Recently in Diary Category

The time has come to move my computer to greener pastures.

After comparing my experience of MacOS-X on my laptop to my experience of Windows Vista, the choice was clear.

On one hand, almost three years of daily use of my laptop and barely any problem to report. On the other hand, Vista treated me with annoying reminders, slow down on file access and unforgivable issues with handling of large amounts of files.

The majority of applications I am using have a Mac version available. The rest can be handled easily by VMware fusion or even bootcamp for more demanding windows only applications.

When I came to replace my aging desktop, I decided to move to a mostly Mac environment.

After moving my files and my applications to my new and shiny 8-cores Mac Pro, I feel like I have moved to a new house. And from the look of it, this landlord is treating me much better than that Windows guy.

Forum Image-in-air3D, a french community of 3D graphists, made me the honor to request an online interview. Thanks Vincent for the great editing job !

I�m afraid I won�t have much to show on these pages for a while.

Too much work during the week, too many issues to keep track of and not much time in the evening to do anything else than chat around a cup of coffee and blow some steam off in the tropical battlefield of Far Cry. This is the longest �low� phase I had to go through for a long time.

Usually, creativity cycles go up and down every other month. High phases are spent cranking one image after the other, until I run out of steam. Low phases are usually the occasion to catch up on video games I set aside for rainy days, and work on the website if I have time. I have enough games to keep on like this for a while, although I can already feel the itch of creating new 3D scenes.

Maybe it is the influence of spending some time every night on keeping an eye on the Vue forum at Renderosity... although things have been running smoothly over there for a while. Hopefully, being a moderator won�t turn out to be such a distraction I can�t find the time to work on more images.

In the meantime, working on the EERIE alumni website has been an interesting experience. First exposure to PHP and MS SQL, blended together with a touch of Cold Fusion. The development of that site is going smoothly so far. I may even go on reviving some of my old pages soon. The next site in line will be the Cthulhu gallery.

Working on the EERIE website showed me how disconnected from my friends in France I have become. It is a great occasion to reconnect however. I didn�t realise how much I missed that until I started catching up with what everybody has been doing for the past few years. I feel like I just came out of a long period of blur once again. Seeing what everybody I used to know have become makes me appreciate even more what I have now. Things are not so bad after all.

Coincidences are really odd sometimes....

After months of silence, I received within a couple of days, news from three different people going back to the time I was in college in Nimes.

That was a good reminder that my plans to revive some of my past websites have not gone very far. So here it is, after a week-end and a couple of evenings of work, the website of the alumni of the EERIE school is about to open.

This site provides a forum to alumni to reconnect and share experiences, a directory of graduates and some old pages about Nimes and the school itself. It was a shock to find out that since the school has been transformed by a take-over from a nearby institution, there is nothing left on the web, of what used to be our school.

Hopefully, we will change that in time...

Quelques mots en francais pour les visiteurs francophones eventuels : le site des anciens de l'EERIE, Nimes, est enfin disponible. Vous y trouverez un forum de discussion pour reprendre contact avec d'anciennes connaissances, un annuaire electronique que vous pourrez mettre a jour, et quelques pages nostalgiques sur ce que fut l'Ecole pour les Etudes et la Recherche en Informatique et Electronique de Nimes.

Si vous etes un ancien... rendez nous visite !

We just came back from our Easter getaway  in the Florida Keys.

The weather was not that great, but it was nice enough to appreciate lazy afternoons by the pool, sunset cruises, dolphins playing here and there, parasailing and sailing lesson for the first time. Overall, it was a fun time. It was also the occasion to discover Key West (interesting enough to go back someday) and Key Largo (not much to see there).

We both needed that break from the crazyness of work, although something tells me that this restful feeling will not last very long once we are back at work.

We just spent a long week-end gateway, far from the tension of work, away from obligations.... a relaxing week-end in a coccoon, in the middle of nowhere, with nothing to do and almost nowhere to go.

The only appointment on our agendas was a glorious 80 minutes massage at a spa. It is still amazing to me how one can come out of a massage completely beat, after spending an hour doing absolutely nothing. I'll do it again...

The 'middle of nowhere' we were at happened to be situated a few miles away from Atlantic City. I have never visited AC before, or Las Vegas for that matter, so we thought it would be a good idea to spend some time out there and visit a casino.

I may be becoming too cynical..... we walked into the Trump Plaza with a feeling of ethnologists taking notes in the middle of a remote tribe. Rows after rows of blinking ligths, screaming machines, and sitting in front of them, an army of empty faces.

There was surprisingly very little happiness. Only people with glazed looks, feeding machines one coin after another. The most painful to watch were the poor and the old, half asleep in front of their screens, and yet feeding their machines with whatever money they had. Just trying to picture the amount of money collected by these machines at any time of the night was mind boggling.

My only experience with a casino before that was Monaco, where most people I saw there could afford to burn large amounts of money and walk away without a regret.

This was very different. It was like walking through a city of ghosts, of empty souls addicted to an illusion.

After seeing this, I am not sure I want to visit Las Vegas any more...