Vincennzo Capelli

Recent Plant Acquisitions

2009-04-03T08:15:00.002-07:00

I exercised my employee discount at work yesterday and purchased four northern high bush blueberry plants and six strawberry plants. The blueberry varietal breakdown is as follows:

Vaccinium corymbosum 'Elliott'
Vaccinium corymbosum 'Toro'
Vaccinium corymbosum 'Darrow'
Vaccinium corymbosum 'Duke'

All of these are of the northern high-bush type. Ideally, I wanted to get varieties that produced small to medium sized fruit as that's what's best for baking. Sadly, we didn't sell any that had that particular trait. Apparently, for the average consumer, bigger is better when it comes to blueberries.

For the strawberries, the varietal breakdown goes like this:

3 Fragaria virginiana x chiloensis 'Rainier'
3 Fragaria virginiana x chiloensis 'Tri-Star'

An interesting side-note about strawberries is that the common strawberry bush is actually a hybrid of the north american and chilean strawberry. The american parent provides the taste and the chilean parent provides the fruit size.

Glad Tidings

2009-03-27T07:45:00.003-07:00

I've managed to secure a position as a software tester with a local 3rd party insurance benefits provider. Oddly enough, on the same day as I was offered this job I was also offered a position as an A- contractor at a certain "software giant in Redmond." I engaged in a fair bit of fretting about which position to take, but in the end it came down to the software testing position being more likely to provide me with the basic skills I need to make good progress in the career I'm trying to create.

So yeah, I'm sad that I won't be working at the garden nursery anymore but I'm excited to be getting started in my new "profession."

Red Robin Menu Widget

2009-03-23T09:03:00.005-07:00

Red Robin has this cool web widget that lets me calculate the nutritional content of items on their menu. I had myself a chicken caeser wrap with an extra side of fries last night. The information about my meal that the widget gave me was as follows:

Calories: 1634
Grams Fat: 78
Grams Fiber: 14
WW Points: 38

Saturday night I ate the second half of the pint of Ben & Jerry's I bought on Friday night. I've been eating two of those big chocolate chip cookies everyday on my breaks at work. I've been eating like this for the last pretty much since I started my new job. I'm not eating tons of junk food every day, but I'm definitely "splurging" a whole heck of a lot more than I have in the last year.

Here's the rub, though. I've been getting so much exercise from my new job that I've lost weight the last two weeks and there's a good chance that I'll manage to lose weight again next Saturday.

It's kind of crazy. I guess the added bonus of this job is that I can eat a lot more food now than I used to.

What I'm Planting This Year

2009-03-22T08:28:00.002-07:00

As far as the previously published yard plan is concerned, I'm only executing a small fraction of it this year. This will likely be the only section I'll ever execute, in fact. I'm a renter and there's just not a lot of incentive to pour time and money into the yard unless I know I'm going to be here long enough to really benefit from the investment.

All I will do is install the vegetable garden and the strip of sunflowers along the southern border of the property. Yesterday, I used my employee discount for the first time to get myself a number of seeds. I purchased:

Italian Roma Tomatoes
SMR-58 Pickling Cucumbers
Tyee Hybrid Spinach
Waltham 29 Broccoli
Autum Beauty Sunflowers
Soybeans
Russet Norkotah Seed Potatoes

I may plant some strawberries as well. I'll have to decide on those pretty soon if I'm gonna pull the trigger on that one.

Right now, the next step is to lay out the borders of my beds and dig up the sod in those areas. Gosh, sometimes it seems like the only landscaping task I execute with any regularity is digging up sod.

What I would do . . .

2009-03-19T22:20:00.005-07:00

. . . if I lived in this house for the next ten years and had the spare cash and time.

"LA Port Import Traffic Collapses in February"!!!!!!!!

2009-03-13T20:53:00.006-07:00

Normally, I'm a big fan of Calculated Risk. I've been reading that blog for quite a few months new. Probably since at least mid-September. That being said, I have a minor quibble with the entry of the above title.

I saw the post's title, looked at the graph and thought, "Oh crap!! Things are getting worse!!" When I got to the list of reasons posted for the decline I immediately latched onto bullet point five for comfort:

Due to the lack of volume and Chinese New Year, Maersk 6700 TEU/week vessel did not make any calls in LA during the month of February (which is traditionally a low volume month).

If you look at the other years displayed on the graph, they "all" have a saw-tooth pattern to them. It's not crazy to assume that sometime in the very near future the derivative of the volume flux through the Port of Los Angeles will switch from negative to positive.

Heh. I just used "derivative" in a sentence.

So yeah, things are worse. That's a big delta from max to min. But, it shouldn't continue going down for at least a little while.

I'd also like to point out that the Loaded Out curve has an uptick in it for the first time since the middle of last year. Is this uptick the result of seasonal adjustment making the graph less accurate (it happens sometimes) or is it an actual uptick? If so, does that mean something? I, for one, would like to know.

Good News

2009-03-08T08:05:00.008-07:00

Unemployed No More

Yesterday was my first day of work at a local plant nursery. The job is more physically demanding than I'm used to but more relaxing and satisfying as well. It's nice to have my life back, though I'll need to be as frugal as I was when living in Davis.

XAMPP

In other news, I installed XAMPP on the XP half of "Mikey" (my recently ressurected Dell Inspiron 1000. I still plan to setup a LAMP environment on the Linux partition I created in Mikey's other half.

