My new Apple iMac I ordered from the Apple Online Store arrived exactly in one month. After finishing Billy Blue, I needed to buy a new capable computer for my work and experiments in motion design and was deliberating on buying a powerful PC workstation. The new Intel quad core processor the Core i7 have just been released I knew that was the processor I would be going for. I didn’t want to buy another laptop because they can only be so much powerful and if I was buying a new computer I would pack all the power possible into it. The other option was a Mac Pro with a quad core 2.6 GHz Intel Xeon “Nehalem” processor which is an awesome piece of machine but just too expensive at over A$4000 for the base configuration. So the only option I could see was a custom PC, probably with the Core i7 920. Atleast I could then play all the games that are not available on the Mac like Grand Theft Auto 4. But in the back of my mind I wasn’t looking forward to switching back to Windows operating system having been so used to Mac OS X for such a long time.

That was exactly when Apple released their amazing refresh on the aluminium iMacs. There were five models:

• 21.5″ 3.06 GHz Core 2 Duo
• 21.5″ 3.06 GHz Core 2 Duo with ATI Radeon 4670
• 27″ 3.06 GHz Core 2 Duo with ATI Radeon 4670 (with an option for ATI Radeon 4850)
• 27″ 2.66 GHz Core i5 with ATI Radeon 4850
• 27″ 2.8 GHz Core i7 with ATI Radeon 4850

I was particularly excited with the the highend model with the Core i7. Together with the model with Core i5, it was the first quad core iMac and it was a beauty, especially for the price of A$2,881 (with 4 GB of RAM). It was arguably a workstation Apple computer priced very competitively with PC workstations.

Here are the things I like about it:

Processor: Intel 2.8 GHz Core i7-860 “Lynnfield”

The new line of Intel Core i7 processors are just legendary. Built on the new 42 nm Nehalem micro-architecture, they have several new features than the older Core 2 Duo/Quads or the older Xeons (the newer  Xeons are also built on the Nehalem micro-architecture).

• Multi Threading
  Each of the the four cores enables two threads which act like virtual cores, making the processor have 8 cores in total.
• Turboboost
  Multiple cores are really useful for most things I do, such as rendering comps in After Effects or rendering out a scene in Maya but when I things like browse the internet or watch movies, there is little use for the multiple cores. In cases like these, the processor dynamically shuts down the unused cores and overclocks one or two remaining core to 3.6 GHz  (Infact the Lynnfields boost five multiplier steps, higher than two additional steps of Bloomfield).
• Direct Media Interface
  Replacing the Front Side Bus technology, Intel Direct Media Interface establishes much faster, higher bandwidth communication between the processor and the memory and the motherboard or logicboard in Apple lingo (although it lacks the Intel QPI and triple-channel memory in its big brother Bloomfield).

27″ Monitor

The 27″ monitor is really one of its kind. First of all, it’s just huge, almost comically. It’s bigger than anything I’ve ever worked on. Not that it’s just physically big, it can display at 2560×1440 resolution, the same horizontal resolution as the 30″ Apple Cinema Display. It uses IPS technology and LED backlighting which results in perfect representation of colors, just what I needed.

Magic Mouse

Magic mouse is, for those not familiar, world first multitouch mouse. The whole top part of the mouse is a multitouch sensor and it  only comes wireless. Apart from looking awesomely sleek, it’s also lot of fun to use. Especially for browsing the internet or reading documents.Whenever you need to scroll a lot (thanks to it’s momentum scrolling). The only drawback of the mouse is that unlike the Mighty Mouse (which was quite annoying to use), it does not feature a middle-mouse button. This isn’t really a big drawback for most people, but I happen to use Autodesk Maya where the middle mouse button is pretty much essential. But being a multitouch mouse this problem isn’t very difficult to fix, a firmware update could add a middle mouse button to equation but it something like that hasn’t been released by Apple yet. I guess I’ll just use my Microsoft Standard mouse (which is quite good for the price) whenever I use Maya until someone fixes the problem.

Anyway, I am loving Here are some more pictures of it:

Yep. 5th December 2009. That definitely a date to remember for me. My first Dream Theater show! I was looking forward to it ever since I found out about it sometime October.

Doors opened at 7 PM and got myself a Dream Theatre TShirt and a wristband \m/. I got in quite early and I the pit was filled up with about 10 rows of people. On the stage were instruments, amplifiers that lacked the hugeness associated with DT (Portnoy’s huge drum set, Myung and Petrucci’s massive amplifier cabs). Behind them was a black curtain suspended from above which obscured the rest of the stage. Having watched videos of them in BC&SL tour in Youtube I knew the DT gear were behind it.

