What I think and what I get....

Adam is a film snob, who donates generously to some SF film society thing, who provides him-- and therefor me sometimes-- the opportunity to screen films in advance and/or with director and/or cast in attendance. I was therefor most fortunate to be able to hear Guillermo del Toro talk after seeing Pan's Labyrinth. This was years ago and I'm certain I blogged about it (dear Livejournal?) but cannot find the post-- nor a quote from him, which is why I bring it up. He said something that struck me deeply and I'm going to slaughter the quote so I ask your forgiveness in advance.

I have monsters in my heart the way some people say they have Jesus in their heart

As silly as it sounds, that quote affected me more strongly then any other quote I've heard in ages. It rang so true in my heart and yet I'd never thought to phrase it that way (the power of all good quotes, yes?). It's not like "woah, angst! ah!" monsters. It's just... a feeling. This is perhaps one of the several reasons I feel compelled to craft stupid shit all the time. I could be making useful things, like scarves or sweaters, but instead I spend time and money making little monsters because that's what I think about all the time. It's what and how I often feel things. Of course, my heart and mind are still miles away from what my fingers produce... let me share an example...

I've got some yarn and a hook and some time. Time to make a monster! Six limbed, lanky, looming perhaps. A maw. Small beady eyes. Bulbous limbs that are fuzzy and then tipped with... something.

This is what my brain is thinking:


And this is what I actually produce:


Well... hmmm... Could be worse I guess...

(Disclaimer : I sketched the image after I finished the monster... the "what am I making" idea shifts around as I go and I can never craft from my own sketches-- however occasionally I can work from others')

Anyway, yeah, so that's how I spent a lot of last weekend. The yarn I picked up from the ever-delightful Imagiknit. Had a good excuse to visit- brought with me a new co-worker from Colorado was in town on a business trip. I started the monster only 2 weeks ago, I believe, and finished 'em rapidly with the assistance of my newly acquired crafting accessorires : a CozE and all of House Season 7. I'm a crafting MACHINE when these ingredients are added!

A painless crafting process... Not sure how I feel about the results. I mean, it's "cute" and all but.... now what? I guess I'll list it on Etsy... "watermelon colored 6 armed monster" is a bit harder to sell then something that can be paired with the word "unicorn" it should be noted. Hmmmmm....

Anyway, random progress photos :


I can't really say much about the process that isn't covered in this post from my old blog : Crocheting Monsters : How to Part 1. (this is from 1/29/2010 and there still isn't a part 2 yet... )

Hopefully my rapid success with this project (and still more DVDs of House!) will keep the yarn ball rolling and I'll finish a couple other projects. I unearthed several projects this weekend while continuing my tragically slow cleaning efforts... They are all at various stages of not-done-ness but all (well most) still have glimmers of potential!



Maybe they'll even look like the monsters I dream them to be

I ♥ SF Food

You see that? You see that there? There's some sushirritos. They are fucking awesome. Living in San Francisco is fucking awesome.

My work office used to be located on an unfortunate block, just a pinch too far from down town. Not a nice location, kinda' dirty. Then we moved offices (about six months ago say) and I know work in the Financial District. Takes some getting used to- so many suits!- but there are definitely perks to working there. Namely the exciting food selection.

There's a Coffee Bar location across the street. If my taste buds shifted just so, I too could be in love with Curry Up Now- the Indian burrito truck that my coworkers rave about. Lets not forget about the Creme Brulee Cart that occasionally lurks around the block from my office.

When I go home, it's just as good. Last week Adam and I went to Flour & Water again- this time for the fantastical pasta tasting menu. Tonight Adam and I went to Local : Mission Eatery for romantic dinner. There's the original Coffee Bar location a few blocks away and Slow Club, which I'm slowly falling more and more in love with.

Yes, Paris had great food... but it was all always sort of the same type of great. I'm thrilled with the variety that I've uncovered in this city I live in. That it flowers and changes over time. Just last Friday I went spur-of-the-moment like to Bones (link goes to a PDF of the flyer) a food crawl on 20th street where all the food was themed off bones. Going by myself made me bolder then I ever am in a group- I had a small cube of what was essentially pig ear jello, among other things...


(click image for link to Flickr page with notes about each dish)

...

so... yeah... it's all relevant because good food makes for a happy Rebecca, and a happy Rebecca is a better coder and more prolific crafter...

