This will be awesome

There is now a legal version of Photoshop CS5 on my laptop. I even paid some money for it. I am very excited to be able to resume/increase frequency of computer sketching-- this being the first graphics software on the laptop. So far I've only been using my "chairtop"/iMac. My first (brief) test of it:



This is also the first time ever I've used Photoshop in the presence of someone who knows the software better then I. It's so enlightening! Exhilarating! Bewildering! Is this what it was like when I explained The Google to my sisters back in High School?

The background processes

I would just like to publicly state that I am still working on the quilt. Yay persistance! Boo lack of new content. It's hard to spiral out and do fantastical new projects when I've got the constant grind of hand sewing holding me down. Which isn't a *bad* thing-- stable "creative" work. It just means I'm limited in some acceptable ways.


(you can see the backing fabric to the left, the black binding on the hex tiles, and the blue binding for the quilt)

Have 10 of 19 hexes sewn up, though none of snaps on them yet. I've just now finished tying each quilt top hex to it's stuffing/backing with some basic floss. This means I can at least throw it around like a retarded (pin free) blanket. Need to either machine quilt it or hand sew the binding to the back now... am... not clear on which one to do... will I ever machine quilt it? Can I do it after the binding? I continue to learn a number of things from this... Have I mentioned that the next time I will be THROWING MONEY AT THE PROBLEM and hiring someone else to quilt the damn thing? (making the top is fun! this part... not so much... there's a place in Fremont I randomly stumbled into which I might use...)

Also, the plants are still sort of growing. I'm realizing that I have not yet found the balance of when/how much to water them yet. Many of my dear sweet green babies have yellowing/sad/dead lower leaves/branches. I think that means I'm wantering them too much... but they get so wilty so fast! I can't help but give them more water! It makes me think of a small child who throws a temper tantrum to get candy, always gets what they want, and is slowly becoming obese. I need to be more strict!

That hasn't stopped some of them from thriving though! Cucumber progress!

Also a number of smaller jars/experiments are... continouing to not die. The middle jar here is carrots. Hee hee! (on the left young mint and on the right older parsley)


Am enjoying myself. Already have ideas of how to do it better next year...

Reading

One of my New Year resolutions for 2011 was to read at least one book a month. Not "read 12 books in a year" but to ensure that my reading was/is continuos throughout the year. Unfortunately I haven't been keeping an exact eye on the matter, but I do believe I've maintained it.

Having a Kindle really helps with this. I'm still very pro-physical book, and have bought several new hard covers... but to be honest, have not read them through entirely... so bulky! This is a sad fact because I really wish to financially support some bookstores (like Borderlands!) but no longer actually want their product... I wish they had a tip jar or... something. An Amazon affiliate program? An in-store download station? I would happily pay more for a book download if I knew part of it went to a physical bookstore (especially if I used browsing in that bookstore to find the "book" I wanted).

But alas, the future continues to approach us and it turns out some things in the future are just better. Like reading on the Kindle. I continue to consume material via the Kindle at a slow but steady rate. This is a very good thing. Also, traveling with the Kindle is heaven. A major highlight of my last two trips (Japan & Belize) was the moments where I was simply hanging out and reading... It's not just easier to physically carry a large number of books with the Kindle, it turns out that I actually enjoy the reading experience with it more.

Yet another fantastic aspect of the Kindle-

While the Kindle (and devices in general) may potentially be "buggy" they do not literally have bugs in them. Like this book did, that Adam found on his shelf while we were rearranging the front room last weekend.

But back to the resolution- Earlier in the year I remembered exactly which book counted for each month, but I failed to write that down... now I just have the listing of my Amazon receipts... lets see what I can extract from them...

• January : The Blade Itself: The First Law: Book One (First Law 1) (purchased 12/25/10)
  
• multi-month/in-progress : Before They Are Hanged: The First Law: Book Two (First Law 2) (purchased 2/23/11)
  
• February : The Name of the Wind (borrowed from Elise)
  
• March : The Hunger Games (3/28/11)
  
• April : Catching Fire (The Second Book of the Hunger Games) (4/20/11)
  
• also April : The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (4/20/11)
  
• mult-month/in-progress : The Girl Who Played with Fire (4/20/11)
  
• May : Mockingjay (The Final Book of The Hunger Games) (4/30/11)
  
• June : My Blood Approves (6/24/11)
  
• July : Hollowland (The Hollows, #1) (6/24/11)
  

That might be stretching it a bit... a couple of those late-month purchases may have actually spanned the month boundary. Haven't started anything new yet for August (finishing up the in-progress ones) but hopefully it'll be A Wise Man's Fear (also borrowed from Elise). While I may not agree with a good number of the rankings on NPR's listeners' top 100 sci-fi/fantasy books, it at least is a guide-line I may refer to as the year progresses. Any suggestions?

Them arts

I used to draw all the time. Always. Non stop. I'd call myself average most the time, and for a brief period maybe kinda' good. But then I went back to just being very average.

Practice makes better, so I've been practicing. It helps to have a vivid subject matter and since Mel and I haven't settled on the MidWinter characters look like I've been... stumped there. Luckily my imagination has been propped up with off-and-on vivid dreams. They're... odd...