I had zero trouble installing XAMPP with the exception of the MySQL service. I even downloaded an MD5 checking utility and used it from the command prompt to determine that the downloaded install package was free of errors. A couple of quick google searches and I was able to fix the MySQL service.

Now if only I could figure out how to actually do something with Apache . . .

A Marathon of Milestones

2009-03-05T18:43:00.004-07:00

Well, not really. However, since the last time I updated I've completed Milestones 4 through Milestone 6.

After an analysis of a number of click-match games I modified Milestone 7 to be:

(7) Refill empty hex grid cells with randomly colored tiles.

Changing Milestone 7 in this manner has meant I needed to go back through an reqork how some of my code works, but generally I haven't had to code up anything extra.

I'm right in the middle of making some adjustments to the code to get everything to work correctly, but I expect to begin work on Milestone 8 this evening.

This project is progressing very quickly compared to earlier ones. It's only been about three weeks since I started working on it in earnest. Barring employment, I should be done with it by the end of next week.

HTML 5 Draft Released

2009-02-28T23:52:00.003-07:00

Apparently, the working draft for HTML 5 was released on Feb. 12th. I've very excited about the introduction of a 2D drawing API which can be used with the new canvas element.

I don't know for sure, but it sounds like you'll be able to use scripts to assemble drawings on pages. I don't know how to do this (or if it's even possible) using HTML 4. It'll be durned cool to be able to do it.

Bejeweled

2009-02-28T11:24:00.009-07:00

This somewhat popular flash based casual game is described under the schema laid out in an earlier post as follows:

Game Condition: Game Condition (ends) is met when a player cannot make any legal moves.
Level Condition: Level Condition (end current & load next) is met when the player's score reaches the maximum for that level.
Score Condition: The player's score increments up when a player succesfully assembles a group of three or more similarly colored tiles or when the player triggers the level condition.
Movement Mode: The player moves tiles around the board by swapping two that are adjacent.
Movement Conditions: The player can only swap tiles if a minimum of one tile involved in the swap creates a group of three or more similarly colored tiles.
Power Ups: The player is granted power ups when four or more groupings of similarly colored tiles are created.
Flavor: Shiny gems on a cartesian grid play surface.

Click . . . Match . . . Power Up!!!

2009-02-26T10:39:00.005-07:00

On Tuesday morning I went through and played a number of different click match games with the hope that doing so would help me to sharpen up my concept for "Beer Pong.

On the one hand, I don't think I've seen a "Click-Match" game that used a hex-grid before. I want to take full advantage of what could be a novel play experience. On the other hand, Beer Pong isn't supposed to be a full fledged product. Its intent is to provide me with enough practic with Javascript to get me to the point where I can comfortably say "I know Javascript" in an interview and keep a straight face.

Looking at "Click-Match" games, it seems like they can be described using a couple of pretty basic descriptors. Mind you, I've only played a couple of different games so far, so this break-down is most likely utterlly incomplete.

What CM Games Have In Common

In every case, there are multiple discrete objects (the tiles) that are contained within the playspace of a CM game.
The most important thing in a CM game is the relationship of these tiles to one another.
A player's manipulation of these tiles within the context of these relationships is the heart of a CM game.

How CM Games Tend To Differ

Game Condition - This what determines when a game ends.
Level Condition - This is what determines when a level in the game ends.
Score Condition - This is what determines when points in a game are scored.
Movement Mode - How the player manipulates the position of tiles within the game space.
Movement Conditions - Restrictions placed on the movement of tiles within the play space.
Power Ups - Instances where the player is able to flout the normal conditions imposed on the game.
Flavor -The visual and audio interface bolted onto the game mechanics.

I'll talk about some of the different games specifically in my next post. For now, I need to get back to work on "Beer Pong."

Warrant Officer Vincennzo

2009-02-26T10:23:00.005-07:00

One quick note. While I was looking at different click-match games on Tuesday I happened across a link for an interesting online game called Startport Galactic Empires. It's a free Sci-Fi MMO where you fly a ship around, trade goods and fight space pirates. Graphically, it's pretty primitive but the game play's pretty fun and interesting for the first little bit.

It gets a bit old once trading gets to a certain level of ease. There's supposed to be advanced levels of game play involving the creation and maintenance of colonies, but it seems like most of the still well inhabited severs (the game's been out since 2004 or 2005 apparently) are totally colonized so finding free space (or creating it through invasion) is really, really difficult.

Still, it's a pretty cool concept, especially considering that its free to play. It would be fun to get some of my gamer friends together and play against each other in one of the non-persistant galaxies (or band together as a corporation in one of the persistant ones.) I'm currently playing in the "Classic Homeworld Galaxy" or whatever it's called. Hercules Cluster looks like it has more traffic, though the difficulty level is "Expert."

Oops, I Milestone 7'd

2009-02-25T01:03:00.003-07:00

Well, only a little bit.

Late last night I coded up the bit that fills in empty hex's closest to the center with randomly colored tiles. The time interval between block placement doesn't scale with score, but that's only because I haven't coded in any sort of way to keep score.

I got to thinking about Milestone 5. Working up the code to generate and place the hex cells was tough and so was the code to allow for click-swapping. But the code for pattern matching? That's gonna take the cake. Before I dive into what will likely be the gnarliest part of this project, I need to make durned sure that I know how I want this game to work.

With that in mind, I spent a couple of hours this morning reaquainting myself with a bunch of different click-match games. It's getting late so I'll go into the analysis tomorrow. Besides, I need to think about it a bit more.

