keizo/weblog

In high-school I was very much into animation and computer graphics. You may have hated Jar Jar Binks, but I had all the magazines with him on the cover for being the first animated character integrated with real actors. It was exciting stuff and my plan was to work in the movies — one day get my name in the credits on the big screen. I experimented with all sorts of computer programs and made several 3D renderings.

In 11th grade a friend and I decided to make an animated short. Something simple and cute, maybe 1 or 2 characters and 2 to 3 minutes long. My friend came up with a story of a penguin who wanted to fly and sketched out some story boards. I set up the penguin character (essentially the linux penguin), modeled several scenes, made textures, set up the lighting, and started animating. It was a hugely labor intensive process, mostly because we had no idea what we were doing. By the end of the year all we had to show was a 20 second preview.

Over that summer I doubled the number of rendered shots we had. Then one day I went to start up my computer and nothing happened. The hard drive suffered a severe mechanical failure. Worst of all, my last backups were on CD from about 6 months ago, mostly because I had run out of CD’s. That was devastating enough that I pretty much stopped all work on it. Instead I started a paddling website and went into engineering at college.

The point is that you should backup. Your hard drive will fail, it’s just a mater of when. Anything on your computer that you still need tomorrow should be backed up. Most importantly, backups should be automated since who really has the discipline to manually backup? Obviously not me.

This was derived from the intro of my 5 minute persuasive speech in speech communication class. The body of my speech also briefed on the how part, so that might get posted later.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 26th, 2006 at 6:19 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.