While the US gets a statue of Liberty, what does Japan get? That’s right, a freaking huge mech. More specifically, a Gundam. Please note what you will see in the video below is not fake or composited, it truly is a 1:1 statue of the iconic Gundam. In addition to that it’s head moves, it lights up and there is even smoke that occasionally comes out of the vents and exhaust. I wouldn’t mind if they built one these mechs or robots here in the US. I also don’t mean one the size of a car, but a full blown 1:1 sized one. Maybe a Voltron or heck how about something American made like the Iron Giant. Anyways those that loves anime, Gundam and robots don’t get too excited because the likely hood this thing will come around to your neighborhood is nil.
People are doing some really cool things with projections. Take this for instance. It’s real and I’m guessing you have to stay at one place to see the true effect. The room has to be pretty much dark as well. None the less, it’s still amazing. Makes me wonder if the little scanner light at the beginning is required to get where all the placement of the object are before the light show begins. Enough of trying to figure it out and let’s just watch the video below. Created by the company Superbien from France.
The first ever Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo (C2E2) took place this past weekend and attendance was pretty good. While I did collect comic books when I was younger, I had never been to a comic convention even though Wizard World was always nearby. Since I can attend almost any conventions taking place at the McCormick Place, I went ahead and checked out C2E2.
For a Sunday, the place was pretty packed. As you might expect, it was Geek heaven however there were also a few normal people roaming around. Marvel’s booth seemed to have attracted the biggest crowd. They were playing some kind of game, but I couldn’t get close enough to the announcer to figure out what they were playing. They had questions such as “Name the inker who colored the brother of Spiderman’s worst enemy in issue 154!“ Of course, that was not the exact question, but everyone was yelling the name as if it was common knowledge. My geekiness is surely fading as I had no idea who the hell the artist that everyone was yelling. Marvel also had pieces of Iron Man’s suit from the Iron Man movies.
There were lots of dudes dressed as Storm Troopers and Cobra Commanders. As usual, there were the occasional scantily clad ladies, some of whom were giving out free sodas. Nintendo was there and vendors were selling everything from figurines, manga toys, posters, and really old comic books. Lots of artists were available for chat and autographs. Unfortunately for me, the only name I recognized was “Alex Ross“. In the end, C2E2 turned out well, but I’ve really become a less-than-average comic book fan.
My pictures turned out horrible as I only had my phone. Either way, here they are:
Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo 2010 – Main Floor
The Streamy Awards 2010 was this Sunday and as of this writing, it has yet to end. I’ve never seen a Streamy Award show, but if this is how we are going to celebrate the people responsible for the web’s creative video content, we are in big trouble! This award show sucks. It’s freaking long and they really need to be original with the format because it looks like every other freaking award show on TV except everything looks cheaper and smaller. They need to cut the cheese, genitalia jokes, lame jokes, and musical groups from outer space. I always thought the majority of the web video viewers were little kids, yet the Streamy’s had presenters talking about balls (not the basketball type). They’re celebrating the creative web works of non-mainstream-celebrities, but almost every other presenters were from has-been mainstream TV shows/film including Steve Urkel, the dead Buy-More guy from “Chuck“, Freddy Kruger, and the brother from “Married with Children” (yes, he’s still alive). Every award category introduction has a skit and they’re dumb and seem like 10 minutes long.
As for the technical production quality, they need to normalize the audio, as the volume was either way too loud or way too low. The nominees video presentations’ volume would occasionally be low and then go way up when presenters and host speaks close into the microphones. The video occasionally drops even though my 5mb + connection never dropped frames in YouTube or other video sites. The echo voices and repeating voices were freaking annoying!
In a nutshell, the Streamy Awards 2010 was unimpressive. Kevin Pollak had the best line in the show when he said something like “This is the best rehearsal award show!“.