You Can't Go To Oregon And Then Leave California

2009-02-23T18:30:00.010-07:00

Milestone 4 has been achieved. Click here to see what project Beer Pong currently looks like. Click on a hex to select it. Click on a hex adjacent to the selected hex to swap them.

I thought I was going to be able to use the hex-coordinate system I developed in Milestone 1 to calculate the id's of adjacent hex's. Shockingly, I ended up running into an unexpected problem.

It turns out that while creating the hex-grid and placing tiles is easier with the ijk coordinate system, finding adjacent tiles becomes devilishly tricky. Ironically, the problem with using the Cartesian coordinate system was that placing the tiles was really difficult but finding adjacent tiles was easy.

Luckily for me, in Milestone 2 I had developed a method to convert between hex-coordinates and Cartesian coordinates. I was able to use that conversion method to easily find adjacent hex's.

While working on this Milestone I ran across yet another bit of quirky Javascript behavior. Javascript can generate events that call functions stored in the portion of the the html document. They look like the following:

img src="foo.png" onmouseout="out_foo()" onmousein="in_foo()
onclick="click_foo()" /

When the cursor passes over a hex, in_foo() gets called and makes the border appear. When the cursor passes out of the hex, out_foo() gets called and makes the border disappear. When a hex gets clicked, other stuff happens (contained within click_foo()) that causes the border to stick around when the cursor leaves the hex, maybe disappear on other hexes and maybe swap places with adjacent selected tiles.

Here's where the behavior gets quirky (though in thinking about it while writing this post, it's really not THAT quirky):

Tile gre_0_1_2 is a green hex tile at ijk coordinate (0,1,2).

Tile pur_1_1_2 is a purple hex tile at ijk coordinate (1,1,2).

These two tiles are adjacent.

Tile pur_1_1_2 was the last tile clicked and remains highlighted even though I've moused out of it.

I mouse into gre_0_1_2 and the tile becomes highlighted.

I click gre_o_1_2 and the two highlighted tiles are swapped.

Both gre_012 and pur_112 become hidden, as do the borders around both tiles.

Tiles pur_012 and gre_112 become visible and the border around pur_012 becomes visible.

When I mouse out of pur_012 the border should remain on because it was the last one clicked.

However, when I mouse out of the hex, the border becomes hidden.

I had to fiddle fart around to figure out what was going on, but I eventually managed to do it and code up a simple workaround.

In layman's terms, once you enter the State of Oregon you cannot leave any other state until you've first left the State of Oregon, unless you enter a state that happens to be entirely contained within the borders of the State of Oregon. So really, not THAT quirky. Basically, once you mouse into an element, you can't mouse out of any other element until you've moused out of the first one or moused into something else.

I Think I Need To Have My OS Reinstalled

2009-02-22T20:57:00.004-07:00

A guy I met on the tubes (a rather cute one from Florida with a boyfriend in Spokane) was telling me the other day that he had confused me with my ex (Scottland) after he saw a picture of the two of us "standing in front of a rock." I think he meant the pictures of us from when we visited Natural Bridge in Virginia while back east at Bob's wedding.

This conversation spurred me to go back and read some of my entry's from years past. In particular, I dwelt on those written during the six months of self-abuse known as "two quarters at the UC Davis department of Chemical Engineering." It was interesting, reading those posts. I could really tell how much I hated graduate school and what a number it was doing on me.

That being said, it felt like my posts back then were funnier, even when I was bitching about how over my head it felt like the still rising waters were. It was like I had more of a sense of humor. Maybe the last year has been tougher on me than I really give myself credit for. I mean, it's been hard dealing with the Avalanche of Dooms, but I'd always assumed that it hadn't really changed me. Maybe it has.

Oh, and "Hi" Suzanne. You're like, the only person that reads this blog anymore. Do you have an RSS feed set-up or did you just happen to blunder into that post on switch statements right after I put it up?

Beer Pong Milestones

2009-02-19T22:06:00.005-07:00

So I've been thinking about (and organizing) my new coding project in terms of 'milestones.' Essentially, these are major bits of functionality that need to be developed in order for the project to have a chance of being succesfully completed. So far, the milestone list is as follows:

(1) Generate and store data that describes a regular hex grid of tiles in terms of variables that will be important to the game.
(2) Use the data from milestone 1 to display a static hex grid of correctly colored and positioned tiles.
(3) Code in the ability to change the change the color of the tiles without reloading the page.
(4) Allow adjacent tiles to be swapped by clicking them.
(5) Be able to see groupings of three or more colored tiles.
(6) Have empty cells in inner rings back fill with tiles from outer rings that are in cells along a line passing through the center of the board and the empty cell being filled.
(7) Place a randomly colored tile in the innermost empty cell at an interval that decreases as the player's score increases.
(8) Fashion a more aesthetically pleasing and functional interface for the game.

Milestone 8 is probably a good deal more complicated than a single milestone should be. Oh well.

So far, I've completed milestones 1-3. You can see the results of Milestone 3 here.

Critical Note To Self

2009-02-19T13:02:00.002-07:00

When translating from pseudo-code to actual code, don't forget to add in the "break;" statements at the end of switch/case code blocks that you left out of the pseudo-code because their presence was "obvious." Doing this can cause unexpected behavior in your code.

