Teleidoscope

Thu, Nov 30, 2006

Bacon Cat

Posted at 8:50 pm MST to Miscellaneous

I know that combinations of cats and bacon have a certain notoriety on the net. I am one of those who who found John Scalzi's excellent and consistently interesting blog due to the notoriousbacon-cat incident. Today I had a different kind of bacon-cat incident.

Dave Barry once wrote that he thought little boys must have pointed their fingers at each other and said "bang" for generations before guns were invented and made sense of the gesture. I wonder if there is something similar involving cats and cans.

My cat, Dinah, has strange ideas of what constitutes proper food. Dinah comes running when she hears me open any can except a soda can. It doesn't matter whether I use a rotary canopener or the can has a builtin opener. However, Dinah does not like to eat anything that comes in cans. Jars do not attract her attention.

She is quite a good mouser and often eats the mice she catches. Or parts of the mice, anyway. It would be less annoying if she would finish them off. She has one particular meow --generally slightly muffled -- that means "I have caught a mouse", and I have leaned to be careful walking after I have heard that meow. She very often leaves one particular organ (which may be the stomach or the gall-bladder) and quite often leaves larger parts of the mouse uneaten. I sometimes wonder why on some mice the front end gets eaten and on others the back end.

Other than the occasional mouse, she eats Iams dry catfood. And that is pretty much all she will eat.

When my old cat Little Kitty was very old and I was trying to encourage her to eat, I served her canned cat food and never needed to worry about Dinah taking it. I don't think it was just because Little Kitty was the alpha: I've tried using fancy canned foods as Christmas presents and special treats after Little Kitty was no longer around to own it, and Dinah wouldn't eat it.

When I open cans of tuna or salmon or chicken Dinah appears promptly and begs shamelessly, but she doesn't want the meat, and won't eat it if I give her some. She just wants the juice or broth from the cans.

Similarly, she begs for turkey at the holidays, but if I give her some, she just licks the juice off.

This evening I dropped half a strip of cooked bacon, and Dinah surprised me by eating the whole thing. After 7 months without real mice, she may be missing some variety in her diet, but bacon seems like an odd choice for an addition to her diet.

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Wed, Nov 29, 2006

Routes

Posted at 6:56 pm MST to Miscellaneous

I've been holding off, because living in an apartment that was mostly packed would be annoying and make me more homesick, but tonight I have officially begun to pack for the trip home 10 days from now.

I have also gone online to the AAA website and started generating alternative triptiks. The shortest quickest route involves I90 thorugh Massachusetts and New York, eventually connecting to I80 at Cleveland. Then it's I80 across the Midwest and through Nebraska to I76, to Denver.

I really dislike the NY State Thruway.

In nice weather I prefer an alternate route that takes I84 through Connecticut and lower New York to I81, then I81 through Wilkes Barre to pick up I80 in Pennsylvania. But there are some steep spots on I81 in the Appalachians that were twisty and single lane (because of construction) when I came through last spring on the trip west.

Some of the I81 scariness may have been because I was tired after driving 1700 miles. But the AAA charts show LOTS of construstion through Pennsylvania on I80, so I don't think cutting south to I80 even farther east will help.

I've saved both triptiks. As we get closer to travel time I'll check the weather predictions for Wilkes Barre and Buffalo NY, and decide which route to take depending on the weather.

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Tue, Nov 28, 2006

Kitsunebi

Posted at 6:35 pm MST to Technology

I am very frustrated at the moment. I suddenly have lots of creative energy, and it wants to go in every direction at once. Writing this blog feels good. There are stories that want to be written. And lots of other projects that were planned or started and then set aside seem to want attention.

And I really should start cleaning the apartment and packing and generally getting ready to move home 10 days from now.

Among the set aside projects:

• lots of needlework kits of various sorts
• trying to learn watercolor pencils so that I can create the images I want for the net of mirrors
• my two original cross stitch designs
• figuring out and writing out the music for Wilde Jagd

I need to prioritize.

I am going to keep up with this blog. So far I have averaged one post per day since the second day of posting, after the big batch of initial posts, and I hope to keep to that.

I need to start writing the stories out, because if I don't I will fall back into writer's block.

And I will plan to return to occasional work on my original cross-stitch pieces.

The smaller of the original designs is called "Kitsunebi", which is the Japanese word for foxfire. It is a picture of a Japanese nine-tailed spirit-fox which I created using a free software package called Kxstitch to generate the stitching chart.

