The tool adds follicles to poly and nurbs objects which are useful in rigging (and especially cloth simulation). I should also mention in all done in Maya…
 
The interesting thing behind this tool is the trouble I had with NURBS… I had no clue what I was doing, and assumed “oh it can be done the same way!” as I breathed and lived with fully polygonal backgrounds.

6 hours later…

So for whoever needs to work with NURBS: I can offer a small insight to finding the proper UV coords on both custom shapes and default geometry.
One thing to notice is that every patch on a nurbs surface (4 point face) has its own 0 to 1 UV map, the first face 0 to 1, second 1.1 to 2 and so on. This is ok, I thought, “I’ll just divide the current number with the max!” (wich is what it should be) but when you try and select the maxU and maxV… it adds more?! so it turns out that the max isoparm and the max UV are not the same.  I am assuming it’s needed to build the bezier curve.. but not user friendly when you’re trying to automate. The fix I used for this was to select the highest possible Isoparm in U and V  obj.u[9999999] and objv[9999999].  Now, this feels like a cheap and dirty solution… and it is… but it works!  If select the 9999999 isoparm, you get the highest one, which you can then use to divide and figure out the current UV across your entire Nurbs surface.  Of course, this is assuming you don’t have 9999999 and 1, but I’m not sure if computers can do that yet… and if they can, why would you need to identify a single point on its surface?

Back to my adventure, enough of my rant.  After driving up a few thousand feet up a muddy mountain, I arrived at my lodge.  Wow.  It was amazing, just perfect for me!  It even had a stockpile of wood outside!

After a great night, I slept in.  I couldn’t help it.  I was too comfortable at that lodge and I could sleep next to that woodstove all day!  However, I got my butt out of bed and started my climb.  I never made it to the top (~12000ft), but I did get to around 10,059ft (verified by gps).  The glacier was too soft and I did slip a few times.  One of the slips really hurt my wrist and that just took too much of my energy to keep going.  The climb was not too hard, I never had any straight climbs or inverted angles, it was just a wall of ice.  My normal camera was out of service, luckily I got a great shot from my cellphone camera.

Will I go again?  HELL YES.  When?  I have no idea.  Will I persue a higher peak?  Probably not.  I enjoyed this type of climb and will seek out other climbs like it.  Mt Rainier, here I come again!

I rented a log cabin in the Canadian rockies for this weekend.  I will be using a skidoo to get there.  The log cabin has a woodstove, a ton of firewood and 1 bedroom.  The cabin is near the “base” of a popular climbing route, so I should be among climbers. 

I am hoping for clear weather as I will be making this climb with one other person and no one else.  Packed my bags with 2 ice axes, picked up some expensive crampons and some quality bungie rope…hopefully I have time to take some quality pictures  

Other plans?  Nothing… just sit on my ass and relax, no cell phone service, no electricity (without a generator, that is).

I should be back Monday or Tuesday.  If not, send someone to pick me up, I’ll be around 52 09N 117 27W (google it…) and skidooing the river to route 93 (yes, I have my permit!!)

Today, I am going to rant, complain and really put down a specific company: “Avalon Communities”.  They won property management company of the year in 2007.  In all honesty, I live in a quiet, relaxing apartment.  I do not hear my neighbors at all.  It’s a great place.  However, if I have something broken, or have a question, that is a whole other ballgame.   Stopping before I get too far, this is not the point of this post.  This post is about GREED.

When I first moved here, the prices were just raised by a couple of hundred.  Right away, that should have been a red flag.  I questioned them and they offered me a free months rent.  That was great, an extra month to save money! My greed got the best of me and I signed a lease.  I did not want to feel stuck here for too long, so I signed a short lease.  I paid a bit more per month, but I knew I wouldn’t be permanently stuck.  I fell in love with my apartment, it’s close to work, close to local shops and away from most people. Did I mention quiet? 

Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end…but it should not have been so soon!  My apartment complex is now considered a “luxury” apartment complex.  This week, almost my entire floor received a personally delivered notice.  Effectively, once your lease expires, your rent will be increasing by at least $200, some people (like me), $400.  The letter was essentially: “Thank you, now fuck you.” (Slapshot reference).  I thought, wow, the prices in the area must have skyrocketed!  I look at rent listings in my area, but they are still well below my apartment.  What gives?  Apparently, this entire building has no vacancies!  What better way of generating income by raising rent on apartments people call home.

As of last night, I’ve been packing and finding a new place to move to.  I can honestly say, it was time not well spent*.

*For lawyers: Avalon’s motto is time well spent, my line was “time not well spent”….

My move to the USA was very rushed.  I literally had less than 3 days to pack an entire house, gather my belongings and declare everything for the USA.  Suffice to say, I declared a fish and nothing else.  After I had physically moved to the USA, I did not receive anything.  My personal belongings were delayed with customs, lost in the wrong end of the country, and finally arriving 91 days after I had left Canada.

Luckily, or as I thought, I received everything.  Sure, a lot of items got smashed, destroyed and needed replacement, but I received all my crap.  Today, I got a surprise!  2 more boxes of crap I completely forgot about.  Do not ask me how they found my new address, but those guys in brown found me and brought me some crap I’ve forgotten about.  As soon as I opened those boxes, old memories really came back to me!