Project Beer Pong

2009-02-18T10:49:00.002-07:00

This is the name I've assigned to my next exciting foray into game development. Here are the details so far:

Beer Pong will be a click management style casual game.
The game will be played on a polar coordinate grid.
The player will move tiles around the board by swapping the contents of two adjacent cells.
When three or more tiles of the same color are adjacent, they will be removed from the board.
Once tiles are removed, infilling (if appropriate) will occur.
At game start, every cell on the board will be empty.
A new tile of random color will be inserted into an empty cell nearest to the center of the board after an interval.
As the game progresses, the interval length between new tile insertion will decrease.
The game will end when every cell on the board is full.
Logged in users will be able to start a game at levels higher than 1.
The game will have a leaderboard where high scores and highest level completed will be posted.
The theming of the game will in some way be related to beer.

Thinking In Hex

2009-02-13T11:12:00.003-07:00

I completed my substr("LAMP",2,2) project earlier this week and sent out an email to everyone I thought might be interested in seeing it. The comments so far have been positive and in particular the two techie's that have looked at it so far have had complimentary things to say.

My next project is going to be to create a "click management" game entirely in javascript. The end goal here is to get to where I can use AJAX and javascript is a big part of that. Also, I wanted to make a real game. The earlier project (S.Rex War) wasn't really a game.

So, the concept for this new project is going to be a "click-3" game with one twist. Most click-3 games I've seen have been done with a basic x-y coordinate system. I'm going to attempt to make a minor variation on the concept and have it play off of a hex grid.

So far, I've been focusing on fleshing out what the overall code will look like. My experience with the "Cryptic Rotating Block Test" reinforced the idea that you should plan before getting into the actual coding.

The most difficult problem so far has been trying to figure out how to easily represent a hex grid using a Cartesian coordinate system. It's been a real pain but I think I finally have a pretty nifty solution. Oddly enough, I've seen this solution before and it very much reminds me of a three-component phase equilibrium diagram.

Geithner's Speech

2009-02-10T09:34:00.002-07:00

Much of what the treasury secretary said sounded good, but without concrete details and an unfortunate preponderance of the phrase "in the coming weeks" it's hard to say how good the proposals really are.

I did note one rather depressing statement on Geithner's part. Towards the end he goes on for a bit, talking about how there will stops and starts in the progress of repairing the financial system. That there will be experimentation and times when ideas fail and need to be jettisoned.

What he didn't say, but what's pretty clear from reading between the lines, is that the Obama Administration expects this crisis to stick with us for quite some time.

So yeah, we should probably start thinking of a name for what we're going to call this thing we're going to be living in. Great Depression 2 isn't very evocative. Whatever we do end up calling it, it's likely to be the central aspect of all of our lives for the next few years.

Personally, I'm most interested in how the financial system is going to be reformed. Regardless of how well we manage to arrest the crisis, we cannot have true long term recovery without making sure that the systemic flaws inherent in the old system are repaired.

A Monster Of An SQL Query

2008-12-09T18:47:00.003-07:00

So i'm in the middle of working on a web project. At some point I'll be switching over to using home brewed blogging software on my main website and I'll eventually figure out how to cross-post to here or something. Whatever.

My point is that I've been sharpening up my SQL skills. Today, over the course of about five hours I taught myself how to make the following SQL query. What does this sucker do? It let's me take three different tables from my database, grab values from all of them and then sum up some of them but not others.

What's the context? It's the main query I needed to figure out how to write in order to get the Leaderboard for S.Rex War to work the way I envisioned. Yes that's a rather mysterious comment. If I had coded up the blog-lite software I could be blogging this as I go along. Maybe I'll do that tomorrow. It shouldn't take me very long at all to do.

SELECT FullName, Wins, Losses, Games, (Wins/Games) AS Ratio, UserJoinDate FROM (SELECT CONCAT(User.FirstName, " ", User.LastName) AS FullName, SUM(IF(STRCMP(Game.GameStatus,'1'), 0, 1)) AS Wins, SUM(IF(STRCMP(Game.GameStatus,'2'), 0, 1)) AS Losses, SUM(1) AS Games, UserAction.ActionDate As UserJoinDate FROM User INNER JOIN Game ON User.UserKey=Game.UserKey INNER JOIN UserAction ON User.UserKey=UserAction.UserKey WHERE UserAction.ActionType='Create' GROUP BY User.UserKey) AS LeaderBoard

Sunny Weather Makes An Encore

2008-09-29T13:34:00.003-07:00

I spent the glorious weather yesterday doing some much needed long term work on the back of the house. I ripped up a BUNCH of sod to expand the size of the beds along the northern fence line. With the added square footage I'll be able to move a bunch of plants to the new space and re-arrange things to make the whole yard easier to maintain. I'll also be increasing the space I'm devoting to gardening by at least a third and I can now pretty reliably grow tomatoes, onions, garlic and spinach. I'll be experimenting with Swiss Chard this month (and anything else that doesn't mind being planted in October.)

I also harvested my onions and tomatoes. The onions this year were a bust as I expected, though I did pull ten pounds. The upside is that what I pulled will become the starters for next year's crop. So, they'll be going BACK into the ground in a couple of days, along with some some seeds I'll be planting just to see how growing onions from seed works.

I had expected the tomatoes to be something of a disappointment on account of the wonky weather we've had all year. Surprisingly, I had a fairly reasonable harvest of 15 pounds of red tomatoes and 10 pounds of green tomatoes. The red tomatoes are already mellowing their way into red sauce on my stove top. I'm going to try and turn the greens into tomato relish or something.