Normal to you, exciting to me

You may know this, but I don't cook. I don't make food. I didn't know how to cook pasta or a potato till I was in college and living in my first apartment. Don't blame my parents- both of them cook, like to cook, and have successfully passed on cookie joy to my two sisters. Until I was several years into my relationship with Adam I really didn't have the pallet to appreciate food and therefor was satisfied with cans of soup, frozen pizza, and dry top ramen. Now Adam has me OoOoo-ing and Aahhaah-ing over fancy foods and I can never go back.

I still don't *want* to make food- my time is much too precious for the tedious task of preparing meals every day†. But I'm willing to experiment a bit more now, mostly with the baking and desserts. Maybe I'll get bit by the baking bug and become a bread head? I know several in Mountain View who already suffer such fates already.

Followed directions from How To Cook Everything the weekend of the Superbowl to make oatmeal cookies. So underwhelmed.



On the up side I got to practice playing with the camera. I like the wide-angle len's closeups but I want... a smaller F stop? Is them the words? A smaller field of focus! This lens only went to 4 I think, and the lowest any we've got is 3 I think. Also need to get a tripod- balancing on tables and chairs can only get you so many shots. And while I'm at it, I want one of those remote clicker things- if I had that (or maybe just a good tripod) I could try my hand again at more stop motion. MMMmMmMMmm... stop motion....

But, yeah, cookies. Big let down. Pulling out everything ahead of time helped make it an easy, almost fun, process but they tasted CAKE-Y not COOKIE. Boo. A lame final product casts a gloomy light over the entire process...


(cookies have a slight reddish tint because I put a couple drops of food coloring in the dough. Food coloring makes everything better...

† : sounds kinda' bad/snobby, I know. Sorry. But it's true. I'm an engineer and Adam's an engineer. We both work all day and come home late. If he wants to cook for fun, that's fine, but most often we'd rather just throw money at the problem and eat out/take out/order in then spend a moment of our few free hours doing "chore" like stuff...

Pin Bird

Feeling guilty about not finishing anything lately. Have been working on things though!


As mentioned in the yarn hanging project, I have an unhappy relationship with my hat pins because they are not as awesome (see: sturdy) as I wish. They also came in a terrible plastic container that once opened never quite contained them. Even after pulling out a handful for the yarn project, they still don't fit.


Wound up sticking them into a cork for storage and then just crafting up and around the thing... Unfortunately horizontal surface area is in high demand in my craft area and I couldn't put the pin poof anywhere practical. So I decided to mount it on the wall. The original idea was to have more of a crouched frog like creature... but as I was working I realized the pin poof too closely resembled to plumage of birds I've seen (most recently in Paris! Photos are almost ready to share!)

Could be more bird-looking, but whatever. I'm calling it done because A) I need to get more shit done and B) I need to work on my "less is more". Adam said it was kinda' bird-like and that's good enough for me.

It's hanging above my desk... which still isn't clean enough to actually be usable, but is getting closer. It goes well with my reddish/purplish yarn chain and I hope to add more practical & pretty things to the space. Practaprettty? Practetty? I feel there's a great new catch phrase there somewhere...

Yarn Hanging Project

Spoiler Alert : This is what this blog post is about

I love yarn. I have a collection of yarns in particular that I love the most. They are fuzzy and soft and lovely and later become the key ingredients to my monster recipes. I enjoy touching and seeing my yarn, as all classic knitters/crocheters do. Unfortunately, for the longest time my yarn lived in an ugly box pushed into my Ikea shelf... which meant I'd need to pull it all out in order to comb through my precious collection.


Having solved a similar problem with my fabric collection a while ago, I knew action must be taken... and I had a good idea of what action it was.

A friend of mine is an avid knitter. Back in college she strung up twine in her studio apartment and used cloths pins to hang several lovely skeins of yarn from it. I will never forget how classy and tasteful they looked.... however A) I've accumulated more yarn since college then we both had back then and need a more compact solution and B) I keep most my yarn in tightly coiled balls which clothespins can't actually grip.

What to do? Well, the solution of course involved pins. All good things involve something sharp, yes?

First off it started with me realizing all my yarn balls kept unwinding as they rolled about. For the balls thick enough, this was solved by coiling the tail around a T pin and sticking it into the ball. I fucking love T pins- so useful!!

That got me thinking... which lead me to my floral/hat pins. I do not love them. They are super long with a pearly head- which is why I got them- but utterly impractical. They bow under too much pressure- and by that I mean any at all- and don't actually mesh well with my pins and T pins for solder bugs. I however had a box of, like, a gazillion of them to find some use for them.

Solution : stick the hat pins through the yarn balls & skeins and hang them from something!


