Category: Life

Selah.

…is my brain. A slow day at work, so I took the time to teach myself how to create fractals. They are linked in the Flash experiments page (Flash 6+ plugin required).

My term as teacher at Kendall College is winding down. Tomorrow is probably the last day, unless I get hired into a time slot next semester which doesn’t conflict with the martial arts class. Did I enjoy it? HELL YES!! As common wisdom has it, you really don’t know how much you know about a subject until you try to teach it.

Having smart students helps, too.

Well, I have my hands full teaching this class at Kendall College of Art and Design . It looks like my stint will last a week longer than anticipated, as the regular teacher is a little under the weather right now.

So since I don’t have time to thrill you with my brilliant insights into whateverthehell, here is a short list of places I think you should visit:

World Blogs
A catalog of english-language weblogs from all over the world, including two (two!) in Antarctica.

Book Crossing
Got books you no longer read? Release them into the wild and track their movements! (Link courtesy of Scott )

Wikipedia
A completely open-source, community-built and controlled, copy-lefted online encyclopedia. 150,000 entries and counting.

Browser Cam
This is one for the developers out there. Enter a URL and your target platform/browsers, and receive screen-captures on the fly. Price starts at $1.00 per url. An amazing resource!

Kuro5hin
Kind of a magazine, kind of a blog, kind of a hangout. Full of really smart people talking about really intelligent things. Like Traffic Zoology , an article I discovered while browsing…

Boing Boing
A directory of wonderful things.

This week I am teaching a class at Kendall College of Art and Design. The inebriated inestimable Bock is on vacation so I am filling in for him, teaching an Intro to Web Design class. I have around fifteen students, and they all seem pretty smart. So then, my job is to make the students love my style of teaching so much that they give Bock a hard time when he returns from Puerto Vallarta.

In other news, there is no other news. The move is complete and I am in the process of weeding my bookshelves. I hope to get rid of ~200 books by the end of the month.

…but not yet moved in. Right now I am mostly living out of boxes. But, priorities being what they are, I have cable hooked up.

Ecce: Through ComCast, a cable modem by itself costs $60.95 per month. If one gets both a cable modem AND basic cable, the total cost is $57.95 per month. This says to me that television these days is SO bad that they have to pay people to watch it.

Cool thing about my new apartment, #1: The leaded glass windows which, when filtering the morning sunlight, throw amazing prisms all over my dining room.

MIT is open-sourcing their course materials . FAQ is here .

According to the most recent unsolicited email in my inbox, I can buy an acre of the moon for $29.99.

This makes me think: For a few thousand dollars, I can buy adjoining acres across Mare Vaporum, rig them with floodlights, and use the moon as a PDA screen. With each acre as a pixel that would be…lessee… 320×240… 76800 acres, times $29.99…

$2,303,232.

Okay, a little more that a few thousand dollars. But think of the possibilities!

320 x 240 is roughly the resolution of a television.
A square acre is roughly 208.7 feet on a side.
208.7×320 = 66,784 feet, divided by 5280 =~12.65 miles by 8.4 miles.
The moon is ~238,000 miles away…

Hmm… I may need to use a telescope. And at ~186,000 miles per second, radio/light waves takes a second and a half to get there, and a second and a half to get back.

Now: the moon is 2,162 miles in diameter, so my PDA screen will be roughly .55% of its visible width. Atmospheric disturbance aside, it will be visible – sans-telescope – as a flickering point of light just north of center. Visibility will be bad during the full moon and great during the new moon.

I am hereby taking orders for advertising time on my Lunar PDA. The current rate is $1,000,000 per second. However, if you want to upload and run a game, you may do so for free. Imagine: Lunar Lander on the moon.

I need to get out more.

7:15 am
Arrive at work. Witness a train engineer, who’s train engine has been parked in by two SUVs, screaming at the owners of said SUVs. Owners are talking on their cellular phones while drinking expensive bottled water. Ready camera in case said engineer decides to use his vehicle to return the SUVs to the Hell from whence they came.

7:20 am
Dive into, in no particular order, email, code, and coffee. Last-second critical content changes for site which is supposed to launch at 8:00am have not yet arrived. Check news.

8:00 am
Last minute changes still not in. Website not ready to launch. Contemplate launching the damn website anyway. Client said “by 8:00 California time”. Boss says “by 8:00 Michigan time”. 8:00am Michigan time is 5:00am California time. Perhaps California, in the grip of nostalgia because of East Coast blackouts, is having a blackout.

8:30 am
Enjoy the sunrise.

9:00 am
Launch the damn website.

9:10 am
Realize that the contact form is still sending info to my email. Correct the problem.

10:00 am
7:00 am California time. Don’t expect to hear anything for at least two hours. Drink coffee.

10:45 am
Hear that there may be rolling brownouts here in Grand Rapids in order to feed some electricity to the East side of the state. Non-essential businesses are being asked to shut down for the day. What could be less essential than a web developer? Maybe I get to go home early.

That was the temperature of Lake Michigan at Tunnel Park as of yesterday evening at 7:00pm. Swimming was a long, slow kick in the nutz.

The Flash Photo Album is nearing completion. 12k of Actionscript, compiled into a 3k .swf file. When I am satisfied with it I will upload a hundred or so Alaska photos. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow.

This morning I woke to the sound of a mouse in a trap. The poor little feller was trapped by his left front leg, up near the shoulder. He had been trying to gnaw himself free for some time, but couldn’t quite reach far enough to complete the job.

So I fed him to a stray cat.

I hate mice.

But not as much as I hate Internet Explorer 5.

Today I began a re-build of the Flash Photo Album application, with an eye on using it as a CDROM presentation tool, among other things. So not much in the way of new and interesting stuff.

This is a sea otter we woke up in Prince William Sound during a glacier cruise:

Sea otters have the densest fur of any animal. The average human head has 100,000 hair follicles. There are 300,000 hairs in a single square inch of sea otter pelt. Sea otters do not have blubber, but instead, when cleaning themselves, blow air into their fur, where it is trapped and acts as insulation.