Matt's Homepage

Two fabulous videos from “Britian’s Got Talent” you really should see.  Two ordinary people who do something completely unexpected and extraordinary:

47 year old Susan Boyle sings Les Miserables

Paul Potts a mobile phone salesman sings opera

I’m currently working with Intel’s newly acquired game development team called Project Offset.  You can see some video clips of recent work here,  or here (Voodoo Extreme), or here (Gamespot).  There’s also a video clip of Sam McGrath on G4 TV showing off the system (I worked with Sam on two different technologies now)

And get it directly from the Offset project page – and see that I’m listed in the ‘Meet our team’ section.  🙂

Also, Tom’s hardware does a decent review of publicly available info on Larrabee.

http://www.katu.com/news/local/42264232.html#idc-container

One of my old managers from a few years back – Pam – a very avid flyer, died in a small plane crash last week.  She used to communte to work via plane (hillsboro airport is right across the way) and I would sometimes pick her up for rides when she was walking between the airport and work.  She was a great lady – and will be missed.

No news yet on funeral details.

Interesting article on the custom servers used by Google that were finally revealed.  The battery backup guys aren’t going to like reading this one…

How to tip a cow

“The guy driving the Prius/Volvo with it’s Obama sticker in the window in downtown Portland is just as big a stereotype as the guy driving the red pickup with a Bush/Cheney sticker in Tigard.”

Even though the experts are saying that certain housing markets are bottoming out, the question is who and which?  To that end, Money magazine published an interesting article that reports estimated housing price changes for the next 12 months by city/state.

Interestingly, Portland is slated for a 10.2% drop in house prices from now till March 2010.  Something that local realtors are not likely to tell you.  In fact, according to the local radio ads – it’s never been a better time to buy!  (Just like they’ve been screaming for the last 2 years).  But anywho, that matches up with the historical data that says Oregon tends to enter recessions later than others, but tends to stay longer (and sometimes goes a bit deeper).  But anyway – go give the list a look – interesting trends.

I’m not a dad – but many people ask me what I do.  Well, in between some new work I can’t talk about, I work with this guy – doing 3D graphics with this new stuff…

Larrabee talk at GDC

Diamond Select is taking preorders for a very limited run of 1701 pieces. A highly screen-accurate, full-size, usable star trek original series command chair – for the actually very affordable $2717.01 (build this one yourself and you’d likely spend just about this much based on prop forum prices + your time)

Interested?

http://www.diamondselecttoys.com/

Spoiler alert – so don’t read if you don’t want to get anything ruin-t…

I just got around to watching the finale of Battlestar Galactica.  I must say the final battle scene was really well done – just a touch crazy – but still very cool attack plan and execution.  It will take a much better writer than I’ve seen yet to beat the atmosphere jump manuver they pulled off in Season 3 episode 4.  That was just awesome – beats almost every Star Wars/Star Trek manuver ever done…but anyway.

They tried to tie up all those loose ends, but I left feeling a bit unsatisifed.  They did a good job with the finale – but I think the series kind of just took a life of it’s own over time and got a little too schitzophrenic for me starting about season 3.  A friend described it as, “I’ve never watched a series that I actually fast forwarded through so much so often”.  I think we were working at the same root cause.  My impression is that they kept investing huge chunks of episodes into things/themes that really didn’t go very far or have any real meaning in the end. I mean, they just shut off Baltar’s harem and his Kafka-esque monologs with the flick of a switch after running it as massive parts of the story for several seasons?  There was a huge story there – but it just shut off and that was that.  And the rambings about higher purposes/etc and angles and so forth – felt like lots of it was just dropped on the cutting room floor for me.  And Kira just dissappearing, and then using the oldest sci-fi cliche in the book of saying life on earth was really just seeded/developed from beings visiting from another world.  Not a bad way to end things – but certainly not original either.  I felt like it lacked a good cohesive story when really considered from season 1 episode 1 to the very end.

Overall, I’d give it a 6/10 – worth sifting through – but definitely lots of good skippable parts. Did I just really miss it? Feedback folks – let me know if I missed some big ah-ha moment and just offended the sci-fi minions…