Yeraze's Domain 3.0

This morning we all got up and decided to cash in on that “Friends of the Zoo” membership we bought a few weeks ago. We got dressed, ate breakfast, and made it there around 9:30. I had forgotten until we arrived that the new “Wilderness Mississippi” exhibit opened about two weekends ago.

Seems we’re starting a tradition of “one odd event per zoo visit”. The one “odd” thing that happened this morning was in the Zebra enclosure. Right as we got there, one zebra “mounted” another. We hastily distracted Rhi and took off for other areas (Don’t need to explain that fact of life yet). Although, the booming roar that one of those zebras let loose a few seconds later could be heard echoing across the entire zoo. A sound so eery that everyone I could see stopped and clutched their children closely, while looking for a rampaging elephant or bull running through the streets. I don’t know if it was a scream of joy (the mount-er) or shock (the mount-ee), but it was surprising to hear something so deep & booming coming from what I always considered basically a horse.

So, about the new “Wilderness Mississippi” exhibit:

The Good:

• It’s remarkably clean, the cleanest part of the zoo by far.
• There’s a wide selection of animals, although since it is “Wilderness MIssissippi” most of it I’ve seen before.
• All the outdoor pens have large shaded areas in front, complete with Benches & fans
• There’s a large indoor aquarium area with Turtles and otters

Today was an interesting day. I woke up at 4:45am to hit the road early heading toward Starkville, Mississippi. I had an early 8am meeting at the HPC2 at Mississippi State University to listen to some vendors and then start some preparations for the upcoming User’s Group Conference in Denver. It’s been roughly 4 years since I was last in Starkville, so I looking foward to seeing firsthand some of the changes I had heard about. Little did I know just how much it had changed.

The signature log-cabin Burger King is closed, with it’s parking lot in shreds. The old Jitney Jungle building has been leveled and rebuilt, with current tenants undecided. The old Krystal’s has been replaced with a Ditto’s Copy Shop, evidently new competition to Copy Cow. My old haunt “Mexico Tipico” is still there, but has a new neighbor in a Chili’s. Seemed pretty much every place left standing has had a face lift, and new housing has cropped up everywhere. It’s almost nauseating to hit the new US25 and as you’re coming in you see dozens, maybe hundreds, of identical 2-story homes just littering the horizon. Speaking of the new US25, it’s finally complete.

The meeting itself was interesting. We started the meeting with CEI, of course, showing off Ensight 8.2′s new Distributed Rendering functionality, along with all it’s new parallel processing support. They’ve added of of new features into 8.2 like texturing and extensibility via Python, and they’ve modified their pricing structure to get it down to a more affordable range for those of us without senatorially-deep pockets. It’s all good changes that I’m sure will get them alot of new users. Perhaps the most interesting thing was the experimental results showing their linear correlation between performance benefits vs number of nodes. If that holds water, then that’s a huge win in the visualization community.

Kitware went next with Berk Geveci talking about all the new features coming down the pipe in Paraview. The new version is expected this summer, but the big bombshell was the discussion of new “Paraview Based Products”. We’ve heard talk already of a Paraview Enterprise Edition that they would be selling with a web-based front end, but the real surprise was that that same codebase was facilitating a product called “ParaQ”. ParaQ is evidently a product just like ParaView but with alot more flexibility in scripting and customizations, designed to be a kind of engine for letting people write their own apps. While it’s currently closed & under development, they hope to open-source it under a BSD-style license sometime in Q4. It supports a wide variety of changes, but the one I particularly looking forward to is the ability to setup a dedicated visualization server system with multiple dataservers and renderservers, and then connect/disconnect clients at will.

IP Video Systems talked after the break. They’re the company formerly known as “Teraburst”, makers of a hardware point-to-point video IP company. They make a product called the V2D system that will allow you to stream live video over a network with interactivity (keyboard & mouse). It uses an extremely high-speed encoding/decoding array to make decisions about quality vs speed (which are user adjustable) and pipes it point-to-point to the desired location, complete with multicast and collaborative capabilities. Previously we’ve discarded their solution as ineffective and overpriced, but recent information has led us to reconsider them. It’s still a bit pricey, but it’s the only device on the market with it’s capabilities. 1600×1200 60fps across internet on 20MB or less is hard to beat. Being able to do it to multiple locations simultaneously, with built-in session recording (Complete with Tivo-Style PVR functionality) makes it a very tempting offer.

For lunch I got to revisit an old favorite of mine that I’ve long since missed: Little Dooey’s. The place has changed alot since last I was there, they’re now a franchise with some pretty impressive credentials. Right as you enter, you’re overwhelmed by the giant ESPN, CBS Sports, and Jefferson Pilot banners all signed “Thanks for the best barbeque in the south!”. We had alot of fun there, especially watching all the northerners squirm their way through some Fried Pickles.

