I wish! No rest for the wicked!
Wrote Chapter whatever-the-heck-it is, ummm, 16 this weekend. A light fluffy chapter entitled "Languages" where I introduce them to the wonders of text languages and the Turing machine.
Some philosophical rambling and I'm out. Eight pages. I hate it... but I don't know what else to put in.
I hope to hell that Chapter 17, ummm, Intelligent Behavior, is better. It's bound to be. I'll basically do a one-chapter recap of the material in "Hands-On AI with Java".
I went through the Haunted Trails script and entered all of my notes from the last meeting, too. It's looking very good, I think.
This afternoon I'll be play with rubber molding compounds. I'm looking forward to it! I only have a few hours, though... game at 6:00.
Okay, I just had a meeting with a counseler at Park University... I'm in! Not a terribly huge surprise, but good to have the waiting over with anyway.
Now to finish that danged degree -- I have 32 of 120 credits already in (they didn't take some 20 credits on my account), so I have 88 credits left to take.
They have 8-week semesters, so about six semesters a year. If I did one 3-week course per semester, it would take the better part of forever (5years) to get done. At two per, that's still two and a half years.
Fortunately for me, I can CLEP out a handful, I can challenge a handful, and I can take a handful online. It's also possible to take 9 credits per semester, giving it to me in under 2 years.
Of course, clep and challenges reduce this schedule. Now I have to work out the details... and get the plan approved by National, who will be paying for the lion's share of it.
Okay, I finally got a bad review on Amazon... sucks! A lot!
I'm not *entirely* sure he was reading the same book as I wrote, mind you, except he did get the missing CD part right.
No one book is for everyone, that's for sure... and clearly this book was not for him.
Doesn't mean I have to like it!
Had a good weekend... and I even achieved most of my goals for a change! I came to a stop on Sunday at about 5:00 with the realization that my queue was empty... it was weird.
Didn't go shopping or get the kitchen or living room cleaned up, but dang, everything else got done! Even wrote a nice, fluffy, 8-page Chapter 15, Communication, in just a few hours. Nice! Well, it was mostly an advertisement for Jan Axelson's books... I should write him and have him give me presents or something for that.
Monday is, as always, a bit of a slow start at work. And I noticed that I am normally in a state of motion... zip! Zow! Stuff to do! As I put white powder into my tea I noticed the convenction currents in it...
I remember once I read about hexagonal cells in convection currents in hot liquids. A long time ago, I noticed these exact same things in a piping hot cup of good cocoa... using a powdered cocoa in coffee, actually, I think. The powder didn't entirely dissolve, so it was in suspension. And the fluid was really nice and hot, so it had good motion.
The suspension of particles was held in these hexagonal cells, with the convection occuring in the coffee-filled walls. It was great! I only ever saw it the one time, though I haven't really tried since.
My tea didn't develop convection cells, but then, it wasn't that hot after sitting on my desk for ten minutes.
I though, though, that sometimes it is nice to just slow down and observe the details around you... science is everywhere, and even the simplest and most common thing can have hidden secrets if you just slow down and look.
The pre-dancing nap helped a LOT, immensely, way out of propoprtion to its 10 minute duration.
I'm thinking that I need more naps. Naps are the number one thing I miss by going to an office. I wonder if I can get them to install nap rooms...
Today I'm avoiding chapter 15, communications, and my mind is all cluttered with thoughts of Haunted Trails projects. Argh!
Oh well, back to banging my head against the desk.
I had a little rant going on in my head this morning about the music industry, greedy short-sighted bastards that they are.
Specifically, the massive success of the iTunes online music (and its competitors). $0.99 for a song... just about the same price as you would pay for the CD if you bought the ten or fifteen songs on it but without the distribution or physical media costs. Bonus! You would think they could afford to give Apple, the service provider, a decent cut... but no, Apple doesn't make money on the music but on the iPods instead. This is a mistake, I think, an inversion of the razor-blade model.
And then what do they do? Thrilled by this success, they decide they want to raise the price! Online music would cost MORE than CDs! How stupid is that? Stupid stupid stupid... but that's old news anyway.
The weeks fly by in a blur these days. The Haunted Trails stuff is moving along very nicely. I have a stack of molding and casting supplies in my living room that I'm itching to play with.
I have one guy working on an air-powered infrasound generator with me and that's going nicely. Another guy should be exploring the wonders of electrically actuated tuning forks for even more physical audio effects. Fun stuff!
