Vladimir Vukicevic

03:54 pm: blog moving~
Not that there's anything wrong with livejournal, there were just a few things related to the text formatting that annoyed me. So, this blog is moving to: http://www.vlad1.com/~vladimir/blog/. If I can, I'll figure out how to rss syndicate those entries into here, but I'm not sure if I'm that smart.

12:11 am: Oops
Yeah, so, updating this thing kinda fell flat on its face this month. I guess that's what happens when you don't really have anything structured to do -- you end up getting nothing done.

That's not quote true. Along with shaver, I've gotten a ton of sparkle-hacking done. It's scarly evolving into a decently-designed framework as we build the client and server bit by bit. (For those of you not following along -- sparkle is the mumble-back-burner-mumble game project that I'm hoping will evolve one day into a multi-billion intenrnational online gaming conglomerate. I'd settle for a few dozen million, though, but can't hurt to aim big.) I'd post some screenshots, if they weren't laughably bad because we have no 3D art talent as of yet and are using various positively asstastic models cobbled together from the net.

I started having some wrist trouble a few weeks ago, which scared me enough to schedule an urgent visit to the doctor. Luckily, she's fairly convinced it's not carpal tunnel related (and the rest of me is also quite healthy, despite my utter lack of exercise and horrible diet), but it's still been sore off and on. It's getting better, but I really need to start doing the gym thing... I've been putting off starting for about two months now, which is silly considering I have a great gym a block away from me. That's one thing on the proverbial to-do list. Maybe I shouldn't actually put it on the to-do list, because I never seem to get those things done.. and instead just actually do the damn thing. (Or, in this case, start doing.)

School's about to start next week, and I'm mildly excited; I have two classes in the geek/tech mecca building of the school, so I hope to meet some of the 3D Arts folks who are looking for some free work for something they can put on a resume. Incidentally -- if anyone knows any decent 3d modelling folks who would be interested in doing some work for a "Sparkle Studios Prototype Game", drop me an email!

The thing that worries me is that I've done almost no photography for this month and a half that I've had off. It's not that I don't enjoy it, or wouldn't have enjoyed it, it's just that.. I simply didn't do any. No inspiration, combined with a horrid sleep schedule, and lots of hacking time instead results in no photos. This worries me because if I intend to ever do anything serious with my photography, I'm going to have to do less of other things, and more photography. But what if I enjoy the other things more? I dunno. Something to think about, anyway.

Speaking of a horrid sleep schedule.. man. I've been going to bed at 2-3 am, usually unable to fall asleep until 4am, and then waking up at noon. It's not like I'm sleeping too much, just need to shift it back by about 3 hours at least. Two 8:30 am classes will help with that, I guess.

I'm still managing to completely avoid having a social life. I'm not sure if this is some deeply-ingrained thing, but I somehow manage to get out of, ignore, forget about, or do anything that might result in me actually going out with, you know, people. I'm pretty sure this is bad; it wouldn't be so bad if I lived close to the folks that I consider friends, but unfortunately, I don't, though that might change. (Incidentally -- having a Duran Duran CD playing with the windows down while driving by the SF Castro district and having "Wild Boys" come on did get me a few interesting looks; unfortunately, this isn't the type of social life I'm looking for. ;) )

At least there's always music to keep me company. I've been going through a lot of Bob Dylan, Duran Duran, The Smiths, and Dire Straits lately along with the usual suspects (Radiohead, Starsailor, The Cure, and a whole ton of Rachmaninov piano works), so life is good in that respect.

Now, maybe, some sleep.

12:04 am: Yay New Year. Time for some major changes, I think. But more about that later.

My LCD's power adapter died about an hour ago. So I call Dell. Eventually I get to talk to someone with a pulse (though in her case, it's kind of questionable.. she sounded like I woke her up).

Me: "Hi, I didn't hear a menu option for Monitors, but I have an issue with my Monitor."
Her: "Ok, monitors don't work by themselves, they have to be attached to a system. You need to call back and use the service code for the system it's attached to."

