Fake or Foto?

Here's a fun challenge to test your critique skills:

http://area.autodesk.com/fakeorfoto/challenge

I scored 9 out of 12 my first time, but I couldn't view one of the images full size, so I had to guess off the thumbnail.

The current presidency

When you do a Google search for "Obama is a ", here are Google's top suggestions:

Might that say anything about our current president?
Conversely, a search for "Ron Paul is ", has "Ron Paul is winning" as the top suggestion.

Somewhat interesting...

First week of swim practice...

I just got this e-mail from my coach...

All:

Just a quick reminder that we start workout on Monday, August 27th at

6:30 a.m. at Audrey Moore.  We will be swimming from 6:30-8:00 a.m.

then you will have 15 minutes to be changed and ready for Cross Fit

training from 8:15-9:00 a.m.  If you are not out of the water, changed

and ready for dryland at 8:15 a.m., you will be running laps for 45

minutes.

Cross Fit instructor is ****.  Any messing around will result

in your removal from the dryland group...and you'll be running laps

the rest of workout.

Make sure you have sneakers, shorts and t-shirt plus refill your water

bottles.  Should be challenging but fun.

Make sure you order / pick up any missing training equipment ASAP.

If you are not familiar with cross fit, you can visit their website

at;  http://www.crossfit.com/cf-info/excercise.html#WOD

Check out the links for some of the exercises listed below (in the

link above) that we will be doing so you are somewhat familiar with

them before we start.  Some of the exercises are done in combinations

of 3 & 4 exercises with even some sprint running in between.  (You're

gonna be sore).  Some exercises are done for time (as many reps as you

can do in X seconds) and others are done as sets of 10-20 reps

Air Squats

Box Jump Variations

Burpee Demo

Dip

Double Unders

Dumbbell Split Lifts

Hand Stand Push-ups (maybe)

Jumping Squats (probably with med ball though)

Knees to elbows

L-sit demo

Medicine Ball Cleans

Overhead squats (with dumbbells or med ball)

Pull-up

Push-up

Wall Ball

Walking Lunges

That should be enough to get you started...

See you Monday.

Audio embedding tracks

Well, I think I've finally figured out how to embed audio well. Here's a test audio track that I made, it's not especially good as I made it up as I went along, but it'll do for a test.

One of the many reasons I don't work in the kitchen

I complimented my sister on her nice smiley faces...

(can't you see them?)

And was soundly berated that it was piping, bunting and drapes!

CPU benchmarking

A while back I posted a video about replacing my CPU cooler and overclocking my CPU. It's currently running at about 3.42 GHz. It was originally a 2.4 GHz CPU, so this is a substantial overclock, especially considering it's using a $20 air cooler! I have been testing it out and having fun with it, I downloaded SuperPi, and ran their benchmarks. Interestingly enough, I had the fastest Intel Core 2 Quad Q6000 series processor!

I ran both the 1M benchmark and the 32 M benchmark, and here's where they came int:

32 M: http://www.superpi.net/Scores/?action=searchScores&test=-12&vendor=&platform=&series=Core+2+Quad+Q6000+series&rpp=20

1 M: http://www.superpi.net/Scores/?action=searchScores&test=-7&vendor=&platform=&series=Core+2+Quad+Q6000+series&rpp=20

On the other hand, people with i7's and i5's are doing it in about half the time mine will, but that's a different matter. I did find it interesting that different CPU's with comparable clock speeds and memory could have such vastly different results. Another interesting thing to note was that my CPU was faster than the fastest AMD CPU! (It was a floating point test)

When we have company over...

When we have company over...

;D

My current 3d models

These are some of my better Blender renders. I created the top two from scratch myself from start to finish, and the asteroid was based off of Andrew Price's tutorial.

Here's a satellite I made in Blender from start to finish. It's for Project 2.6, and this is the current render.

Here's a quick piano render I did one morning. It's not very good, and there's one obvious flaw visible right off! But, overall once I finish it I think it will look nice. 

Below is an asteroid I made in space. At some point I plan to make it collide with the satellite!

Audio system

I'm a bit of an audiophile, and was pretty excited when I got a chance to take home for a day a real honest-to-goodness Mcintosh amplifier! This is my current audio setup:

30 Watt Mcintosh amp

2 Polk monitor 40 speakers in parallel

Close up of the driver tube

Mcintosh amp end view

If you are wondering why the speakers are stacked on top of each other, and in parallel it's because this is a monoblock amplifier, and I only have one :( It still sounds great though. I've got the two eight ohm speakers connected in parallel so I could connect them to the four ohm tap on the amp. This is what I have been working on at my job, and I got to take it home to listen to it once I had fixed it. It had been rewired to some weird design with horrible distortion, and I had to rewire it to the original Mcintosh schematic, which took a while, and then I had to go through and troubleshoot what I did wrong, which took significantly longer!

At any rate, I've run hundreds of audio tracks through it in the short time I've been listening to it, and it sounds great! Now I have to take it back tomorrow...     ; /