Pixar

Many of you know that I like Pixar Movies, but let me explain why. Pixar is a company that uses 3d animation program called Renderman to make there movies. Renderman is a program that Pixar created. Anyway, they put extensive time and effort into making all of these characters and objects into a movie so that it looks real.






All of the Pixar movies to date look just like the real thing, except for the people in the Incredibles, but that is because they are super heroes. A company such as Pixar has to make there movie so that people will believe them. They have to make the movies so that the people look at the movie and story line, and not the animation. Now this personally makes it very hard for me because I like to watch movies for 3 reasons, first is to see what special effects are in the movie, to get ideas for what I may want to do in the future, and second for the story line. When a movie such ad Pixars recent Wall-E, is done well, it makes it very hard for me to focus on the animation. I tend to focus on the story line instead of the animation. It takes me 3 or 4 times before I start to pay attention to all of the special effects and 3d animation.



Now I personally like 3d animation. And when I finally look at the movies at an animation stand point, they always impress me. The complexity of the scenes is just amazing. I personally have done a little bit of 3d animation which you can see on my website, but I have not ever done anything as complex as what Pixar has done.



Another thing that impresses me about Pixar is that they always try something new. In Finding Nemo for instance, they learned and implemented the idea and ability to make a scene look like it was underwater. The water in Finding Nemo looks so much like real water that if you did not know it was 3d animated, you would have no clue that it was not real. Another example is in Monsters Inc. Sulleys hair was, from what I understand very hard to make look real and move correctly. They had to build a separate gravitational field in order to accomplish this.



Pixar is also very creative, they like to put objects from other shows into there movies. For instance, the Pizza truck form Toy Story has appeared in every movie since Toy Story 2. To see a full list of these instances, click here.



To this date, Pixar has made 9 full length movies. Toy Story, Bugs Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, Incredibles, Cars, Ratatouille, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WALL-E along with many short films including For The Birds, Jack Jack Attack, and the most recent Presto and Bern-E (Bern-E will be released with Wall-E the DVD).



Since Pixar puts so much time and effort into all of there movies, they have to start them many years in advanced. Pixar has 6 Upcoming movies between now and 2012. Those movies are

Up (2009),



Toy Story 3 (2010)




Newt (2011)




The Bear and the Bow (2011)




Cars 2 (2012)




John Carter of Mars (Before 2012). No Picture Available

It looks like Pixar has a lot of work on there hands.

Lively

Google recently released a program called Google Lively. It is a 3d "Chat room" where you can go and create a aviator then go into rooms and talk to people.
Although I do not like chat rooms, this is a little different, it is something that I would actually recommend.
There are a few problems that have not been worked out yet, but I am sure that Google will get them fixed soon.
Also, as expected, many people have been creating immodest or immoral rooms. But you can stay away from them. The rooms that I tend to visit are the official Google room, or the world room.
I have also created a room called the great old west. You can get into it by going to this site.
To learn about lively visit the lively site.
Have fun with it and let me know what you think of it.

Firefox VS Internet Explorer

I think it is time to talk about browsers.
I have lately been working on my website.
And today I decided to check my website with the 4 most popular browsers. Internet Explorer (IE), Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Opera. When programing my site, I have just been checking it in Firefox because that is what I use, and what I prefer. Well being a website developer you need to make sure that your site is compatible with all browsers, so I decided to check. Here is what I found.

FireFox



Internet Explorer


Safari


Opera



Can anyone spot any differences in the photos other then the different picture in the text.
If you think that the IE picture looks weird, you are right. The reason is because all browsers follow a set of Internet Standards which where set up when HTML was created, Except for IE. Microsoft as a company likes to do things there own way, and come up with there own way. As a developer, this just makes my job harder. I personally do not like Internet Explorer because of this reason. Hence my Google User Icon.



I did not make this image, but it fits, so I am using it.

Anyway, I am not going to change my site to work with internet explorer, so you will have to use a different browser. If you want a real web browser, get Firefox, you can use the link below to do so.

Electric Lake

We went up to electric lake last weekend. It was okay up there. Hot in the day and cold at night. The flies were bad, and the fishing was not very good either. Usually when we go up there we catch a bunch of fish, but it was not as good this time, until Saturday night. I then caught 2. It was cloudy and raining that night, and so the fishing was better. I will tell you though it was interesting to bring a fish in while the rain was hitting the water, the waves were like 12’ high, and the wind was trying to blow us backwards. But I got that fish in.

That is an interesting lake, at the dam, our fish finder said 213 feet deep. That is a deep lake.
Many people don’t know much about the lake, but it was actually created by Utah Power and Light back in the eighties. They built the dam, and they control it. Before they filled up the lake, there was this old ghost town in the bottom somewhere called Connellsville. About 4 years ago they discovered that the lake was leaking into a mine somewhere around there, so they dropped the water about 50 feet to see if they could fix the problem. They started pumping the water from the mine back into the lake. Anyway, I do not know what is going on with that mine now, but the lake is full again, and the water from the mine is still flowing in.

