Ponyo

I watched Ponyo, one of Japanimation made by Ghibri studio.

** This article has many spoilers **
I like to share why I found the animation was so interesting.

Ponyo and ponyo-shaped-friends are analogy to a baby and sperms, respectively. Ponyo passes through a dark tunnel and gets into a transparent egg shaped room, which implies that a baby is carried to a mom's egg.

Not everything are exactly mapped to the process of delivering a baby but some are added to make the analogy complete and some are exaggerated.

The animation shows that Ponyo's visiting is causing a lot of troubles: the moon is falling down, ships are missing, and an entire city is submerged. This is very exaggerated but probably almost same level of troubles will be expected in a family once a baby is delivered or being delivered.
The protagonist boy was too smart to be 5 years old boy. Five years old is obviously too early to take a responsibility of having a baby but who on the Earth will be fully ready to have a baby.

By showing ancient fish, it reminded that human species is also from sea and shares many parts on DNA. Who would easily connect dots between delivering a baby with ancient fish.

Ponyo was crossing the line between the world of magic and that of real. I thought this point of view was very romantic.

I didn't find any political factors in this animation but there was a number "1907" on a door. I am guessing that there might be some events in the year.

Ganglion Cyst

I went to a hospital and a Doctor told me that I have a Ganglion Cyst:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganglion_cyst

It is a special case of Cyst and he also told me that it may go away or pop; I don't know what "pop" would mean tho.
I feel little bit of pressure on my hand and arm but not a big deal.
Hopefully it goes away soon.

3D Mouse

After asking around several people, I finally decided to get one, 3D mouse.
http://www.3dconnexion.com/products/spacenavigator.html
Since our project is done at this moment, I will have some time to study others and I am thinking of learning Maya.

If some one is already expert and used to the legacy way of navigating 3D modeling tools, they may not need such a fancy toy. But I am not comfortable navigating 3D space with a mouse yet, so I am expecting high... high... :)

Photoshop free video tutorial

It seems like Adobe provides free video tutorial for their products:
http://tv.adobe.com/channel/how-to/

I haven't seen them yet but I will soon.

Optomologist

I have visited an office of Optomologist or optometry.
It is only because I wanted to have a new glasses. If I am in Korea, I can just go to a glasses shop and get one; they will measure my eye sights as well. I wasn't sure what the procedure of buying a glasses in USA, so I went to Optomologist. After all, I had an interesting experience.

The office had several huge devices that measure something on my eyes. One was for taking picture of back side of my eyes, retina. Another one was for measuring my peripheral sights. Another one was to measure pressure inside of my eyes; that's what I heard anyway.

The cost of most of them were covered by my Vision insurance that my company pays for me. Otherwise, it could cost about 150 dollars. I know that although it seems free because of the insurance, after all I must be paying for them somehow, so I didn't feel much good about those expensive and inefficient process to get a glasses. Although having a new experience was enjoyable, I will prefer to avoid them next time; if I can...I haven't bought my glasses yet, which was the point of all. The office didn't have much variety of glasses in my favor. I will pick one later.

Power XCell 8i as a PCI card

I went to an IBM web-page and I found that there is an PCI card that has one PPU and eight SPUs. What a surprise...
More details are here:
http://www.matrix-vision.com/products/cell/mvxcell8i.php?lang=en

However, it doesn't seem cheap. I cannot just click and buy one.

Toshiba's notebooks, G55, G50, F10, have four SPUs

Today I was surprised by finding that some of Notebooks (and super-computers) has SPUs that are used in PlayStation3. Unfortunately I cannot buy any of them at this time of writing and I don't know why they don't sell them anymore.
Little more details are here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpursEngine

Those notebooks has 4 of SPUs whereas PlayStations3 has 8. So it is little simplified and smaller version of it. I also heard that it comes with some kind of manuals for SPU programmers, which is very interesting.

I have also found that F10 had some defects on chips, so probably G50 and G55 should be available still...