National is going well enough -- I feel slow still, the pace of work is not what I'm used to. But still I think I'm being useful. It takes a long time to get up to speed in such a large environment...
W.Eng. continues to exist, though one of their customers, whom I signed a contract with along with the rest of the officers, came up out of the blue and sent an e-mail pissing in my wheaties. I came unhinged and did the verbal equivalant of kicking him in the nuts -- I don't take well to having my chain jerked and my response is not to make nice but to kick back. I never said I was entirely sane.
Tonight I hope to take a nap before dance lessons... last week didn't go very well, I was really to worn out and I got all frustrated. So much for exercise helping with stress! Ah well, it's my own damn fault for doing too much.
Mostly I just want to work during the day and play at night... of course, the book interferes with that, but just a handful of weeks remain on that project. It will be a joy to be done! I'll get weekends back! Just in time to play with Trails stuff!
Woo, today is a big-ass company meeting, and we are getting bussed out to, I dunno, the convention center or something, for it. But it's a field trip!
Sadly, no bologna sandwiches or pudding cups for me. I'll be eating lunch, alone in my house with my cats, before the meeting.
I've decided that junk Chapter 15 and do more work on Chapter 14 this week. After that, there are five more chapters... five more weeks! Well, probably six weeks. And then some editing, and I'm freaking DONE!
I just hope this book doesn't suck too much.
Time, that is.
Yow! Has it really been five days since my last boring entry?!
Time does slip by faster during the day when I'm doing useful work, and heck, I just feel better about myself when I'm creating code. I mean, getting paid is nice, but knowing you are doing something useful for that money is better.
Finished Chapter 14, Linkages, on Saturday. About five pages of text (half size), but about 20 figures. Still a small chapter... I hope to add more mechanical entries to it during editing. A meagre, flickering hope, mind you, with little faith I'll have the energy to do so.
Instead of starting Chapter 15, Advanced Mobility, on Sunday, I spent the morning with a sick headache (my specialty). I perked up again by about noon.
Sunday afternoon we did a walkthrough at the Wild Basin to try and iron out some of our more difficult plot points. I think we did good work, though I need to spend some quality time with the new script to make sure we have a couple of real pants-wetting moments in it still. Americans are so jaded, after all... what will it take to really scare them?
I'm spending today, essentially, compiling.
Did a bunch of integrations from the main line to our little development branch... and now I'm compiling.
Compile, compile, compile.
We're talking HOURS of compilation. And this is on a really hot machine!
Compile.
My cell mate has it lucky; he's debugging some godawful problem... okay, maybe not so lucky.
Compile.
So I fill my time catching up on those things that I can catch up on online... get a voter's registration card... put notes in my journal... update the Haunted Trails script site... read Slashdot...
Compile.
Argh!
Compile.
At least while I've been slacking off on the book work, I've been catching up on "real world" duties! And I find I'm feeling much better for it.
My garage has been an albatross around my neck since I moved in... it has been in terrible shape! And Halloween last year made it worse!
Yesterday I went and bought a STACK of durable, large, plastic shelves. The nice heavy ones with the grill-like shelves. I mean, something like 33 square feet of shelf footprint, five shelves high... and I use the top shelf, let me tell you.
Nice shelves, and cheap. Something like $50 for a 2' x 3' x 6' plastic shelf unit, rated to 1,000 lbs.
Didn't have time to put everything away, but made a definite dent in things, and Marla was a great help too! Much easier to work together on cleaning tasks, keeps the morale up.
After I pay bills tonight, assuming I remember, I hope to put up the pegboards so I can get my TOOLS out and organized. Ahhh, that will be sweet all by itself.
I'm banking on the hope that all this cleaning and organizing will make me so cheerful, so happy with the world, that I'll just blow right through this poor neglected chapter. I've been dragging on the book lately, and I need SOMETHING to put the spring back into my writing.
Busy weekend today! Sadly, NONE of it was spent on the book... which puts me a week behind (again, still, whatever).
Actually, that's not entirely true. I got Chapter 14, linkages, started and worked up several models and several more renderings. Getting started is the hard part. The other hard part, unfortunately, is writing the rest of it.
What I did do was work up a bunch of my notes for the Vdgo people, who I consulted with before National. Getting all of my notes in order, so they can finish their pitch to the investor on Monday. If it goes well, I expect to be amply rewarded for all that consulting... and if it tanks, well, I'm a week behind. Could be worse.