I had stitched the fox's body and a couple of the tails before my medical problems in 2005. I set it aside then, when the mammogram came back questionable, and somehow have never gotten back to working on it. Now I'm finding myself annoyed by the fact that it's stalled, which isn't quite the same as wanting to work on it, but close.

One of the nice things about my shift from SuSE to Kubuntu Linux was that Kxstitch comes prepackaged for Debian/Ubuntu: when I originally ran it (on RedHat/Fedora on my previous laptop) I had to build it myself, and I never quite got around to building a 64-bit SuSe version. Now I have my design tool back without having to fuss with it.

My other original design is too large to be portable, or to have any hope of finishing it in a reasonable amount of time when I'm also working on other projects. But I will write about it and show the design at an appropriate time next month.

The Kitsunebi design is shown below the cut.

See more ...

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Mon, Nov 27, 2006

Parking space

Posted at 6:42 pm MST to Current Events

This morning the radio news announcer mentioned that someone has just paid $250,000 -- yes, one quarter of a million dollars -- for a parking space in a Boston alley.

I hope he got the mineral rights with that.

I find this especially amazing because, as US cities go, Boston has an amazing public transit system which is actually useful. By useful, I mean that it it probably possible to use the MBTA to get from point A to point B almost anywhere in the greater Boston area. And there are tentacles of commuter rail stretching out in all directions.

There have GOT to be more sensible alternatives than spending a quarter mil for a piece of an alley... and I wonder how the purchaser plans to stop other people from parking in 'his' place/

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Sun, Nov 26, 2006

Techlands

Posted at 1:38 pm MST to Creative Work

As threatened previously, I seem to be in the mood to write fiction again. I use the Astral Trading Company website as a gateway for any fiction I put online, and the stories with related settings will be accessible through the Techlands contents page.

The first installment, Perspective is a sort of prologue explaining a bit about the environment that provides the settings and props for the stories.

Please note that this piece is meant as fiction, not prediction. I extrapolated current trends in semi-plausible directions that would give me lots of neat material to play with, not always in directions I think are likely. (Honest predictions would probably involve nastier climate changes in Europe and nastier political situations everywhere.)

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Sat, Nov 25, 2006

The Vondish Ambassador

Posted at 11:01 am MST to Media

I've enjoyed Lawrence Watt-Evans novels for about as long as they have been published. I think I 'm missing one trilogy about alternate worlds, but believe I own all the other he has written.

His first fantasy series had a main character who was not human (which was very refreshing at the time) and lots of other interesting ideas and details. It also had a feline warsteed, and I'm a sucker for neat cats.

The fantasy series he started second is set in a world containing several cities named Ethshar and focuses more on ordinary people in the world, not the great and powerful. It has been quite popular, but not quite popular enough for the publishing company, so Mr. Watt-Evans is taking advantage of the internet to experiment with alternative publishing methods.

The first draft of the most recently completed Ethshar novel, "The Spriggan Mirror" was published online as a serial, with direct donations from fans paying for each chapter. These donations took the place of the advance that the author would usually receive from a publisher. The finished novel will appear soon from a small press (it has been delayed slightly but should be in book stores before Christmas) and people who donated more than a certain amount will receive a physical copy, plus a chapbook of an additional story.

I'm just as glad "The Spriggan Mirror" has been delayed: having my mail forwarded makes things messy, and this way it should not arrive until I am back in Colorado.

The current, 10th, Ethshar novel is currently being serialized. It is called "The Vondish Ambassador" and can be read for free online, with a 25 dollar donation guaranteeing receipt of a hard copy as well. The first eleven chapters are currently online and the story of political and magical complications, from the viewpoint of a guy who just wants to make an honest living, is getting to the exciting parts. Assassins!

I've donated enough to get my hard copy but I'm going to make another donation. Experiments in stopping the big conglomerates from homogenizing everything and blocking the channels for interesting stuff between artists and audience need to be encouraged.

Lawrence Watt-Evans is also editor of an online donation-based "magazine" publishing the shorter lengths of speculative fiction

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Fri, Nov 24, 2006

Stuffed Celery

Posted at 3:44 pm MST to Technology

I do a decent turkey dinner, even though I have lived alone since college. My Mom always did big Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners (New Years was ravioli at Nonna's) and I started helping from the age of seven or eight with things like the stuffing for the turkey and stuffed celery, and stirring the (packaged) filling for the lemon meringue pie.

