Serve another cupcake

Bud Light Presents: Real Men of Genius
(Real Men of Genius)

Today we salute you: Mr. Excuse-Ridden, Over-Confident Kansas Football Fan.
(Mr. Excuse-Ridden, Over-Confident Kansas Football Fan)

Eleven straight wins, you wore that classy "Muck Fizzou" shirt like you meant it
(Pinch me, I'm dreamin')

A season of bloated statistics and over-hyped wins against Junior Varsity competition
(Serve another cupcake)

Losing to a superior team with better players is no match for your what-if scenarios and could-have-been dreams
(The field goal missed by inches)

So crack open an ice-cold Bud Light, you emphatic engineer of excuses. After all, you would've won...if the game was played somewhere else!
(Mr. Excuse-Ridden, Over-Confident Kansas Football Fan)

Bud Light, Anheuser Busch, St. Louis MO

Pickup truck saves an SUV

No, for real! We all know that SUVs are alive, they commit heinous accidents all the time, killing people right and left. The media says so. Well here's a story of a pickup truck that actually went and PREVENTED an SUV from causing an accident. Actually the driver of the SUV was unconscious so the SUV was trying to use that excuse to cause an accident:

Driver's quick thinking prevents head-on crash on GG Bridge

(11-27) 22:25 PST San Francisco -- A Mill Valley man prevented a potentially serious crash on the Golden Gate Bridge today by using his pickup truck to guide a sport utility vehicle - in which the driver had gone unconcious - away from oncoming traffic, the California Highway Patrol said.
A 62-year-old Tiburon woman driving south over the bridge at 6:50 a.m. slumped over her steering wheel after suffering a medical condition from which she later died.
John Beatty, a 50-year-old electrician who was driving to work across the bridge as he's done almost every weekday for the past 30 years came up behind the Jeep Grand Cherokee stopped in the second lane from the center divide.
"I nearly hit it, and the car behind me nearly hit me," Beatty said. "All of the sudden the vehicle in front of me starts to drive to the left very slowly."
The Jeep was headed toward oncoming traffic.
"You never know what you're going to do when something like that happens," Beatty said. "I didn't think about it. I just did it."
Beatty drove up along side the car, saw the woman slumped over the wheel and acted quickly. He maneuvered his Ford F350 pickup in front of her vehicle to block it from moving into the oncoming cars.
"I let her hit me," Beatty said.
Then - with the Jeep still moving - Beatty used his truck to guide it across two lanes of traffic to the right hand curb as other cars passed, he said.
"They were going crazy all around us, but as soon as they saw what I was doing they left me a big hole to do this maneuver," Beatty said. "Everybody just kind of stopped to let me slowly pull off to the right to park her."
The CHP credited Beatty with selfless act that prevented a potentially "extremely serious" headon collision on the bridge.
Beatty said he called the CHP and pounded on the woman's windows.
But she was unconscious and the doors were locked, Beatty said.
A CHP officer arrived on the scene and smashed a window to unlock the woman's door, and a paramedic found a pulse and began CPR, Beatty said.
The woman was taken to California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, where she later was pronounced dead, authorities said.

It's a damn shame. The driver died, but the SUV will live again to terrorize and murder. When will the madness ever end!?

Yeah baby!!

Thanksgiving

The Thanksgiving ritual is usually as follows: I drive home to St Louis on Thanksgiving morning, we hang out at the house for a few hours, then drive to our friends the Hamms' house in Illinois (a 40 minute drive or so), and we hang out with them for the evening. The Hamms' family seems to get bigger and bigger every year; they have three kids and all three of them are grown and married with children.



They're great people .. we've known them since I was a kid. It's always rather odd that as the Hamm family grows, I feel further and further removed from them .. less able to relate I guess. It kinda bums me out, cause we used to all be really tight. But my sisters and I spent most of the evening together instead of mingling with all the parents and children. Jen has in the past brought her boyfriends, but this time John was spending the night with his own family.



Kinda surprisingly, the big story this weekend is the Mizzou/Kansas football game. This game has national attention, and would be the most fantastic win of our entire year (if not decade, barring the 2003 Nebraska win) so I'm actually pretty excited about watching it tonight .. although I may not get to watch the ending, as I really need to drive back to Columbia tonight so I can be home and get cracking on the multimedia movies for the magazine tomorrow. I have about one week to go until I want to be complete and launched. Since the MU/KU game starts at 7, if I wait till it ends until I get on the road, I probably won't get back into Columbia until 1am or later. So I might leave earlier, particularly if the outcome of the game is less in doubt).



I also got my Christmas shopping started, partially by braving the traffic and heading to Circuit City with my dad. After consulting with the ads, we managed to find and bring home a wireless router (that included a new printer for free), that we then hooked up and configured. So now, at long last, I can surf wirelessly at broadband speeds when I go to St Louis to visit mom and dad. So I was up last night doing some Amazon shopping.

The bad news is, I found out this afternoon that my brother won't be coming to my graduation next month. :( I'll miss ya, bro.

In the meantime ... GO MIZZOU!

Making movies

Alright, so last night I finally sat down with The Movies and made my first little picture. Since last night was Halloween, I made a little slasher movie. Click the picture below to download the QuickTime. It's about 70MB download so this is a big fat file. I will see about generating a smaller version that's more web-friendly.



The story is wafer-thin and the title is stupid, but it's a slasher movie so both are appropriate for the genre. I mainly made this to start to learn how the game's moviemaking tools work and see how much control I had over the final product. This took about .. oh .. 7 hours or so of work, which involved watching all the tutorials so the next movie should hopefully not take as long. Also, as the "years" progressed in the shooting of the picture, a lot of additional costumes, props and sets were unlocked so I will have more options next time. (Watching the little characters shoot the film on their sets and so forth it is actually kind of amusing.)

There are limitations with the kinds of things you can do. I'm really unhappy with the control of the titles (you basically have almost none), and oftentimes, the kind of story I wanted to tell was hampered by the selection of scenes available. Keeping a consistent lighting and environmental mood was challenging as well (before the monster's first attack in the bathroom, the lighting is "night" and there is no fog. When the main character rushes into the room, the lighting becomes red and the room is full of steam).

However I had the most fun with experimenting with camera moves. Although complex multi-stage movements aren't possible, the game does give you a lot of control over where you put the camera and how it tracks through a given scene. Lots of dramatic possibilites are there for the taking, constrained only by the size of the set really. I was particularly happy with the camera movements up the stairs while the main character was being chased, and the pan and movement while the other girl was stepping out of the bathtub. It takes a bit of experimentation because you can only control initial mark and final mark, and how long the camera has in the scene to make that movement. But it was really fun to play with.

Anyway, enjoy :) I am sure I'll be posting more of these little things.