I knew at this point I was doomed.

Me: "Uh, I bought just a monitor from you, not a system. I have an issue with that monitor."
Her: "Well, we can try.. do you have a service code?"
Me: "No, there isn't one on the unit."
Her: "Hmm. Well, maybe an order number?"

I did have one of those. Hurdle one passed.

Her: "What seems to be the problem?"
Me: "Well, about an hour ago, the power adapter died. Everything was fine, all of a sudden the monitor went off. The power LED on the adapter doesn't come on any more.. I've tried different plugs and tried jiggling the cables."
Her: "Power adapter? Monitors don't have power adapters, they just have a power cable that plugs into the back."

Uh oh. Hurdle number two.

Me: "Well, this is a flat panel monitor. They have power adapters."
Her: "Wow, really? That's interesting..."
Me: "Yep..."

Now came a long silence. I'm worried.

Me: "Hello?"
Her: "Hi, I'm still here.. I'm just trying to find.. the system, it won't let me.. it just wants.. it won't let me find.. one second.. I can't select just a monitor, it wants a system! It keeps asking me for a system!"
Me: "..."

More waiting. At this point my phone's batteries died; I figured, I'd just call back and get someone who potentially had a clue. I put the phone back to charge.

A few minutes later she calls back and starts leaving a message on my machine.. "Heeeey Vladimir! This is [...] at Dell Supprt.. I have a part number here, but I didn't confirm an address! We didn't get to do that yet, so.." I pick up the phone.

"Oh, hi! You're there! Yay!"

I give her my address. Me: "So you were able to find a part number for the power supply?" Her: "Well, I have the order here, so I'm just going to break it down and ship that out to you." Me: "Ok, sounds good." Of course, the power adapter was part of the single box.

I have a feeling I'll have a brand new LCD coming on Tuesday.

12:39 am: Wow. Haven't posted in a while, though lots of stuff has happened.. some that should have been posted, others that's probably best forgotten.

There's something very theraputic about driving down highway 1 during the night in a brand new 545i, with the music turned up, and the gentle beep of the little "Speed Limit" indicator on the console long forgotten. Alas, the car's not mine.. if things had gone a little differently, it probably would have been, but at least I'll have a chance to drive it often. Soon enough, anyway.

School's over, and I'm trying to decide what to do for next semester. I need to really throw myself into photography and see where it takes me, or just forget about the whole deal. It's going to take Sparkle at least another six months to a year to really have a chance of taking off, so maybe photography is my best bet, for now.

This, along with my involvement with the Wish beta, and having three good EQ friends stop playing in the past month or so will most likely lead me to significantly cut back my EQ time during the next year, if not completely cut it off. I feel somewhat bad, as I only recently joined an awesome guild with great people, but we'll see. The next EQ expansion doesn't excite me in the least, so maybe I've finally realized that the proverbial carrot is rotten.

I can't believe another new year is almost here... thinking back, I can't really name anything significant that I've accomplished over the past year, which saddens me, though I'm sure there were things. I keep remembering people and friends from the past whose company I really enjoyed, but with whom I've completely lost all contact with -- mostly due to my own fault. Maybe that would be a good new year's resolution, to reestablish contact with some of those folks.

Hopefully these updates will come a little more often, though I guess it's more of just a personal journal than anything, as I only know of a handful of people who've mentioned that they've read it.. but, that's better than none. :)

Merry Christmas and happy holidays!

01:00 am: Lots of stuff to update, to busy to do it.  Next week is the last week of the semester, and so I'm swamped... both by work and by a reticence to do said work.  The resulting internal tug-of-war makes me tired, further complicating things.

I really wish I could talk myself into the opinion that regular socializing isn't a chore, and to not put off things like important phonecalls, meetings, and the like.. and to learn how to network.  Maybe that's a decent New Year's resolution, though that would require me actually keeping one.