It helps to have such a clear image, but I miss drawing things that aren't me.

Also, sadly, I'd say the first sketch was the best and they've been getting worse since...


I do mean to keep sketching... I hope to pick up Photoshop for my laptop which will make sketching easier...

Knowing the words

One of the things I'm worst at is words. Terrible. I always like to say I'm good at talking to people. Silly contradiction. I believe both statements true, but I'm not really clear on how that works out. I think the "talking" I'm good at is actually called "making a connection"... not the kind of talking that conveys in real, solid data.

Anyway, it's hard to be good at something in a technical/work sense when you can't speak the jargon. So I've known of "closures" for a while. And I'm pretty sure I knew what a closure was even though if you had pressed me for a definition I'd have waved my hands about and said something about functions and private data and scope. Hacker news and some spare time at work resulted in me running through this:

What's a Closure?

Absolutely love it. Love it. It starts off slow (almost painfully so) but builds ever so nicely! I had a hiccup at #9 due to some typos/sloppy code and in #10 I forgot a return statement and failed to "see" that I had missed it for, like, 10 min.

Our... "PM"? McCool (yes, that's actually his real name) went through it as well. He has some minor programming experience from college but not much and he was stumped on a couple, but he worked through them. Which is awesome. Interesting how he actually read some things closer then I did. He raised (what I think is) a valid point about #7 which I didn't even see/consider. Relating to the fact that there's no guarantee the return value of f() is constant. Also, when he questioned me about a block of example code, my mind skipped around and was almost unable to process the code during the conversation. Very interesting.

Also, there's talk about doing an HTML5/JavaScript customer facing project at work, getting away from the sucking hole of hell that is Flex 4. Woot!

I still love Java the most :P

Portal 2 : turret side-tracking...

I posted video footage of this a while ago... and the next day it was a broke-a-did by a friend while I was showing it off. Oops.

Finally got around to [hot] gluing it back together this weekend. 's kinda' cute... Unfortunately one of the sides is a bit thick and that's the side connected to the tip of the nail (I use nails for my straight lines in this) which all just means that the connection to the "arm" is too thick and it can't close completely. As demonstrated below.


In case you need some helper music while watching this... Don't forget the Portal 2 soundtrack is an EXCELLENT free download!

Clearly I need to work on my .gif making...


(in other news : worken on the quilt... worken' worken'. The garden is growing- I have not one but TWO pea pods now! The pole beans are really, any day now, about to flower... any day now... )

Smart people learning to program...

This post is about taking on challenges. Here is a photo of my cucumber plant ready to take on any challenges. See that? He's holding a fucking hat pin. Don't mess with him or he'll fuck you up. Take that, challenge!

My sister (the middle one) has embarked down the respectable path of acquiring a PhD in the field of... bio-chem-ish-something... She's over out at U of Madison which is nice because that means she's living near our father's side of the family. Nice people, them.

Anyway, dear sister K and I don't talk much, which is fine. We're rather different folks... but just last week (or so) ago I got an email out of the blue notifying me that sister dearest has signed up for a class on Perl! Oh joy! Never before has she shown the slightest interest in programming and now she is (rather unprompted) elected to take a class on it. Unfortunately it's an intense summer course with classes every day and it failed to notify her of several pre-reqs that are kinda' required. Or at least suggested... and oh my how she should have taken them. I've been talking her through a couple subjects... it's been a while since I've "taught" programming and it's... different with A) a sibling B) someone who isn't a child/dumb AND isn't really into it. It means she's bright enough to get it but doesn't quite... go out there and try to learn. No- she is trying to learn. But she's not trying to.. really dig in and grasp everything?

Subjects that have confused her so far :

• Hashes. Somehow her professor phrased something in such a way that she basically thought hashes were a collection of key & value pairs where *every* pair you gave it was stored. She thought she could add several sets of pairs all with the same key and then request the set of pairs that matched a given key and iterate over them. I feel bad because I can totally see how that could make sense... and yet she really, really had to struggle to get back onto the right track. You know, the whole "keys are unique" idea...
  
• Debugging. She gets stuck and then... I don't know what... I told her that she really should be printing out the values of things to "check" them but it just... it doesn't seem to click with her. She prints some now but without additional comments (so the spew is a really confusing jumbled mess) and not all the information. Also, walking through the code. I can't tell if it doesn't occur to her or she can't do it herself. When we do it together she can quickly spot the problems...
  
• Initializing values. Several times now when discussing a problem with her I realize she's initializing some value inside a while loop and over-writing the existing data she was hoping to collect. We had a long conversation about the idea of conditionally initializing something and it... didn't go well. This is the most fascinating problem of them all to me because I cannot figure out what her brain is thinking...
  

Anyway... have been having several (of my first!) video conferences with her. Talking about programming is fun but I'm severely out of practice. And an even worse word-garbler then before. In the theme of things over-coming obstacles, here is a photo of my cucumber plant from last week. Notice that it has a baby cucumber on it. Fuck yeah! Take that you tiny-container doubters!! (to be fair I've no reason to believe it will actually make it to maturity yet...) Also- all 3 of my edamame plants of popped out pods... even the severely retarded/bonsi one. All pods scaled to the appropriate size so far.