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You are here: Home / Personal

The DEATH of the Hollywood Special Effects Industry

March 2, 2013 by Stefan Didak Leave a Comment
The Death of the VFX industry

Over the past many years, going back at least as far as the past decade, I have been hearing and seeing the hurt and imminent death throes of the VFX (visual effects) industry and its many great artists that made it the industry that it has become over the past several decades. Even thought I have not been an actual “artist” (if I ever was one, since I considered myself always more of a “crazy scientist developer annex artist”, which most of us were back in the founding days before there even WAS a VFX “industry” to speak of) in this field since the very late 80′s, or early 90′s at best, I have most certainly not failed to noticed the direction things have been heading in for a very long time. And I am sad to say that many of the things I saw coming have been coming to a pass in a very rapid pace the past 2 to 3 years. It does appear, however, things are in an even more hyper-accelerated way the past year.

Filed Under: Lengthy, Rant Tagged With: 3D Animation, Computer Graphics, Hollywood, Visual Effects

The Home Office Tattoo?

February 9, 2013 by Stefan Didak 3 Comments
Steven Dray Home Office Tattoo

This morning I woke up and checked my e-mail and found a message from one of the big fans of my office and website, Steven Dray. Attached were two images that certainly surprised me, to make an understatement. Steven has posted the images to his Facebook page and on Twitter but considering the content of the images I’m also posting it here with a little bit more information. It is, I suppose, flattering, but at the same time it brings up a few questions. I asked Steven Dray how he made the image because I couldn’t see any artifacts that are usually present when photoshopping or compositing an image. With my background in 3D computer graphics, rendering, and pixels in general, I would be able to tell and I couldn’t. So either this was a really amazing photoshop skill or not. I asked Steven about it and he told me it wasn’t a composite, it was real.

Filed Under: Home Office, Personal Tagged With: Home Office, Ink, Steven Dray, Tattoo

Mitch Haile and Stefan Didak in the New Office

January 21, 2013 by Stefan Didak Leave a Comment
Mitch Haile and Stefan Didak in the New Office

I have a quick update on the current status of the new (7.0 final) home office for you all. Pictures are being delayed by several factors. One factor being that it’s real busy here. The other factor being that two machines arrived with some serious problems after transport. They’re being looked at now but this is going to be an insurance claim situation. Of course, if you are a fellow crazy home office aficionado, you get “first dibbs” on seeing the current new home office “live and in the flesh” or is that “live and in the metal?” :-) So for those few crazy people out there who blog about how Mitch Haile and myself are adversaries in some kind of home office contest, we’re not. We get along just fine! And yes, Mitch is the first fellow tech guy who’s actually seen the office as it is right now.

Filed Under: Home Office, Personal Tagged With: Home Office, Mitch Haile

Getting ready to build the new home office

December 2, 2012 by Stefan Didak 14 Comments
The new USB LED lights

However, I have most of my camera gear here and the other half is being shipped along with the majority of Home Office 6.0, my books, and tons of boxes with other stuff that still needed to be shipped from Rotterdam to California. With a bit of luck everything should arrive in perfect order sometime near the end of the year. This of course means that starting 2013 I’ll be (finally) constructing the final office 7.0, the combination of the current California office and the previous office.

Filed Under: Home Office, Personal Tagged With: Batteries, Charger, Office 7.0 Beta, Person Of Interest, Velcro, Whiskey

Pearl Aday, The Swing House Session – Live & Acoustic

January 19, 2012 by Stefan Didak Leave a Comment
New Pearl Aday Album - The Swing House Session - Live & Acoustic

I think it’s time for something completely unrelated to the Home Office! A recent poll done by VentureBeat shows that Metallica is the #1 most popular artist to listen to while writing code. The poll also shows that as far as the type of music goes, Rock/Pop makes up 42% of the total. Not that I am surprised about that. However, putting rock and pop in the same category is a bit of a stretch for me since I prefer my rock on the rocks! Lately I’ve been listening (and coding by) Pearl Aday’s latest album, The Swing House Session, Live & Acoustic. I’ve written about Pearl before, back in 2007, and more recently in 2010, and she never ceases to amaze me with the passion and soul for her music which is a very honest and classic rock style with modern influences and, of course, great vocals! For me, that’s my personal #1 choice to write code by. :-) The Swing House Session album is a great addition to the original Broken Thorny Crown and the debut album, Little Immaculate White Fox, the latter of which has been recorded into a full acoustic set during an afternoon at Swing House Studios in Hollywood. The acoustic versions of the songs have an interesting twist to them and while completely recognizable to anyone who’s heard them before, add a new level of depth to the sound that is otherwise hard to catch when performed “fully plugged”.

Filed Under: Personal Tagged With: Acoustic, Album, Hollywood, Music, Pearl Aday, Rock, Swing House

Office 7.0 Beta 3 (stage one) is final… for now!

