Archive for the 'Books' Category

new listening and reading

Published
by
Danny
on May 8, 2006
in Books and Music
. 1 Comment

While making a regular stop at Crossroads on Saturday for bubble tea and a stroll through Half-Price Books, I decided to stop by Silver Platter to pick up the new Pearl Jam and Tool CDs. It’s been quite some time since either band has released a new album, so there was a great deal of hype and promotion prior to their concurrent release dates last week. KISW just couldn’t play the main tracks from either album enough.

Pearl Jam’s new self-titled album is mostly good. Most of the tracks are good ol’ rock song that induce head bopping. My current favorites include Life Wasted, Severed Hand, Big Wave, and World Wide Suicide. They don’t have the same raw energy as previous Pearl Jam tracks, but they’re still fun songs. There is one track on there – Parachutes – that induced a “WTF?!” reaction when I was listening to the CD in the car. It’s got a ballad-y feel to it that for some reason reminded me of rainbows and soft-focus images of lovers paddling a canoe on a pond. I’m sure that’s not quite the feeling they intended, but that’s what the song did to me. I’m glad that was just a one-off. The rest of the album is a pleasant listening experience.

Tool’s new album, 10,000 Days, absolutely rocks. It covers the full spectrum from the hard and heavy sounds of Vicarious all the way to the very minimalist industrial noise of Viginti Tres. Listening the album from start to finish was like experiencing a dark and disturbing opera that leaves you feeling angry, scared, and exhilarated all at the same time. Every Tool album is a great listening experience, and 10,000 Days is no exception.

One bonus of actually buying the physical CD as opposed to getting digital downloads on iTunes is the amazingly cool CD case. There is a set of clear glasses built into the case for viewing the stereoscopic images in the attached booklet. The booklet features some great portraits of the band members as well as some neat illustrations all seeming to relate to the songs on the CD. I haven’t bothered reading up on what all the images mean, but it was cool to look at the pictures while listening to the music.

I also picked up some new reading material this weekend. After hearing Mei rave about The Da Vinci Code and seeing some recent trailers for the upcoming movie, I decided it was time I finally caught up with the rest of the world and actually read the book. I stopped by Barnes and Noble on Saturday night and picked up the special illustrated edition of the book, because I thought it would be cool to see photos and illustrations to go along with the text. It turns out that the extra visual aids were really handy. Whenever there was reference to specific pieces of architecture and artwork, there was usually an accompanying image on the exact page. It definitely made following all the academic portions of the book much easier on my mind. Also, since I’m a lazy bastard, I didn’t want to have to search for images myself and slow down my reading.

The Da Vinci Code is a surprisingly fun and engaging read. I suppose there’s a reason it’s such a widely popular book and why there are entire sections at bookstores devoted to the book and its various editions. It’s an intelligent book that provides an alternate perspective on the Holy Grail and the history of Christianity and backs it up with incredibly detailed academic research. At the same there is mystery, intrigue, and plenty of action to keep the story exciting.

The book was so engaging that I read it in about 9 hours – half of it on Saturday night/Sunday morning and the other half on Sunday evening. I’m really looking forward to the movie to see how they handle all the insanely detailed discussions of art, architecture, and religion. The action parts will be easy to do. Plus, Audrey Tautou is in it, and I always love her work.

relaxation at its best

Published
by
Danny
on April 22, 2006
in Books, Food, Fun, Photography and Travel
. Closed

glorious spring weather

What an amazingly gorgeous day it was! Although the photo above is from a week ago, today’s weather was just about the same. It was still a bit on the cool side because of the wind, but it was incredibly nice.

My day started off with a stroll through Wilburton Park behind my apartment. The sun was shining through the trees. The smell of fresh flowers was wafting over from the botanical gardens. Birds were chirping. The leaves were rustling in the wind. Abso-freaking-lutely relaxing.

It was about lunch time when I finished my walk, so, after dropping off a roll of film at Rainbow Photo, I moseyed on over to Gilbert’s Main Street Bagel Deli in Old Bellevue. Gilbert’s has a nice selection of sandwiches, soups, and breakfast items. I opted for the turkey and swiss bagel sandwich – not too heavy, very tasty. While I ate, I flipped through this week’s copy of Seattle Weekly and listened to the live jazz duo that was playing in the deli. Live music at lunch time. How’s that for atmosphere?

