Start It Yourself

I've learned an important lesson. I'm not a do-it-yourself kind of guy; I'm just the start-it-yourself kind. In fact, I've started a whole slew of projects and was going great guns on them until I got over the hump. I just don't roll downhill well, I guess. I've found my solution to this problem: pay someone else to finish what you start. So after this weekend, the entire downstairs half of my fixer-upper will be finished. The cabinet doors will finally have hardware, the outlets will be new and white, the baseboards will be replaced, the door painted, and I'm even splurging on new carpet. The old stuff was a white berber that I got free, then my tenants had their way with it, then my kids took their turn, now it's the color of [ugly]. I'm pretty excited. I'll be away for the weekend, then I'll return home, and voila it will all be done. I can't really believe it.

In other news, I've just about scored a big moonlighting gig that should keep me busy around the clock for the next few months. We'll see if my blog dies again. I'm dreading it, but afterwards I'll be able to afford those two [Russian girls] I hope to adopt.

posted by chopper @ 12:41 PM | 3 comments

Raytracing-- You Know, For Kids

One of my favorite pastimes as a boy was [ray tracing]. I loved measuring real world objects and meticulously duplicating them in the POV-Ray scene description language. I once set out on a mission to recreate my entire house, but got stumped by things that defied easy measurement like the toilets. I did manage to recreate the living room and the furniture in it though. I absolutely loved it; I daydreamed about it.

As I was telling my son about it the other day I got to thinking about how I could introduce him to the wonderful world photorealism, and how it would be a great segue into programming concepts. Then after mentioning it to [Joel], we started discussing the idea of a ray tracing GUI on top of an engine like povray that did very simple wire frame modeling and key frame animation with primary colors and bulky lines.

Picture a dumbed down kid friendly interface with a seven year old at the helm ray tracing scenes that he has crafted to fit his fancy. Ray tracing is just plain cool; what boy could resist?

posted by chopper @ 8:43 AM | 0 comments

Never change! OXOXOX!!!!

I was trying to find the phone number of an old friend from high school yesterday when I got the bright idea to check for some sort of online alumni directory. I thought it was a long shot considering the po-dunk school that I went to, which was run entirely by Franciscan friars. However, I held out hope vaguely recalling a little man in brown robes who joined the friars a few years after I left. When I met him he was overly eager about anything technical which was cute since he barely knew more than an average home user. He had an innocence about him, too, using junk like FrontPage, calling himself a web developer, and even trying to start up a computer lab at the school. He reminded me a lot of myself when I was a kid.

When I was 10 years old, I approached my parents and offered to create for them any software that would be useful. I had the vague feeling that I could revolutionize any business with my skills and I was jumping at any chance to be taken seriously in the adult world. I disdained anyone who said I was playing on my computer-- this was not play. Play was for morons. I was creating, inventing, honing my skills, and now I was ready to prove it. My parents of course, never thought of computers as anything useful in the real world, and grasped for any idea that would send me scurrying. "Something to do bills on," my mom distractedly offered. Aha! I was off like a shot, quickly drawing up the initial design. I, of course, had to return a few times to gather requirements, after all bills were not yet within my realm of experience. In the end, I made something like a checkbook register and forced my mom to sit down and use it. She humored me just that once, but I felt triumphant nonetheless. It was their own fault if they couldn't see the usefulness. I was a cute little nerd.

Anyway, this techno-friar was just like that, desperately trying to be taken seriously within a school that had no notion of cooperating. I found the website. It appears that he too has triumphed over adversity. There's a complete alumni collaboration site with blogs, news feeds, photo albums, professional Flash movies, and, yes, an alumni directory. Under his dominion are now multiple computer labs, a technology club, and even a robotics competition.

I salute you Brother.

posted by chopper @ 4:56 PM | 0 comments

Tuesday is the New Thursday

I am hastily preparing for our biggest dinner party yet (not counting El Fid's birthday bash). There are a lucky thirteen guests tonight, plus children. I know that many of you are familiar with the Thursday night dinner parties we've been throwing all summer, but you'll be happy to know that things are finally taking off in the direction we intended all along: new faces each week with lively discussion.