So, in the end I got about the same poundage (25 lbs. vs. 30 lbs.) of tomatoes from eight plants as I got from six healthy and three "blossom rot" afflicted plants last year. Of course, 2/5 of this year's poundage is in the form of green tomatoes so technically my yield was a lot lower. It all depends on whether or not I can transform the greens into something useful.

Next year I'll be going back to real tomato cages and giving the plants more room. Something on the order of two square feet per plant. I suspect I'll get much higher yields doing it this way. I still need to figure out how to handle Roma's growth tendencies. It seems like a combination of pruning and vertical support is key.

As for the "blossom rot" there's no sign of it this year. I don't really know what made the difference. I have started amending the soil with Gypsum to provide additional calcium and that could have helped. It's also entirely possible that some random factor that caused the blossom rot last year didn't happen this year.

Aspartame Kills With Sweet Seduction!!

2008-05-02T09:03:00.005-07:00

The Backstory

The author of a blog I read recently published a post where he wrote about his Diet Dr. Pepper addiction (a monkey that I too carry on my back) and his concerns about Aspartame poisoning. Apparently, a well meaning friend told him about the internet controversy related to whether or not the methanol generated when Aspartame breaks down is toxic.

The Preface

My initial response when I come across references to one of the many internet hysterias scuttling about the Tubes is to scoff and click on. There's so much innuendo, rumor and distorted argument out there in the Tubes that finding dependable information is well nigh impossible unless you already have a good sense of what the correct answer looks like.

Every now and then, one of these rumors pops up in a locale that's "close enough" to me that I feel comfortable (and maybe even a little obligated) to put together a well thought out counter argument. Of course, when you do that, you always run the risk of offending someone. That's why I always try very hard to not affect the "everyone else is retarded" attitude that seems to infest a lot of the Tubes. Honestly, there are an enormous number of wildly varying opinions and it can be very difficult at times to figure out who's telling the truth.

The Reference Materials

Much of this information is gathered into a single source on Snopes. The first bit of the Snopes page contains that chain email that was the "seed" material for the urban legend.

Then there's links to rebuttals. My preference is the link to a letter published in The Lancet, as its a VERY prestigious medical journal, contains a good bit of technical information and address the actual Tubes related controversy to an extent.

I also relied fairly heavily on some pages on Wikipedia. While "tube-a-pedia" can often be a powerful source for disinformation, it can also be accurate and in the instances I used it for, I think it is.

The Analysis

Aspartame is made of two amino acids (Phenylalanine and Aspartic Acid) that are held together by a "methyl ester" bond. When ingested, Aspartame is split into its constituent amino acids and a methanol molecule is released. The reaction looks like this:

Near as I can tell from a quick perusal of tube-info is that, when in solution, Aspartame is an inherently unstable molecule and the "hydrolysis" reaction is going to happen no matter what.

However, how quickly this reaction occurs is a function of both the acidity and the temperature of the environment.

In a very acidic environment (like a can of diet soda) the molecule is fairly stable and thus useable as a consumer product.

In a neutral environment (like your intestines once your stomach acid's been neutralized or your blood) the molecule is a lot less stable. So, once ingested, it's pretty good bet that some, if not all, of the Aspartame is gonna break down.

So then, we're left with methanol, phenylalanine and aspartic acid. All of these are going to get absorbed into the blood stream and either excreted via the kidneys, metabolized by the body and excreted or (gasp!!) incorporated into your bodies genetic structure!!!

"How is this possible and will I develop mutant powers?", you ask? Well no, because you see, Phenylalanine and Aspartic Acid are both amino acids. Amino acids are the molecules your body uses to make proteins, your DNA and neurotransmitters. So, ingestion of these materials is not inherently bad.

In some cases, the ingestion of a specific amino acid can be harmful if your body lacks the ability to metabolize excess molecules of that type. In the specific case of Phenylalanine, some people cannot metabolize it because their body lacks the necessary enzyme thanks to an inherited genetic defect.

This is a specific metabolic disease and does not mean that any concentration of phenylalanine in the blood is bad. Rather, it is a persistently elevated concentration of phenylalanine in the blood that can cause brain damage.

Then there's the issue of the quantity of these molecules generated by ingesting a can of diet soda. I'm just going to directly quote the letter here:

Although a 330 ml can of aspartame-sweetened soft drink will yield about 20 mg methanol, an equivalent volume of fruit juice produces 40 mg methanol, and an alcoholic beverage about 60-100 mg.

The yield of phenylalanine is about 100 mg for a can of diet soft drink, compared with 300 mg for an egg, 500 mg for a glass of milk, and 900 mg for a large hamburger (1).

Thus, the amount of phenylalanine or methanol ingested from consumption of aspartame is trivial, compared with other dietary sources.

Clinical studies have shown no evidence of toxic effects and no increase in plasma concentrations of methanol, formic acid, or phenylalanine with daily consumption of 50 mg/kg aspartame (equivalent to 17 cans of diet soft drink daily for a 70 kg adult)

Personally, I find the last sentence the most illuminating. The clinical studies they're talking about aren't rocket science. If consuming 50 mg/kg of aspartame caused elevated levels of methanol, formic acid or phenylalanine in the blood stream it would be DEAD SIMPLE to find out.

A group of motivated graduate students could perform this study on themselves with nothing more than some syringes, basic biological laboratory glassware, a centrifuge, a high pressure liquid chromatograph and some college level knowledge.

The Conclusion

So really, that's pretty much it. The idea that you're somehow poisoning yourself by ingesting diet soda sweetened with Aspartame is pretty far fetched.

