From MTV: Richard Kelly's Latest Guest Blog Takes Us To Skywalker Ranch!

Awesome mention of Kate's interview of Richard Kelly last week at ILM in this article:
http://moviesblog.mtv.com/2009/10/29/exclusive-richard-kellys-latest-guest-blog-takes-us-to-skywalker-ranch/

Google Wave first impressions

Joel just sent me a Google Wave invite (thanks, Joel!) Been checking out google wave for about 45 min, seems cool so far. I am pretty nervous about instant messaging in general though, cause it's always so "in your face" when you've got thousands of contacts potentially all writing to you at the same time... it becomes overwhelming in those cases. That's why I literally never run Facebook chat, and why I am invisible in Gmail chat or invisible on Skype. Alternatively, I just turn those tools off when I am not logging in specifically to talk to someone.

This sortof brings up the issue of instant gratification in today's society ;) I like the letter writing style of email in general, by not having an instantly-viewable conversation, email lets you word sentences a certain way, give a certain focus or intention to your words, and really focus on why you're saying something and how you are trying to say it.

Instant Messaging is more akin to chatting with 1000 people, all at the same time, and each person pulling your in a different direction. I always get way too flustered with instant messaging, and that's the main reason I stopped using ICQ and Windows Messenger ages ago - it's just too much to handle all at once. When I go to write an email, I am aiming to communicate calmly with one person (occasionally more), and I want to write a letter at my own pace and send it off once I've proofread it (to make sure it doesn't sound stupid or imply things I didn't mean to imply)... so for the Google Wave folks to say that wave will "completely replace email" seems a little far-fetched (at least in it's current implementation). I think there will always be the need for quiet, private conversation, and it seems too nerve-wracking to have someone potentially peering in and reading my sensitive email while I am in the midst of writing it to them!

An area where I really DO see using Google Wave is collaborative stuff - brainstorming, working with co-workers, planning classes and curriculum... this would be huge. It could even be a more exciting/interesting way to deliver blogging to friends and family. This is sortof like sending a mass email but you get to drop photos and comments and stuff in the "wave", that is actually VERY cool. I also see this as the real implementation of google docs - this is the way that people will actually use Google Docs for business meetings etc (and Google could take down MS Word with this). Pretty cool stuff.

One area where Google might benefit is that I could definitely see using this for work, but definitely not with proprietary files or company information. I don't think this is a plausible tool for a lot of businesses yet, until there is a "private" version that doesn't store any information on Google's servers. But until then, I can definitely see using this as a personal communication tool (rather than sending multiple text messages, for instance). The "invite" feature is awesome, and totally wipes the floor with Facebook's Events feature.

Cool stuff!!

How To Train Your Dragon trailer

My buddy Kurt is working on this!! The dragon looks hilarious, GREAT water shots too, really nice stuff. Looks like lots of great fire sim and action sequences too... badass.

Banff Day 3: Gondola up the mountain

On the last day in Banff, we went up the gondola at Sulphur Mountain and got some AMAZING views of Banff, the city and the rockies surrounding it.

This is literally the view FROM OUR HOTEL ROOM WINDOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

A funny chaise thing and the view of the rockies from our hotel room

Gondola lift up the mountain

Snowy!!

Norm getting onto the gondola

View as we are going up the gondola

View from the other side

This "castle" in the middle of our photo was our hotel!!

Hilarious signs

Good stuff

Awesome view!!

"Don't feed the mountain goats!"

Another hilarious sign

Excitement!!

Norm having fun too

Gondolas coming up to the station

Oh, Canada :)

Our "castle" again

It was a GREAT trip! :)

Banff Day 2: Lake Louise

On Day 2 after the huge breakfast, we went down highway 1A (rather than the Trans-Canada Highway, Highway 1) which turned out to be more scenic. We stopped off first at Johnston Canyon and saw the Lower Falls there. We became quite accustomed to "falls" since the pathway was insanely icy, and we almost fell over like 20 times. It was funny and I took a good video of Norm trying to walk along the ice. Eventually we got to the falls and it was great.

After that we drove to Lake Louise. We were sorry to see that the road to Moraine Lake was closed, we really wanted to go there. Since that was the case, we just spent a longer time at Lake Louise, which was fantastic. We took a bunch of photos, walked along the edge of the lake, and then went for tea at the Banff Lake Louise hotel. They also had scones, which was EXACTLY what I was keen for. Awesome stuff.

