Movies: Even though I really enjoy most of John Travolta's movies, I'm afraid I have to agree with the critics about "The General's Daughter". The character development seemed shallow and although it kept me interested enough to finish watching it, it lacked suspense and the attempt at a twist for the ending just fell flat. If the comraderie between the Travolta character and the Hutton character had been more developed and the General's backstory and relationship with his daughter more fully explored, it could have been a taut thriller but as it was, I would deem it a "one watcher".

My husband insisted on watching "Big Daddy" with Adam Sandler. He claimed he needed something light and entertaining but I found it to be neither. I have little use for spoiled, self-centered people and found no humor in teaching a child to be filthy, thoughtless and cruel. The contrived, cliched ending was nothing except merciful to the viewer who had suffered through almost two hours of insensitive Hollywood sarcasm.

With my passion for history, I naturally enjoyed the PBS presentation of "The Greeks: Crucible of Civilization". British filmmaker Anthony Geffen attempted to give the "Ken Burns treatment" to ancient history and for the most part it worked pretty well. Geffen, of course, did not have the plethora of diaries and photographs to work with that Ken Burns did when he produced the Civil War anthology but the reenactments and artwork were effective. I was astounded when they mentioned actual "ostrica" bearing the name of Themistocles had been found in an ancient well. Ostrica are the pieces of tablet that Athenian citizens used to vote to "ostricize" someone and drive them from the city. Despite the fact that Themistocles had saved the Athenians from the Persians at the sea battle in the straits of Salamis, several years later they felt he had gotten too powerful, influential, or arrogant and ostricized him from their midst. (Maybe this is the beginning of civilization's attitude towards her military heroes). He died, ironically, as a homeless soul in Persia, the country he defeated, several years later. The narrator also hinted that the vote to ostracize him was very likely purchased by the enemies of Themistocles. It seems Greece was the crucible for democratic corruption as well.

Readings: I finally got a chance to read Colleen McCullough's "The Grass Crown", the only one of her novels in "The Masters of Rome" series I had not read. I guess Nicholas Meier was accurate after all in his references to Gaius Marius' later years. I just couldn't imagine the wise, courageous commander I had grown to admire so much in "The First Man In Rome" could degenerate into such brutality following his second stroke and forced exile by his former right arm, Lucius Cornelius Sulla. When he returned to Rome as military support for Cinna's regime and his behavior and appearance were described as "almost simian" in nature, I was deeply saddened. Nature can be exceedingly cruel. Of course the Roman populace remembered his courage and strength so were unwilling to acknowledge his demented condition and made no effort to halt his atrocities. Mercifully, a third stroke ended his suffering (and the suffering of everyone else) after only two weeks of his seventh consulship. These passages were painful to read because it reminds me so much of the dilemma many of us face as our parents age and weaken. We still remember them as strong pillars that were there to help us during times of life's crisis but sooner or later you have to acknowledge the truth of their condition.

I am in the process of reading "Memoirs of Cleopatra" by Margaret George. It is well written but lacks the strength of McCullough's dynamic dialogue. However, I am only about one fourth of the way through it so it may be a little early to tell.

Technology:

I have been hard at work on my virtual Julius Caesar project. Although the graphics I developed with Poser 4 would have been adequate, they have a caricature nature about them that I was not satisfied with. So, I experimented with character animation software developed by Digital/Compaq called "Digital Faceworks". It is available as a free download from http://interface.digital.com.

I took an image of one of Caesar's busts done in ivory marble and loaded it into Photoshop. Setting the opacity of my paintbrush to only 30%, I succeeded in colorizing the image. Having the opacity set that low allowed the structural features of the sculpture to show through the delicate color I applied to the face, hair, and brows. I also "blushed" his cheeks and detailed his lips. I then loaded the colorized image into Faceworks and positioned the animation templates to outline his eyes, brows, lips, chin, neck, nose and hairline. I selected blue eyes (McCullough said they were "piercing blue") and human teeth (Faceworks has templates for animals, insects, and aliens as well). If an expression requires an open mouth, Faceworks gives you the capability to have teeth show even if your original graphic, like mine, was a person with their mouth closed.

