For the flick The Abyss James Cameron wanted it to look as authentic as possible, and CGI was still a new thing, so it was decided to shoot underwater. Their were not tanks anywhere big enough to film in, so after some scouting, the crew came across an abandoned nuclear power plant on which construction was never competed. The studio bought up the property and converted it into a movie set, using the outbuildings as the interiors for the Deepcore station, but they also built a 1/8 scale exterior of the Deepcore set inside of the containment building of the reactor! Inside the reactor they were able to pump in 7 million gallons of water, to a depth of 40 feet, and completely submerge the set. After the movie was completed, it was pretty much abandoned. Over time, people have trashed the interiors, but exterior of Deepcore still exists. Check out links to some pictures and more after clicking Read more »

Several weeks ago I was poking around Wil Wheaton’s blog and found a link to RFJason.com who had taken an image of the Enterprise, NCC-1701 D from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and overlaid it onto real world images using Google Maps. Well, I just got my blueprints for my favorite ship, Serenity, so I thought I would give it a try with some Earth that was locations. I’m using some of the locals from RFJason for comparison, as well as some of my own places, starting with a few from Wisconsin.

Wisconsin State Capital in Madison. I know the building quite well and was really surprised on how closely Serenity matches up to it on width and length. The Capital is about twice as high.

Camp Randall Stadium in Madison, home to the University of Wisconsin Badgers Football team. Something tells me the crew of Serenity are not Badger fans…

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I was playing around with ancestry.com and found myself, which was quite cool in itself I thought. Playing around I found a line going back 24 generations to a grandfather born in 1229, before that the farthest I was aware of was 16 generations back to 1524. Then I noticed a little button to find famous people related to you. So of course, I couldn’t resist. Some of the highlights:

Lyndon B Johnson, 36th President of the United States of America, 6th Cousin 2 times removed
Dwight D Eisenhower, 34th President of the United States, 7th Cousin 4 times removed
Elizabeth Virginia Wallace Truman, First Lady, wife of Harry S. Truman, 8th Cousin 3 times removed
Walt Whitman, Poet, 7th Cousin 5 times removed
George Orwell, Author, 9th Cousin 5 times removed
William Avery “Billy” Bishop, Canada’s first combat ace, more WWI victories than any other British pilot

Thats as close as I will ever get to being famous or important :p

Angel, my female sugar glider, passed away last night. She was five. I had her for almost two years. She was a normally a shy timid little thing, but she had her moments where she would get brave and warm up and want to play. She loved her mealies and yogurt drops and play with her big brother Shady.

Good bye sweetie…