Then we made our way back to Banff, and checked out the city itself. It was Halloween so to "celebrate", we bought $20 each of candy at a candy and chocolate store. Yes!!

In the evening we hung out in the heated outdoor pool while it was snowing outside, awesome times.

River near Johnston Canyon

Haha they had an ice cream store?! It was freezing outside!!

Norm trying not to slide down the ice

Still walking carefully on the ice

Icicles

Beautiful

Lots of flowing water too

Lower Falls!!

A weird bird who landed on our car in the Lake Louise parking lot

A little snowman and Lake Louise

Glorrriouuuus. You can see the Banff Lake Louise hotel in the distance

I loved this tree

Hangin' out

Word!!

At the "V" of the Lake Louise mountains, this is the classic postcard photo

Lake Louise!!!

Then, back to the hotel for dinner

Norm chillin' out

Haha

Funny mailbox chute

Banff Day 1: Arrival

Holy crap this was amazing. My sister was at a conference in Banff, Alberta, Canada and as her conference finished I headed up there to hang out, see the mountains, and stay in this sweet hotel in the rockies. Norm got to stay here for the conference, so we extended the stay and it worked out amazingly well. I arrived late on the Friday night (about midnight local time), and thanks to my trusty brand new GPS (and new maps, see earlier post for the map updating excitement, haha), I managed to get to the hotel pretty quickly.

It was pretty dark on the way from Calgary to Banff, but it was pretty clear that the view was going to be frickin' spectacular, and it WAS.

Also, the breakfast in the hotel was AMAZZZZZIIIIINNNNNNG. It was really, really good, and each item was really intense/flavoursome, it was nuts. Even the french toast was intense!

The hotel was absurdly awesome, we stayed in the Fairmont Banff Springs hotel (thank you, hotel conference rate!), and it was just nuts. It was created in the late 1800's by the Canadian Pacific Railway in an effort to get people from all over Canada to travel to the rockies. It has a long history, and a great museum inside too. It's referred to as "The Castle in the Rockies", cause, well, it's a castle... and in the rockies!! Super amazing.

Awesome room at the hotel

The classic "taking a photo of everything in the room" photo

This is a zoomed in view of what we saw FROM OUR HOTEL WINDOW?!!!!!!!

Norm excited for breakfast

Norm at breakfast, fancy!!

This was so frickin' GOOD. Baked apple with marzipan, Pineapple french toast with strawberries on top, and gooseberries were my favourite things.

Oh no, is it raining?! (This only lasted an hour, and then cleared up totally)

Rundle Hall/Rundle Lounge

Chandeliers

Awesome entranceway

Haha, really funny Canadian Pacific Railway clothes/vests etc.

ILM Halloween 2009

Awesome Halloween party this year for work!! It was SO great, tons of good food and awesome people, and some ridiculously cool costumes too. Matt and I went as Hipsters, and I spent a bunch of time trying to find an "ironic t-shirt" - turns out Urban Outfitters had one that said "Socialist" and I thought it was EXTRA ironic because I am Canadian :)

Gelling my hair

Ready to go!

Clark Kent/Superman, Dwight, and a Cat walk to the party :)

Rolled up my pants and ready to go!

Who you gonna call?

Frank, you've got some red on you

Awesome pinata costume

Hao look insane

The McD's and the Becknerwalds looking awesome as usual

AMAZING

In each photo we try to look more and more hipstery. Sometimes it works!

haha

Hipsters unite!

Uma

LOVED the Up house

Perfect

Woo!!

This 50's monster was hilarious

Classy

Haha, a bit less classy

Mary Poppins and Hobbes chillin' at the bar

Glorious

Good times!!

Mountain Biking in Marin County

Haven't had a chance to post this yet... Matt and Ollie and I went biking in Marin County a month or so ago, and it was totally awesome. Matt crashed a couple times but was all good with only a few "battle scars" - GREAT times.

Matt after falling down the hill

Matt showing off his "battle scars"

Deer!!

Almost back at the cars...

Banff is awesome

Hanging out in Banff and it is just amazing. I can see the Rockies from my hotel room window! Absurd. There are HUGE mountains on either side of the highway, no cars (and thankfully no elk either!)

