click here to access Diaryland click here to send me an email click here for bio and links click here to access the archive list click here for the latest entry


--First, a couple for your video files. First up is THIS short video trailer for a new dirt bike DVD coming out. I saw guys like these on SpeedVision one day and I thought it was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen. Those guys FLY. They really get that high and that far, and they do it consistently. Some of the jumps on the SV show were absolutely gravity-defying. Talking hundreds of feet. Imagine clearing a football field every jump. This vid is just a small taste. 1.17 MB.

Second is actually a FLASH video which you can get RIGHT HERE. It illustrates why racing should be confined to the race track. The near bike is an '02 Honda Interceptor, the far bike is some anonymous Hardley. 149 KB.

--Know what Saturday morning is? That's right, SitRep Live, baby! Jess Johnson and Charley Jones (and others) at Collin County Community College.

--I've downloaded a bunch of free modelers and renderers including Amorphium, Amapi, Anim8or, Python, Wings3D, MetaSequoia, Cybermotion, Marbleclay, and a couple more. trueSpace 6 comes out next week. I could get it for $300, but I just don't trust that program, even three generations beyond trueSpace 3. Just too buggy and frustrating. Too bad I can't find Max 1 for cheap. 512 MB is also pretty much minimum for any of these programs. And Geforce 3s don't even cut it.

--AMD is paying for its budget pricing and razor-thin profit margins. Sure, they grabbed alot of market share from Intel with chips that were faster (for some things) and less expensive, but now Intel has the faster chips and AMD is in trouble. They are not making a profit and the situation is getting worse. Shareholders aren't happy. They're going to have to raise prices significantly, and the 'ClawHammer' chip will have to wait until some time in 2003 instead of late this year. You want to root for the underdog but somehow you just knew AMD's strategies were going to come back to haunt them sooner or later. I think I said as much in this diary about a year and a half ago.

--Speaking of a year and a half ago... In just a couple months kevynwight.diaryland.com will be two years old. Wahoo.

--The National Alliance for Nutrition and Activities is at it again. Going after fast food restaurants. All those 'supersize' meals that somehow jump off the table and into people's mouths when they enter the restaurant. Help, I need to be protected from myself! I'm too dumb to make up my own mind about my own body so I need these folks to go after those evil corporations! Gimme a break. They eventually would like to take down 'Big Fast Food' the way they tried to take down Big Tobacco, probably by rolling in some morbidly obese folks who were 'lied to' and 'deceived' by fast food commercials and 'tricked' into consuming a quarter of a million calories worth of fast food per year. Basically, they (the NANA) don't like the fact that 'Biggie' or 'supersize' meals are such a good value! If they were just trying to educate, I'd just think they were annoying, but no, they want to use the Courts to try and destroy fast food corporations financially and have all sorts of Laws passed, as if there's some paucity of laws in this country.

--This Summer is whipping by uninhibited. I'm already three fifths of the way through my first Summer session (gonna get an 'A'). I'll say one thing: the weather this year is a relief! Remember 2000? It got up to 108� or higher several times when I was walking out to my non-air conditioned car leaving the Census for a seventy mile commute. It's hovering around 90� this year. Nice!

--If anyone has Sony's CD-R software suite they'd like to 'share' with me, I'd appreciate it. Their online support is crap. I've sent four emails so far and gotten nothing back. The model is the CRX0811. It's an 8x/4x/32x CD-R/RW drive. I think the software will work with several of their drives but there may be a few different sets of the software. I've looked long and hard on the net to no avail, and Sony doesn't keep the software where you can reach it (for some unfathomable reason). The deal is that the computer I salvaged the drive from probably only came with one of those wonderful 'Restore' disks, the ones that make it so none of your hardware is upgradeable and you don't really own Windows.