Pain of Salvation came on to stage and started making jokes about the fact that they were from Sweden and the fact they drove a long time to get to Sydney (he then proceeded to add the fact that they drove from Brisbane not Sweden, because it isn’t possible to drive from Sweden to Australia). A soon as they started to play their first riff and vocalist Daniel Gildenlöw started to give out a shrill, energy started flowing and heads started banging. Most people not being familiar with Pain of Salvation (me included) people couldn’t sing along but the energy was there. But there were a group of people who had come to specifically see Pain of Salvation. I didn’t actually see them but I found out later was a group of Pain of Salvation fans with self-made Pain of Salvation t-shirts.

After Pain of Salvation finished their set, they proceeded backstage and their equipment is swiftly frisked away by the crew. Petrucci’s guitar tech brings Petrucci’s massive pedal board and places on stage right (his usual position). He brings a shiny Musicman John Petrucci BFR Signature Model guitar and does a final check before the show. Petrucci’s two footrests (for him to rest his foot while he plays billion notes per second, ) come in and the rig is complete. While the rig is being fixed an amazing acoustic cover of As I Am with a female vocalist is played through the PA system to the delight of many fans who sing along. Later, back from the concert I learn that they were Pipo and Elo and the fact that they play it on every show in the BC&SL tour. I’m a fan. Check it out:

As I Am – Pipo and Elo

The crew finish setting up and leave the stage. After a few minutes of nothing, suddenly a sound of thunder fills the entire place. To the fans ofcourse this is the opening of Nightmare To Remember and people start cheering. Soon Rudess’ twangy chorus-laden piano starts off, with the curtain still in its place and no sign of any band members. The suspense is chilling. Another couple of cracks of thunder and the curtain falls off with the crunch of Petrucci’s guitar revealing the band. Portnoy’s huge shiny drum kit is definitely the first thing anyone notices. Couple of bars later Myung’s throbbing bass combined with Portnoy’s relentless double-bass fill the sonic spectrum. That is when it hits you, “I am watching Dream Theater LIVE!” Having been used to watching Dream Theater on DVD in my tiny Macbook, the fact that they are actually right in front of you (I was at about 7th row from the front, almost directly in front of Petrucci) needs getting used to. I mean Petrucci was less than 100 metres away from me!!!

The show was rocking awesome. I am a big fan of Dream Theatre and for the past 6 months, that’s all I’ve been listening to. They songs are great, turns out they are even better live; didn’t know that was even possible! Their intricate drumwork, odd time signatures (I have to say it isn’t as easy to headband to odd time signatures, you’ll feel you’re constantly out of time), guitar and keyboard solos that seem to border vulgar display of power and powerful basslines driving the rhythm sections when Petrucci and Rudess are busy delivering a barrage of notes.

Here’s the setlist from the show

• Nightmare to Remember
• A Right of Passage
• Hollow Years
• Keyboard Solo
• Prophets of War
• The Mirror
• Lie
• Wither
• The Dance of Eternity
• One Last Time
• Solitary Shell
• In the Name of God
• Encore: The Count of Tuscany

Here are some Excerpts from the show, thanks to rufusdisturbed.

This one is solo excerpt from In The Name of God (from Train of Thought). Just witness the Majesty (pun intended, LOL) of Dream Theatre with that guitar/keyboard unison solo and when they come to the main riff after it and Portnoy is playing the drums standing up. Amazing!

Here another part of the same song when Portnoy gets off this throne (another Majesty pun LOL! For people not familiar with DT, they were known as Majesty before they were big, but had to change their name because of copyright issues) improvises on this cymbals from the stage.

And here’s Dance of Eternity, just an amazing song.

And here’s Nightmare To Remember opening the whole concert with the curtains fall down with the guitar thing:

I’d been experimenting getting a good guitar tone on Apple GarageBand and ended up coming up with these two recordings:

Moody

Yes I suck as naming my music, my brother knows about all too much  This one starts out as trip-hop influenced piece with bluesy guitar solo and then progresses to a more upbeat bass-heavy track while still maintaining the blues element. I use a GarageBand’s Electric Piano sound for the affirming chords that piece is based on and distorted it slightly with the overdrive effect, with the gain turned up just a notch. For the guitar sound I had been experimenting quite a bit, trying come up with a nice tone which could be used as a clean tone with the guitar’s volume knob turned down. And I was also trying come up with a tone which sounds like the delayed sound John Petrucci uses in Dream Theatre’s Presense of Enemies Pt 1 which you can also see here. The bass tone is pretty generic and the drums were just drum loops which come with GarageBand.

Classic Rock Riffage

This one’s definitely a work in progress. It utilises pretty much the same guitar tone used in Moody except the volume knob in the guitar is turned up completely so that there is maximum gain. The main riff is reminiscent of the classic rock and hardrock riffs during the 70s. The bass is also made to resemble the bass sound in the 70s. It was played using a pick instead of fingers the way I normally like to play bass. The middle section solo is placeholder for a future vocals hopefully and a shorter solo.