Today we hiked at Lake Louise and it was frickin' glorious, it's that usual milford-sound-y/mountainy/cliff-y situation that you always see on postcards or as the typical Canadian image. VERY cool. Actually, it was cold as a beast, the weather is ok (like 5 Celcius, not too much rain or snow) but the wind picked up on the hike. We finished the hike along the rim of the lake itself, and the view was painfully spectacular. We wanted tea and scones so damn bad afterwards and the fancy Fairmont Lake Louise Hotel had a tea place, complete with "the" view of Lake Louise, plus (yes), tea and scones. It was so awesome I wanted to punch myself in the face, but I had a lot of winter clothing on so that was tough. :) haha.

Anyway it rocked. Earlier in the day we went to Johnston Canyon, which was a nice really fast-flowing waterfall, and a bunch of icey walkways to it. We slip and slided for a while to get there, and it was fun. After Lake Louise we had planned to go to Moraine Lake but, unfortunately, the road is closed now for the winter... boo-earns. Instead we checked out the town of Banff itself, and spent like $20 each in a really awesome old-school candy shoppe in Banff itself. We hung out at the hotel tonight and in an outdoor heated pool while it was snowing outside, that was really fun/glorious.

We had planned to go into British Columbia a little if possible, we'll see if we have time for it. Otherwise there is lots more cool stuff to see around Banff, hot springs and gondola rides and tons of coolness. Turns out Western Canada is frickin' sick, not a huge surprise :)

Happening now in san francisco :-)

Glorious!

GPS update: worked!

Woo! After a bit of a computer-based schlep to get the GPS maps updated in time for my Alberta trip, it's all working again now. I think I even got some fancy new TomTom GPS signal enhancer add on which helps the unit pick up satellite signals faster, pretty cool.

So yep that whole long story in the previous post? It worked! You need to manually delete the maps on the GPS unit, and then use Windows Explorer to copy everything over manually. It did take ~4 hours or so since it was 1.6 Gb of map data and it apparently has only a USB1.0 port. Crazy business!! Anyway it worked eventually which is sweeeeeeet (and means I don't need to try to return it back to Amazon, hooray!!)

Also another exciting computer-y update for this evening (been nerdin' it up, as you can see), I've got source control working on my web server now and this will help any random future efforts for art projects and stuff that Matt and I might be working on. Pretty awesssssssssome stuff.

Why updating maps on TomTom's One 140 GPS unit sucks the big one

And now for a chapter in the "Don't ever do this if you run a software company" magazine...

Haha, WOW. TomTom's "Home" software to update the Map software on the TomTom One 140 GPS Unit is a huge magical "epic fail" of Quality Assurance proportions. This is so terrible I figure I'd blog about it now that I have a solution, and hopefully others can benefit from the research I just did figuring out how the heck to fix this.

When you buy a GPS Unit from TomTom, it comes with Canada/USA/Mexico maps pre-loaded. That's great, but they also include something nice called a "30 Day Latest Map Guarantee". This sounds great - you can download the most recent map from TomTom via their "Home" software, and it will install itself on the GPS device, giving you the most up-to-date maps possible. In theory, this is a great idea, and solves the need for TomTom to supply a DVD with maps on it inside the shipping box, etc.

In practice, this breaks down terribly. The "Home" software downloaded the maps no problem, worked like a charm, and only took 10 minutes or so for approx 1.6 Gb of files, pretty sweet. The issue occurred when the software attempted to copy the downloaded maps onto the GPS device itself. The copy failed within 5 minutes, claiming that there was a "write error", something to this extent:

ERROR: HomeBase/IO: Error writing file: K:\USA_Canada_and_Mexico_P\cline.dat @ .\portable\cfile.cpp(1947)

Now, if you've got a degree in Computer Science, you can see this is some sort of I/O error, and it's being thrown from a C++ file that is internal to the "Home" software's IO module...?!?!! Of course if you are most people who just bought a cool new GPS and you want to update the software to the most recent maps (since it's being touted as a great new feature of this GPS), or perhaps you just bought this/received this as a gift, then you probably have no clue what just happened and you think you broke the GPS. Of course the software did not back up the previous map automatically for you, so there is no way to re-set the GPS to "factory" settings. And since the map update failed, when you launch the GPS now you get a big startup screen that says "No Maps Found!" OOPS. Epic faaaaaaillllll!!!!!!!!

Wow so of course I bought this GPS unit right before going for a trip when I need to use it, and I thought it would be smart to update the maps to the most recent maps before going on the trip. But now I've had to spend 4 hours figuring out why it's broken and then how to fix it.

