bist du verrückt?

© Joselito Briones Mati spent sometime in the afternoon teaching this bird, Buddy (photo, above), a family pet, to say "Bist du verrückt?" ("Are you crazy?", in German), and succeeded in doing it twice, the rest of the time, it just laughed on his face. Click on the image above, or here, to see a short clip. XXX

better be worth it now

floren emailed me these photos he took with his phone earlier today. first one's with the always fab and beautiful faye. am not even sure that's how she spells her name. maybe without e. i don't know. it feels like it should be with an e if only because she has cheekbones sharper than dunaway's.

second one's of me having breakfast. at 5pm, same table. 2 photos a few minutes apart. i know that glass of wine looks very wrong in a breakfast setting. i swear i only had one. not that there's anything wrong with having more. for breakfast i mean. if that's what you're into. woke up very late. i was supposed to be there at 2pm, but then i know that when floren says 2pm it means 3pm earliest. and anyway i wasn't expecting to eat there. i had a couple of snack bars before going. last time we had a mini party there we had to wait so long. i was already very hungry and cranky by the time we started eating. this time i was prepared. i was only going there to chat and catch up with them. that there was food was a plus. it was a bit disappointing that not all of the usual crowd wasn't there. but the ones who were there were fun. especially faye. she was there with her boyfriend simon of course, and their new spoodle (sounds yummy, no? like home-spun noodles) which is a two-tone bastard mixed breed of a poodle and something else. really cute. and looks really expensive. name's charlie. chuckie sounds right. kept fighting for attention against monty. the resident spoiled puppy. purebred poodle. yep. looks just as expensive. no wonder i can't hang out more often with these people (poodle and spoodle owners). they're just so damn rich i can't afford their lifestyle. i'd like to say i hate them but i can't really. they're nice people. okay i hate them. there. hahahaahah. ok not really.  sometimes they feed me really good food. excellent food. oh. speaking of expensive and good. chris told me that on one of their few celebrations this week (his and floren's birthdays are a few days apart), they popped a bottle of 1982 chateau latour pauillac. (that was the part where your jaw was supposed to drop and think to yourself, WTF?).  yes sir. that's HK$10,000-15,000 a bottle bordeaux. naturally i asked if it was worth it (when what i really wanted to ask was why i wasn't invited to THAT party). he said it was really really good but not that much better than other good wines he's had at, say, 5% of the price.  so i said, "well, the only way you can make it really worth its price tag is to tell as many people as possible that you've had it". so here we go.

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(eta: currency)

my first revit rendering (fine, if you have a better title go ahead and change this)

© Joselito Briones

can you believe this stupid thing took more than 2 hours to render?!?!?. i really need to ask my boss for a new pc at work.

anyhoo.  3d rendering has definitely gone so far since i last played with it.  used to be that one had to create every single instance of every single object even if differs only slightly.   and then export it to a third party rendering software and readjust everything again. now with revit,everything's parametric. you do it once, if you're not happy with sizes, you change, say, a numeric parameter, and everything defined by that adjusts accordingly.  i created all the elements in this rendering (okay, except for that guy in suit, it was provided by revit) and they're all adjustable by mere changing of numeric values. yay! hahahahahaha. me's old. that i can still learn a new system is something i'm happy about.  best thing about this tho is that it can render natively. all i had to do was define the sun location/time of the day, and level of cloudiness.  2 hours of wait, and presto. come to think of it, 2 hours isn't all that bad, it used to take my old pc overnight to render a scene similar to this.

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