I met with James Cameron a few times when I worked in the Windows Media Division at Microsoft. Mr. Cameron had just finished the 3D IMAX documentary “Ghosts of the Abyss” and was looking at different technologies to use in an upcoming “big budget 3D production”. This was back in 2003 or so. In the first meeting, we just provided a broad overview of the technologies that Microsoft was working on, and had a general discussion on what he was looking for. I must say, I was exceedingly impressed with Jim’s technical knowledge. Most “Writer/Director” types I’ve interacted with are great on the creative side but fairly light on the technical side. I pointed out that the digital camera that they used for the “Ghosts of the Abyss” had a subsampled horizontal resolution, and he jumped right in and told me how they solved that problem ... by tapping into the actual image sensor itself, bypassing the rest of the storage capabilities of the camera, they were able to capture the highe...
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I’m tired of dinner at home, so I think we’ll go out to Little Seizures tonight. My kids always have a Petite Mal Seizure. It’s a really good deal and it comes with a small shake. You get a large shake with the Gran Mal Seizure, but sometimes it’s just too much for me – and one time I ended up biting my tongue. It was closed the last time we went, and the kids had a fit. We really love that place – there’s just no stopping us when we’re having our Little Seizures!
I bought my wife the new Kindle, from Amazon, for her birthday last week. I really love the whole idea of eBooks – the Kindle is quite portable (about the size of a regular book) with a gorgeous high resolution surface that is really easy to read. Plus, you can do cool things like set multiple bookmarks, change font size, store hundreds of books at one time, and download new books wirelessly from almost anywhere in the world. It even has “text to speech” built in so it can read to you! Wow. It really is very, very, very cool technology. But there’s one thing that still bugs me ... we read a lot, my wife and I both go through a few books a month. So it’s quite likely we could spend a few hundred dollars (or more) on a library of Kindle books over the next couple of years. But what guarantee do we have that we will still be able to read them in ten years? What happens if our Kindle device breaks, and there is no replacement? Or what if the best device on the market in ...
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We finally moved in to our house two weeks ago (after living in a temporary apartment for the past three months) and we’re busy exploring our new neighborhood. We live up on a hill, just southeast of downtown Basel, in a nice and quiet residential neighborhood. At the bottom of the hill, just three tram stops away (or about a ten minute walk) there’s an eclectic commercial district with stores, restaurants, and a huge outdoor ice skating rink that we just discovered last weekend. I was down the hill the other day and had passed by a Thai restaurant that looked pretty good, so last night I suggested to the family that we give it a try. We haven’t eaten out since we moved, and I’ve been wanting to try out some of the local joints. On the way to the restaurant, we went down a block we hadn’t been down before, and discovered a large group of industrial buildings with a bunch of establishments – an incredible arena with eight huge rock climbing walls, a local theater (live stage), a din...
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