happy holi

happy holi, originally uploaded by elephantatech.

happy holi to all

Post india trip chat

It has been sometime since I blogged. It is because I am married now (I got new responsibilities). I have the still have to complete the blogs I promised but here is something you can have a laugh about while I complete the blog posts I promised. Me and my friend Canolgon had a chat after I returned from and India trip and it turned to this really messed up funny chat discussing life.

Elephantatech [12:49 PM]:
hey
Canolgon [12:50 PM]:
heyo
Elephantatech [12:51 PM]:
you are not away
I see you at your desk
Canolgon [12:51 PM]:
i'm away in spirit
Elephantatech [12:51 PM]:
but ur not
do you see the contradiction in your wording
do you
?
Canolgon [12:52 PM]:
no
this body is merely a husk
Elephantatech [12:52 PM]:
why must you argue?
Canolgon [12:52 PM]:
and is capable of typing while my spirit lets one rip right behind you
Elephantatech [12:54 PM]:
can you not see that this only make it all the more [interesting words that will convince you in old age]
Canolgon [12:54 PM]:
can you smell that? that's the smell of victory!
Elephantatech [12:54 PM]:
not quite
that is just the spice from my warmed food from the microwave
Canolgon [12:54 PM]:
are you sure of that?
Elephantatech [12:55 PM]:
yup
Canolgon [12:55 PM]:
are you positive?
Elephantatech [12:55 PM]:
I am but neutral
you see positive and negative as only the answers
why must you see only black and white
Canolgon [12:56 PM]:
neutrality jut gets stomped out by both sides and forms a mess of gray!
Elephantatech [12:56 PM]:
but that grey has many shades (is grey or gray)
Canolgon [12:56 PM]:
either or i think, american spelling
Elephantatech [12:57 PM]:
americans always want their own
Canolgon [12:57 PM]:
butchering the english language one word at a time!
Elephantatech [12:57 PM]:
yet they forget they are after all english just run away
Canolgon [12:57 PM]:
yeah
Elephantatech [12:58 PM]:
with some spainish and hints of italian and obviously the aboriginals
Canolgon [12:58 PM]:
everyones a mix of something if you go far enough back
Elephantatech [12:58 PM]:
true everyone is black at the end of day
since original of man is africa
Canolgon [12:59 PM]:
lol i thought it was an asian mixture
ah whatever, we're all human
Elephantatech [1:00 PM]:
atleast the science says that if you believe in facts otherwise bible says we came from garden of eden
seriously it was a garden
can you even imagine that
Canolgon [1:01 PM]:
lol i know
Elephantatech [1:01 PM]:
why would not adam and eve eat the freaking apple
Canolgon [1:02 PM]:
the devil made em do it!
Elephantatech [1:02 PM]:
no it was not
it was a snake apparently this once speaks
Canolgon [1:02 PM]:
i'm pretty sure the devil took the form of a serpent and convinced them
Elephantatech [1:03 PM]:
yeah then it should be distinctive about the description of the snake
Canolgon [1:03 PM]:
serpent!
Elephantatech [1:04 PM]:
the way they describe the snake or the serpent it seems like so we don't have an animal sly and cunning enough
then one guy goes o let try a fox they are cunning
next guy goes but foxes don't climb trees
well let go with snake or serpent then
Canolgon [1:05 PM]:
lol
it's a relgion, told by many different people and eventually compiled into one book
obviously the story will vary, but the overall effect and lessons remain
Elephantatech [1:05 PM]:
they are slithering slimy things they will play the bad guy nicely ... no I mean the evil guy
Canolgon [1:05 PM]:
lol
Elephantatech [1:05 PM]:
the snakes I mean
Canolgon [1:06 PM]:
build a time machine
and go back and see what happened
do it now!
Elephantatech [1:06 PM]:
I did it was the africa theory that proved right
Canolgon [1:06 PM]:
less typing more temporal science!
Elephantatech [1:06 PM]:
the other one was a story
and did you know aparently they did not have tails
I though the first man would have tails but it was not so
Canolgon [1:07 PM]:
it must have at one point
we still have tailbones that serve no other purpose
as well as a bunch of other organs the current human body has no use for
remnants from a less evolved time
Elephantatech [1:08 PM]:
it was because we either through tailess is cool or we some one stole it. could not tell since they did not even speak english
it was Like i was back home in india
in the village
they all speak a alien language apparently It was alien to them
Canolgon [1:09 PM]:
did you hit on your great, great, great ,great, great, great, great, great, great ,great, great, great, great, great, great ,great, great, great, great, great, great ,great, great, great, great, great, great ,great, great, great, great, great, great ,great, great, great, great, great, great ,great, great, great grandmother?
Elephantatech [1:09 PM]:
wierd huh
tried to
Canolgon [1:09 PM]:
rejection is a part of life
Elephantatech [1:09 PM]:
but apprently dead people don't like to be bothered

Macro Feature Rediscovered

I was playing around with the camera yesterday and re-discovered the macro option on my Canon Power Shot SD550. I got some quite unexpected results. You never know what you will get when you get up close to something. Like my biology class when I entered high school playing with the microscope was fun.

Some interesting things I discover from the naked eye flowers look great but some of the flowers in the slideshow you will see the flowers have some sort  of damage due to time, insects and weather.

Since I am using macro feature of the camera it gives of some times the effect of tilt shift for some picture which is cool. (more information on tilt shift check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilt-shift_photography). The photography here is mostly macro photography which takes picture of small objects as opposed to tilt shift which is basically taking picture of large landscapes creating a illusion of small. for more information on Macro photography check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macro_photography. Anyways enjoy



By the way the pictures in the slideshow are Creative Common Licensed so use them for your personal use in every way you can think of. let me know what you do with them.

