Satori

I was sad to learn today of Randy Pausch’s passing. Randy Pausch was of course huge in the game industry, as one of the founders of Carnegie Mellon’s well-known Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) lab.
My interaction with Randy was years and years ago, when we were both getting involved in the budding virtual reality scene, [...]

Last week we were having some storms here in San Francisco, so I plugged my XP machine into a monster back-up power unit, an APC Back-UPS XS 1500. It’s supposed to be good for 900 watts, which is good since my previous decade-old back-up unit was only good for 450 watts, and you know, [...]

It’s the 25th birthday of the Commodore 64, happy birthday! CNN has a piece about it, and the Computer History Museum is having a celebration on December 10.
The lovable little computer was my first introduction to affordable home computing. I had cut my baby teeth on a TRS-80 for a few years, and [...]

I just found this video on youtube and had to share it with you all. It is “Stanley and Stella in ‘Breaking the Ice’”. I saw this short as a kid, it was made in 1987 – it was one of the first computer graphics animations that I really fell in love with. [...]

Lately my life has been pretty frenetic. I’m working on a Wii game contract during the day – most days I am on-site with the studio, where I am working to help them optimize their CPU and graphics performance. At night I’ve been working on finishing up some installation routines for some really large [...]

Ars Technica has the beginning of what looks to be a great series on the history of the Amiga computer.
The Amiga 500 (example shown above) is probably my favorite computer of all that I’ve owned, built, or re-built. I lusted after it during high school, purchased one just before heading off to college, and [...]

…for dinner!
This is cute. Apparently an early predecessor of Cookie Monster. And an early predecessor of the PC.

I just noticed that Mark Cerny will be giving a talk on the PlayStation3’s graphics chip, the RSX, at GDC 2007. I know that Mark was intimately involved with this chip and has a lot of opinions and expertise about it. If you’re going to be at GDC, and you’re working on the [...]

This evening I attended a reception at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA… it was a party for the alumni of the computer science program at the University of Washington.
The reception itself was good, though frankly I didn’t recognize a single student there. I did see a few professors I recognized, most [...]

George Lucas spoke at Siggraph today, and I have to admit, it wasn’t a very good keynote. They had a two hour time slot for him, and spent the first hour giving the annual Siggraph computer graphics awards. The second hour was a “Hollywood event guy” asking George generic softball questions and basically [...]