I was exploring around Treasure Island (in SF Bay) during magic hour. It was a clear day and the light was stunning. This rusted spiral stairway goes up the side of an old water tank.
I was using a Canon 40D for the day. This image was shot as a jpg (I usually shoot RAW now), and is completely untouched – straight from the camera.
Seen in Venice, CA.
It’s a wacky little instrument. Only three strings, tuned to G D G, so by strumming you get a root and a fifth. And it only has 9 frets, spaced to give you every note of a major scale, plus a flat seventh: G A B C D E F F# G.
Basically you can strum away and hit frets at random and it will always sound okay.
The tone sounds more like a cross between a banjo and a uke than a guitar.
It’s lots of fun, and you can give it to little kids to play, and they’ll be thrilled at how great they sound.
PDI/DreamWorks hosted our Carnegie Mellon ETC students today. We had presentations from Scott (VFX Supervisor) and Beth (Director of Character Technology), lunch with CMU alums there, and a great tour from Hoyt. Thanks Marilyn and Jim for setting this up.
It was especially fun for me to see all my old friends and the incredible work everyone is doing. What fun!
Senator Obama was in town today. We were fortunate to be able to attend one of the fund raising events.
It’s a snack food AND a magazine! As seen at Safeway, filed under “Cooking Light.”
It seems I know a lot of drummers. We went and saw Mojophonic tonight, my friend Peter is the drummer, Jack sings and plays guitar, and Evan is on keyboards. (Sorry, I don’t really know the other guys.)
They were great – some rock, some funk and a lot of fun.
I made a roundtrip to LA today. The top photo is heading south at 6:50am, the bottom photo is heading north at 7:50pm.
I’ve never really understood why the light is so different for sunrise vs. sunset. I imagine it has to do with cool air warming up vs. warm air cooling down, or something like that. Each has its own wonderful quality.
I’m not even sure this tower is used for water any more.
This is a 6×8 grid from the first game I’ve programmed in umpteen years. Given the CMU students I’m working with, I thought it would be good to go through the process of programming something for the XBox, so I implemented John Conway’s Game of Life. The Game of Life is a simple example of a cellular automaton. Mine runs on a 100×100 grid.
If you’ve played around with the Game of Life, you’ll know this is a glider that by following a very simple set of rules will work its way across the grid.