Staff Sergeant (now with solution!)

So this morning I leveled up to Staff Sergeant Ying…

And got called a “fuck” for my incredible lag, since I installed this wireless myself and it’s as stable as an elephant on a beach ball on a toothpick on loose gravel. I guess that should be a compliment, to be called a fuck. I shot him half a minute later. Crude bastard.

I would post some images of my progress from FYP but I’ve come across a very horrid and potentially life-threatening situation. When maya flashes me the error:

mental ray: got 8 satellite CPUs.
mental ray: out of memory
mental ray: out of memory
mental ray: out of memory
mental ray: out of memory
mental ray: out of memory
mental ray: out of memory
mental ray: got 8 satellite CPUs.
mental ray: got 8 satellite CPUs.
MEM 0.3 fatal 031008: can’t allocate 16480004 bytes.
MEM 0.3 fatal 031008: can’t allocate 16480004 bytes.
MEM 0.3 fatal 031008: can’t allocate 16480004 bytes.
MEM 0.3 fatal 031008: can’t allocate 16480004 bytes.

Then fail to render anything at all. And I’ve been trying periodically for the past 3 hours. It’s bloody irritating.

Now, from what I gather off the ever-reliable cg forums, it seems like running a scene in maya takes up 400mb of ram. Rendering can take up to another 1G depending on the amount of texture information used in the texture nodes. Then there’s the photon emissions from my lovely final gather shaders set up everywhere.

I can’t do diddly squat.

Just when I fixed my batch render problem too.

I have a 4G ram, a top notch graphic card, two hard drives, a virus-free computer, fully opened chakras and a bottle of Essence of Chicken. What am I doing wrong?!

Bah. Screw this. I’m going to sleep.

Maya is going to be a cuss word really soon…

-edit-

Apparently, quite a few people are searching the net for an answer to this Maya connundrum. Here is what I did to solve it.

If you get the error MEM 0.3 fatal 031008: can’t allocate 16480004 bytes, it probably means you have another Maya render window going on invisible in the background. Open up the Task Manager (for windows) and you’ll see you have another Maya render window going on unseen. Stop that application, and rerun the render. It should work fine after that.

All else fails, save, quit, and restart maya to clear the entire thing.

Dear Maya.

PLEASE STOP CRASHING ON ME YOU PIECE OF SHIT.

Thank you.

Dammit I’m bad at this.

So I just got back from the ADM versus SCE futsal match. ADM won 2-1 against NIE on Monday even in the most horrid of conditions. And today? I totally fucked up and we lost 2-1 to SCE.

Not to mention I’ve only got 8 functioning fingers left after 20 minutes as a goalie.

I suppose this being my first time playing I should be patting myself on the back for not getting myself killed… But I lost an important match for my school. My school that I would toss myself in front of a bus for. Instead I tossed myself into the oncoming ball a second too late. The girls played really well today, and me (the only newbie today) felt like an ugly oblong anchor weighing them all down. Now I’m being asked to join the table tennis team. I’m terrified of letting my school down again. This is our first year separated from HSS, and we all want to make a splash in the ISG…

I wish someone would scold me already. Tell me I suck. Slap me. Anything.

Anything but tell me it’s not my fault. Because it all is.

The world made me sad today

Warning. You may find this post offensive if you feel strongly against homosexuality. e-Bashing on my blog will not be tolerated and I will obliterate you if you even try to do so. This is a very long post. So click to see the entire thing. Post contains images that may be disturbing.

“Watching the returns on election night was an amazing experience. Barack Obama is our new president. Change is here. I, like millions of Americans, felt like we had taken a giant step towards equality. We were watching history.

“This morning, when it was clear that Proposition 8 had passed in California, I can’t explain the feeling I had. I was saddened beyond belief. Here we just had a giant step towards equality and then on the very next day, we took a giant step away.

“I believe one day a ‘ban on gay marriage’ will sound totally ridiculous. In the meantime, I will continue to speak out for equality for all of us.” – Ellen DeGeneres

Today the world is an uglier place.

Rally 08

So this evening was the election rally for 2008.