One trip a few years ago, we were fishing, trolling on the lake, and all of a sudden I got a fish. Well I started reeling in, but I couldn’t reel in. That fish was pulling hard on that hook. My fishing pole looked like a horse shoe. I was fighting that fish for a good 10 seconds with my pole bent over to the side of the boat. Then my line broke. I was using 8 lb test line, but that fish just broke it like it was a tooth pick. It must have been a good sized fish down there. I never got to see that fish, but it would of probably of been the biggest fish I would ever have on.

Anyway, I had some pictures, but they got deleted on accident. I will have to get some from my brother and post them.

Below I have included a map of the lake, incase you don’t know where it is at.

View Larger Map

My Website

I have finally got to putting all of my stuff on my website. Well some of my stuff on my website.
I will continue to put stuff on it, but if you want to take a look, you can visit it at http://gbfarns16.googlepages.com/index.html.
Let me know what you think.
I know that a lot of pages are saying that they are under construction. I just made them, and I have not put anything on them yet, but I will edventually put stuff on them, Maybe.

Wall-E

Post Number 3 for today.

I went and seen Disney-Pixars Wall-E. It was better then I expected, and I expected a lot, it being a Pixar movie and all. In case you don’t know, Pixar uses a program called Render Man to make there movies. Render Man is a Software Program Created by Pixar specifically for 3d animation. Anyway, back to Wall-E. As many of you know, I tend to watch movies to look at the effects and all of the tricks that are in the movie. I was extremely impressed on this movie, Pixar took some time made Wall-E the robot a very complex character. The most impressive part of Wall-E the robot, was how his solar panel unfolds. It was amazing. I do not want to spoil the movie to much for you, so I will not say much more about it, but I would recommend seeing it.

Google Reader

Post Number 2 for today
Some of you know that I use Google Reader to read blogs so that I do not have to visit the websites of the blogs all the time.
I am currently subscribed to 55 different blogs. But let me tell you the story behind why I use google reader, and why I am subscribed to so many blogs.
Most of you know that I am very interested and keen to technology, and media. I originally started using google reader and reading blogs so that I could keep up with all of the current things that Google and other companies are doing in media and technology. Since I started using Google Reader, I have increased what I read and what I am interested in. Although 14 of those 55 blogs are from Google, or Google related, I also find that I am reading many blogs related to space and NASA. In fact 5 of my subscriptions are to NASA sites. Anyway, let me get to the point here, I know that most of you do not like to use a Blog reader, but I have another good reason for you to use one. On the LDS.org site there are many blogs you can subscribe to. Many of them are great, but If you are going to read them I would recommend using a reader such as Google Reader. That way you can subscribe to multiple sites, and can view them all in one site.
In order go use a Reader you must get a account. Like all other services, Google reader is free, and 99.9% of all Blogs are free to subscribe to.
Once you create an account, all you have to do is look for the little orange RSS Feed button on a page, like the one listed below. There are many different views of these feed buttons, but they are almost always orange, and always have the white shape on them.


You just click on that button, it is that simple, and then you can read anything that any of these blogs post without even visiting the sites.

Re: Simtek Fence

It looks like I am going to be posting three times today. Here is the first one. If you don’t know, I work for SimTek Fence. I manage there website along with other things. On my original post, and the reason I started posting is so I could increase the standings of the SimTek Fence Website. By putting blog posts and likes all over the internet, a search engine thinks that the site is more popular then it really is, therefore it increases the standing of the website in the search engine. It is called Website Optimization. It is complicated stuff. Anyway, I started posting in order to use my blog as a location to help boost the stats of that site. I realized just recently that my blog is set to where Google does not see it, which makes my attempt to at increasing the site states almost useless. The only way it helps is to have other people click on the links provided in the text. That way it references it as a bounce, and not a link. Anyway, I don’t want to go into to much detail. If I do, I will probably confuse every one.

Nerd

Nerd:
1. An intelligent but single-minded person obsessed with a nonsocial hobby or pursuit.
2. A person who is single-minded or accomplished in scientific or technical pursuits but is felt to be socially inept.

Does that sound like someone we know?

My Blog Content

I thought I would take a minute and talk about all of the stuff on my side bar, and bottom bar. So here we go.
The first thing you see if a box with a bunch of things links in it. This is a read my favorite blog posts from all of the blogs that I read. I use a program called Google reader, which allows me to share my favorite blog posts. Once I push share on Google reader it show up in this box. You will see posts from multiple blogs in this box including things about Google, and about NASA along with many other things.
The second thing you will see is a photo feed that is reading the Google logos that someone has put together and posted on Picasa web albums. The photo should change every once in a while.
The third thing is a feed from my Pandora Radio account. It is displaying my bookmarked artists.
The forth thing is a bunch of videos from Simtekfence.com. I like there fence, and so I thought I would post these videos on my blog.
The fifth thing is the "subscribe to this blog" link on the bottom of the page. If you click on this it allows you to save my blog to Google reader or any other reader that you choose.
Anyway, that is it for now.