Blowing Barley

It’s tough brewing beer during the winter on Donner Summit. But it does provide a nice opportunity to combine snow management tools and homebrewing!

Homebrew Equipment

A breakdown of the equipment I used to make my all-grain homebrew.

Summit Gingerbread Ale (#9)

First time I’ve ever tried using spices in my beer!  Or really, anything other than grains, hops, water and a bit of whirlfloc.  This was a light-colored ale with autumn spices.  A bit different than a normal Christmas Ale because it is so light colored (but still full bodied).

Summit Pale Stout (#7)

Lucky #7. Shooting for a strong, full bodied blond ale, with a flowery hop in the low range of the IPA category.

Deck Construction

We built a deck this summer. Emily and I are now enjoying the results of our fantastic crew’s great work.

New Year’s 2005

We got a bit of snow this holiday.

GPU Gems II

Eric Enderton and I wrote a chapter for GPU Gems II describing part of Gelato’s hider including a full implementation based on a generally useful C++ GPU toolkit.

Lock Leven

This summer we tried to hike to all the locally known hotspots. Loch Leven is a small lake near the summit where Cici loves to chase ducks.

2003 Tahoe Donner Fire

On the way back from our hike to the John Benson Sierra Club hut, Emily and I saw a fire start near I80 and head up and over the ridge to Tahoe Donner.

May Snow

It was a late snow year up here in Serene Lakes. Here’s some pictures that show what the house looked like on my birthday, May 11th, 2003.

Petroglyphs

Our friend Jennifer signed us up to go learn about and see some rock art outside of Reno. It was really hard to withstand the urge to bring our rockhammers…

Skiing with Lynelle and Sharon

Some pictures of the last day we went skiing this year. Our friends, Lynelle and Sharon came out for what we thought was one of the last days with snow.

Naomi’s Bat Mitzvah

Photographs of the party following Naomi Wexler’s ascension to adulthood! Ah, tradition.

Cici Wonderdog

What’s up with Cici? Well, she lives a dog’s life in dog heaven aka Soda Springs, so what would you expect?

Olympics

Emily and I drove out to Salt Lake City to see the 2002 Winter Olympics. We spent a week attending nordic events and watching the best atheletes in the world heat up the snow at Soldier Hollow.

Snowboarding wtih Gilles

A picture perfect day (or two) for my friend Gilles and I to float down the powder at Sugar Bowl and Soda Springs.

PARC

A Python and C toolkit for simple animation, rendering and compositing. A micropolygon based renderer with motion blur, depth of field, and procedural shading and geometry via Python plugins. The scene description language is also Python, which means PARC both extends and embeds Python.

Bokeh

Bokeh is a Japanese term describing the quality of out-of-focus regions in a photograph. I describe how to simulate bokeh in a CG renderer. This page contains a bokeh depth of field demonstration and links to the PDF for the Siggraph bokeh sketch.

Shrek Rendering Statistics

Graphs of the rendering log data from Shrek including memory usage, scene complexity and other fun facts.

PDI Renderfarm Statistics

A description of the hardware render farm used at PDI to create Shrek. Details of the machine configurations and interesting trivia tidbits are provided.