musings from the sleep deprived

Update (9/28/2011) … linking straight to the gallery.

I’m going back and editing these posts (9/28/2011) and now I’m just going to link to the gallery.

On my old page, I had a log of all the work I was putting into my fishtank. I thought about moving all those posts over, but since the fishtank itself has taken a sort of hiatus, I figured I’d just restart that all when the time came. So I will do just that.

The state of the tank currently is that it is still up and running, with only a couple algae eating fish in it to keep the majority of the algae down. Not being heated (room temp), not being lit at all (room lighting only), and still being actively filtered. Don’t do any current measuring, feeding, planting, adding of fish or anything. Its in ‘low-maintenance’ mode for the moment.

I am absolutely still actively interested in getting this thing back up and going again, once the time/energy presents itself. We’ll see when that happens…

Content from old… this one is an animation I put together from the individual images photographed from a Leonid meteor shower awhile back. Note, the image is over 1Meg in size, for those of you bandwidth impaired.

Here’s the Image!

So yeah, I eventually agreed that my colors were all too dark and stuff. So now it looks like this. After some tweaking and playing and getting good feedback from others (Thanks Dar/Grey/Lore!), I’m once again pleased with the layout and appearance.

Until the next time I get sick of it.

<update time=”2004-9-1 21:22:04″>
I once again refer back to this site and the work of B A Khan for his Dark Fire template. Sorry for not including the credits up front. I’m such a slacker.
</update>

It was certainly our intent to see the last Phish show in Coventry, VT. Tickets purchased well ahead of time, flights, rental cars, friends to tag along with, etc. Mother Nature, apparently, had made other plans.

The closest we got was about 25 miles from the campsite before Mike Gordon got on the radio with the local constabulary and announced that they were going to begin turning people away. We were roughly 15 miles from where they were going to setup that roadblock. Being the pseudo-responsible citizens of the world that we are, we turned the car around, and went home.

A significant portion of the people in the immense snake of cars, though, had different plans. Some 2100-2500 groups abandoned their vehicles on the interstate and hiked the rest of the way in, and saw the show. In retrospect, it would have meant abandoning our food/drink filled cooler, slogging along 25 miles on a gouty foot (yes, my gout took that opportunity to flare up on me) and spending the remainder of the weekend muddy and/or wet. Did I miss an opportunity there? Sure. Do I regret that we turned back and avoided alot of pain in the process? Not so much.

Additionally, based on an official statement from the band manager, folks who still have unripped tickets will additionally get free downloads of the show and sound checks from their site, as well as an exclusive, signed photo book of the band. No, it isn’t a replacement for the missed show, but it goes at least down the right road of giving us some recompense for the trouble we went through. On the whole, I’m pretty ok with the whole thing.

I wanted to see how this thing handles image data. So I’m including one in this post. I’m also going to link it to the larger image of my back tat. Not that you care. I’m just experimenting.

Dig it.

I suppose that is the nature of all things. Even more so when you take into account that, like just about anyone else working in IT worth their salt, I’m about as ADD and OCD as the next guy. Ok, so I don’t have to count the nuimber of CDs in the stacks every day to make sure they’re still there, but you get the idea. Bottom line: things have a tendency to, and will come in and out of my attention span at seemingly random intervals. Like say … this blog for instance. I may have frenzied posts for weeks, and then nothing for a month.

Oh well.

I was a comic page reader from way back. I grew up on Peanuts, Garfield and later discovered Calvin and Hobbes, the Berke Breathed efforts and the more politically geared works like Doonesbury. My current active reading list is just three. They’re listed in the links on the right. This topic deserves more discussion than my brain is willing to give it right now, but I will get back to this in the future.

Once again, in an effort to start moving stuff from my old site to this one, here’s a general post regarding graphics. This one will hopefully get quite a bit more attention as time goes on.

It is true, as I mentioned almost 4 years ago in that original posting, that I’ve always been fascinated by the visual aesthetics of things. I think, with the possible exception of people who are born blind, that everyone, likewise, does have a certain ‘taste’, in art. Color combinations they find appealing, shapes and overlay and combinations of layers that strikes them as pleasing to the eye, and such. I would also say that most people never really develop this sense. They simply accept what they perceive as fact, and never delve into the hows or whys of it, nor do they ever really find any way to enunciate it clearly, or find particular art or artists that particularly exemplifies the things they like.

I won’t say I’m any expert in art. Far from it. I’d say I’m more in the ‘discovery’ phase of things. I do know some artists that I particularly enjoy…. Escher, Dali, Klimt, Giger and Mandlebrot, to name a few. Don’t know that last one? Well … it is definitely a name that doesn’t really belong with the others, at least in the traditional sense. But it does bring out one aspect of art that I’m particularly fond of. Benoit Mandlebrot was one of the formative scientists in the field of fractal, or chaos theory. One of the more popular ‘sets’ of data, or more accurately, formulas describing data is named for him as well.

Eventually, I’ll link in several of the research documents on fractal theory for those who want to pursue it deeper. In the meantime, go google it and see what turns up. The crux of it though, is that these researchers were finding ways to describe patterns they observed in nature, in seemingly random things (cloud patterns, for example), with formulas. The visual representation of these formulas were strikingly similar to the kinds of things we’d see in the summer, cloud filled sky. Soon after, they starting using these formulas for a whole series of predictive simulations, many in the weather related fields (as well as others).

While this research is all very interesting, one of the more appealing parts of this is the sheer visual splendor of the images these formulas are capable of producing. Eventually, there were people out there doing nothing but investigating new ways to make these fancy formulas produce pretty images. Dozens of tools exist out there today, and producing these is pretty trivial. No understanding of the core math behind it all is necessary anymore. Which, to some extent, is good, because its pretty high-powered stuff.