The supplies and tools are simple :

• Tools
  
  • Scissors
    
  • Hot glue gun
    
  • Hole punch (optional)
    
• Supplies
  
  • Floral / hat pin (1 per)
    
  • Buttons (1 per)
    
  • Cork-board (only a tiny section used)
    
  • Chain(s)
    
  • Hot glue
    
  • Thread / v. thin yarn
    

The cork-board came from a hardware store (6 flat squares) and has proven useful for a number of projects and makes an excellent work surface. Using scissors, cut tiny squares (~1 cm x 1 cm) or- as I later discovered- you can use a hole punch to achieve cleaner results. Select a complimentary color button for the yarn you're going to hang.

Cut a length of thread (you'll quickly figure out what's right... ~5 inches to start with) and tie one end through one of the button holes. Hot-glue the cork-board bit to the button, trapping the short thread end in place for neatness purposes.

Take the other end and tie it tiny loop through it (small enough that the hat pin's top can't pass through). Stick the hat pin through the loop, spear as many yarn balls/skeins you want and jab that hat pin end into the cork board bit. Bam! You've got yourself a little hanger.



Next you take a chain and hang it somewhere. The chain I got came from a hardware store and was perfect. Note that each link is C shaped with a tiny gap where the ends meet. This gap was just the right size to slide the hanger's thread through, which made hanging and re-hanging the yarn extremely easy. I got 2 types of chain (the color variation is too subtle to see in the photos), used a pair of pliers to separate them into smaller chains, and then hung them about my craft room.


I tried to separate and hang them by color. It definitely highlighted my extreme love for the blue-green spectrum and how I really need to stock up on some more reddish hues. The hanger loops slide in and out of the links so easily that shuffling and hanging the yarn clumps has not proven to be a hassel at all. The hanger construction process is super easy so I don't expect any problems as my collection grows either. Now I can easily trail my fingers across my favorite yarns as I come in and out of my room making my craft room even more awesome.

Not owning the apartment we live in, I don't feel I can drill into the ceiling, as would be my preference.... so the only issue now is where to expand to when I (eventually) run out of the chain space I now have. I still have a ways to go however so... we'll tackle that problem when we get there...

Haywire : Movie Review

Haywire is a fucking awesome film.

I just walked through the door and I am compelled to write a glowing review for it right god damn now. So indulge me for a moment (this is neither code, nor crafts... but it is about a woman breaking into to typical masculin rolls while still maintaining her femininity which I feel is a subject near and dear to my heart and relevant to the mood of my blog)

Haywire is a great action genre film. It stars Gina Carano, an actual MMA fighter, as Mallory, our hero. There's a plot, a rather classic one, that is neither offensive nor groundbreaking. There's acting, which while having several notable, respectable named actors remains reasonable but does not really call attention to itself. There's some dry and subtle comedy sprinkled here but no collection of terrible/great one liners. And then there's the action. There's fight scenes, certainly, but also running and climbing and driving and handling of weapons and one's self that all scream high quality.

The real highlight and draw of this film is the well choreographed actions and the actors abilities to deliver them so well. It's certainly not an arty violence like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon but it's no Drive. The blows and impacts are jaring and, at times, even a little uncomfortable to watch but the gore is minimal. Violence in the real world is bad, but I enjoy a film like this for its ability to display such technical tallent and skill while also getting the viewer's adrenaline up a notch or two. My viewing companion, Andy, noted that the entire film was very tightly done-- no extra exposition, plot, or characters. Its 1:33 in length and everything feels put together, progressing steadily, and focused on plot points tied to intense action sequences.

But, really, the main reason I'm so over-the-moon about this is because Gina is female. We've seen films like these by Jackie Chan, Jason Statham, and Bruce Lee before. Vehicles to display our heros awesome powers. But this one is a woman. Just... dwell on that a moment. There have certainly been action movies with female leads before-- I saw and liked Angelina Jolie's Salt (2010) for example and while it has some good action, and certainly looks similar at a high level... it's not the same. It lacks the technical bite that this film has. Jolie can act, but her action and violence is more arty or at least staged. I just can't buy her really swinging at someone or for that matter anyone ever landing a real punch on her. This film is about how bad ass Gina is. How well she can sell the intensity of a fight scene. She gives and takes and then gives some more and wins.

There are several shocking shots of Mallory getting taken by "surprise" at the start of an attack. These are sudden and disturbing because it's just some dude suddenly lashing out at her, a (very very) latent fear in my own mind and perhaps other folks. This happens though because like all good and classic heroes, Mallory doesn't start fights-- she just finishes them. Once the initial punch is thrown however the fights explode into action and it's a level playing ground.