December 20, 2011 by Stefan Didak 30 Comments
Stefan Didak's New and Second Home Office in Oakley, California, Final Intermediate Stage

Yes, it’s a milestone. Office 7.0 (beta 3, by now) is officially done, functional, installed, running, and ready for action. I’m not going to make any final “beauty” shots of the current state because there’s not much point in doing that until the other half of the office completes the current ensemble and that won’t be for quite a number of months yet. I’ll just have to make do with this setup in the meantime. And yes, you can imagine it’s painful and under-powered and under-monitored, and boy am I missing the extra pixels… not. :-) I’m quite happy with the 3 x 2560 x 1600, actually. But of course, the office won’t be complete until it’s complete. And besides, my camera gear is all in The Netherlands anyway, so there’s no point in trying to create perfect RAW shots and then editing them for a final “beauty” pass. I didn’t take shots of other parts of the office since nothing has changed there but if you want to see then anyway I refer you to the other Office 7.0 beta blog posts and images. There’s a server, a workstation, a second workstation, a Mac Pro, the MacBook Air, and the Clevo laptop. That should be enough for the intermediate stages of getting up and running. The three Lian-Li cases look nice together and all have watercooling for the CPU’s. ATI 6970 Eyefinity cards take care of the two workstations, each of them hooked to the 3 x 30 inch Dell U3011 monitors using StarTech DisplayPort switches to allow for an extra set of DisplayPort ports on each monitor. The server is hooked up via DVI connection (and also capable of doing 2560×1200) while the Mac Pro is using 3 x DVI where one of those is run from a mini DisplayPort port via an Apple converter that turns it into full dual-link DVI.

Filed Under: Hardware, Home Office, Personal Tagged With: Audio, Cables, California, Monitors, Multi-Monitor, Network, Oakley, Office 7.0 Beta, Pictures, Screens, Switches

Time for a change: An Autodesk Free One!

December 1, 2011 by Stefan Didak Leave a Comment
Dynamite VSP Boom

It’s time for a little announcement and yes, you heard it here first… I’m officially Autodesk-free! And what a great feeling that is to not have to deal with an entity “where software goes to die” (can’t remember who first came up with that one but don’t mind me quoting you). Not having to deal with lacking and/or online only docs and the poor state of the Civil 3D API is not unlike wearing shoes that are too small and being able to them off… a feeling of relief, that is. Development has not been as fun and exciting as it was prior to Autodesk acquiring Dynamite VSP (and rebranding it as Civil View, integrated with 3ds max Design) and because of my 6000 mile relocation and in particular other plans I have for my business and the directions it should be heading into it seems about the right time to leave the Dynamite development arena so I can reclaim the time I normally spent on it and put it towards cool and new things. You can learn about the cool new things on ignyter.com and ignytion.com once I am (legally) able to unveil those. Which, granted, may be a while yet before I can, and will.

Filed Under: Personal, Software, Software Development Tagged With: 3AM Solutions, Autodesk, Civil 3D, Civil View, Dynamite VSP, Engineering, Software, Visualization

The New Place

August 27, 2011 by Stefan Didak 1 Comment
The New Place in Oakley California

It’s official. The new location of the Home Office 7.0 will be in Oakley California. That’s OAKLEY, not OAKLAND. Not even nearly the same. Oakland is a dump IMHO and Oakley is a nice low-crime no-grime area towards the east of the San Francisco Bay Area. Don’t mind the odd copyright notice on the image. That’s the image of the real-estate company that had it advertised. I’ll be posting better and nicer images once I get around to it and once I get to actually have some decent content to show. Now the real fun starts; getting the electricians over to see what we will do about getting tremendous power routed to the new office space, furnishing, getting hardware and systems installed, all that good stuff. Or if you will, all that frustrating stuff.

Filed Under: Home Office, Personal Tagged With: Black Widow, California, El Cerrito, Home Office, Oakley, Office 7.0 Beta, Snakes, Spider

A serious bloggable delay, powering down!

July 25, 2011 by Stefan Didak Leave a Comment
KLM

No matter how well you plan something and how much detail you put into it, there are always things that can throw things off. While most of the detail planning of the new office is still valid, the general timing is going to be way off thanks to an unforeseen relocation to a new location. A new location that at the time of writing has not been found yet, I should add. Recent discoveries about our place in California has left us no other option than to find a more suitable location. I’ll spare you all the details regarding the sub-standard piss-poor third-world electrical wiring. Instead, let me just tell you there’s no way in seven hells I’d consider hooking up a ton of expensive computer equipment to the electrical network as it is. And the required overhaul is not what I would ever consider spending on a rental. We had several electricians check things out and provide quotes for the kind of overhaul required to bring the place up to snuff.

Filed Under: Home Office, Personal, Rant Tagged With: California, El Cerrito, Electrical, Electricity, Fire Hazard, Fuses, Inspection, Panel, Third World, Wiring

Do not host with WorldStream! Thanks BREIN!

February 22, 2011 by Stefan Didak Leave a Comment
Stefan Didak Home Office Version 5

That, dear WorldStream, is what got you knocked off my shortlist. You have shown that you can’t be trusted to host anything, much less the important corporate data and development systems I might have otherwise chosen you to host for me. Needless to say, I am recommending to everyone else not to use this company for any hosting activities because it should be clear that your data and continuation of business might be at risk if a company is this negligent about its responsibilities towards its customers. Oh, and BREIN, thank you for breaking the law and showing yourself as ordinary criminals. If you had not done so I would have potentially picked StreamWorld as my new host.

Filed Under: Personal, Rant, The Web Tagged With: Dedicated, Hosting, Internet, Servers, WorldStream
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