This year, being in New England I went to my brother Larry's (where I assembled the stuffed celery). I stopped at my Aunt Irma's on the way back to Boston and ended up spending the night, since the weather and traffic were both and staring at headlights through pouring rain was threatening to trigger a migraine.

My Aunt Bev and cousin Karen were at my brother's for dinner (Aunt Bev made the pies) and my cousin Tom and his wife Mary and son Michael were staying at Aunt Irma's, so I saw all of my New England relatives this trip except my Uncle Tom, who is still in the nursing home after falling off the roof, but seems to be making progress.

There is a leak in the roof he fell off, so he may have been examining the situation at the time of his fall.

Stuffed Celery

cream cheese
milk 
celery, trimmed and washed
Worcestershire sauce
pimento-stuffed green olives

Put the cream cheese into a bowl with a little milk
mash it with a fork until smooth and stirrable
add some Worcestershire sauce and stir it in
(if the cheese turns brown after you mix it in, you
have used too much sauce)
slice lots of green olives (1) and 
stir them into the cheese mixture

Use the fork you have been stirring things with to 
load the celery stalks with the cheese mixture. 

Don't make these too far ahead, 
the cheese gets tries to dry out and get nasty. 
On the other hand, the cheese mixture keeps well 
in the fridge in a sealed plastic tub.

The cheese mixture is also nice between crackers 
and wonderful on hot toast. 

Note:

1. When you get tired of slicing olives, do another dozen.
You want bits of olive in every bite of cheese and celery. 

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Thu, Nov 23, 2006

Christmas List

Posted at 5:58 am MST to Miscellaneous

I know I'm terrible to buy for: I own literally thousands of books and hundreds of DVDs (and buy more constantly) and my tastes are geeky and strange. And I'm always buying craft stuff that I never have time to do anything with.

I have all but one or two of the 630-odd DVDs cataloged in ReaderWare, but the approximately 1300 books that are cataloged so far are only a small fraction of the total. I thought I had scanned all the music CDs, but I can tell I'm missing at least one rack of them from the Readerware list. (This is annoying. I need to fix that when I get home.)

I honestly don't know what I need for the kitchen or the house (except to get rid of the mice): I haven't been there enough for too long. And I don't really want clothes until my weight is back under better control.

Things I've considered getting but haven't gotten around to:

Books:

• P.G Wodehouse (I've read some from libraries, but don't think I own any)
• Lymond series by Dorothy Dunnett (mine are a disintegrating small paperback edition)
• Niccolo series by Dorothy Dunnett (I haven't finished this series, might own the first volume, though I think I read a library copy)
• Dorothy Sayers (another set of disintegrating favorites)
• a book on horses, etc. with lots of technical details about harnesses and saddles and how they were used, not just pretty pictures of horse breeds or other miscellaneous equines

Objets d'art:

• a coffee-table grade kaleidoscope (with colored crystals) or teleidoscope (where you see the world broken up and reflected) or one of each
• a nice Japanese fan with a display stand

Music:

• folk music from Europe (other than British and Celtic, which I have a fair amount of)
• or the Middle East or Asia (other than Japanese, which I have a fair amount)
• or Africa, or
• medieval or Renaissance music
• I only have "Passage in Time" by Dead Can Dance
• I only have "Book of Secrets" by Loreena McKinnit

Note:I can't remember if I own Kitaro's Silk Road album. I already have a lot of Krishna Das, and Supreme Collection vol 1 by Nusrat Fatah Ali Khan (which is similar in style despite the religious difference. I prefer Krishna Das). I would love some more Hardanger fiddle music -- that's what was used for the Riders of Rohan theme in Lord of the Rings. I have a CD of reconstructed Ancient Egyptian music, and one of Javanese Court Gamelan, and one of "Edda: Medieval Myths from Iceland". I have a couple of operas by Purcell, and the Chant CD that everyone has, but most of my classical CDs are for later periods.

Other:

• The Goddess Dancing Belly Dancing DVD. (Reference material, and I need something more active than yoga and less boring than walking the treadmill to try occasionally.)
• A good book on folk dances or the history of dance would fill a reference gap, too. I have books on music, books and printing, and the theater but I don't have a good reference on dance

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Wed, Nov 22, 2006

Climate and Ecological Change

Posted at 7:11 pm MST to Current Events

Getting ready to work on the story that has been growing in my head.

In the past day or so I've done Google searches for pictures and information on mules, donkeys, Asian Wild Asses (onagers) and Morgan horses, Turkish and Armenian given names, and possible future coastline changes due to the icecaps melting. Also the old Silk Road overland trade routes. (I'm not sure the overland routes will be in the story.)