The problem appears to be the following:
-The GPS unit has only 2GB internal memory
-The maps alone are 1.65 Gb
-The "Home" software does not delete the old maps first, so it cannot copy the new ones over as there is not enough space on the GPS unit

To fix it:
-Ignore all the places where it says you need to "Activate" the maps first, that seems to be incorrect. I think the "Home" software just can't manage to copy to the device correctly.
-First delete the old maps from the device. Be careful not to delete anything important - you have FULL ACCESS to everything on the GPS unit, as if it was an external Hard Drive. Follow the instructions here closely: http://forums.gpsreview.net/viewtopic.php?t=13390 and this site (http://www.tomtomforums.com/tomtom-one-xl/18644-urgent-tomtom-one-140-iq-routes-map-does-not-work-device.html) is good too, lots of people with the same problem.
-Then do not attempt to copy the maps again using the "Home" software. That fails. Instead use Windows Explorer and unzip and unrar the downloaded map directories and CAB file as described in the above sites.
-Then copy the files manually using Windows Explorer to the GPS unit, and make sure not to be viewing or accessing the GPS directory in multiple Explorer windows at once, that seems to make the copy fail.
-Finally... note that you need to set aside ~5 hours for this. Apparently a USB2.0 connection on the TomTom unit was too expensive for this "cheaper" model, and so instead of paying the extra 12 cents for one of those, they opted for a USB1.0 connection which is 40 TIMES SLOWER than USB2.0. (Also, USB2.0 has essentially been a standard for the last several - maybe 5 - years). It's pretty nuts that it's USB1.0, and that adds several more hours to the wait time. WOW. REALLY?!?!?!! ;)

Whew!! Anyway after all that I hope this is gonna work. If not, I will follow what other people on the site mentioned and contact TomTom's customer service directly. Apparently the maps used to be too large to fit onto the 2GB memory and that has recently been fixed by removing some of the "point of interest" data. The problem here appeared to be not that the map files were too large, but rather that the "Home" software wasn't able to copy the files across successfully. Oh yeah, and that it's frickin' USB 1.0?!?!??! REALLLY?!??!?!?!

I'm gonna send this over to TomTom so hopefully in the future they can sort out some of these issues before their customers see it. I wouldn't have minded a bit of extra work to sort out downloading the maps, but it's really quite bad for their customer service to have the software fail, AND clear the maps completely, AND not be able to return the unit to factory install, AND have it take 5 hours to install the maps in the first place. Crazy business.

After all this hopefully I have the GPS working again, and more importantly, hopefully the fancy new map update was worth the hassle!

Rob Kutner and Sheryl Zohn's PSA on the Healthcare Debate

The famed Rob Kutner, legendary creator of "Jewno" (see post here), is now a writer for "The Tonight Show". (Yes, the friggin' tonight show with Conan O'Frickin' BRIEN - just the most hilarious comedian of our time, you know...) ;) Insane!!!!!!!

Along with now writing for Conan (probably my favourite comedian ever), Rob has also been busy at work on some other projects, including the following PSA on the Healthcare Debate. This short (as well as the hilarious "Jewno") were co-written by Rob's wife, writer Sheryl Zohn (http://www.sherylzohn.com). I like the Canadian shout-out too. Nice work, Rob!


"Don't change American Healthcare!"
IMPORTANT PSA on the Healthcare Debate
Written by: Rob Kutner & Sheryl Zohn

Fingerpainting with Autodesk Sketchbook for the iPhone

Autodesk just created Sketchbook for the iPhone which is friggin' super cool.

It amounts to a very very fancy way for modern-age fingerpainting, and since my art skills are similar to that of a 5 year old, this is obviously a lot of fun and results in some silly drawings. Here are a couple of "drawings" so far, haha. I gotta figure out how the heck people make really fancy high-quality drawings with this, I think my fingers might be too fat. ;)

Angry dude

Angry dude with rabbit ears and a cyrano de bergerac moustache


rocky mountains

New Japan and South Korea labels for the blog

Since there is going to be a TON of stuff I'll be blogging about over the next little bit for my Japan and Korea trip, I've made 2 new "Labels" for this trip and all the blog posts related to it. See the right hand side of the blog for the labels list, and you can sort by that if you only want to read Japan and South Korea trip details. Enjoy!

Dave Feloni on Clone Wars Episode 2

Awesome!! Great interview with Dave Feloni, director of Clone Wars from Lucasfilm Animation.

http://www.awn.com/articles/cg/filoni-talks-second-season-iclone-warsi