TITLE: ODBC
NAME: Jeff Goeson
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: jgoeson@msn.com
WEBPAGE: no
TOPIC: Unbelievable
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: odbc.jpg
ZIPFILE: odbc.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POVRay 3.1e

TOOLS USED: 
    POVRay 3.1e, MS PhotoPaint for conversion to JPEG

RENDER TIME: 
    0h 24m 11s

HARDWARE USED: 
    P233, 64MB, Win95

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Open Database Connectivity is the bane of my existence and the food on my table.
 With a connection so faint and brittle, how does it work at all, and how do
the engineers
who developed and released this thing sleep at night (other than with their
trophy wives that they can afford with their buttloads of money they got for
foisting this barely-
polished turd on us...)

On the good days, everything works well.  When the sunspot activity has
decreased noticeably and the winds blow in off the desert just so, my screens
populate well and quickly, and my users rejoice in my skills and sing songs
around the campfire in praise of my code.

On bad days, the data source will not stay connected.  I can verify that the
database engine on the server is functional and the database engine services
are running and the network is blipping, but timeouts abound.  On these days,
my users curse my name and date of birth and sing songs around the campfire
calling for the removal of my hands and erasure of my drive.

Users are so fickle...

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

This image is my second submission to a competition.  I try to not submit unless
the topic really grabs me.  I've been battling data connection problems
lately...

Anyway, this image is essentially two cylinder chunks (databases) connected with
a third cylinder (data pipe).  The DataStreams texture is intended to show just
how 
scarce the connection really is.  It's made with a color map that allows very
little of the surface to actually get any color.  The light sources that I have
embedded 
in the databases are supposed to look a little like fiber optic connections,
only with blue going one way and green going the other way (I'm not a big fan
of red...).  
I embedded the light sources inside the databases so that you can't necessarily
see where the blue and green are coming from, but you can see it reflected well
on the 
opposite database.  That kinda looked cool, but then I decided that it would be
cooler to have the ability to see where the light sources were beaming from, so
I reduced 
the diameter of the data pipe.

The sky is a modified high wispy cloud sky.  I made it dark and imposing... just
like it should be when looking at ODBC.

I'm not bitter, though...

