Wednesday I went to the opera to watch Manon Lescaut. Does Puccini ever put anything to music which doesn’t involve the miserable demise of the heroine? Dying of thirst (Manon - in the middle of Louisiana?!), or of consumption (La Bohème), or jumping off a tall building (Tosca), or self inflicted stabbing (Madame Butterfly), or poison (Suor Angelica - in one act!). Oh wait, I did see La Fanciulla del West last season, and technically I suppose one could count Turandot, even though who knows what Puccini intended for the ending there since he didn’t finish it himself. Anyways, Wednesday’s performance was extremely well done. In the middle of a somewhat numbing work week I was definitely in the mood for emotionally overwrought melodrama, and Carol Vaness in the lead role delivered that in spades in an amazing performance, vocally and dramatically. Jay Hunter Morris was somewhat less convincing, but then he has a pretty thin role to play (duped boy to duplicitous girl) so I can’t blame him there. And this time around, they didn’t try anything new fangled with the costumes or scenery that I could complain about.

Rosalind bought a new computer, and gave her old one to Mom. I brought it back home with me temporarily to upgrade it, so I paid the Microsoft tax for XP, and installed RAM and a new CPU. It was pretty much a no brainer to pay $46 for a new Duron 1.6 GHZ processor (Slot A motherboard) to give it a speed boost so her bridge games can go that much faster (and presumably smarter). I know this is old hat, but the price of hardware is just ridiculously cheap. Back in the day I paid Mom paid a horrendous amount of money for a pokey 386SX with 2 MB of RAM, and now look at what you can get for pennies

Friday was my sixth anniversary at Pixar. I can’t decide whether this means I qualify as a curmudgeon yet, or whether I can’t compete with others who have been there much longer than I have.

We finally got a new beta release out the door, and thinking that testing the speedups might be fun, I hacked on l2rib over the weekend, and have decided the result is worthy of being called a 1.0 release. This may seem ridiculous but Lego - yes, those not-even-close-to-resembling-skin-shaded ABS plastic Phong shaded bricks - Lego can bring a renderer to its knees provided you throw enough bricks at it. RenderMan implementors take note: LDraw and l2rib provide very useful data sets of quite arbitrary complexity. Ever think you could skip implementing all those silly quadrics with those crazy sweep angles that noone gets right on the first try? Think again: l2rib gives it to you in spades, becase Lego likes half spheres, conic sections, and cylinders upon cylinders like you wouldn’t believe. Oh, and for those people who need to generate images for SIGGRAPH right about now: if you have absolutely no talent at lighting (like me), keep in mind that a hemispherical occlusion light requires no brains and is thus well worth the rendering time.