Blog › October 2006 Archives

Coloured squares
Woo, coloured squares! I'm changing direction slightly for Torq2. I'm starting from scratch, which if you know me, you'll know is something I like to do quite frequently. I did have a terrain implemented using geomipmapping, but I'm changing to the new and shiny geometry clipmapping algorithm. I've been working on it for 2 hours so far and all I've got to show for it is coloured squares:



I'm implementing geometry clipmapping (hereafter geoclipmapping) from the Asirvatham / Hoppe paper, and I'm planning to blog about any obstacles I come across and hopefully overcome.
20 October, 2006 at 00:24 4 Comments
Goo Goo Dolls


Just come back from the Goo Goo Dolls gig at the Shepherd's Bush Empire. Man do they rock! I've been to some good gigs before by some great bands, but I think this has to be my favourite gig so far.

They played a lot of the old favourites - Slide, Broadway, Name; and some of the newer songs: Tucked Away, Smash, Stay With You (the opener), Let Love In. However, when they strummed the first few chords of Iris the crowd went absolutely wild - great stuff.

The encore was Become, a beautiful song that ends their most recent album, and then Give a Little Bit - probably my favourite song on Let Love In.



Altogether a fun evening - I really should go to gigs more often.
16 October, 2006 at 00:04 0 Comments
Little preview of my coast to coast video
This is mainly here for my own benefit - it's not from the actual edit, this is more a proof of concept of the slow motion. What do you think? The version here isn't very high quality so it will look better on DVD, I hope.

10 October, 2006 at 21:01 0 Comments
Spiders


I noticed a spider on my bathroom wall last night (not a particularly pretty one, I think you'll agree). It didn't move at all, and I realised I don't actually know how spiders sleep, if indeed they do. So I decided to find out, and since I'm sure that you're all just as interested as I am in this, I decided to share my findings with you. (Just for accuracy, the spider was in fact on a wall, but I've rotated the pictures through 90 degrees just for the convenience of a landscape format.)



The simple answer to the question "do spiders sleep" is, apparently, that nobody really knows. All animals have some sort of circadian rhythm - a daily activity/inactivity cycle. However, nobody's ever done any studies to measure how long spiders spend in each state, and at what times different species do it.

Scientists do know that in cold climates, spiders are able to go into a form of hibernation, where they bring their legs into their body and remain huddled in a shelter for the winter.

It is thought that if they can shut their bodies down for long periods, they may be able to do the same for shorter periods in their daily cycle, which could be thought of as sleep.

So now you know.

Oh, and for the record, it seems that you're not going to swallow any spiders in your sleep, despite the urband legend telling you otherwise.
01 October, 2006 at 11:07 5 Comments
100000 miles - woo!
My little Peugeot 106 has now travelled 100000 miles since it was manufactured (or since the odometer got reset by a dodgy dealer, but I don't like to be accusatory on my blog). I believe this is the traditional point at which it requires a new cylinder head gasket, or a new engine, or something like that. Anyway, I caught the whole exciting event on my mobile phone's camera - I'm not completely sure of the legality of using a camera while heading down the A3 at 50mph, so if there's any police reading this, my real name is definitely not Tim Jones.





01 October, 2006 at 01:14 1 Comment