Inside these boxes, apparently a possible threat to national security, were all my old electrical hacks.  I built fm transmitters, directional mini antennae’s, magnetic debit/credit card reader, and a whole lot of other random and useless junk.  Most of these were indeed pet projects, curious endeavors and simple fun I had as a young teen.

Curiously, or what I can remember, everything I packed in these boxes did arrive.  No markings, no government stamps, nada.  Even my big copper coil tied to a capacitor was in this box.  I’m too scared to fire it up to see if it still works.  The thought of sending an EMP shock wave across my apartment and cooking all my hard drives scares me a little.  Unlike back home, I no longer have the luxury of big fields of nothing to test my experiments.  Except for 7th grade science fair, that was a lot of colourful tv screens…

Today, I brought my car in for an oil-change.  It was scheduled to take an hour or so, but I did not have the time to wait around and took their rental car to work.  After being in the shop for most of the day, I received a phone call letting me know I had a “few” problems.  Not only did I have a bunch of “problems”, but they decided to fix them for me without asking.  I had a complementary service and full tune-up scheduled from 40,000 miles, under warranty, that I was going to use in June.  Instead of charging me for all these problems, they used my free 40k tune-up, without doing the tuneup!  They told me I’d need to get an alignment done too, but I’d need to make another appointment for that; it would have been nice if they called me in the morning and told me all this right away…

Anyway, back to my post.  BIOS updates.  After driving my car around, I started noticing some things.  First of all, my odometer was wrong.  I brought the car in with 36737 miles on the odometer, the trip odometer said 301 miles.  After I left, I had 36739 on the odometer and 8 miles on the trip odometer.  Am I being overly anal? Possibly, but it was still odd.  My radio station presets were gone!  Also, they used to be labeled A0 to A9, now they are labeled P0 to P9.  The last time I mucked around with my car’s computer, my sunroof started acting up, so did my passenger airbag detector.  Oh, my passenger side window was a little odd too.  Either way, I decided to log into the car’s computer again.  Disappointingly, I got myself a lovely hyperterm connection error.  Seems like the qnx subsystem is off-limits for the time being, until I find time to figure it out again

My 4th plan was being invited to a bon fire.  The 6th plan involved going out with friends and really just relaxing.  I ended up combining the 4th and 6th plan together, bon fire, say hi to friends, and run off to meet my other friends.

Sunday was really unexpected.  A mountain hike!  Yes, I got up Sunday morning at 7:30AM to hike a mountain.  It was not a really high mountain at all, but going up 3000ft still took some time.  I took my broken camera and did manage to grab some snapshots (and patiently did not throw my camera off the cliff).  Since that lil car mishap, my cam has been “loading…” way too often, and if not loading, it’s forgetting to save my pictures.

I had a great view of the lake and my car!  Not sure I would be able to do much if I saw it getting broken into, but it was neat to see it in the distance.

After all that hiking, I made it to the top of the hill.  I won’t call it a mountain, Mt Rainier is a mountain, this is just a little hill.  My goal was reached and I enjoyed the view.  It was a very sharp drop, I tried to ignore the fact I was standing on ice and it was windy.  I had my picture taken and you really can’t see me scared as hell.

After the climb down, I got a great shot of the peak where I was standing.  It was a major detour from where I parked, but I could not leave without getting a picture of my feat.

I was *on* that cliff!

The pictures from my camera do not give this climb justice.  The view, the height, was just incredible.  Oh well, my next climb is going to be Mt. Rainier’s basecamp Muir.  I guess I’ll have to invest in proper gear, but I know I am going to do it within 60 days.  Guarenteed.  Or it’s free.

Starting back with sambuca, it’s a strong anise-flavoured drink which you can definitely smell in the air once it has been poured.  The drink is good on its own or with some cheese on the side.  It’s generally not mixed, but adding ice can remove some of that strong anise taste. 

Moving onto Raki, the unofficial national drink of Turkey, which is another anise-based drink.  Unlike sambuca, it is made usually with grapes or figs, and distilled with anise-seed.  Sambuca is distilled with anise-seed and generally mixed with a pure sugar based alcohol. 

Raki does not have a lot of flaming recipes.  A mix of blue bols and sambuca, lit up, is a very popular European flaming drink.  However, Raki is a very popular drink mixed with water and served on the rocks.  It is very important, as told to me by a cute Turkish girl, to drink it in a tall glass.  I can understand the reasoning and the change of its taste.  When drank from a tall glass with ice, the anise in the drink will crystallize with the ice and diminish the anises potency.  Personally, I enjoy a glass of straight Raki with a piece of cheese on the side.  I can do with either Cheddar or Mozzarella.  Back in college, I took a shot of Raki in with my coffee at the local hookah bar.  I remember doing this at least once a week.  I cannot remember if it was Karim or Moey that introduced me to this lifestyle, but it was very relaxing and a great way to sit around with friends and shoot the shit.  Or work on opsys. Smoking Apple flavoured tobacco while working on a buggy linux kernel… 

Efe Raki – Fresh from Turkey Ottawa, Canada.