For the month of November, I kept a pretty awesome mustache all month. For the month of December, I gave up shaving. For Christmas, I was given a wet shaving kit, which I had been looking at, but just too cheap to buy. So, today, I shaved off my beard. First, that might have been a dumb way to try to learn the art of wet shaving. But, it worked out. I just trimmed it down to my normal Van Dyke, which may not be as straight as it should, but, thats ok. My face feels great, and the shave is close. I did two passes, mostly because I didn’t want to mess up my sideburns or the region I had designated to remain. I think I might get a little braver, and try for a third pass, to see if I can get it any smoother later this week. Using the brush was awesome, I can’t believe that I didn’t get one, and use it sooner. I think that if I keep this up for a few months, I might make the jump all the way to the straight razor. I keep thinking about it, possibly because its manly. I don’t know, and I don’t want to know if its not the truth, but I assume that Sam Elliot uses a straight razor. Long, sharp, and with some sort of bone handle. But, thats a digression. And I have a project to finish, so, maybe I will post some pics later.
Today was my 1 year anniversary at my current employer. I didn’t make the realization until I was driving home from work, and it was sort of a bittersweet realization. I had known it was coming up for a while, but for some reason it just didn’t occur to me until it was over. And the thing about it is, I am still staring at the same issues, and high-level goals I was looking at a year ago. I have identified plenty of things that need to be updated or upgraded, or even reimplemented. And thats not to say that I haven’t accomplished anything in a year. Rather, I have resolved several initiatives that weren’t pre-existing. I have implemented new systems, and made small adjustments to the way that we do things, and I keep working towards integration and automation, but its a long road to the point where I feel I should be.
A year ago Obama was preparing to take office, and he had won that office on huge plans and lofty ideals. I wonder if he feels the same way. I wonder if he looks at his first year in office, and thinks to himself that he had hoped to have done more. I know that I had hoped to have accomplished so much more, and I am not deciding the future of millions of people. I am only trying to make life easier for thousands of people.
I don’t mean to imply that things are bad, rather, life is probably better for me than it has been in a long time. I am appreciative of where I am, and I am yearning for artistic output. I have been slowly working on a couple of personal pieces of fine art. In addition, I am working to enrich my knowledge of several systems that I have recently encountered, and am trying to get to the point of writing applications for my phone. In general, I am happy. I find that I am still frustrated sometimes, but, I have opportunities to find joy in the little things. I am often reminded to lighten up, and not to sweat the small stuff. I am thankful for that. I also find myself seeing further into the future than I used to. I am not entirely sure why, but, maybe its just that I am getting older. When I last saw my mother she reminded me that I will turn 30 soon. I don’t really ever remember being too concerned with my age, or aging, but its a good thing to stop and think about every once in a while. I am not a kid anymore, I am an adult, though, it really doesn’t feel like it. I find myself thinking about what I am going to do when I grow up. While its not techincally accurate, (I don’t think I will be getting any taller), it can’t be a bad thing to always think that eventually you will have to become more serious, but this isn’t it yet. I still have my toys, though they definately have gotten more expensive, and I still dream about newwer ones. But I also find myself trying to find ways to help others, such as my parents. I don’t have the solutions for things, but, I am not worried by that. I enjoy the search, the move to find the solution.
I have given up the vices that were mentally stifling me over the last year, and thats something that I appreciate as well. Since I quit my addiction to video games, I find that I am able to focus on more things, and maintain my focus a lot better. I still want to play video games occasionally, but, I also have no desire to let it consume my life, waking and sleeping again. I am no-longer interested in RPGs, instead, I am only really interested in playing where I can turn it off at any moment, and there is no obligation or detriment if I don’t login again for months at a time. This alone is probably one of the greatest points of growth that I have personally felt over the last year. While it hasn’t directly affected my math skills, I do feel that I am spending more time mentally calculating now because I am spending more time staring into code. I still regret not taking any math classes in college, because if I had, they would have only strengthened my programming skills, but, thats a lesson I learned after I finished. I feel as thats the lesson to life, once you realize that you should do something, usually its later than you wish you would have.
I generally assume that nobody reads my blog, which is ok with me, I really just write it for myself, and as such, I am starting to feel as if I am rambling, so thats it.
Well, that’s my guess anyway. I made it back to my friend’s house after work today, and took a look at the bike. I will post pictures later, but apparently the radiator hose was touching one of the exhaust headers, which combined withseveral other factors set it up for catastrophic failure. I have no idea if the hoses have ever been changed, and the bike is 22 years old, so that alone can be devastating. The fact that I pretty much walked the bike 2.5 miles in standing traffic couldn’t have helped. Anyway, the end result is a hole in the hose approximately the width of a pencil. The good news is that the hose should be under $10 I would think, and then a bottle of coolant will be another $6. And it should only take a Phillips head, an 8mm socket, and a bucket to repair the damage, and get it back on the road, and I am currently estimating about a half hour of work. Now, to be honest, that’s all contingent on this analysis of the problem, which seems pretty safe to me. There is the possibility that the water pump blew or something like that, but I am in a mood to think the simplest solution is probably the most likely.
(Press play to watch the youtube video, or view on the site if you are in an RSS reader).
And this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7IGE58IPgo which they won’t allow embedding.