Europe must have steep coasts except for the Netherlands and Venice and a few localized spots elsewhere (London, for example) Even a 6 meter increase in ocean depth doesn't make a lot of difference there, while it prety much wipes out the Eastern Seabord of North America.

Of course, if the Gulf Stream shuts down when the Arctic Ocean goes ice-free, Europe is going to have another set of problems. I'm glad I saw Venice when there was only a few inches of water on St. Mark's Square at high tide... and I kind of hate to think of Greece and Istanbul dealing with Newfoundland winters.

It's really hard to judge things from orbital distances, so I may be misreading things. When Google Earth first came out, I looked at my house, and the Denver/Boulder area, and it looked inhabited. (I could see my birdbath! No one else would know what that teeny white spec was, but I knew.)

I also looked at the area of Connecticut where I grew up, and all I saw was trees. I remember walking in the Connecticut woods and seeing stone walls everywhere, because the woods were cornfields 100 to 150 years ago and they needed to do something with all the rocks. And now it's all turning back to scrubby forest.

And the deer are taking over the place, and coyotes are moving in fromn the west...

A bit of trivia: in those fountains in Japanese gardens where water fills up a piece of bamboo until it tips and spills out, and the bamboo falls back down with a "bonk" sound, part of the original reason for the noise-maker was to scare the deer away. I wonder if it would work in Colorado. (I wonder if it worked in Japan: it may be like squirrel-proof bird-feeders, where making the effort makes you feel good but the squirrels don't usually go hungry).

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Tue, Nov 21, 2006

RIP Robert Altman

Posted at 6:38 pm MST to Media

When I move into corporate housing for the duration of a contract, Gosford Park is one of the DVDs that always comes with me.

At the moment I also have A Prairie Home Companion on hand: I had missed it in the theaters and picked it up when it came out on DVD.

I think I like "Gosford Park" better (the cowboys telling bad jokes in Prairie Home Companion goes on waaay too long) but it's still very good. I may need to watch more of the extras on Prairie Home Companion to really appreciate it. I think I actually like some of the commentaries on Gosford Park as much or more than the main story track. I appreciate the mix of anthropological detail and skewering of standard literary tropes (which Prairie Home Companion also does with its noir detective theme instead of Gosford Park's Agatha Christie).

Whe I get home I will check my copies of Roger Ebert's reference books for reviews of Altman's work to figure out what else of his I might like. My DVD collection runs heavily to anime, and movies with lots of special effects and CGI, (and, to be honest, fairly high body counts) but I like richly detailed world-building as much or more than the flash, and I believe that more of Altman's work might fit my tastes.

"A Prairie Home Companion" feels like something Jimmy Stewart should have been in... which is good, though I'm not quite sure what I mean by that.

Is there a recent trend toward what might be called "cast of dozens" movies? Or is that just that I have ended up watching things with large ensemble casts instead of a tight focus on just a few characters?

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Mon, Nov 20, 2006

Access to More Weblog Entries

Posted at 7:12 pm MST to Code

The main page of the weblog was showing 40 entries, which is a bit long. I have shortened it to 25 and added clicky buttons at the bottom to access previous/next pages of entries.

I want to add "Return to main" clickies to the by-category and by-date and search results pages, but other than that, I think I have implemented most of the standard weblog features now.

If there begin to be conversations (or spam) in the Comments, I'll need to turn on some more features, but I can't judge what's needed in that area yet.

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Sun, Nov 19, 2006

Family and Recipes

Posted at 7:57 pm MST to Miscellaneous

Yesterday I visited Aunt Irma and Uncle Tom, who is now in a nursing home recovering after his fall from the roof. My cousin Tom (known as "Skip" in the family) and his wife Mary were there, and so were my second cousins (Aunt Irma's first cousins) Angela (Chi-chi) and Carol, whom I had not seen in years.

Uncle Tom.

ChiChi and Carol

Skip spent several hours working on the heating systems in the building -- a matter of relays and steam pipe valves and complicated wiring.

During lunch, I mentioned the collection of family recipes I put together last Christmas, and promised to send copies to Tom and Mary, and ChiChi and Carol. I'lll do that once I get home. In the meantime, I have added the Recipes to the Data-Raptors website.

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Sat, Nov 18, 2006

What Tarot Card are You

Posted at 6:31 am MST to Media

I found the link to this in James Nicholl's Live Journal.