Recently there have been some articles that take a look at what it’s like to work for a production company. Well over at Techland, they show some videos from the Toy Story DVD. The DVD shows the experience of some of the people who work at Pixar. I’m not certain how old the interviews are, but its quite interesting to watch. To those that do CG animation or VFX, remember you don’t need it to be perfect because there are people whose whole job is to make it not perfect. Head on over to Techland to view their article. Now, what I’m wondering is how many of their employees were interns before they got hired?
Well, more likely I’m a multi OS person now. As you know, I’ve been using Window7 beta on my netbook. It will soon been turning off ever two hours and after that sometime in the summer it will totally be unusable. I know that there are ways to circumvent it. I just don’t want to deal with.
I’ve been looking at Linux and more closely Ubuntu. If you want to give it a shot and you’re on windows, check out Wubi. It’s an Ubuntu installer and is all done in Windows and acts like an app. All you do after installing it is restart your computer and boot in Ubuntu. You can even uninstall it in Windows if you don’t like. This is probably the easiest way to install Ubuntu or the other way is just to use the live CD, which boots from the cd. It is somewhat slow though.
Probably the hardest thing with Ubuntu is installing drivers. If your components are built into Ubuntu you’re all set. If your not familiar with the terminal (command window), then you should probably stick to windows or mac. If you’re lucky, they will probably have an automatic installer, but I’ve haven’t seen it yet for the drivers I need.
I tried to set up my wireless network usb adapter (purchased separately). Note, that adapter didn’t have a Linux driver, so it made it harder to get it noticed. I had to look around. Found a similar device with the same chipset. Did all that was instructed. Ubuntu detected it, but I didn’t know how to input my network settings. It did install, but there was no GUI for the device. The built in network manager didn’t see it. So, I eventual went back to my built in wireless card. That was detected upon install and worked with the network manager. No problems at all. I did lose my Broadcom Crystal HD (didn’t matter as installing it’s drivers in Ubuntu was more than I could handle). The gist of it is that if you’re unlucky, you gonna have to find the linux driver, and either just install or compile, make the installer, and then install it.
As far as installing the software, it was a cinch. There are a lot of how-to’s. If they don’t have an automatic installer, you would just install using the terminal. A lot of them are just cut and paste. All the Linux software that I installed didn’t have any issues. The only one were a Windows app running on WINE, but other than that all smooth sailing from there. Web browsing works the same. Flash works well and Quicktime/mp4 works well too. It uses an open source version and it still works as well as the original.
The best thing about Ubuntu is customization. It took me awhile to get it to look right after installing theme managers and so forth. The best thing is it doesn’t seem to have reduced my system performance. I’m running this on a netbook (Samsung NC10). It doesn’t feel clogged or stressed out. I’ve made mine similar to Windows7, but with a black glass look. It’s pretty neat. I’ve also added the Expose of OSX. I didn’t use the multi desktop (very specific to Ubuntu/linux) because I just couldn’t get used it. Maybe later when I’ve matured with Ubuntu.
I do have to work out some kinks. One is trying to get all permission to a storage partition for a non-administrator user. The other is trying to find an anti-virus software that is easy to install and will also detect and kill the virus. You’re asking why do you need an anti virus software for Linux, well I do use Windows. I’m also on a network that has Windows so there could be problems. Also I’ve read that you can still get rootkits/spyware especially if you just download programs that aren’t in the Synaptic package thingy.
As far ditching Windows, well that probably won’t happen. I use software that only works in Windows or OSX (Adobe CS3 Master) and WINE doesn’t work well for those types of programs. Also the driver thing is a big turn off for me. I’m sure they could sort it out in the future, since you can already install programs just like how you would do it on OSX or Windows. If I didn’t need software that only worked on Windows and the driver installation wasn’t so hard, I’d have it on all my computers. Yes it’s that good. Just another thing, Ubuntu feels so much snappier than when I had windows7 except for the boot time. So check out Ubuntu or the other Linux OS. You won’t be disappointed. Check out the video below for a how-to.
