KODA

This little poem sprang into my mind one night a few years ago, just out of the blue. Just three words, three orders, and reversed. But is it more than just wordplay? I continue to ponder what it means… and how it can have meaning.

Whee! Somehow, tonight became an exercise in spontaneous javascript coding.

I was just hanging out early this evening when my good friend Insta popped up and said hello. I showed him a little error page I had been working on, and our conversation rapidly spiraled into a rather random little javascript idea of his that would make a “hella cool” error page. Well, I thought it was pretty hella cool too, so I proposed that we write it. He gave me a few starting pointers, and after a little while I was blindly blazing away at this language I had never seriously used before. Well, one thing led to another, and it turned out I would be spending the next several hours going from nearly nothing to DOM access in javascript to pull off this little effect.

Some colors for you to enjoy

Today was one of those days when things seem to flow… creatively and generally. It was a long day, but I feel I got so much completed that in afterthought I’m glad to have done. The lion’s share of the evening was spent making the comic you see in this post.

It was just one of those random ideas I get in the least opportune moments, like mid-running to the dinner table. In spite of this, I guess I managed to keep the excitement of the concept alive until I was free to work on it. It’s been a while since I’ve done some serious Inkscaping, though I did scoop up a development binary from their (recently redesigned!) official site a few days ago. It was a lot of fun to just loosely work on a picture like this… something I hadn’t really done in a long time.

Doesn’t she just make you feel reaallly sleepy?

Hmm, looks like something borked samba printing (and it’s respective smbspool) in Ubuntu Dapper over the past month or so. I just noticed my print attempts were failing last week, only to discover this ongoing discussion over in the Ubuntu bug tracker. There are some packages purported to contain the fix, too. [update: this fix does indeed work here]

Looks like they’re well aware of the problem… but really, a very similar has issue occurred before, only a few months ago.

I suppose that’s what you get for running beta distributions…

…spend their first hour on the deck. This is the first time they’ve been in the open air, able to explore the sky, the trees, the bugs, the reflections of the wind chimes, the view of the area outside our house. It’s so exciting for them. Ane was wandering around, sniffing everything in sight. Imo’s tail was jiggling with excitement as she realized that now, after watching from the door for all this time, the deck was hers to explore!

It’s exciting for me, simply watching them

We’d been waiting until the right time, out of concerns that they might jump up onto the ledge and out of the deck. Now, the proverbial cats are out of the bag, and they’re loving it.

I’ve been working tonight on getting a little Blogroll going here in the sidebar. I’ve tried to put together a preliminary list of people and places that came to mind. If you’re not on there, and would like to be, leave a comment and I will gladly add you. On the other hand, if you’re on there and would like to be off, the same applies. I’m not asking for reciprocity – just looking to point to the sites and writings of some good friends.

I doubt these’ll be getting much traffic in the near future, but it’s more of a respect & recognition thing than anything else. You never know, though.

Soon I hope to get a Linkblog going here, though details right now are very sketchy. I was kind of looking for an independent PHP app to put up, since I’m trying to experiment with a variety of systems… though it doesn’t look like there are any specialized apps very widly used. At least, from what I’ve seen so far, google’s results are filled with linkblogs, rather than linkblog software. I know many seem to take the Wordpress route, though I’m reluctant to install another instance or create a category hack here for something that (in my mind) should have it’s own separate space… perhaps I will find something after some more searching over the next few days.

Is it not true that often, the most you can ask from someone for them to be a “good person” is the concerted effort to be a good person?

And if that is the case, does that not simply become the concerted effort to a concerted effort be a good person? The concerted effort to a concerted effort to a concerted effort to be a good person?

Where did the good person go? Where did the original goal lose it’s meaning? Is this not the fallacy of this kind of self-referential definition? But then, is it not enough to simply try one’s best?

Yesterday in the car, I was experimenting with some long exposure photography. For the last few months I’ve had a bit of an obsession with light painting, a technique of drawing forms with point light sources in a dark environment (example). Well, more recently, I’ve been interested in pursuing the opposite effect. Essentially my thinking is that with light painting, your base color is dark, and you draw colored light in contrast to it. Well, I’m flipping it around, making the base color white and the less intense objects the contrast.

I’ve been experimenting with quarter to half second shutter speeds in bright environments, with the goal of having light elements wash out leaving less intense objects motion blurred and distorted in an abstract way. This achieves a similar, desirable light painting look, but with more spread out color and a white background. It’s really just a quite roundabout way to say I’m overexposing motion-blurred images for effect, but that’s not as cool, is it?