01:38 am: I'm not really sure what possessed me to decide to go to the mall on a rainy Saturday evening in December; the place was a madhouse, and it's only the first week in December. On the way there I managed to find the antique tool shop that someone told me about, though driving in very crowded city streets in a massive downpour in an area i wasn't familiar with isn't really my idea of fun. People who decide to just stop and double-park in the right lane, especially without bothering to turn their hazard lights on, just plain suck. But, I survived, and managed to get some neat-looking tools... I'll shoot tomorrow, and hopefully process and scan at the same time.

Shaver pointed out a good C++ book, Modern C++ Design, and I subscribed to O'Reilly's Safari service (14 days free) to get access to it. Very good, so far -- books where I learn more than one concrete tool right off the bat within the first chapter are awesome.

Tomorrow, besides photography, I need to set up the Mac as a mp3/ogg storage machine. I have music spread all over the place, and it's getting annoying to not be able to access it all in one place.

03:07 am: If that damn thing beeps one more time I'm going to rip its gd speaker out of its cold aluminum heart. (Tomorrow.) Seriously. This thing is great, I wanted a firewire port on the front of my PC, and I got a neat geeky LCD and temperature monitors and all that. And a dreaded "beep" to let you know when something's overheating. Problem is, 30.0 degrees Celsius is not hot for a fast Athlon. And you can't turn off the beep from the panel. I swear...

Beep.

11:33 pm: I rediscovered lileks.com tonight. Much laughing ensued.

Edit: I also rediscovered that lileks is not spelled "likels".

12:17 am: Arrrgh. centericq is acting up; keeps randomly freezing, and also dropping connections to servers without telling me anything, so lj updates might be a little slow until I figure out what's going on.

On the photography front, I have great plans for this weekend -- though mainly out of necessity, since I only have two more weeks until the end of the semester to finish two final projects. Should be plenty of time, though, but I want to have everything done next week, so I don't have to panic the last week like I usually do. I think I also have an essay (if a two-page double spaced deal can be called that) due for the silly art history class as well.

(I have in my head some images with stop-action motion juxtaposed against classically-lit portraiture.. an apple in the air keeps coming up. (Note that this is mainly for me to remind myself... I'll put images in the gallery later, after the semester's over.) The grabbed hand, with something tucked inside. (young hand/old hand? flower?) Weathered hand holding something (where the heck am I going to find a weathered hand who'd be a willing model)..)

I know shaver already ranted about gdb, but I just want to add my massive hate in its direction. I'd hoped TotalView would be better, and it is, for the most part -- there just seem to be some symbol lookup problems that plague both gdb and TotalView, so I suspect that there's a combination of things to blame. I'm tempted to just toss the whole thing onto Visual Studio; the debugger isn't great, but it works. I also fought with jam instead of make... Jam is such a good idea, and is such the right thing to do for multi-directory projects with interdependencies... but it's also a massive pain in the ass to set up when you want to do anything that they didn't concieve of. It's really a documentation issue -- there is no good documentation for extending Jam. Shared libraries also apparently don't exist in their world, along with a few other things.

Sleep time now.. dentist appointment on Friday, I can barely contain my excitement.

09:42 pm: Some go up, some go down..
Up and down today.. hacking motivation is high, photography motivation is low. Three more weeks in the semester; I wish I could somehow prod myself into action, get things finished so I don't have them constantly in the back of my mind. Having stuff like that hanging over my head seems to be the worst for me -- it immobilizes me, which in turn causes me to be even more stressed out. It's a nasty vicious cycle that I recognize, but doing something about it is harder.

01:52 am: Do people actually buy this stuff? I guess it's comforting to know that if I was in the market for a $1500 PDF, Amazon's got me covered...

01:03 am: Making some progress on Sparkle! shaver and mark have some time to hack, so we're actually doing some joint work now. Hacked together a ncurses-based client (reimplementing the useful bits of readline in the process, unfortunately), and we're playing around with Freeze/IceStorm ideas. This is, however, having a negative effect with regards to me getting my school stuff done, which is bad. Only about three more weeks left in the semester...