And, umm, I spent a chunk of cash on Trails stuff. Casting and molding materials, mostly, with a couple of sub-woofer floor shakers for jollies (heck, for $30 a pair, how could I not?).
I was not terribly happy with the materials last year... the squish tears too easily, and it's hot and hard to work with.
This year, I'm exploring the product line of Smooth-On -- their Dragon Skin looks awesome, and their Body Double skin-safe silicon molding compound should put alginate to shame. Really, hanging its head in embarrasment shame.
The process of casting, say a face, in alginate is this:
1. Measure, mix, and apply alginate to said face. Wait about five more minutes for it to harden.
2. Apply a plaster bandage "mother mold" shell.
3. Remove and then cast a plaster positive in the alginate, RIGHT AWAY or it shrinks.
4. Make a final mold on the positive using rubber or whatever... there are different ways of doing this.
5. Cast your prop in the final mold.
With the new body-double stuff, you cut out steps 1-3 and go directly to the final mold. Full head casts may be trickier, but faces, hands, and their ilk are much easier. And, you use less, it hardens FAST, it doesn't require mixing if you get the cartridge form, and so on.
Then, for the props themselves, I'm looking at both silicon and polyurethanes.
The materials themselves are not actually that expensive. The pain comes in from the supporting materials -- the cartridge gun is $68, the silicon tints are $15 each, the NON-silicon tints are $10 each. And you need four to five of each type... black, red, blue, yellow, and white if they have it (which they don't for the one set).
That's a couple-hundred dollars just to get in the door.
The materials aren't CHEAP mind you, but they aren't too bad.
It should be fun! Whoo!
I almost let slip WHAT we were going to make with all this... but that would be telling. All I can say is that we hope to inspire wet knickers all around.
A guy can dream, right?
Howdy peeps,
I've been neglecting my journal lately... I've been dragging pretty slow for most of this week.
I wrapped up Chapter 13, Programming, but I think I neglected some topics that I may have to go in and back-fill. I'll know more when I re-read it.
Up next, Chapter 14... ummm.. something to do with mechanical linkages and motion, or something. Should be fun!
I spent a couple of extremely frustrating days here at work feeling my way through the debugging environment and the driver framework that our stuff lives in.
The pace of development and debugging is very different from what I'm used to, and that caused a bunch of strain the first day. The second day I came back with a different expectation level and things went fairly well.
This feels like a transition period for my projects right now. I even dreamed about the Haunted Trails walkthrough that I'll be doing on the 16th... my brain is really beginning to gear up for Halloween already!
Which is rough, since I'm really not done a lot on the book. I'm not supposed to be transitioning until July, dang it!
But there are some new materials that I want to work with before then, for making body parts... so I'm doing my homework, lining up suppliers, and this weekend I'll be poking at my budget.
At work, I'm still transitioning from being clueless to having a clue. It will take longer than I'm used to before I ramp up to expert, though.
Oooh, an awesome thing happened last night!
I was at the Tai Chi studio practicing my short-stick weapon form and Lorna, from Eugene, was there signing up for classes! Woo! She was one of the teenagers that was attached to the piercing shop, and one of the niftier ones at that.
I was stunned, though. Critter (Chris) was (is?) in town, too. Now I wonder who else from the High Priestess contingent will appear next!
Anyway, it was cool.
Happy Birthday To Me, Happy Birthday TO Me, Happy BIRTHDAY dear MEEEEE, Happy Birthday To Me!
Yup. Gimme prezzies! You can buy me anything from my Amazon.com wishlist you want...
Or not. Heck, it's not like I'm about to buy YOU presents (unless you happen to be my wife, and then, prezzies are us!).
Marla got me some neat stuff... some movies from my wishlist like Twelve Monkeys and Nightmare Before Christmass. Good stuff!
And some graphic novels like Barry Ween, Boy Genius (hilarious! Love it!).
My dad found these Mikro Men "sculptures" from an artist in England. They are brilliant! Absolutely brilliant! These are fold-out metal sculptures, chemically milled out of a 95mm by 35mm plate of stainless steel that is only 150 microns thick.
See for yourself at www.mikroworld.com (or, possiblye, at www.mikroworld.com/web/html/entry.html).
I have the Accident and the Jungle, so there are only four more I need to compelete the collection.
Tonight we will be eating chocolate torte of doom until we are dizzy. It should be good.
Oh, and Chapter 13, Programming, is moving along pretty good, too -- I may be done by tomorrow night.