Then, using the annotation tool, I imported a .wav file of mostly silence so I could apply the preprogrammed expressions from the expressions palette. Faceworks is designed to allow you to record actual sentences then the program analyzes the audio file and produces a series of phonemes to match the syllables of the words. The image is then manipulated by the program to make the appropriate facial and mouth movements to match the phonemes. The file is saved as a streamed .smi animation file that is playable by the Real Player G2. However, I just wanted to create a series of animated gifs to portray particular emotional states for use with Artificial Life, Inc's WebGuide software.

The Web Guide software is a java applet and the animations are downloaded with the applet to the client's browser so you need to produce small compressed graphics to prevent excessive download times. I was able to take Caesar's image and make him look angry, sad, disgusted, and surprised, as well as nod "yes" and shake his head "no". There is no export to a still image feature in Faceworks so I would add the appropriate expression from the expression palette into the annotation editor, press the play button and click the Print Screen key at the appropriate moment. Then I would paste the clipboard contents into Photoshop and precisely crop and size the image. I would then create a vertical strip of images, like pieces of movie film, containing the different facial expressions. The Web Guide applet produces animation by telling java the size of each image frame, how many frames are in the animation, how fast to transition from each frame to the next, whether to play the strip in both forward and reverse order, and how many times to loop the animation. It works with either .gif or .jpg images and my images were much smaller saved as .jpg so that is the format I used.

My default animation is a neutral expression with Caesar just blinking occasionally to give the impression of a living entity. To create a more natural blink rate, I had to produce a strip of 10 images containing only one frame with his eyes closed to produce the appropriate interval so he didn't look like he had a nervous tic. I emailed Artificial Life and asked if they could add the ability to specify a time interval before an animation was looped. This would allow me to reduce the strip to only two frames, eyes open and eyes closed, then increase the interval before the strip is replayed. With the current version of the program, I could only adjust the number of milliseconds between frames. I could not increase this setting above 300 milliseconds or he would have his eyes closed for an unnatural period of time. So the only alternative was to increase the number of frames with his eyes open.

I have also begun programming Caesar's knowledge base. I am grouping his knowledge base into people, places, and things then developing a list of questions answering "who, what, when, where, why, and how" as appropriate for each subject under each category.

I received my new Sony Digital Studio workstation this week at work and it is a screamer! I ordered it with 256 Mb of Ram, a 40 Gb hard drive, and fast ethernet. It comes equipped with a 4 - 8 -32X speed CDR-W drive, a DVD/CD-Rom, USB jacks front and rear, 16 Mb of video Ram, and the PC equivalent of Firewire for direct download of digital images from the college's new Sony digital camcorder. Topped off with a 19" graphics artist-quality monitor it is a pure joy to use.

I also produced my first Filemaker Pro 5 web-published database this week. Unlike publishing databases with Filemaker Pro 4, version 5 gives you the ability to design your layouts in Filemaker and, if you specify one of the web layout styles that uses the Cascading Stylesheets 1 specification, renders your layouts on the web pretty close to your original design without extensive rework of the HTML with CDML tags (As long as you use an IE 4.x or later browser). The manual says "a browser that supports CSS 1 but I quickly discovered Netscape browsers, even version 4.x browsers, do not render the layouts correctly. They simply revert to the default "unrendered" layout like those in Filemaker Pro 4. I encountered a few other little oddities as well. If I placed a text object in the form header, it is not rendered with the appropriate font color, size, or type. If I move it down into the body of the form, it is. Go figure! Also, I needed to have a published database that had one group of users input data and the majority of users with read only access. The manual says if I use the Web Database security feature, I lose the instant web publishing features. Bummer! So, I installed Filemaker Pro 5 on an NT Server, set the sharing permissions of the Filemaker Web folder using the NT user bindery then set the folder to web shareable and users are appropriately prompted for username and password by the NT server when they click on the database link on the web, even MacIntoshes! And, I retained the instant web publishing features. Now I need to figure out how to place related hyperlinks on the layout within Filemaker. I created "Open URL" and "Send Mail" scripts and attached them to buttons that I placed on the layout but buttons do not appear to be active on the web. I tried to call tech support after checking the Filemaker Knowledgebase and Blueworld discussion list archives but Claris closes at 2 p.m. PST on Fridays. I called at 1:55 p.m. but they had already turned off the phone system. Some people have better than bankers' hours!