Deeper Within You (just a random name)

My attempt to use a clean arpeggio with a distorted guitar lead sound. Kind of sounds like Pink Floyd a little bit, just a little part of it. The later part just a riff I came up with earlier which I just plugged in. I like it in metal when there isn’t any backing guitar when they play a guitar solo and you can hear the bass real nice. It becomes like an interlude. Dream Theatre does it so does Pantera. And that’s what I’ve tried to do for the solo at the end.

And on a different note, I’M GOING TO WATCH DREAM THEATRE LIVE. I bought the tickets yesterday from Ticketek, and I can’t believe I’m gonna see them live. The concert is on 5th December at the Hodern Pavillion, will be a nice early christmas gift for myself. Haven’t convinced anyone to go with me at the moment. I don’t have anyone who shares my passion of Dream Theatre in my circle of friends but looking forward to meeting other Dream Theatre fans at the event. Dream Theatre rocks! I need to get myself the Live in Budokan DVD for warming up. LOL!

My brother Parimal started this thing about meeting ourselves with our own bookshelves, because of the books we choose to keep. A selection from a mind-boggling plethora of other options. So he posted a snapshot of his bookshelf on his blog Reality Equation (check it out). And he invites others to do the same and share their bookshelves. Its a way to meet people through their books. I thought it was an amazing idea. Here goes mine:

And my collection of Wired Magazine. I’m a big fan of this magazine but I since I live in Sydney, Australia (and Wired is published in San Francisco, California) I have to either pay $18.70 and buy the same month’s issue (shipped via Airfreight) or pay $11.95 for the last month’s issue (shipped via snailmail). I usually choose the latter, and read Wired News (online version of the magazine) with I wait for it. My collection has grown quite a bit. This isn’t the complete collection, I have more scattered around the house, which I should consolidate soon.

The broad categories my books fall into are: Design, Music, Science/Technology, Biographies, History and Lifestyle. Some books fall under more than one category. Missing from here are: D-Day: From The Normandy Beaches to the Liberation of France which can’t keep in the shelf because its too big for it, it HUGE, Band of Brothers by Stephen Ambrose, How Starbucks Saved My Life by Michael Gates Gill and Catcher In The Rye by JD Salinger. The latter three I forgot at home in Kathmandu when I went there in January 2009.

Meeting myself through my books, I have found out that my head functions in phases. And these phases dictate what kind of books I will read. However. unlike my brother who hasn’t yet decided on a major (or a self-designed concentration as they like to call it in Hampshire College) I know what I’m doing and will always be reading books areas of motion design and VFX. For everything else, I go through phases. I was in a biography phase once and kept reading biographies of people whom I admired, Ar the moment I was reading the Brief History if Time by Stephen Hawking, a book I wanted to read since grade 10 but didn’t for several reason. Having been reading that it got me very interested in reading about our universe, its origin, its fate and and its mechanics (superficially ofcourse, I do not plan to go into theoretic physics) and among other things I have been reading include a university paper written by a friend of mine (with other people) on several topics on the universe and cosmology which he wrote as a part of his assignments in the first year of his Aeronautical Engineering Degree at USyd. Anyway, so that’s me!

Region-locked DVD, don’t they drive you mad. I borrowed a copy of the movie Tokyo from a friend of mine recently and it was bought in Singapore by friend of hers. Because the DVD was intended for audiences in Singapore it only runs on drives with Region-code set to 3. I live in Australia where the region code is 4. Macs (or rather the DVD drives that come with macs) will usually let you change the DVD code 5 times before it gets  locked to the last selection. I have changed region code 3 times in the past and 2 changes left. There must be a patch or a clever hack by some genius somewhere. Good news: there is. A guys called xvi made a patch called Region X which lets users play DVDs of any region-code on the DVD Player software on Mac OS X. Bad News: Patching the DVD Player software isn’t enough, you need to patch the DVD drive’s firmware itself. That’s not completely a bad news though. The clever people around the world have patched firmware of lot of different DVD drives in production and they are available for download so that you can use. But what really is bad news is that the DVD drive in my mac (a macbook with a combo drive) is Mashita CW-8221 firmware: GA0J. And there doesn’t seem to be a patch available for it yet. Sigh! I guess I’ll have to watch it on the $40 Phillips DVD Player which is completely region-code free.

I have had this book in my possession for quite a while now and due to lack of time and distractions had failed to go past the basic first couple of chapters. Now that I have little for time I really want to nail the art of matchmoving. The whole subjects quite dry to be honest, but as Tim Dobbert who wrote the book calls it, it’s an invisible art which is an essential part of teh production pipeline. The result that you get is a real motivator ofcourse. I’ll post some of matchmoving experiments up, which should be quite interesting.