A while ago, a friend asked me if I’d be interested in riding on a motorcycle track and I said, “Sure!”.

So we rented a couple bikes from Feel Like a Pro and booked some time at Sonoma Raceway through Pacific Track Time and gave it a shot.

It was a lot of fun, but it was also very challenging. So I made a little video talking about what I learned from the experience. If you’ve ever wondered what it’d be like to be on a motorcycle track as a beginner, this will give you a good idea:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tc6QQ3NNig

This morning, I submitted a long-awaited update to my iOS app, Holograms. I’ve been working on it on-and-off for the last couple years or so (finding spare time to work on apps with a full-time job and a toddler is pretty challenging) but I took a vacation from work to do some projects at home and finally managed to finish it.

I was expecting it to take a week or so for Apple to approve the update but surprisingly, they approved it on the same day. That’s great news, but it does mean that the update came out before I had a chance to make a demo video. So here’s a list of the new features:

• You can now share your holograms with friends through email or file sharing!
• There’s now an undo button! (ooh… ahh…)
• Updated the icons for the Retina Display!
• Updated to work with the new 4″ display on the iPhone 5.
• Holograms no longer crashes on the iPhone 4 (which is fortunate, because that’s the one that I have).

So check it out and if you like it, please leave a review. Thanks!

I am attending SIGGRAPH again this year (which may or may not have something to do with the fact that it’s being held a block away from Disneyland). And I’ll be at the RenderMan Users Group meeting presenting a Stupid RAT Trick, like my last one on Minesweeper.

This year, I’m showing a calculator implemented in the RenderMan shading language. It’s actually quite silly because all it does it embed the given expression into the shader code. The only tricky thing is that it takes this numerical value and displays it using the standard 7-segment calculator display.

But then, I realized that I could modify the interface to create 2d and 3d graphs. In fact, it turns out to be even easier to create graphs than it is to display numbers.

If you happen to have a copy of RenderMan and Slim, you can check out the source code. The comments at the top show how to load it. Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJm5QnGhL1s

It’s been about 6 weeks since I dyed my hair blue and it was really starting to fade. I was going to re-dye it earlier, but a friend of mine was throwing an epic Monster’s University themed birthday party (involving drinking games and a midnight expedition to a dance club) so I wanted to keep it for that.

Well, I managed to make it home from her party around 2am this morning and next week is my cousin’s wedding so I figured this was a good time to go for a more subtle hairstyle. Fortunately, dyeing hair that’s already been bleached is a pretty simple process. This was the result.

Apparently, I have 51 subscribers to my RSS feed (it’s that link at the very bottom on my blog) through Google Reader.

If you don’t already know, an RSS feed is a way to monitor a website without having to visit it directly. This is handy if you have a bunch of things like blogs or webcomics that update sporadically that you want to keep track of. Just add all their RSS feeds to your RSS aggregator and then each day, you can just check that one place to see what’s new.

Sadly, one of the most popular RSS aggregators, Google Reader, is going away. I chatted with a friend at Google about it and she speculated that it was because it didn’t have over a million subscribers and with an upcoming overhaul of some of the infrastructure it relied on, it wasn’t deemed worth the effort to update it. She also felt that it might be a good way for other RSS aggregator services to thrive in the market.

So if you’re one of the 51 people who checks out my blog through Google Reader, I hope you stick around through one of the other aggregators. One of my friends recommended Feedly and it seems pretty good so far.

I went rock climbing with some friends at Castle Rock State Park the other day. It was a lot of fun and I was telling Dyson about it. The next week, he said, “I want to go rock climbing gym with Papa!”

So off we went.

Neither of us did a lot of climbing that day, but it was a start. He’s getting to the age where we can actually do things together. It got me thinking about all the fun stuff that we’ll get to do and maybe someday, we’ll even work on projects together.

Man, I really have to start teaching him how to code.

This post is has minor spoilers, although if you’ve seen the original Monsters Inc, you kinda already know.

Monsters University is a bit of an anomaly for a Pixar movie. It’s the first prequel but it’s also a bit unusual in what it tries to say. Most Pixar movies are about how you can be anything you want to be if you just try hard enough. And that’s a great message.

But sometimes, life doesn’t turn out as expected. Consider the story of Stephanie Brown Trafton. She originally dreamt of being an Olympic gymnast. Unfortunately, she grew too big for that to be possible but she found another path and eventually went on to win the Olympic gold in the Women’s Discus Final.

So Monsters University is a lot of fun and you get to see old and new characters in a wonderful setting. But it’s also a movie about the importance of working towards something, even if that something turns out to be different from what you expected.

I recently got an email from Apple informing me of a new “App Transfer” feature. Basically, you can transfer the rights to any of your apps to another developer. It got me thinking about principles (and money).

I thought about what this might mean for my apps like Mach Dice and Selector. If I transfered those apps to an unscrupulous developer, they could do totally shady things like install cheat codes to get high rolls or favored picks. Can you imagine how terrible (and potentially profitable) that would be?

Fortunately, for the tens of thousands of loyal and trusting customers of my apps, I have integrity. And integrity like that can’t be bought for any amount of money (under $1,000,000).

I have this theory that at some point, everyone is the best in the world at something, although it might be pretty minor. I wondered what it might be for me and when it might happen.

Well, this week, I found out. On June 2, 2013, I managed to get the world’s fastest time (4.55 seconds) on medium level 99 of Blendoku (a fantastic free color matching iPhone game).

So, at least on that day, I was best in the world at something. As it happens, it would have been my dad’s 74th birthday. It’s the sort of thing he would have found amusing.

Every once in a while, I get a request to license the source code to Mach Dice. It’s not something that I actively encourage because it’s an app that I just hacked together haphazardly over the course of several years. But who am I to stop people from giving me money?

This week, one of those requests came to fruition in the form of an app on the iTunes Store. It’s called Bangkok and as far as I can tell, it’s an interactive choose your own adventure type book about an American cop turned bodyguard in Bangkok. I’m not entirely sure because it’s originally in Spanish and the English translation is … creative.

Anyways, it’s free and it’s got my dice in there so check it out!