It might be sexist to discuss Gina's looks, but since I'm equally happy to dwell on male leads, we'll call it fair game. I find it also very heartening that we see her in several stages of dress-- bruised post fight, all dressed up, casual, and later in intense butt kicking mode (which- spoiler alert- involves her hair being braided back into very compact corn rows and made me ridiculously happy in its extreme practicality). She's a lovely lady with a figure I can believe in. Since she actually is an MMA fighter it shouldn't be surprising that she actually looks like she can throw a punch but still-- it's kind of surprising. The fights don't ignore the fact she's a woman (several times her opponents easily lift her off the ground) but it does not dwell on the fact, which is pleasing. A final note should be made that she cleans up quite well and has the most lovely lips that I've seen on screen in quite a while. She is what and how I imagined Nolan's Catwoman to be. Non of that Hathaway nonsense.

Gina hasn't really been in any real film before and I have high hopes that this isn't her last. I plan on going to see the film again with Adam* and look forward to the chance to see her in something else later. Ideally beside that Kiwi from Tarantino's Deathproof, Zoe Bell, and amazing French parkour gentleman David Belle. I'm actually quite curious about how this film came together will be reading what I can about it.

In a closing note, really, this film is fucking awesome. And, really, it's not just the action. The supporting actors are all fantastic, I think particularly Bill Paxton's character. Also Michael Angarano's. Let me not fail to mention that the magical Michael Fassbender is in this as well. Every flavor of evil/bad he portrays is delicious. The man can do no wrong.

* Adam is willing/interested in seeing this film because it's directed by Steven Soderbergh. I should also note, before anyone's hopes get too high, that this test fails the Bechdel Test. And as of this posting it has an 80% on Rotten Tomatoes (86% from critics)

Programming in Paris

Still in Paris. Things are going ok. Did you know that there are NOT fireworks around the Eiffel Tower on New Years? We didn't. No biggie, but still... a pinch of a let down. Adam emailed the Rick Steves Paris 2012 travel book we have with the correction.

So, yeah... no fireworks. And there was this whole being sick for a week thing... Spent a lot of time in our rental sleeping... and... sleeping... there was some reading at least. And sadness.

But! But! Things have been getting done! One of which was the porting of my Java Stereogram program to HTML5! The algorithm is from http://www.techmind.org/stereo/ which is great. Very dry, but I did eventually wrap my head around everything it was doing... back when I implemented it the first time ~3.5 years ago... It was a sample code project for a job application, and after combing through what I wrote back then I'm shocked I ever got hired. It was my first Java project after school and clearly I had a lot to learn. Amusing that I'm using the same project to learn/poke at HTML5 with... I've no doubt I'll look back later and wince at how ugly it all looks...

Took a little under a week of scattered work. Mostly debugging. Fucking lack of typed variables! Ran into lots of "Javascript doesn't have ints" problems... yes, yes, you can cast the value... but remembering to cram everything back into int format is not the same as/far more trixy then just having values that are and will always be int. Grrr...


----- Java ------

int b, c;

int a = b - c/2;



----- javascript ------

var a = Math.floor(b + c/2); // WRONG

var a = b + Math.floor(c/2); // CORRECT



Adam gave me a hard time about it after I found the problem. I mean, *yes* I know the difference between the two and I realize why I was getting problems.... but... when I'm re-writing code quickly, I feel like it was an easy mistake to make... :(



Another gotcha I ran into was with Canvas (a major part of the learning exercise). When trying to scale an image, remember to transform before drawing the image.... This makes total sense when I think about it (and given how other graphics stuff works) but, again, slipped my mind.


ctxt.scale(scale, 1); //don't be retarded, remember this goes BEFORE the .drawImage call
ctxt.drawImage(otherCanvas, 0, 0);


A final thing to note is that I'm using this project as an excuse to finally work with git. Yes, I know I can set git on my own, but I didn't see the harm of using github to track the work. Now all I need is an actual web hosting service to host the page! Anyway, I'm still very much working on the Stereogram code so don't judge too harshly by what you see uploaded now... I'll post again when it's pretty (and hosted) : https://github.com/sithel/Web-Stereogram-Generator

Todos:

• Lift code to let you save canvas images
  
• Made the page less ugly
  
• Make sure everything works (just now fixed another rounding bug)
  
• Add some tests
  
• Provide sample images for depth maps and tiles (the quality of the tile can greatly affect the result!)
  
• Find hosting for it
  
• remove JQuery need- only used that because I was lazy initially