I still had time to kill before my film was ready, so I grabbed a coffee and took a nice leisurely stroll around Downtown Park. There were droves of families and dogs at the park this afternoon. A little kid try to push his dad on the swings. A mom chased her daughter around a picnic table trying to take a picture of her. Hyper little dogs were running circles around bewildered big dogs. It was the perfect park setting filled with photo ops. However, I opted to leave my camera in my bag. No snapping this afternoon. I just wanted to chill and watch everyone do their thing.

I considered spending the entire afternoon walking at the park, but I was really excited to take a look at my film. I shot a roll of Velvia 100F over the last week and was really excited to see how it would cross process. Normally I get blue or green tints with my other cross processed films (Kodak Ektachrome and Elitechrome go blue, Fujifilm Provia and Velvia 50 go green). I had seen xpro’d Velvia 100F photos on Flickr and saw the red tints they all had, and I knew I had to try it. When I looked at the index print at the lab, I was floored by how crazy wacky red everything was. I’ll be uploading some of my xpro’d Velvia 100F over the next few days. You’ll know it’s them by the insane amount of red in the photos.

Once I was done ogling my photos, I migrated over to Crossroads Mall to get some bubble tea and chill out at Half Price Books. I spent 3 hours browsing through various photography books and ended up purchasing a big book of Martin Parr photos. I really love Martin Parr’s photos. Raw. Relentless. Funny. Scary. Gross. Odd. Honest. Playful. There are so many ways to describe his work. His website has lots of great samples. Definitely worth checking out.

I capped off the relaxing day with dinner with Scott and Tim at Kaosamai in Fremont. It’s a relatively small place, but the food is really good, and the prices are just about right. My phad thai was super tasty and only cost me $8.

As great as this day was, what really amazes me is that I didn’t snap a single photo today. I had cameras with me all day, but they never left my bag. It was just one of those days where I didn’t need to photograph anything. I’ll probably make up for it tomorrow and fire off a few hundred shots. :)

flickr book with qoop

Published
by
Danny
on December 5, 2005
in Books and Photography
. 3 Comments

the book of sheena

Here’s my first Flickr photo book printed using Qoop. Not surprisingly, I used all of my photos of Sheena at the time to fill up the book. I figured those would be a good way to test out the service.

Overall, I’m happy with the book. I like the options of specifying both the order and number of images on each page as well as being able to use titles and/or descriptions (I elected to go without text for this run). The glossy cover and pages are neat, although a matte option would be nice. I also wouldn’t mind the option to add some sort of intro text at the beginning of the book. It’s still pretty cool, regardless.

inside the book of sheena

I originally ordered this shortly after Qoop premiered on Flickr, but I had to keep it under wraps for a bit. This was one of the gifts I sent to Mei for her birthday, and I didn’t want to spoil the surprise. Now that she has it, I can talk about it here. :)

Technorati | |

3D Game Animation For Dummies Redux

Published
by
Danny
on August 15, 2005
in 3D, Animation, Books and Games
. Closed

3D Game Animation For Dummies

A couple of days ago, Benjamin Bradley of GarageGames commented on my blog entry regarding the book 3D Game Animation For Dummies and told to me later on IRC that I am mentioned in the book. He also told me that Torque was featured in the sample engine section of the book. I was pretty harsh with my review of the book, so I figured I might as well take another look and give it a second chance.

That's A Head? Animation... Right...

My second flip-through of the book was a slightly better experience. Most of the content that I read was actually pretty decent. The book is good at what most Dummies books do: introduce the basic concepts in a very simple, non-threatening manner.

Unfortunately, the “artwork” leaves a lot to be desired. Check out the example character in the above images. That’s what you’re supposed to build as you follow along with the character modeling and animation chapters. I wasn’t kidding last time when I said it sucked. Gallerie Abominate contains better artwork than this book.

Me In The Index That's My Work

My main reason for checking out the book again, of course, was to see where I was mentioned in it. The only blurb about me was acknowledgment that I wrote the dtsUtility MEL script for the Maya2DTS exporter. Nothing really special but kind of cool nonetheless. I still think the book sucks.

« Older Entries