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And another really cool clip of his 5-day visit to Skywalker Ranch to demo the capabilities of these Canon DSLRs to the Lucasfilm folks.  Nice story on his blog too:

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“In San Francisco, Halloween is redundant” — Will Durst

So there’s an amusing collection of street photographs at People of Walmart, People of the Park (Disney) and People of Public Transit. I think if somebody built a site of folks from our city, this would put these other sites to shame. And that’s not even including the really interesting and colorful characters at annual events like Bay 2 Breakers, BurningMan, Folsom Street Fest or Exotic Erotic Ball.

What other similar sites do you know? Please do share.

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Been learning Autodesk 3DS Max 2010 for the past 2 weeks. It’s nice that the 30-day demo is not crippled.

The modeling tools are pretty intuitive once you understand the terminology and basic use of ‘modifiers’. I generated the  frames on the PC and brought in the frames to After Effects CS3 (color correction, curves).  I then assembled these assets in Premiere CS3 and exported to Web format (720p H.264). In the architectural scene, you could see some flickering. Not sure if that can be eliminated by using a higher quality setting but the rendering times would definitely be longer. The bundled Mental Ray rendering engine is awesome.

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We celebrated Valentines and Chinese New Year at my sister’s place with some seafood. I am stuffed.

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Hope you like the minor site redesign!

We drove across Tioga Pass on Friday, surprised to find some snow still at 9,000 ft. The thunderstorm and hail eventually subsided by the time we made it down the eastern entrance on our way to Mono Lake.

Saturday, we had a quick breakfast at the Curry Village before our Vernal Fall hike. The mist was at full blast this time of the year and we spent about 30 minutes or so drying up on the granite surface and taking in the view.

To avoid the mist trail on the way back we instead hiked half a mile further up to Clark Point passing by Emerald Pool and Silver Apron. Once again we heard thunder rumbling on the valley’s northern side and we could see the dark clouds approaching. We hiked down as fast as we could while trying to avoid stepping on “souvenirs” left by mules on the zigzagging John Muir Trail.

That same evening, we visited the Le Conte Memorial expecting to hear a presentation about “Sound That Nature Makes” but actually found ourselves in front of a poetry reading session by shall we say, a “nonconventional” artist. I guess you could say the “Eminem” of the Sierra Club (if such a title was ever bestowed!).

I was particularly relieved to hear the feedback from another lady the following day who summed it up candidly: “that was WEIRD!”.

Sunday was less hectic. Took some photos around the valley and wrapped up with an impromptu picnic by the Swinging Bridge before heading back down to the Bay Area.

Long weekends are never long enough.

Flickr Slideshow