The site has several decks to choose from for your image. I chose "The Chinese Tarot", which is one that I have at home.

See more ...

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Fri, Nov 17, 2006

Valid, Standard, Web Site

Posted at 9:22 pm MST to Technology

Everything on the sites except the Mirrors first edition stuff is now valid XHTML. Which means Internet Explorer may choke on it, but any browser that follows international standards should have no problems.

I was able to clean things up faster than I had feared because I remembered that there is an XML validation plugin module available for the KATE editor that comes with KDE. It turned out that I can even feed it the weblog (which is generated, not HTML static text) so my turnaround cycle on tweaking things and seeing how much progress I was making toward cleaning things up was very rapid.

I've been doing format tweaks because it is still too hot here to do anything that needs actual thinking. There is something just wrong about having an apartment be 80 degrees Fahrenheit in late November. At least the rain has stopped, so I can open the windows wider and possibly cool things down over night.

I hope we get a cold snap soon. I think I'm like the trolls in Terry Pratchett's books: my brain turns off when it gets too warm. As long as it stays this hot in here I'm not going to make much progress writing fiction.

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Thu, Nov 16, 2006

Apartment

Posted at 3:41 pm MST to Miscellaneous

Arrgh. 23 more nights in this apartment. That sounds shorter than 3 and a half weeks, which is important right now.

They have turned off the airconditioning for the whole building. Unfortunately, I am in an apartment on the top floor, so I get all the heat that rises from the floors below. This is fine when the weather is cold, but the weather at the moment is unseasonably warm and humid from a week of rain.

And my windows face the bus station, so if I open the ventilators I will get 1) noise (which is bad enough with the windows closed) and 2) diesel fumes instead of fresh air.

I want to be in my own house, where I control the HVAC systems and the nearest paved road is a quarter of a mile away as the crow flies.

I want Colorado, where the weather doesn't stay cloudy and rainy and humid for a week at a time.

I want my kitchen with the fan that actually vents to the outside and windows that can be opened to give cross-ventilation (even though it has been over-run by mice since the cat has been here with me). I was going to bake for a potluck at work tomorrow, but I am not sure I can stand to do it with the AC dead. This place is warm enough right now.

Tonight I'm going to finish the website cleanup I started earlier in the week for everything except the Net of Mirrors first edition pages. Those were generated by Microsoft Publisher and are both hideous and so far from standards-compliant I could spend weeks just dinking with the formatting without doing anything about the content. Oh, well, knowing how hideous they are gives me some more incentive to work on the rewrite.

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Wed, Nov 15, 2006

Plans for the Next Few Weeks

Posted at 8:14 pm MST to Miscellaneous

Things are getting hectic all of a sudden. I have 3 and a half weeks left before I head home to Colorado.

This Saturday I will visit Aunt Irma and Uncle Tom, who has just progressed from the hospital to a nursing home after his accident.

I am scheduled to spend Thanksgiving at my brother Larry's.

I will have the Friday after Thanksgiving off, but will be working the following Saturday (Dec 2) instead.

And the following weekend (after packing during the previous week) I will be driving across the country, home to Boulder, to reclaim my house from the mice (ick).

The frustrating thing in all this is that I think I have a story that wants to start being written, and I'm not sure when I'll actually have time to work on it. Writing this blog has been good exercise: it has gotten me back into the habit of writing, for the first time in years, and I don't want to give up the daily updates.

I may start writing this week and hope that I have some momentum built up before the break for the move.

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Tue, Nov 14, 2006

W3C Validators

Posted at 8:22 pm MST to Technology

I've been testing various aspects of my sites against the official markup Validators provided by the W3C. My RSS and Atom feeds are valid, so they should work for any one who tries to use them.

The actual web markup is another matter: the home pages, which were originally created using Microsoft tools (insert ritual gesture against the evil eye) were a mess, but are now valid international standard XHTML. Which means that MS Internet Explorer will probably choke on it anyway, but that's Microsoft (repeat gesture).

The Cherani pages are fairly clean except for some typos in the markup, which will be fixed shortly: I generated those files myself.

The first edition Mirrors book pages were dumped from a Microsoft tool (repeat ritual gesture... I realy need an official icon for this).

What I need is a validator I can run against the local copy of the websites on my laptop, so I don't need to be constantly uploading to check the progress of my fixes.

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Mon, Nov 13, 2006

Website Cleanup

Posted at 8:56 pm MST to Code

I've been doing a lot of miscellaneous cleanup on the websites.