The potential liability its manufacturers and industrial users would be on the hook for if it did have toxic properties is vastly countered by the extreme ease with which a group of motivated individuals could scientifically prove the existence of these properties if they were, in fact, there. And believe me, there are a lot of motivated individuals out there with access to the actual resources needed.

If you believe that a plausible case for conspiratorial cover-up can be made, then I have a friend in Nigeria with a business proposition I want you to meet.

All this being said, there are a lot of arguments to be made against the consumption of highly processed foods like diet soda. These stem, however, from arguments related to simplicity and the consumption of limited resources. If a caffeine fix is what you need, then there are better ways to go about getting that fix than a can of Diet Dr. Pepper.

Time Is NOT Money

2008-03-07T18:27:00.006-07:00

Interesting editorial in the NY Times today (that I don't have to pay to see!!) about the obsession with time and not spending it wisely enough. Oddly enough this happened to dovetail perfectly with a chart I was throwing together using my Excel-Fu to visually demonstrate to my poor beleaguered honey that Daylight Savings Time does In Fact, save energy. He's promised to stop complaining about it if I can prove that it does what it claims to do.

Here's the chart:

Yes there are all sorts of caveats you can use to explain why you as an individual might not save more energy under this scheme, but when you're dealing with the averaged effects of hundreds of millions (if not over a billion) people the savings can add up.

And here's a link to the article.

"What Is That Noise?!?!"

2007-12-13T21:47:00.000-07:00

The day after Dollywood, we drove back to Warrenton and spent another night at sister Lynn's place. That evening, we went to Lynn's daughter's middle school band concert.

As usual, the 6th grade band performance was a feast for the ears!!!

Elizabeth (Lynn's daughter) was in the 8th grade band and they did considerably better.

It Burns!!

"It Takes A Lot Of Money To Look This Cheap"

2007-12-13T18:13:00.000-07:00

Ah yes, straight from the mouth of Dolly Parton while a guest on the Oprah Winfrey Show.

Apparently, Oprah asked if she had resorted to having plastic surgery done at some point. Dolly's response was something along the lines of "Of course. My career as a performer (and I think she was generalizing to most performers here) is bound up as much in my public "image" as it's tied up in my "show." I need to do what I can to maintain what the public expects for as long as I can."

And you know what? I can respect that. She's open and up front about it. She doesn't deny that she's had work done. Most importantly, she's not doing it because she's deluded herself into believing she can look like some young and sexy vixen for as long as she wants.

As time moves forward and various stars come and go, some just fading away and others exploding like tabloid supernovae, I've come to appreciate entertainers (particularly women) that have the ability to just go on and on and on. And I mean that in a good way. How they're able to adjust their "show" to compliment the different points in their lives. How they always seem to be able to produce something new that people find interesting and are glad to pay for. How obvious it is that they've got a good mind for business. It can be really inspiring when you see someone like that and can say "that person really knows what they're doing."

So yeah, I'm not necessarily a huge fan of her music, but I loves me some Dolly Parton. I almost want to go out and buy one of her albums as a way of registering my vote for the "this lady deserves to continue to do what she does" awards.

Can you tell I liked Dollywood?

Thanks to Scottland, I've been to a whole mess of theme parks in all sorts of different parts of the country now, and Dollywood is easily in my top three. Cedar Point in Sandusky still occupies the number one position. Disney World is in the number two position, but only by virtue of its ridiculous size and level of engineering complexity. That leaves Dollywood in the number three position, but if Dollywood could somehow be increased in size to rival Disney World I'd have a hard time deciding which was better.

What makes a theme park good is how well it grabs you by the mental cojones and thrusts you into the self-contained world its trying to create. To do that, you have to have a consistency to your theming that's not heavy handed. If you go too over the top it becomes a parody.

Disneyland was sort of like that for me. I liked it, but it was trying so hard to be "The Happiest Place On Earth" in the middle of the crappiest place on Earth that I just couldn't buy into it. Disney World worked because it's theme isn't "The Happiest Place On Earth", it's "The Biggest Place On Earth" and I could buy into that. The sheer size of the place and how well it all fits together produced it's own sense of wonder after a while.

Cedar Point, on the other hand, was all about the thrill rides. To maintain their theming and experience they simply needed to provide high quality rides within a high quality experience. This is actually more difficult than it sounds though. The park needs to be easy to get around in. It needs to be clean and attractive. It needs to be well organized and staffed with friendly people. All of this they did in spades and more. Most other Thrill Parks failed in one way or another. King's Island was disorganized, Great America was crowded, dirty and difficult to walk through.

Dollywood was a beast of a different nature. It's trying to be part Thrill Park and part Theme Park. Sort of like a down home country Christmas where you occasionally get to ride a kick ass rollercoaster. They had craft shops with actual craftspeople making things. They had two really good rollercoasters, the Haunted Mine Ride and the Thunderhead. The Haunted Mine Ride was very well themed, if a bit light on the thrills. It succeeds where "The Italian Job" coaster at King's Island miserably failed. And the Thunderhead? What can I say. I usually HATE wooden coasters. They scare the bejeezus out of me, and this one ROCKED. It was easy to see why it was voted "Best Wooden Coaster In the World" several years in a row.

Beyond that, the appearance of the park was consistent, visually dynamic and attractive. The food options were good and consistent with the "Smokey Mountains" theme of the park. Sadly, I never got to try the BBQ, which is supposed to be quite tasty. Nor did I get to eat pork pulled directly from a pig roasting on a spit like Suzanne promised me.