Anyway, fractals led me to look more closely at the computer as a source and creation tool for art, and is where any of my current efforts at producing anything are focused. Mostly, this has produced just some nice wallpapers and such, but occasionally, something pretty nice spits out. The graphic on the top of this page is a good example. Thanks again to Tom for help ing with that one.

Enough for now. Eventually, I’ll post some example images, and integrate some kind of graphics database or something into this page.

Let’s see….

Karen
Kathy Jo
Clarence
Karen
Terry
Karen
Dave
Pat
and now Rory. 8 manager switches in less than 4 years. Not too bad. The one positive thing to come from this, I think, is that Rory will be the first technical manager I’ve had at SUN. While not required while I was an instructor, everything after that really required one. On the one hand, its nice not having your decisions questioned …. on the other hand, its nice to have validation for those same decisions.

Ah well, time will tell.

Another vacation coming to a close. Back into the fray, as it were. This is not going to be an easy time, SUN is not “being all it can be”. Here’s to hoping our esteemed colleagues in upper management can defy gravity, nature’s laws and lawyers, and turn this all around. That’d be nice. 3 more years. 3 more years. Its like a mantra.

And what then? Who knows, but its got to be better than this. Ah well … *tips a glass* … back into the fray.

It almost seems as if I’m on vacation from myself. I forgot everything I was supposed to do for work. It required force of will to remember those things again. Man, apparently I really needed a break from all this.

It was a fairly low profile week. Played a decent round of golf with Jason, and then subsequently, probably one of my worst rounds ever with Sky, John and Rob. Ah well, I got some good advice from them, so it was definitely worth it. If I can find some time, I’m going to grab a lesson from someone. Golfing, if nothing else, is another sport where you’re sort of competing mainly against yourself (first and foremost). It reminds me of pool (billiards) in that regard. Body control, perception, consistency, assessment, etc. They are all elements of both.

I should listen to my own advice that I give others when teaching them pool. Start with the absolute basics. In this case, I still need to learn what all those are. Stance, grip, body position, arm position, backswing, etc. Once again, all the same terms from pool. I need to either rent some video or something, or spend some time with a pro who can get me those basics. Once those are consistent, then I can start working on all the nuances that make up the rest of the game. Before then, the rest of it is silly to focus on. It’ll get there.

Talk to Sky about the pool league team. I’m going to sit the next session out in order to make sure the whole team can play without hindrance of worrying about ranking out of a match. The APA has a rule that says that you can’t have more than 23 “points” of players play in given week. The ranks vary from 2 to 7 in 8-ball. Since I’m currently shooting as a 7, if I play, that means (currently) that not only MUST Ella play, but we also can’t play two 5’s in that week either. Me sitting out a session will get the discussion going as to what to do with the team longer term. Sky and I discussed splitting into two teams, etc … but I think we’ll just wait and see what happens this session and how the discussion develops.

Played alot of WoW and AC. Go figure. In AC, StormWlf was around this week, and Friday night, we had the Queen’s Quest which I went on for the first time ever, and got the kill! Holy smokes. Lemme see if I can link in a screenshot of that…. there we go QQ.png (148K). Quite a fun ride. Thanks again to all the PL, and Lyc as well, who joined us for the mayhem. We will definitely be doing that again.

WoW has been pretty crashy since the last push. Seems like they’re trying to push alot of new function in at once. This last push was Auction Houses, the beginnings of the talent system, level cap raise, etc. Its been hard to quest with how much its gone down. But then again, thats what Beta is all about, right? They’re definitely making progress though.

Ah well, more later.

The latest idea thats been swimming around in my head remind me of the early Lazarus Long novels. This one family had been tracking its most long-lived members, and was trying to get certain of them to breed to continue those traits, often seeking out specific other families or particular individuals to reinforce those traits in their children and future generations.

The idea I’ve been having is similar in nature. I wanted the initial … hmm … maybe even significant portion of the book to be flashbacks to earlier days. In each case, a particular character would be highlighted and focused on, with the eventual end of the chapter focusing on a particular character trait that they have, and also some insinuation that some mysterious party has made a note of that trait.

In the early chapters where all this is happening, I’m looking the mysterious party to take on a sort of illuminati type feel to it, or close to it.

I love technology. I really do. I think its one of the core things about me that just drives my being. Its a difficult field, constantly in motion and driven by a strange set of forces. On one side of the rolling ball, there are the monolith companies driving billions of dollars into research to come up with “the next big thing”. On the other side are the small companies, even sometimes single people … who hit it big with an amazing idea, new invention, or new use for some existing thing. Either way, there is this momentum of progress that keeps the geeks of the world slathering through their webpages, tech news sites and magazines to see what toy they get to play with next.

I’ve had discussions with folks in the past who think we should still be swinging around in the trees by our tails, happily spending our days with simple thoughts. There’s something to be said for that, I agree. Simplicity has its rewards … life remains predictable, stable and comfortable. On the other hand, there’s an inate curiosity in me that has to know what the framerate I can push is using the latest video card with Far Cry, or what improvements I can get in my rendering projects by switching to a 3GHz processor instead of a 2GHz one. I mean, I really want to know. Y’know? No? Oh well.

This is also a pretty complex general topic. There’s all kinds of mini-asides that can be made about technology … our dependence on it, research driving its advancement, controls on it, and so on, so I fully expect to address many more of those topics at some later time. For now, though … I just wanted to be clear about my fascination with it, and leave it at that.