New Blogger Template Designer

While I was drafting the next blog yesterday I decided to tweak the template a little on blogger and found that the blogger just put in a new template designer removing the old template tab. I then found a the information on the Googleblog check it out here. I decided to update my blog design after I saw the templates. Let me know if you like it or not.

Edit: Forgot to mention that you will need to be http://draft.blogger.com to access this feature

Upcoming Projects

It has been a while since I blogged last. This has been due to a lot of work that I have been doing and planning as well. Here is the work I will doing and blogging. Also I will be soon be launching my YouTube Channel that will showing tutorials and showcasing my work online. Once the name is decided I will do a separate post for it with the details.

Support Factor - This will a series of posts about support. Basically every week I will be writing about what things you should consider on how to better support your online projects and work. Things to consider like what if something happens what you can look into. I will applying my experience here as I have been a support Technician for more than 10 years now and showing things may be you have never considered and some that you use that you might now have noticed as bad habits or good habits.

Front Yard Tree – I was trimming the front yard and then I started to work on the tree cleaned it up. I will show you what I did on the front yard. It will be about do's and don't's when working on such a project. This is a DIY project you might want to consider.

Intro Video for YouTube Channel – I will be starting a YouTube channel but I need an intro for the videos so I will be creating that and I will document the whole creation in Blender 2.5. I will post it on YouTube and provide you with the channel information.

Intro to Carving - This will be my way of introducing carving. My work flow on how I go on to design things as well what to look out for. One thing I will introduce is designing with and without computers.

Walking/Hiking Stick – From the tree trimming I got nice piece of stick that I will be using to carve out designs on for using as a hiking stick or walking stick. I will be doing a blog spot as well as a video. I think I will attempt to design it in blender 2.5 first and come up with something feasible in making as well as using it when done. This post and video will be needed to be done in parts as I continue to work on it.

Here is an small example of my work I will be showing an updated version of the same work during the intro to carving. These are all long term posts and may be covered over 2 or 3 posts and video. I should be able to post at these a little more regularly on this so keep track.




This was an elephant head was craved on a Medium-density fiberboard (MDF) of 3/4”.

Blender Benchmarks on Windows 7 64bit

To test how good my desktop was I did a render Benchmark with Blender this past weekend and got some interesting results. The Benchmark was done using blender 2.49 and new alpha 2.5.2 both found on the download page at the blender 3D website. I wanted to know what my new PC will tell me about blender and its performance so here is a test.

Desktop Configuration:

• Dell Studio XPS 9000
• Intel® Core™ i7-920 processor(8MB L3 Cache, 2.66GHz) X58 Architecture
  
• 12GB DDR3 SDRAM AT 1066MHZ-6X2GB,
  
• NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 260,RIOS
  
• 1.5TB SERIAL ATA 2, 7200 RPM,DIM,X
  
• Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit
  

Blender File was taken from http://www.eofw.org/bench/

Blender Version 2.49 64 bit build at http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/

Blender Version 2.5.2 64 bit build at http://www.blender.org/download/get-25-alpha/

The Render settings are as per the blend file states. Then I did rendering with 4 CPU threads and with Full 8 Threads of my CPU.

Here are the results in the Table and Chart for both blender 2.49 and 2.5.2.

	Render Times
CPU Threads	2.49 (hh:mm:ss.00)	2.5.2 (hh:mm:ss.00)
1	00:02:05.0	00:00:54.3
4	00:00:40.7	00:00:17.2
8	00:00:26.7	00:00:12.0

 

The table the and charts show 2.5.2 takes less time to render the same file with defaults or with added CPU Threads in rendering. Good news but how does the image rendered look like? Well, see for yourself below.

Rendered in Blender 3D 2.49

Available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/elephantatech/4562660929/

Rendered in Blender 3D 2.5.2

Available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/elephantatech/4562660959/

2.5.2 gives user better results than 2.49. It seems that the quality is similar to what we can get if you used LuxRender or Yafaray. Does that mean we no longer need install external renderers? Not quite actually as rendering goes it is not the only 3D aspect that blender does therefore it is not a complete solution as a good one. The external renderers give more options and give you results that can far exceed what blender can do since they are focused on rendering purely. So I am looking forward to when we get the Stable version of blender.

Whiteboard Creative Mess

So here I have my latest creation. The entire drawing was done between December 2009 and last week. Each time I passed the whiteboard in the office I added a stick figure. slowly it built up to something interesting. Enjoy the Flickr slideshow.





all the pictures are Creative Commons licensed Version 3.0 see Flickr page for details http://www.flickr.com/photos/elephantatech/sets/72157623858515341/show/with/4574366309/

Blender 3D Pictures Channel in Flickr

I just started my Blender 3D page with all the Images captured created in Blender 3d the application found at blender.org. Currently I only have some test images but they really show some kick ass stuff.



You can click on the slide show above to see the Flickr page.

Enjoy!

Moving leaves Illusion

moving leaves Illusion
Originally uploaded by elephantatech
Check out my latest work in Harmony web app (http://mrdoob.com/projects/harmony/) focus on the leaves and look at the in a circular motion around and away from the black spot and you will think the leaves are moving or flowing out of the black spot. This is also marked with creative common license click on the picture to see the flickr page for details

Handmade art

Check out some of my older work on my new set
mostly sketches I had made before




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