A much-needed weekend to be spent riding

Posted on 2007-04-20 by frank

Well it’s been a rough couple of weeks, what with the massacre at my alma mater, the deer, taxes, and work. None of them seem like such a big deal next to the first item on the list. I don’t know any of the people who lost their lives or their loved ones in the massacre, but with things like this, we all lose a little something. I’m not moving on from it yet. I still think about it a lot, but I am obviously going to keep on living my life, doing my best to live it well.

SO. Up until today, aside from one night last weekend when I woke up and worried about it in the wee hours of the morning, I’ve barely even thought of the Baker’s Dozen, the 13-hour mountain bike race I’m doing tomorrow as part of a 3 or 4 person relay team.

Now I’m nervous and excited. It’s basically self-supported, and due to the length and time of day, 10 AM to 11 PM, I need to have two complete meals plus snacks and beverages. I’ve never done a ride like this before so I’m nervous I’ll be underprepared for some aspect of the day, for example, gee, I really wish I’d brought a tent or a canopy to get me out of the sun. Then again, I also don’t want to bring so much crap I spend a lot of time setting it up and taking it down.

At least I don’t have to worry about trying to win the race — it looks like we’re going to be down to 3 people, since one of our team members didn’t manage to register before the event filled up. Also, I heard through the grapevine there’s a team of ringers that’s doing the race on cyclocross bikes. We’re just going out there to have a good time, and I know it’ll be fun!

I just learned this afternoon that Andrea wants to bring us dinner, which is really nice. It’ll be good to see her and the girls after a few laps of racing, and I bet it’ll be fun for Elizabeth to see what I do when I’m out riding my bike. Andrea’s also going to make me some home-made energy bars; very cool, so I won’t have to choke down multiple Clif bars in one day.

I’m taking my camera and a couple of good books I’ve been working on, as well as my bike repair stand and supplies, so I’ll have plenty to do between laps.

The fun doesn’t end on Saturday either — I’ve also signed up to do the 4th edition of the Best Dam Ride, a 60-80 mile ride around Clark’s Hill Lake. I just have to remind myself from the start of the Dam Ride to take it very easy. If I stick with an easy pace, the worst problem will probably be just that the sheer amount of saddle time in two days will exceed any two week period for me so far this year. Wish me luck!

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Remember.

Posted on 2007-04-20 by frank

hokie.jpg

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QuickTime’s Strange API

Posted on 2007-03-29 by frank

A while back one of our projects at work needed a plug-in for Unity to play QuickTime movies in the scene. It worked out well; the plug-in took me several days to implement, including one false start where I tried to superimpose a standard QuickTime view, minus the controls, over top of the running Unity scene. That approach didn’t work out because it behaved differently depending on whether it was run in full-screen or windowed, and it was ugly besides.

I ended up taking ideas from the Apple examples of rendering frames from a playing movie to an OpenGL texture, and combining that with the existing Unity plug-in example of rendering arbitrary data to a texture. I wrote about it in more detail already.

Recently it came up that I ought to provide a way of looping the movie’s playback, meaning in this context that when it reached the end, it would simply start over from the beginning and continue to play. I found Movie Toolkit’s SetMoviePlayHints, but after setting the looping flag, it still didn’t loop, so I google’d around a bit. I have yet to read a definitive answer, but it seems like looping a movie is the responsibility of the controller, whether that is Apple’s Movie Controller, or one you write yourself.

However, I can’t use a MovieController because as soon as I create one, even if I use the mcNotVisible flag to draw it, I have to give it a rect when I create it, and since I’m playing this movie to an offscreen bitmap through a GWorld, the rect’s origins are at 0,0.

The workaround is to continue using the primitive toolkit calls to play the movie, and when it reaches the end, send it back to the beginning and play it again. Ugh!

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Daylight Saving Time so far

Posted on 2007-03-12 by frank

I’m a morning person by nature and don’t use an alarm clock unless I have to be somewhere early, like the airport for a 6:00 A.M. flight. Now the clock tells me it’s 9:43 P.M., my wife and daughters have been asleep for an hour, and I don’t feel the slightest hint of a tired urge to go to sleep myself. The sun didn’t come up until 7:45 this morning and it wasn’t light enough to ride my bike in to work until after 8! This morning, I would’ve given two thumbs down to the early switch to D.S.T. since I LOVE this time of year when it starts to get light out really early.

This evening’s ride home from work at 6:20 changed my mind. The temperature was balmy and comfortable, there was still plenty of light left, a nice change from last week when I’d rush to leave work by 5:45, and felt like I was racing the sunset to get home. I took it easy all the way home today, and it was only a couple of minutes slower than when I try to go fast.

So far my opinion is mixed.

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Does YOUR bed head have a barcode?

Posted on 2007-03-11 by frank

I’d been meaning to scan all my books, cds, dvds, and games in to Delicious Library for a while now, and this morning I finally made some progress. While using the built-in iSight camera of my iMac to scan bunches of barcodes from these media, I discovered, much to my surprise, that my bedhead also has a barcode.

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