Most importantly, the staffing was excellent, and that's key. I've found that it's really the staff that can make or break a theme park. If they're friendly and helpful it's so much easier to just get into the experience and have fun. If they're surly and/or disinterested the place becomes very hard to enjoy no matter how spectacular everything else is.

I even got my science fix for the day, when I got to learn all about chestnut blight.

So yes, I would recommend Dollywood to anyone that has a chance to go there. The three of us (Suzanne, Scottland and myself) had a great time. Suzanne even got to hold a butterfly in her hand while a staff-member to a photo of us.

You're The Only Ten I See

2007-12-12T07:25:00.000-07:00

After nearly eight hours of driving, and much confusion once we left the interstate, we arrived at Suzanne's mother's house on the outskirts of Knoxville, Tennessee. This is where we'll be staying until Thursday morning. Today's big excursion is Dollywood!!! Scottland is so excited, though we're both a little worried that bad weather may close the rollercoasters. They're the main reason we're going to Dollywood in the first place.

Last night, Suzanne's mom cooked us a delicious meal of bacon wrapped fillet mignon, followed up by another round of card game playtesting. Suzanne seemed to enjoy it and was offering all sorts of suggestions. Scottland was impressed by how much easier it is to teach and learn now. "Rachaeling" is still a problem, but I'm sure I'll figure out a solution eventually. It's pretty much the last "problem" to be solved now, as long as you don't consider figuring out the formatting for the easiest play experience possible a "problem."

In other exciting news, were able to snap the following exciting photos of Squeak and Flounder, who are both doing quite well and see happy, in case anyone wanted to know.

Here's clickable thumbnails of Flounder actually allow himself to be touched by Suzanne when other people are around!! Imagine what she can do when they're alone!!

And here's clickable thumbnails of Squeak standing up!! It's a rare event indeed, based on how hefty Squeak is getting. Of course, her sister is just as likely to pack on the pounds so it's not entirely the poor dear's fault.

And, in case anyone needed proof, Suzanne's cats are in point of fact demon-possessed, though I can't say for sure if this is Suzanne's fault, her mother's fault or something that can be laid at the foot of the great state of Tennessee.

Ebberon Is Dino-Mite!!

2007-12-11T20:22:00.000-07:00

In the Ebberon Campaign Setting, the Haflings of the Talenta Plains can often be found riding dinosaurs (or so I've been told).

It turns out that the Haflings of the Virginia Hills do the same thing. Not sure how the go about domesticating them though . . .

Apparently the Hafling culture of Virginia is best summed up with the word "Western", and I don't mean classical greek mythology and latin.

Bridge, Au Natural

2007-12-11T19:00:00.000-07:00

Somewhere between Warrenton, VA and Knoxville, TN I began randomly proclaiming "Jesus!!" in a sing-songy faux spiritual voice. Why? Well, somewhere between those two points the world went from not-Jesus-land to Jesus-Land. We're talking crosses, bumper stickers, billboards, etc. Jesus was everywhere!! I think, though I'm not entirely sure about this, that the transition really started when we hit Natural Bridge.

Natural Bridge is a privately owned park that you have to pay admission to get into. It's got a wax museum, a mini-golf course, a haunted house, and a gift shop. Of course, it also has the Natural Bridge, The eighth natural wonder of the modern world or something. It often gets confused with the natural wonders of the world, places like the Grand Canyon and the Great Barrier Reef.

Natural Bridge was very cool. It's essentially all that's left after the roof collapsed in a series of limestone caves. The "bridge" itself is quite thick and there's a functional road that goes across the top of it. The sequence of images below takes you through Natural Bridge along the path visible in the first picture. The pictures are thumbnails that link to higher resolution images.

So what initially got me onto the "Jesus!!" kick was, "The Wonder of Creation" light show they do at Natural Bridge every night. I guess they project images onto the rock face or something. That's what all the benches are for in the first image in the series. Places for people to sit while they watch the show.

There was also an "Jesus!!"-related interesting sign describing the Natural Bridge's origin. Sadly, I failed to take a picture of it. As I pointed out to Scottland, the two paragraphs comprising the sign were playing to different crowds. The first paragraph described the bridge's formation using standard geological terminology telling the reader when the rock comprising the bridge was formed, what caused the caves and how long the overall process took. The second paragraph contained coded language about creation, miracles, sculpting, etc. I was surprised that the park simply didn't have two signs, one describing the geological time based version of events and the other telling us which at minute on the third day of creation God stopped by to sculpt the bridge.

Here are pictures of Scottland and I admiring His wonderful sculpture:

After our brief interlude at Natural Bridge, we hopped back into the car and got back on the road to Knoxville.

Please Fasten Your Belt and Put Out Your Fag

2007-12-10T19:00:00.000-07:00

First we dropped Mikey off at the Downtown Dog Lounge. Then we participated in the Jingle Bell Run 5K, with Scottland in his skivvies, shoes and Scooby outfit. Then we changed, finished packing and were off to the airport.

After a fairly pleasant five'ish hour flight we touched down at the Ronald Reagan airport this evening. And by "touched down" I mean hit the tarmac like the engines gave out five feet above the runway. Oh well, no harm no foul I suppose. Took about an hour for Scottland's nail-marks to fade from my fore-arm, though.