So, if you're in the area and you know the address, drop on by. Tonight's feature is a deluxe potato bar with every topping you could want, followed by wine and chocolates outside by candlelight. Mmmm...got to run!

posted by chopper @ 4:01 PM | 3 comments

Paper is the Enemy

Hello, my name is Chopper, and I'm a paper-holic. My office has become unmanageable.

It would be one thing if I cracked open a new ream of high quality cotton bond just to smell the starches and trace my fingers over the fine white surface, but I don't. Not at all. In fact, for me any paper will do, credit offers, old business cards, even toilet paper. It's only about quantity of information storage. Each of these precious papers becomes a perverse palimpsest of critical information. I then pile the often torn scraps on my desk, my floor, all around me, and I cling to the insane belief that on each of these bits of trash there is somehow indelibly recorded some minutiae of critical information.

A Nigerian proverb states, "the leech that does not let go even when it is filled, dies on the dry land." I am that leech, but I'm learning. I'm giving up my office. It's the only thing that can break my addiction-- to let go of the holder for my precious hoard of jumbled thoughts. I've been trying out a portable office idea for the past few weeks, moving from coffee shop, to library, to bread store, etc. From here on out, I have a briefcase as my only refuge, thus effectively limiting my paper intake.

The home office is getting torn down today.

posted by chopper @ 11:46 AM | 7 comments

How's Your Kung Fu?

A while ago, a friend told me that I should always say, "My Kung Fu is the best," when asked. Kung Fu, I found out, is sometimes used among nerds to brag about computer skills. I thought it was a joke-- one more reason why nerds are nerds, but I got a Kung Fu T-shirt just for fun anyway.

Well, this morning I was thinking about art and my interest in computation, which I regard as an art. I sometimes find unspeakable beauty, yet I have no way to convey or really describe that beauty to the uninitiated. Who would believe there was beauty in programming and machinery? In searching for a metaphore to accurately capture the essence of it, I thought of Judo.

A Judo master can take in a situation and immediately see it as a jumble of bio-mechanical force vectors. He knows that throwing his opponent with beauty is accomplished by very little involvement from himself. He just adds a small, nearly insignificant force vector to the picture by maybe sweeping against the opponent's foot with his own. Then as the picture unravels, we see that this little gesture, this minute force added to the larger picture, becomes the center of the picture and the whole thing unravels to show his opponent on the ground.

This is what I do in various forms... and, oh yeah, my Kung Fu is the best.

posted by chopper @ 8:35 AM | 5 comments

Things as They Are

Anias Nin said:

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.

... and I concur.

The difficulty brewing in my soul is that I desperately want to see things as they are, which is OK for me because I believe in an objective reality. If you don't believe in one, then mind your own business; it's true for me. So already I have a conflict-- an objective reality that I can only view subjectively.

I'm kind of stuck in a Klein Bottle. If I come up with a theory for how something really is, how do I verify it? I know it's a BIG question, arguably the whole point of science, but what good is a blog if not to ponder such things fuzzily. My interest is in things that defy measurement.

Ultimately, I'm a moralist. I want to know the best way to see things, or if such a superlative even exists, whether as an objective standard or not. I want to live my life on purpose, and I'm interested in the nitty-gritty. So much of my life is dictated by the paradigm I inherited in adolescence, and now I have all the trappings of a 21st century American on accident.

So I have to question everything around me and decide on it. For example, what are the long-term effects of watching television commercials? Should I see that this ultimately enhances the GNP conditioning us to be good consumers and therefore approve? Should I see the same facts, be outraged at the way it is sapping our independent spirits, and throw my TV away? Should I paint my walls off-white or bright yellow, or should I even have walls?

These and other things, these and other things...