Aside from the horrible mix-up with our venue (we wanted the LT… Not sure why we swapped with AFH which was supposed to be held in the tiny crit room we ended up in. Half their students wandered into the crit room while we were setting up…), the rally this year went pretty well. There was a greater attendance than the year before, and more positions being contested. I got to know more about the people to be running the next management committee, putting at ease a whole bunch of worries in the back of my mind, and raising some new ones.

I’m glad I didn’t have to pull out all my default questions to get the ball rolling. Neither did I have to ask all of them, since either the contestants or the audience asked and answered those before I got the chance to.

I did, however, feel very insulted at some point.

And it’s been happening quite often lately. All I’m doing is sitting back, plastering a smile on my face and willing every ounce of restraint in my body to hold myself back from slapping a face lop-sided. Why go out of your way to insult someone so much? What is the point? To prove your superiority when there was no hierarchy to challenge to begin with? I simply cannot understand your downright ridiculous actions which I can only try to assume is a rather deformed visage of immaturity, akin to farting flagrantly in the wind.

I really don’t like the way you act. And it is definitely not going to help you in the near or distant future.

GAH.

Shall practice more with my bokken tomorrow to swing out this anger.

On lighter news… The ADM Alumni constitution is finished.

Now to find people to help start it all off.

Bitter bitter irony

Today was/is a day of wasted effort.

It all began with an email.

The email notifying me that I had been rejected from hall. This year, as with the years before, I have 12 points. I maxed out my CCA points and got the bare minimum for distance. I wasn’t the only one not to get a place in hall. Half the management committee didn’t as well. I begin to seriously question the system by which our lives are governed.

Nearly all my management committee members are not on the recommendation list for their respective halls. Why? Because we work so fucking hard for our school that we don’t have any extra time to put into hall. Coupled with the fact that this year, cut-off for all halls is now 15, half of us are ruled out of the equation.

This is the MANAGEMENT COMMITTEE for crying out loud. It becomes painfully obvious who the HAS system favors when only those who put a whole lot of time into hall instead get on the rec list. What is this system saying? That people who work for their schools are less important? That students who represent their faculties in the university are secondary? What the fuck is going on?

I can’t help but wonder if the triple room issue has something to do with the shortage of rooms. I had already anticipated the lack of rooms and massive exodus of seniors from the halls, but not this soon. And definitely not to this extent.

I feel really angry for my committee. That I’ve made them work so hard, yet they cannot be acknowledged for their efforts. Fine the system is supposed to be “fair” and place equal emphasis on distance and school involvement. But why do students who live nearer have to be forced into working so much damn harder than people who live further away? People who live in areas with 8 or 9 points simply join and event and BANG they get a hall.

It is because of this I am terrified that people will choose to work for hall instead of their schools. Already I’m hearing such cases from various sources of people having second thoughts about choosing school over hall. They need to retain culture but so do we. How do we pass on from one committee to the next when there is no committee to pass on to? Is my committee being penalized for being part of the school club? How can you penalize students when you refuse to reward them?

Sure then there’s the whole “they’re supposed to do this for passion” tirade I hear every damn meeting. But how CAN you be passionate when your passion is limited by the time of the last train or bus?

Don’t even get me started on how fucking inaccurate the distance calculation system is.

It is particularly hurting when this committee has done so much not only for the school but for the university. We’ve helped SAO recruit designers, we’ve represented NTU in the first time the university has ever been in a St Patricks day parade, we’ve given an effective voice to our students in the university, we’ve given many amenities, we’ve promoted the university, we’ve been part of HASIC (hahahahahahahaha)…

All that. And a rejection letter at the end.

I feel so jaded right now. I have a choice (with a car and a girlfriend willing to share her bed/floor/space outside the door). But what about my other committee members? What about the management committee of the other con clubs who must also undoubtedly face the same problem? I’m going to write a letter to SAO once I calm down.

We were useful. But now that we’re not, we’re tossed aside.

I’m furious, jaded and betrayed. And that’s an understatement.

SHUT UP ALREADY.

I cannot believe I was just woken up by my goddam ipod.

It’s 6.30am FOR CRYING OUT LOUD.

I only fell asleep at 1 last night. This is so not funny.