The display problem in the Target layouts should be fixed.

The really hideous html generated for the Data-Raptors and Astral Trading home pages by Microsoft Publisher has been cleaned up and made standards compliant. The Data-Raptors Links and Resume pages have also been cleaned up.

Some of the text on the Data-Raptors headings has been replaced by images, so it actually looks like it is supposed to on machines that don't have my fonts loaded. However, it seems to be loading very slowly now. I will probably switch it to a single complex image, like the one used for the Astral Trading logo and contact info.

The next rounds of cleanup will get all of the other pages (the Cherani pages, the Tarot and Mirrors layouts, and the weblog) to a point where they are generating standards-compliant xhtml code. Then I can make a pass to switch everything to stylesheets and get a look that is consistent (and consistently modifiable)across the sites.

Items to be addressed: "browser friendly" colors that should look the same on differnet browsers, crowding of the left margin in the generated layouts. Resized logos etc. for the non-home-pages.

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Sun, Nov 12, 2006

Category Icons and other upgrades

Posted at 2:21 pm MST to Code

I have now turned on icons for the different categories, as promised.

I've also done some other tweaks to the software that runs the weblog

Please let me know if there are any problems with the blog, or additional features that would be helpful.

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Sat, Nov 11, 2006

Tarot and Mirrors Tool

Posted at 8:24 pm MST to Code

This should also be under the Mirrors category.

If you go to the Astral Trading Company website, you can get a reading for the Mirrors using any of the Taget, 10 Gates or Celtic Cross layouts. You can also get a Tarot reading using either the Rider-Waite deck or Nanette's deck, in any of the three layouts.

Be sure to enter your name or a topic in the text box. It will be used in the randomization (i.e. shuffling).

The icons for the tarot cards are placeholders.

I will eventually lay the Crossing cards in the Celtic layout on their sides, but that requires another 160 images for the Mirrors and another 78 images for each Tarot deck, and working on images (even just rotations) kills my mousing hand.

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In Flanders Fields

Posted at 8:18 am MST to Miscellaneous

Remembrance Day

This was an important day for my family. My parents were active in the VFW, so every year at this time we had bunches of those little red artificial poppies in the house, waiting to be distributed.

On a more cheerful note, this is also the birthday of my cousin Tom. Our family seems to have a thing about birthdays and holidays: besides Tom, my youngest brother was born on July 4, our father was born on January 6 (Epiphany, Twelfth Night), and both of HIS parents were born at Easter. I think my other brother was aiming for a New Years Day birth, but the doctor made other arrangements.

My 6th grade teacher was Miss Glassbrenner, an old-fashioned lady who had us memorize and recite poems for the different holidays. The only one I can still recite from memory is the one for Veterans Day. When I checked it online just now, I had only one word wrong: I had remembered "blow" in the first line as "grow"...

See more ...

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Fri, Nov 10, 2006

Key Ace of the Storm: Thunderbird [I Ching 51, The Arousing] (Twilight)

Posted at 9:21 pm MST to Net of Mirrors

Alternate ImageThe Garuda, divine warrior, enemy of serpents, herald

InterpretationThe shock of alarm, or of laughter, that provides the energy to accomplish great things. The "Eureka" moment of understanding that changes everything.

From the I Ching: Thunder over thunder. A sudden impulse to accomplishment.

Reversal A word or idea that distracts, scatters energy, prevents progress. Dust devils and bewilderment.

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Thu, Nov 09, 2006

RT Computer Graphics

Posted at 10:08 pm MST to Media

Or why the Mirrors are Southwestern art when so much of the philosophy is Asian and European.

When I was first creating the Net of Mirrors, more than a dozen years ago, I needed to have images to put on the cards. I can do an adequate job of design and layout, but I have no particular skill at any representational art.

I was willing to pay reasonable amounts of money for materials for what was effectively a hobby, not a business. I like books and typography, so I bought real licensed fonts from Adobe and other professional type-foundries and spent serious money for a laser printer with PostScript capability (which cost 10 times as much as my current laser printer, even ignoring inflation). I also bought various Adobe Type Manager tools for OS/2 and Windows, so between that and the fonts I ended up on some professional-graphics-designer customer.

I love the Publishing Perfection catalog. I just can't often justify buying from it, especially since my home systems have generally been OS/2 and Linux and most of the products they carry are aimed at the PC and Mac. (My wallet is glad there are good open-source fonts these days...)

