Hoodwinked, and Matt Pharr emailed me!

Another sweet day, lots of interesting times at work and I had a great time. Today I got a huge surprise email from Matt Pharr, author of the book "Physically Based Rendering" awesome!!!!

Since this is so cool I totally have to quote his email here. He must have seen my blog when I talked about buying his amazing book.

http://jutanclan.blogspot.com/2005/11/looking-for-raytracer-book.html
Mike Jutan:
I am taking Graphics next term (summer) at school and I am looking for Raytracer book recommendations. I have been told that "Physically Based Rendering" by Matt Pharr and Greg Humphreys is a good choice so I am picking up that for sure.

Letter from Matt:
Definitely get that one! Buy two copies! For a gentle introduction to ray tracing in general, Shirley and Stark's book (2nd edition!) is good. And Glassner's "An Introduction To Ray Tracing" is old but definitely worthwhile. -matt

Isn't that super cool?!??!! I saw his name in my Inbox today and thought, "wait a second!!!!!!! That's the author of this legendary raytracing book!" haha awesome. So that rocked. This is totally the equivalent of being emailed by a celebrity, in this case it's a Computer Graphics celebrity. :) Very exciting. Well Matt if you are reading this, I certainly DID buy a copy of your book and it was just delivered last week. At first glance it looks awesome and I will be using it a lot next summer.

Ok also today I saw the movie Hoodwinked. It was a good story and pretty interesting premise. I liked the "Run Lola Run style" telling of the story. (If you haven't seen "Run Lola Run", it's a really good movie that is told a few different times from a sortof different point of view.) It was a pretty good change of the Red Riding Hood story and some pretty clever dialogue. The little rabbit is hilarious and very good choice of voice acting for that character. Xzibit is in it too, I think he was the Policeman/Bear which was funny too. Technically some was good and some parts it was pretty clear that they had a tight budget for the movie. I really liked the fur on the small rabbit character, he was this fuzzy fluffball thing and it was quite good. The snowboarding sequences were pretty neat and I liked the rollercoaster part too. There were some parts that I think they could have improved a lot if they had a lot more time and budget, like the texturing, the cloth for Red Riding Hood's red hood and the water effects specifically. But the most important part is of course the story, and it was pretty funny at times and the rabbit character stole the show, he was hilarious. I really liked the hyper squirrel guy too, that was great.

I am probably going to go to LA for a weekend in the next few weeks so that will be really fun and I will definitely post lots of pictures!!

Still listening to the Garden State soundtrack a lot, it's awesome. I am thinking about buying the Mr. Show complete season DVDs. But I need to wait until my paycheque comes, I am having the "start of a new term" money situation where you completely run out of money until you get your first paycheque. :) I should get an American Credit Card for situations like this but oh well it's all good. :)

I am going to get my Mom's 2GB Sandisk Extreme III camera card next week which rocks, so I can start taking lots of photos with my Mom's new Canon Digital Rebel XT camera. It looks awesome but I haven't used it too much yet.

Not sure what we are doing this weekend, Taylor is busy and I am not sure what Jake is up to, but probably the usual breakfast, hangin' out, going to San Francisco etc. Sunday I am going to this super cool comedy show and it is going to be awesome.