Pop Quiz

When you read "stuck in a Klein Bottle" above, did you think:
a) What the heck is that?
b) Ahhh, a nerd reference.
c) Wait, that's not possible.
d) None of the above.
e) Didn't read it, just skipped to the quiz.

posted by chopper @ 10:18 AM | 2 comments

My Humble Beginnings

I first began programming [BASIC] back in 1985 on my brand new [Atari 65XE]. I had the [1050 floppy drive] with a bootable Atari version of DOS 3, a few books like the one pictured to the right, and even a [cassette tape drive], oh yeah! This thing was macked out and ready to receive my expert keystrokes. I crafted such gems as Alphabet Soup, American Flag, and my crowning achievement Revenge of the Tykes, a text based adventure game with line drawings of the scenery. I even created my own peripheral device-- a cushion that informed the computer when you sat down or stood up. I used it to automatically pause games and restart them according to posterior placement.

Soon, I became bored with the plodding execution of my programs. I wondered why everything I wrote was so slow, while cartridge games were blazingly fast. A little research revealed that it was something mystical called machine code comprised entirely of numbers being PEEK'd and POKE'd different places in RAM. I decided I was ready to learn it, blissfully ignorant of the difficulties that lie ahead.

It took a full ten years before my brain had grown enough ICs to fully comprehend machine code in all its glory. I became a rare aficionado of machine/assembly languages. I devoured systems manuals for different microprocessors, chipsets, architectures, anything. I must admit, it was my drug of choice. I got no end of pleasure from cyber-walking into nerd chatrooms and settling long standing esoteric arguments about the internal workings of things like DOS memory allocation interrupts. I knew the answers. I had been there in the very heart of the black-box matreshka all the way down to the electrons tunnelling across silicon depletion barriers. I had entered the inner sanctum. I had found transcendental union with [Turing completeness]. And I had reemerged from my caffeine powered techno-cave to walk among normal people.

posted by chopper @ 11:43 AM | 0 comments

Domo Arigato, Mr. Matsumoto

As the chipper salesman buoyantly suggested for the third time that we arrange another internal conference call next week to discuss potential efficiency improvements, I pressed mute and began a relaxed buzzing hum that followed rhythmically the ebb and flow of corporate busy-speak droning out of my desk phone. The sounds gradually mingled their essences to induce a soothing trance-like state in the participants. At least, that was the effect on me, and as you may already know, it is out of just such a depth of personal absence that the echoes of long know, but forgotten, truths can be faintly heard. "Ruby," they seemed to say.

Ruby is a scripting language designed in 1995 by Yukihiro Matsumoto. He created this language for one simple reason, to "maximize the joy of programming." *wipes tear from eye*

I first came across Ruby a few years back while investigating different types of programming languages, in particular, fully object-oriented languages like SmallTalk. Ruby seemed like a mish mash of SmallTalk, Perl, and PHP, with syntax that looked ugly given my C and Java background. I considered it a novelty supporting a lot of interesting dynamic features that I had never found in one stylish package. It had a following in Japan at the time, but was virtually unmentioned anywhere else in the world so I dismissed it as impractical for real world development. Tut. Tut.

I mindlessly began combing the web for news of Ruby's increasing popularity, and to my surprise, I found it. Ruby has passed Python now, in Japan, and is becoming a reasonable platform for web development with the advent of [Ruby on Rails]. I watched a few videos, read a few language primers, and took the [Rolling with Ruby on Rails tutorial]. At this early stage, I can say that I am thoroughly delighted.

posted by chopper @ 4:21 PM | 1 comments

The Return of the Native

I learned a valuable lesson yesterday as I sat watching Blue's Clues with my sick children. A little bar of soap in a paper boat was singing for the cartoon neighborhood on a makeshift stage (which I, the viewer, helped build using my clever intuition for appropriate materials). As he sang he swayed back and forth, sliding ever so slightly from side to side in his own lather. This foolishness rather quickly got the best of him, and he tumbled onto his side unable to stand up again. He might as well have been in a pitcher plant, for all his efforts to right himself failed embarrassingly. The onlookers could only giggle.

"Don't give up, just go on," resonated from back stage as his friends encouraged him in musical form to keep trying. And he did. He struggled once more to portrait orientation and finished his song to the delight of the audience and the satisfied home viewer.

The lesson: When blogging seems like an unfulfilling chore, don't give up, just blog on.

posted by chopper @ 8:33 PM | 3 comments