I woke up to the sound of my ipod crashing hideously. It was making sounds like a screaming wet cat was placed in a pan and dragged across a chalkboard followed by a train of dismembered fingernails.

Undoubtedly, I’m very pissed off.

I even resorted to banging the damn thing on the table like a caveman after reasoning with it, scolding it, and obviously plugging it into my computer didn’t work.

Now I just want to make sure it’s either quiet or dead. Whichever comes first.

I put it in a tupperware in my kitchen to lessen the noise.

But tupperwares were never meant to keep sound in, probably on the pretext that whatever went in was probably not screaming.

GAWD JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP.

Stupid Ying

Stupid stupid. Beat Ying to pulp with a crazed looking goat.

Stupid insensitive ying.

Bah-Fuck.

<warning: profane post>

Fuck. I feel like shit on a stick. I don’t understand what could have gone wrong. I spent a good half hour matching the sound exactly. Why did it screw up during the export? So fucked up. I don’t really care that I spent hours on the project. Now all I’m angry about is my utter carelessness. Now Boo can’t showcase that film. Total bumble-fuck.

YING HOW CAN YOU BE SO GODDAM STUPID LET YOUR STUPIDITY FUCK UP YOUR OWN WORK. DON’T FUCK UP THE WORK OF OTHERS CAN OR NOT

Why didn’t you just check while you were masking… Why didn’t you see the project through to the end… Why… Why… Why…

I need a drink and a walk.

Hello, Panda

It’s 10am. And I’m awake.

Doesn’t sound like much of a feat really. Until I tell you the tale of deceit, tragedy, horror, sheer exhaustion and finally weary triumph that quietly rampaged in this part of Singapore all the way till 6am this morning.

Yes. It’s the story of our mounting boards.

The dreaded phonecall I received last night came from Boo at 2345hours who had, mere moments before gotten word from the shop owner of the store we sent our photographs to be mounted at (said shop owner henceforth known as “Auntie”). The auntie had scolded Boo on the phone, ranting that she had only completed one mount in 2 hours and she was only charging us SGD2 per mount and that we had to collect it in the evening (when we specifically said our deadline was in the morning).

Now, what really baked our noodles was that we had given her our prints and mounting boards with full written and illustrated instructions on THURSDAY early afternoon, with instructions that we would pick it up on Friday 9pm (to give her ample time to finish it. She normally does the mounting there on the spot and returns it to the customer after a slipshot job. To save our prints, we gave her more than a day to finish ours.) However, upon arriving at the store on Friday at 7pm to check on our prints, she gloriously announced that she had forgotten about our mounting completely. So we told her the latest we could pick it up would be 10am the next day. And she said it wouldn’t be a problem, and that she would give us a call if it was finished sooner.

Then the phonecall at 2345hours.

My eyes swathed in livid red, I drove to pick up Boo where we then sped over to Sunshine Plaza to pick up the mounting boards and prints ourselves to finish it. And lo and behold! She didn’t even finish one. DECEIT! All she had done was to paste our mounting boards back to back and cut them in half. Now… Window mounts are basically 2 boards put together, the top one has to be cut like this:

and to the size of the image to be framed. The image is then placed between the two boards, then sealed, creating the window mount (as demonstrated here by my really disgraceful illustration of a man on the verge of being eaten by a giant carnivorous brinjal.

So you get the idea. Anyway, the point of that entire explanation was to show that you stick the boards together AFTER cutting the window. If you stick them together before, how the hell do you mount anything?!

With this TRAGEDY, we dragged ourselves back to school at the ungodly hour of 0130hours. Thankfully, Lin Wei helped us! She’s done with her submissions but came back with us to help us mount. What ensued was a true triumph of human resolution, where we were temporarily transformed into a mounting board factory line, cutting photos, measuring placements, cutting windows. Finally at 0520hours, we were finished, and hauled our exhausted selves back to hall where we then started to stick the photos into the already cut windows.

Now… I’m just waiting for Boo to wake up. Then we’ll paste our names on the boards and hand them up in a finale of blazing glory!

Then get shot down by Wayne for not meeting his standards.

Basically, tiring night.