Movies: I received my DVD copy of "The Mummy" this week. Being such a history buff enthralled with the art and culture of ancient Egypt, I was eagerly anticipating the release of this film to home video. The set decoration was stunning, the special effects awesome (Industrial Light and Magic did their usual spectacular job - although their web page is certainly boring), and the story fast paced and well acted. I'll admit a couple of the one liners seemed a little misplaced at times but overall it was a lot of fun. I told my son it was sort of a "Indiana Jones" meets "Jason and the Argonauts" kind of experience. My sister and I thought the Israeli actor Oded Fehr as Ardeth Bey, the descendant of Pharoah's bodyguard was "hot"! Arnold Vosloo also made a very attractive villain. Brendan Fraser had a very physically demanding role. The DVD has a wealth of special material including an illustration of how the mummy priests fight scene was created. Before ILM added the digitally generated mummies, Brendan Fraser had to step through some very complex choreography which he executed so precisely and gracefully it made me think of a highly trained ballet dancer or martial artist. I also admired Fraser's believability as an action "hero" which is a sharp contrast to the sweet, naive young man who had been raised in a nucelar fallout shelter that he played in "Blast From The Past", another entertaining film. I also finally had a chance to view Kevin Costner's "Message in a Bottle". I really like Kevin Costner and his film "The Postman" was one of my favorites of all time (in my opinion the critics didn't know what they were talking about - I liked it even better than David Brin's book. I didn't like the inclusion of cyborgs in the book.) but I have to admit I found "Message in a Bottle" to be pretty slow and the bleak ending really a bummer.

Readings: After watching "The Thirteenth Warrior" last week, I decided to read Michael Crichton's "Eaters of the Dead" on which the movie was based. I was surprised to learn that much of it (at least the depiction of the Viking culture) is based on a translation of the actual accounts of the real Persian ambassador, Ahmahd ibn Fahdalan - and I thought it was just a written-for-Hollywood typical Crichton action adventure movie! So, now I'm really curious about who the "Eaters of the Dead" actually were. Coincidentally, this week one of my favorite archaeology websites, Discovering Archaeology, had an article about the Scythians, a culture that inhabited the Ukrainian steppes between the 5th and 3rd centuries B.C. The Scythians were ferocious warriors who flayed the skins from their enemies and made arrow quivers from the skin of their right arm (they believed it imparted the strength of their enemies into their weapons). They took the heads of their enemies and made gold-plated mugs from their skulls and drank their blood. Their burial practices sounded eerily similar to those of the Vikings described by ibn Fahdalan except that the Scyhthians buried their leaders with all the sacrificed wives, servants, concubines, and horses (one tomb contained the remains of 360 horses) in tombs covered with earthen mounds called kurgan instead of burning them in ships. (And I believed the statement in one of my favorite movies "Highlander" that the kurgan were a tribe of vicious people who wandered the steppes of Russia, feeding children to pits full of hungry dogs for sport!) Although the events depicted in "The Thirteenth Warrior" occurred over a thousand years after the disintegration of the Scythian culture, their brutal practices may have been adopted by subsequent tribes like the "Eaters of the Dead".

Software:

I received Alife, Inc.'s Web Guide 1.0 and I'm so excited to explore this artificial intelligence product. I'm going to use this product to create a virtual help desk for my network users at work and in my spare time I'm working on a virtual Julius Caesar that I can upload to Ancient Sites so history buffs there can engage in a conversation with him. The product has excellent documentation and clearly explains the steps to build a Natural Language Knowledgebase. Like the Sylvie product from Virtual Personalities, Inc., Web Guide is based on the Eliza model developed by Fuzzy Maudlin back in the sixties but Web Guide incorporates the concepts of context, filters and synonyms which really helps when it comes to specifying and ranking subjects and anticipating potential user queries. It is also extremely customizable. You can create and incorporate your own character graphics and imbed the Web Guide in a frame page so the guide can pull up related web sites while answering user queries. I am using Poser 4, a character animation product developed by Metacreations to create my characters. This is also my first experience with Poser and although I'm still a little clumsy with it I was able to produce a character resembling Caesar (except with quite a bit more hair than Caesar had - they didn't have a "male curly receding hair " feature). Poser's character palette includes a variety of different ethnic combinations and the ability to change facial shape. (I slightly elongated Caesar's face, narrowed his cheekbones and gave him a hint of a Roman nose - I tried to base it on a picture of the bust of him I have seen). Using the face camera, I was able to manipulate every aspect of his countenance - from a slightly raised eyebrow to a flared nostril - to create a range of facial expressions. I could also export the face as a jpeg which I needed to do because I am going to use the face-only template in Web Guide for my Caesar character (there is also a full body template). The exported jpeg quality of the 300 pixel by 300 pixel face was not real crisp but by the time I reduced the image size with Photoshop to only 100 pixels by 100 pixels, a recommended size in Web Guide because of web bandwidth limitations, the compression artifacts were not noticeable. Web Guide is based on a java applet that lets you specify any number of animation parameters. You only need to produce a vertical strip of images of equal frames, give it a name, tell the applet how many frames are in the animation and at what speed in miliseconds you wish to play the animation and voila, your artificial character can express emotion. To help me with this process, I opened each of the facial character animations that come with Web Guide then attempted to create the same range of expressions in my Poser figure. Then I simply exported each facial expression as jpeg, loaded the jpeg in Photoshop, reduced the image to 100x100 pixels, created a new image with the correct height for the number of frames in the animation (a five frame animation would be 100 pixels wide by 500 pixels high) and pasted the images in the proper sequence. I also added a feature that I learned by experimenting earlier with the Virtual Personalities software "Sylvie". It makes the character seem more alive if it blinks so for each facial expression, I designed one with eyes open and one with eyes closed so I could create the illusion of blinking. One problem I encountered was the absence of historical costume props in Poser. There were none included with Poser and Zygote, a company that makes props for Poser, didn't seem to have any on their web site, either. So, since I'm using only a head shot which includes only part of the shoulders, I dressed Caesar in a T-shirt which I colored vermillion and a vest which I colored a burnished bronze color. It was about the closest thing I could create that would somewhat resemble a Roman uniform. Poser is a very powerful product but I wish Metacreations would provide a Quickstart tutorial that is designed for a novice. The manual that comes with Poser includes a tutorial but it spends most of the lesson on animation concepts such as keyframes, lighting, etc. I think a tutorial should begin with inserting a nude figure, then step the user through choosing hair, ethnicity characteristics, and clothing. Then demonstrating the use of the paint tool to adjust colors and the use of the face camera and facial manipulation tools to display emotions, especially how to save facial expressions to the face palette. Then move on to animating and manipulating the limbs, creating various poses, motion path, keyframes, and lighting. Working with hair and clothing is not described in detail until page 163 in the user manual while complex topics like inverse kinematics precede descriptions of basic fundamentals. I have always been more of a linear thinker rather than a spatial thinker and perhaps that is why I find Metacreations approach awkward. I had a similar feeling when I was trying to use another of their products, Bryce 4. The tutorial did not seem to progress from easy to difficult. Also, like many other software companies, Metacreations spends an inordinate amount of time describing ways to customize your work environment. Trust me, after over a decade in tech support I can say with relative confidence that customizing the workspace is about the last thing new users are thinking about when they are exploring a new software product. In fact, most users do little to customize their workspace even after spending many hours with a product. I went to a Microsoft seminar once and was extremely frustrated by this penchant. The seminar was limited to only a couple of hours and I wanted to talk about advanced network functionality and instead, over half an hour was wasted talking about customizing the workspace!

Technology: Explored a new web site (http://www.spyonit.com) that offers free software agents that you can program to seek out such things as auction items coming up for bid that meet your specified search criteria, notify you if your favorite author publishes a new novel, notify you if a web page changes and includes key words you have specified, notify you if someone links to a web page you have specified, or notify you if someone even mentions your name in a web document. You simply select the type of agent you want to add and input the keywords, website URL, author's name, your name, etc. I have agents checking auction sites for a slide scanner, a copy of the PC game "Braveheart", and audio books by Gabaldon and McCullough. I have other agents checking to see if my favorite author, Stephen Hunter, publishes a new novel or if someone links to my home page (http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~mharrsch) or my photo essays on Cabela's Outdoor Outfitters store (http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~mharrsch/cabelasmain.html) , the Movieland Wax Museum (http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~mharrsch/movielandwaxmuseum.htm) , or Cameo Creations (http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~mharrsch/cameo_creations_page_1.htm).

Another useful site I learned about this week is http://www.bookmarklets.com/tools/categor.html established by our very own University of Oregon alumnus, Steve Kangas. Bookmarklets are nifty java-enhanced bookmarks that serve as handy shortcuts to perform such tasks as web searching, converting units of measure, creating a list of all links in a web page, bookmarking a particular place in a page (particularly useful when reading long documents online), etc. There are over 150 bookmarklets available on the site. I like the all purpose "More Info About" search bookmarklet. I keep this bookmarklet on my browser toolbar and when I encounter a topic I would like to research further I simply highlight the word and click on the bookmarklet. I am presented with a dialogue box offering different search tools and I just select the search tool I want and click GO! If I find a word I would like defined I highlight the word, click my bookmarklet, select the Look up in Dictionaries choice and click GO! A real time saver - especially since my current web browser does not offer a built-in dictionary or thesaurus!