When I got home there was even more interesting news: a tanker truck carrying “hydrogen fluoride anhydrous” flipped on I20 around Pearl (on WLBT3 and WAPT16). The stuff is extremely dangerous and toxic, and while it wasn’t leaking yet they were afraid it could start if they tried to upright it. As a safety precaution they had evacuated the surrounding area, and blocked all Eastbound and Westbound lanes of I20, starting around 5:30am. As of the time of this writing, it’s still closed. Evidently there are only about a dozen trucks in the US capable of hauling this stuff, so they’re waiting for another truck to come in so they can transfer the load before they upright the truck. With any luck the road will be open again sometime late tomorrow.

Guess it’s a good thing I wasn’t planning on going to Meridian this weekend. Although my mom has to find a way around it today …
[tag:starkville][tag:barbeque][tag:accident][tag:ensight][tag:paraview][tag:kitware]

As many of you know, I live in Mississippi. Widely regarded as one of the most backwoods redneck states in the union (it’s debatable which is the most, Mississippi or Alabama), it’s hard to be taken seriously sometimes when people hear you’re from Mississippi. Afterall, what does Mississippi ever do besides pull down the National IQ & Academic Test Scores, or beg for more welfare money?

My dad sent me an email a few weeks ago, and I just managed to get enough details to deem it worthy of repeating. As reported in The Mississippi Press, an advertising agency known as The Cirlot Agency, Inc has taken it upon themselves to boost the image of Mississippi by launching the Mississippi… Believe it! campaign. It’s a series of 11 posters showing how Mississippi is not only a national but global force in Technology, the arts, and sports. Highlighting such things as our Ballet companies, the new Nissan plant, our numerous Athletes, musicians, and writers, and even our world-changing medical procedures, even veteran Mississippians can probably learn a thing or two about our state from these. They claim they’ll be published in several newspapers and circulated country-wide, although I’ve not seen any yet.

Go check it out, all the posters are on their website in nice high-resolution PDF format. Spread the word

I had hoped that I could say that Rita was no problem. For Laura & I, it really wasn’t. We got rain all weekend, but no damage. In fact, we kept power and cable all weekend, not even a flicker.

Unfortunately, Mississippi State University, my old home, wasn’t so lucky. A tornado spawned off by Tropical Depression Rita ripped through the campus and caused a pretty good bit of damage. Bad enough to cancel classes on Monday. I heard from some old friends that apparently alot of roofs are gone, and alot of trees are down.

At least nobody got hurt.

With Hurricane Rita heading in towards the keys, alot of people are worrying that New Orleans and the coast is in for another hit. But I got to wondering, if they’re already up to R then what names are left?

The National Hurricane Center has a list of 20 names, alternating male and female, that they use for hurricanes. 6 years worth even, but they retire & replace names linked to devastating storms. So what’s left for this year?

• Stan
• Tammy
• Vince
• Wilma

Hurricane Tammy? Guess it’ll bury us all in a few pounds of mascara as it sweeps across the land.

And Hurricane Wilma? That’ll ruin an entire TV generation there if it’s dangerous…

Hurricane Stan just sounds boring, so I doubt we’ll hear much of it. Hurricane Vince is a little more intimidating, but just because it sounds like it’s just as soon bust your kneecaps than flood your house.

And what happens if we use all 20 names this year? Well the NHC claims they’ll go greek: Hurricane Alpha, Hurricane Beta, etc.

Great.. now combination frat/hurricane parties…

So, I’m sure the big question on all your minds is “How did you weather Hurricane Katrina?”

Short answer: Pretty Well.

Longer Answer: It was still a mess.

For the full story, read the details inside…

Well, it seem Hurricane Katrina is looking to one-up Ivan from last year. On a nearly identical path, it’s set to run aground near New Orleans and plow right through Mississippi.

Of course, New Orleans has already started an evacuation, so that means I20 and maybe I55 will be packed all around Vicksburg and Jackson. And, of course, alot of people aren’t taking it seriously. I guess it’s a little of the “boy who cried wolf” after Ivan didn’t come, but with so much of Near Orleans below sea level, the storm surge alone is gonna do alot of damage. The wind & rain will do even more.

Guess I get to spend tonight cleaning out the rain gutters and preparing for the “week-o-rain”.

Well, Dennis has passed.. and rather quietly at that. Shame to think they went through all the trouble of bringing that sign and dropping it in my front yard, only to have to come and pick it up yesterday afternoon again. Oh well.

We hardly got any rain at all. Sunday was kinda spooky. Cloudy, windy, with a constant rumble and whistle in the background as the wind whipped through the trees. But hardly a drop of rain during the whole thing. Never lost power, never lost cable. Geez, I played Star Wars Galaxies through the entire thing. So much fuss about nothin.

Well, for anyone who’s been able to see past the recent tragedy in London, us here in the South have been carefully watching Hurricane Dennis. Surprisingly, the models this time are pretty convergent.

Last year in Miami, the models were always divergent, making prediction nigh impossible. But it looks like it’s pretty certainly gonna soak us here in Mississippi. And they claim that it’s going to make landfall as a Cat3.

This is gonna be worse than Ivan… Guess I get to spend today cleaning out the Rain Gutters in addition to cutting the grass.

So I start digging through email and such today, and wrap it all up by checking my blogline, and what do I find?

The