Willingness to buy doesn't help if there is nothing to be bought, even with sources for professional grade clipart and tools. The vast majority of the clipart that was available in the early 90s seemed to be either business-related or (mostly Protestant) Christian religious, which wasn't much help to me for illustratng the Mirrors. (I thought that much of it was hideous, too, but that was a separate problem.)

The major exception was the Santa Fe Collection from RT Computer Graphics www.rtcomputer.com in New Mexico, a set of Southwestern and Native American images and motifs that supported the richness of symbolism and abstration that I needed.

The original edition of the Santa Fe collection came on floppies and was, I think, all black and white.

The second edition came on a CD and included color versions, and GIFs for use on websites, since the web was becoming important by then. They added other packages added to the product line over the years: one of Plains Indian art, one of Petroglyphs and art inspired by petroglyphs, one of Cowboy images.

Their most recent addition is the Santa Fe Collection II, about half of which is business-related and holiday clipart with a Southwestern and Native American skew. I found this a little disappointing, but my uses for clipart are fairly peculiar.

I now own all but the Cowboy package. The Santa Fe II and Petroglyph Collections just arrived a few days ago.

Expect to see little petroglyph people doing strange things around the blog and website in the future.

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Wed, Nov 08, 2006

Election 2006

Posted at 8:16 pm MST to Current Events

The Democrats are in and Rumsfeld is out.

Time for a reading. Lots of illusion and trickery. Lots of diplomacy. And "The Army" (I Ching 7) in the Future is hidden pressures and the possibility for progress through working together, which isn't too bad.

See more ...

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Tue, Nov 07, 2006

Falling Off a Roof

Posted at 9:16 pm MST to Miscellaneous

I got a call from my sister-in-law this evening. She wondered if I knew that my Uncle Tom was badly injured about a month ago. He fell off a high roof onto the roof of a lower wing of the building, and suffered serious internal damage. There were no broken bones, but it sounds like most of his vital organs were damaged by the impact and internal bleeding. I had't previously heard of the accident, and called my Aunt Irma immediately.

Uncle Tom is elderly, and diabetic, so he doesn't recuperate well any more. Things keep going wrong that the doctors don't expect or understand, and he has spent most of his time in the hospital since the accident.

The roofs where the accident took place were part of an old historic factory building he owns in Willington, CT. He has beautifully restored the main building into office suites with lovely exposed brick and beams, and created a gorgeous multilevel apartment in what was a small annex. There is a large pond just outside the apartment, with a dam next to the factory building, which originally used water power for spinning thread. About 10 years ago, Tom built a redwood deck over the dam, so that on one side you can look down the waterfall, and on the other you look into the millpond. I'm not good at estimating sizes of things, but the deck is at least 12 feet bt 20, and Tom did most or all of the work hmself. That was when he was 72.

Uncle Tom fell from the roof of the living room part of the annex onto the roof of the kitchen: either a two story fall or a very long one-story fall due to the high ceilings of the old factory space. (Even at the age of 83 he was still doing some of the maintenance on the building, which is how he came to fall.) He got down off the roof himself and was trying to take a bath when my aunt found him and called the EMTs, who arrived just barely in time to save his life.

A couple of my Aunt's cousins have come to stay with her and try to help out, and my cousin Tom is able to come some weekends to help. Aunt Irma always disliked driving, and I don't think she drives at all any more.

Willington is in Northeastern Connecticut, not particularly far from where I am in Quincy MA, so I may go down on the weekend, if Aunt Irma needs me or won't find my presence an added burden.

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Mon, Nov 06, 2006

Kubuntu

Posted at 9:16 pm MST to Technology

The operating system seems to be working, although KDE is acting a little strange. I think some of the settings that got copied over from SuSE in my home directory are conflicting with the way Kubuntu wants things. I have a feeling I'm going to be spending some time exploring the KDE config files.

I've got the following important non-KDE applications usable:
apache2 (for the local website development), ReaderWare, GnuCash, VMWare. I haven't attacked reloading Oracle yet. That will be a project for after I get the main environment tuned a little better.

Considering that apache is a mature a widely used and well-documented package with fairly straightforward configuration, I would like to know why every Linux distro wants to screw up the config files in their own unique way so the standard docs won't quite apply. I think the Linux Standard Base should consider standardizing the apache config files.

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Sun, Nov 05, 2006

OS Change

Posted at 7:47 pm MST to Technology

The laptop I work on is now running Kubuntu. The absence of normal Linux access to root is being annoying, as I expected. And it will take a few days to get back to the full configuration I had previously... I'll need to reinstall Oracle and VMWare, among other packages.