Then, an update. I have been trying to get into Blender, and I have found what I feel is a really good resource, http://www.gryllus.net/Blender/3D.html. I have used 3D apps for probably 13 years give or take, and have used pretty much all of the commercially available ones at some point. If I remember right, I downloaded 3d Studio MAX off of a BBS, and started with that one, and use R2 for a while. Then while I was in college I switched to Lightwave, and dabbled with Maya 4 a bit. After college I got a job where I was using Maya 6, Cinema4d 7 & 8, and Pro-E along with Nugraf. Over the years I had dabbled with Poser and Bryce, and a few other one off applications. Eventually I used Maya 7 and 8 extensively, and have even taught classes in Maya and Lightwave, so I feel confident that I understand 3d applications. And, I am fairly comfortable with my ability to sit down at pretty much any of them, and get things done if I need to. Blender is the outlier though. When I sit down in front of Blender it all goes out the window. The conventions are so far outside of the realm of every other 3d application that its just impossible to use. But, I am making a concerted effort, because I really want to start using it. For one thing, I am using Linux full time at home now, and while I could use Maya on Linux, I am also using Shake and AE for compositing, and Premiere Pro for editing. In the Blender world, I can do all of this inside the single application, which is a killer feature that I am looking forward to. At work, I am currently utilising many applications for the pipeline for some of my products, and while its not a big deal, I definitely miss the 64 bit OS and applications while I am at work.
One application that I think Linux is sorely missing is a professional video editor. There are a handful of crappy editing apps, and a smaller number of decent home editor apps, similar to iMovie on OS X, but there is really not a polished professional video editing application that I have found. There is Cinelerra, but its not polished enough for me to want to sit in front of it all day, and the installation of it is almost worth skipping Linux if that’s what its going to take. I have used Avid, Premiere, and Final Cut Pro since the late nineties, and I admit they are all good. I understand why Final Cut is taking so many editing jobs away from Avid. And I understand why so many Avid editors won’t try using anything else. If someone would port one of those apps to Linux, they could easily grab 100% of the market-share for video editing on linux. And if they sold it as a bundled hardware-software-support package, they could be very profitable. I just don’t understand why they don’t do it. I understand in the Final Cut world, because they would be cannibalising their hardware sales, which isn’t going to happen. Anyway, tangent aside, I know the video editor in Blender isn’t going to be the greatest in the world, but it appears to handle the basics pretty well, and be more akin to After Effects for video work. I have to admit, I have had problems with editors before, specifically once where I was using a Media100 with a Vincent card, and I had to get it done, so I just exported clips, and did all my editing in AE.
On a different tangent, I went to see 9 last night, and I enjoyed it. I thought it was a good story, however I felt there was a fatal flaw in it. If you intend to watch it, you may want to stop reading now, and come back later. While not being a spoiler, I will explain, based on the types of knowledge enumerated above, I found it very difficult to watch as a movie. The movie has been described as stitch-punk, a textile based variant on steam-punk, and the main characters are made of fabric. While this is a beautiful vision, which I think borrowed a bit from The Brothers Quay, the main character’s texture felt unnatural to me. Every facial emotion that the character had was difficult, because the texture map didn’t seem to have enough detail, so as the brow would furrow, the end result would be noticeable distortion of the pattern. It just didn’t feel like cloth moving so much as an image map being distorted, and I didn’t notice this with any of the other characters, so I can only blame it on the decision to use a coarse weave for the main character. Oh, and the enforcer appeared to visually be based off of James Earl Jones so much that I wonder why they didn’t get him to do the voice for him.
So despite true awfulness, yesterday was a pretty good day. It started out fairly normal, but really changed when I was out on my motorcycle. I didn’t think about it being UT’s first game, and that the freeways would be parking lots. Well, about 15 miles into my ride it became stopped traffic, and I was walking the bike more than anything. I started to get worried after about 20 minutes of this, as I saw the temp gauge getting higher and higher. I got a brief amount of relief when I made the turn from 35 onto 183, and had a few blocks of actual riding, and could see the temp appear to drop noticably. However, it was only for a mile or two, because then a fire truck came carreening by, and I found I was now going to be sitting in traffic behind a wreck. After another 15 minutes of this I crested a hill, and could see I was not far from my destination, but I was still behind the wreck and sitting watching the bike temp climb. Then the worst thing happened, I heard the engine start to choke, then it died as there was a pop, and I was engulfed in a cloud of steam. Apparently one of the radiator hoses had burst from the heat of the coolant.
And then becomes the fun part. I pulled over to the shoulder, and put the bike in neutral, and walked it down and past the first fire truck. That’s when the EMTs saw me, and were asking if I had broken down. They escorted me around the accident, and then one of them kindly helped me start pushing my bike up the hill. About 2/3 of the way up the hill, a landscaping crew offered to put the bike in their trailer and take me the rest of the way.
ADD was really awesome yesterday, and I appreciate the help. And the same with the landscapers, I didn’t expect any of that, but couldn’t turn it down.
After that, there was some rain but a mostly uneventful trip into Houston. And a good evening with the family which allowed me to get a lot accomplished.
Now I will need to find some replacement hoses for the bike, and I really am thinking more about a new set of handlebars. The current set feels very narrow, and forward, and I would like to get a set that lets me feel a little more relaxed while I am riding.
And I hope to remember never to ride into smoke or stopped traffic. I remember hearing something about lanesplitting being legalized in certain places, I will need to research that, becuase that could have saved me.