11:26 pm: Not much to report today.. spent most of the day wrangling with WinDbg, and learning how to write extensions despite the lack of useful documentation for the stuff. I got something working for what I need though, so I'm happy. Also got Fedora Core 1 installed on my desktop... painless upgrade from RH9. Tomorrow, photos all day... yay!

I can't bring myself to not post my friend Mark's rendition of the food-formerly-known-as-pie.

02:23 pm: The turkey was a great success.. I don't think I've ever seen a turkey disappear so fast after we started eating. Some technical difficulties in the preparation: I mismeasured the amount of oil needed, and the top 1.5" or so of the turkey was sticking out. Oops. We solved this problem by sinking two cast iron frying pans into the oil to raise the level up (yes, I have pictures), and also by using a soup ladle to baste the top of the turkey with boiling oil for the 30 or so minutes. Worked great.

I'm probably going to pay for lj pretty soon, especially now that I've discoered various friends/acquaintanes either have lj accounts or are syndicated through lj. I can't add jacob's diary to my friends list through syndication, since it's "too expensive".

02:10 am: So, I was happy to discover that at least shaver syndicates his blog through lj; I might actually read his ravings more often. He writes far more intelligent things than I do, often with interesting links.

I had a brief, but happy, affair with my new server boxen, before I turned it over to sancus -- "my" new box has memory problems, but I figured I have enough to focus on in the next three or so weeks without screwing around with Fedora and/or Lustre. Or distcc, or gcc 3.3, or any of those other things I had planned to do.

I can feel myself getting a bit more excited about sparkle hacking again as well.. maybe new osg + new Ice + gameswf is what I need to kick myself into gear.

But now, it's time for dreams of turkey. And pie.

12:49 am: Rather insightful post regarding Deus Ex 2. It will make you laugh and cry. However, there is Knights of the Old Republic to keep you company -- the last single player game that really gripped me was Deus Ex 1, with a smattering of NWN after that. KotOR is now another.

I'm buying stuffs to deep-fry our turkey on Thursday tomorrow. I hope I can report happy turkey yummyness on Thursday, but I might end up lj'ing from the hospital, recovering from massive oil burns. We'll see.

10:44 am: Sports photography is Hard. I'm going shopping.

10:56 pm: How to build a B&W tabletop studio for less than $100, or, I spent two hours at home depot hunting for PVC pipes, wood, various vinyl/plastic/screen door material/etc. I'm a little disturbed that I only found 100w lights -- I was hoping to find some that could do 250w, though I didn't find any bulbs that went up that high! I guess my images are going to be entirely static, so long exposures aren't going to bother me.

I am, however, tempted by both alien bees lighting (www.alienbees.com) and by the Calumet/Bowens QUADX system. Maybe for Christmas.

Tomorrow, the massive apartment cleanup begins in preparation for turning my kitchen into a mini studio.

12:06 am: So my dad wants to shoot my sister's soccer tournament. Great, I tell him, you probably want something longer than the 80-200 zoom, so go rent the Nikon 400 zoom for the weekend. He says he will, and then asks me to go pick it up today since he was out of town. I get to the store. Apparently, they didn't have the 80-400VR available, so he rented the Nikon 400mm f/2.8 beast -- for $100/day, no less. I'm curious to see what shots he ends up with... the situation's kinda crappy, since I didn't bring my F5 down. I would've told him to just shoot film if I had -- the 14n can't really shoot fast enough (one shot every 1.5 seconds or so instead of 6 per second for the F5) for good sports stuff, and the Fuji S1 can't even use the lens because of the focusing motor. So he's going with the 80-200 mounted on the S1 and the 400 mounted to the 14n. With one monopod. I hope nothing happens to the 400mm, seeing as how it's a $10k lens and under my credit card.

In other news, I bought a brand-new 1U 1.7GHz Celery with 512mb and 40gb ata/100 for $350. I should've bought two. Or three.

11:30 pm: So.. tired..

I get to werk this weekend. And shoot. And get started on my final project(s). I'm excited about mine for 4x5, will be fun. But for now, sleep.