vsftpd.conf file. At one point in the past I added commands for the pasv_min_port and pasv_max_port (my firewall has an exception for these ports), as well as specifying the pasv_address. That was my problem—by specifying the IP address, I was allowing PASV mode to work only when it was connecting via that specific address. By commenting out the pasv_address line (and leaving the min/max range alone), I fixed the problem.
Today is my dad's birthday! Happy birthday, dad! We were going over to have hamburgers and hang out, but apparently he and my stepmom are both quite sick with a cold and the flu. So our party is postponed to next Sunday.
Apparently there's something else going on today, but I don't care about baseball…
Yesterday morning I watched Secret Agent Super Dragon, a 60's era James Bond copycat movie that was way worse than the original. Secret Agent Super Dragon practices yoga, which is how he later averts death when he's thrown into a river. SASD is investigating murders and other strange happenings around a town in Michigan when the trail leads him to a girl in Amsterdam, who later also mysteriously dies, just after telling him about the drug the bad guys are testing on people. SASD sneaks in to the bad guy's hideout with the help of Baby Face (on a special work release from Sing Sing). The movie's poorly filmed, poorly acted, and was probably poorly watched in its day—a perfect candidate for MST3K. I give it seven empty seats because I can't think of any other rating right now.