Star Trekking

Last night I went to a concert by the K-W symphony orchestra with a couple of friends, my brother (though he's not a Trek fan) and my sister-in-law. This wasn't what you might call a regular concert as the orchestra was playing the music of Star Trek. This included themes from several (though not all) of the movies and most of the television series. As I first started watching Star Trek with The Next Generation (it was still airing new episodes at the time), that theme was, for me, probably the most iconic.

The concert was hosted by John De Lancie (Q) and Robert Picardo (The Doctor on Voyager). The concert, as a whole, was quite entertaining and I was particularly amused when the hosts referred to the Governor General as "The Queen's Grand Negis." Some of the concert goers were in costume (though not a lot) - most were in Star Fleet uniforms though there were a couple of Klingons in the audience. There were also several orchestra members in costume, which I thought was rather nice for them to be allowed to do that.

Anyway, it was an entertaining evening and also quite nostalgic at times.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

A Knotty Issue

The second assignment for the NPR (non-photorealistic rendering) course I'm taking this term was due yesterday. The topic of the assignment was symmetry and Celtic knots (an example of which is pictured above). The Celtic knot portion of the assignment was based on a paper that presents a way to generate Celtic-knot style artwork using a grid-based method which can be done by hand or, as in the assignment, by computer. I seem to find it rather fascinating and doing the method by hand is, as the prof pointed out, a very good way to kill time in class. Some examples of knotwork that I created for the assignment (some based on ones that I did in class) can be viewed on the results page of my write-up. Those interested in some of the technical details (though I don't describe the method in detail - unfortunately there does not seem to be a freely available download of the paper in question) are on the main page for the write-up.

Completely unrelated to that, I was watching an episode from the 3rd season of Deep Space 9 last night - "Past Tense, Part I". As the name might suggest, it's a time travel episode and those often tend to be fairly good episodes, overall. The "treknobabble" invovled in justifying the time travel, however, was rather laughable. Ignoring that though, it was generally an enjoyable episode, despite being a bit predictable at points.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Reboot

Went to see the new Star Trek movie last night with the usual group and we all quite enjoyed it. It will be interesting to see where they take the franchise from here, presuming of course that they continue on with it, though considering that the movie seems to have done quite well, both critically and financially, I'd be surprised if they didn't follow up on it some how.

It was also nice to see a good Trek movie since the franchise has been in a bit of a slump for the past several years.

Freak Out,
-TFitC