At the moment, I'm still restoring my /home partition. It took 7 and a half hours to back up, so I suppose I can't complain when it takes a similar amount of time to restore. I'm giving home its own partition this time, though, so if I decide I can't stand Kubuntu after all, I can just nuke the system space and load something different. I'd need to back up /home, to be safe, but unless something went wrong I wouldn't need to do the restore.

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Sat, Nov 04, 2006

Betrayals of Principles

Posted at 4:29 pm MST to Current Events

Two cases of betrayal of principles are holding my attention today.

One is the Haggard case, which is mostly amusing (especially since I am 2000 miles from Colorado Springs Conservatives). I liked John Scalzi's followup entry "In other words, he didn't inhale. Either time." and some of the discussion on that blog entry is very amusing, too.

I am also looking forward to Mr. Scalzi's comments on the election. His blog is one of my favorites, lately. (But I am embarrassed to admit that I am one of those who who found his excellent and consistently interesting blog due to the notoriousbacon-cat incident.) I haven't tried making a schadenfreude pie because I don't do pies even when I have an adequate kitchen (which the one in this corp-housing apartment isn't) but I may try talking my friend Nanette into attempting one.

The second case of betrayals of principles is the announcement on thursday by Novell that they are allying with Microsoft and will be paying them royalties. Don't these people pay attention to history? I don't mean world history, I mean industry history, the kind that is covered by trade papers like Infoworld and Computerworld. Anyone who shakes hands with Microsoft draws back a bloody stump... it just sometimes takes them a while to notice that they are bleeding out. alliance. And making vague claims of IP infractions in Linux while violating the spirit (if possibly not the strict letter) of the GPL has done real well for SCO. Groklaw in general seems to be doing a good job of following this mess, while the outrage of the free software community is reverberating across the web.

One effect of this is that I spent several hours today trying to decide which non-Novell Linux version will replace SuSE 10.0 on the laptop where I am writing this. I'd been reluctant to upgrade to 10.1 or beyond (10.2 is almost out and I want some of the newer packages) because I didn't like reports of some of the technical directions they were taking. Now I have an added incentive to go another direction entirely.

It will probably be Kubuntu because Ubuntu is an officially supported host platform for VMWare. Kubuntu instead of vanilla Ubuntu because I strongly prefer KDE to Gnome for my desktop (the main reason I was driven away from Red Hat/Fedora, which I used for several years).

I'll start the backups before I go to bed, and plan to make the OS switch tomorrow.

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Fri, Nov 03, 2006

Mirror layouts for everyone

Posted at 8:10 pm MST to Code

Working versions of the mirrors layout tool can now be accessed from the Astral Trading Co. website

Or directly from here:

Get a 10 Gates Mirrors layout.

Get a Target Mirrors layout.

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Thu, Nov 02, 2006

Literary Wills

Posted at 5:58 pm MST to Miscellaneous

Author John M. Ford, who died recently, apparently didn't put his intentions for his literary estate into writing.

This happens far too often, and Neil Gaiman is actively trying to prevent future problems. He got a lawyer to write up a sample literary will and has posted it on his site, with instructions, and is offering to host sample wills for jurisdictions outside the US as well.

I need to pay attention to this when I update my will, which I really should do when I get back to Colorado next month (It's November now! I can talk about going home 'next month'). My current will dates from before I owned part of a business. I can't remember if the current will mentioned my writing and other creative work: I know it made special provision for my pets and collections of books, etc.

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Wed, Nov 01, 2006

Divination Tool Projects

Posted at 5:46 pm MST to Code

I now have two scripting projects running in parallel. The perl program that does Net of Mirrors layouts is coming along nicely: it will now organize the icons correctly to display the 10 Gates layout, and I know how to do the other layouts I want as options.

My other project is a related program that will do layouts of tarot decks. It will currently 'know' about two different decks: the standard Rider-Waite and one being developed by my friend Nanette. I haven't figured out what to do about icons for it, though. (It took me 3 days and some serious RSI to generate the icons for the Mirrors, but I had the image files from the original cards to work from for those.)

Actually, at the moment, I'm too tired to work on much. I've been staying up too late working on my projects, and it has caught up with me. At the moment I am incapable of typing a list of the Major Arcana (from either deck) and having it come out right, even with a list to copy from. It's like trying to balance a checkbook and having it never come out the same way twice.

And I know beeter than to try to program when I'm this groggy. Tonight will have to be an early night.

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