So yeah. Welcome to Washington DC, err I mean Crystal City. Not sure why it's called Crystal City, unless its a reference to the wild packs of meth-heads roaming the streets. Hah hah. I kid. Besides, they're crack-heads.

Ronald Reagan is across the Potomoc and in Virginia and we got in so late that we went straight to our hotel after supping at a sports bar that turned out to be next door to a gay bar. Which explained why the pool table of vaguely mary bears next to us kept giving us "the eye", though I got all internally 'phobic and thought it was the proverbial "the stink-eye" at first.

Anyhow, after a restless night of minimal sleeping (oh how I love that first night in a new bed) we woke, dressed and took the Metrorail into DC proper. The rail was quite cool and I found myself wondering yet again why Seattle can't get its act together and install a comprehensive and useful public transportation system. I did have a lovely "woah, I'm on the East Coast" moment as I ambled across the station platform at a Seattle pace and was nearly trampled by a sudden stampede of recently disgorged commuters.

From the Metrorail we walked to the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum. The Air & Space Museum was pretty cool, though it seemed kind of outdated in spots. Scottland was quick to note how dusty the section on the lunar landing related stuff was and I have to admit that he was right. Even I noted it, and the gain on my Dustometer is set WAY below his.

Still, it was cool to see replicas (and in some cases the real deal) of the various probes and craft from the US space program. I had no idea that Skylab was SO HUGE. The International Space Station must be just enormous. Scottland and I both agree that our favorite exhibit was the one dedicated to the history of air travel. There were a lot of different displays that explained how the industry has evolved since the beginning of the 20th century and much of it was quite entertaining.

For example, I didn't realize that before deregulation, the only way for airlines to differentiate themselves was via sexy (or "memorable") stewardess outfits and the quality of in-flight service. As you can see, Southwest Airlines (on the left) and California Air (on the far right) were quite aggressive in their pursuit of "sexy" and "memorable."

My favorite part of the museum had to be "Cosmic Collisions," the 24 minute long planetarium show. It was essentially about the different types of space related collisions that are going on around us all the time. Things like the creation of the moon, huge meteor impacts, nuclear fusion, the Aurora Borealis and collisions between galaxies. I was pretty familiar with the subject matter of the show, but to see it all rendered out in super high detail and projected onto the dome of a planetarium is something else entirely.

After that, we were done with the Air & Space Museum. On the way back, Scottland had to take a long phone call so I amused myself in the Hirshhorn Museum, which is one of a handful of modern art museums at the Smithsonian. Some of it I liked, some of it I didn't get and some of it I thought was just plain ugly. Three pieces in particular really captured my imagination.

Milk Run, by James Turrell is actually a darkened room that you go into. As your eyes adjust the piece resolves itself. Sure it's just a bunch of lights, but I really liked the concept and thought it was about the act of appreciating art.

Round Rainbow, by Olafur Elliason was also really interesting. I honestly don't have a clue what it MEANS. However, the concept of light refracting through a rotating, beveled acrylic hoop that creates a variety of different types of mathematical curves on a wall was just too cool. The link to the image of the piece on the Hirshhorn page is broken, but I was able to find it via a google search.

The Way Things Go, by Peter Fischli and David Weiss (II) was definitely my favorite though. Essentially it's a giant "Rube Goldberg Contraption" captured on film. For some reason the Hirshhorn doesn't have an entry in its collection database, but I found a short section of the half hour long film on you tube.

After this, we took the Metrorail back to Crystal City, got in our ultra-sexy rented minivan, fought traffic nearly all the way to Warrenton, VA and spent our next night at Scottland's sister Lynn's place.

Random Plant Stuff

2007-12-06T21:43:00.000-07:00

So I spent a sizable chunk of the day working out 2008's Landscaping Plan for our yard. I'm happy to report that the cherry tree in our front yard is, in fact, a Japanese Flowering Cherry (Prunus Serrulata). It may or may not be of the 'Ukon' variety and there's really no way to tell for sure until next spring, when I can get a good look at the blossoms. Nailing down the exact species would not have been possible if I had not been able to walk out and pick the literal last leaf on the tree and compare it to an image from the internet.

In other happy news, I've also decided on the other two "architectural" plants I'm going to install in the patch of lawn the cherry tree currently has all to itself.

One is going to be what's called a Smoke Tree (Cotinus coggygria) and will no doubt look spectacular in that location, particularly if I can get my hands on the 'Royal Purple' variety.

The other is going to be what's known as a Burning Bush (Euonymus alatus 'Compactus'). I find it funny that I'm going to have a plant in my yard that has a name that implies that it's on fire. Perhaps I'll jokingly refer to it as the "gay bush." That being said, in the fall the it really is on fire.

The Great Icy Death Storm of 2007

2007-12-01T16:10:00.000-07:00

That's probably what they'll be calling it on the news tonight. We just got about 1.5 inches of snow in about two hours over here in West Seattle.

Funny Spoof of Star Wars

2007-11-30T19:46:00.001-07:00

Maybe you've already seen it, but I certainly had not. Thanks to Ron Mullikin for emailing the link to me!!

George Lucas In Love

The Beast Goes Live

2007-11-28T16:31:00.000-07:00

I just finished submitting my (surprisingly easy to put together) application for registering "GoatDog Games" as a trademark. The USPTO won't even assign an attorney to review my application for 4-5 months and the application probably won't be approved for upwards of a year, assuming it isn't denied for some weird reason. The important thing is that my application is filed, so trademark squatters (they really do exist) won't be able to force me to pay them for use of my own company's name.

On top of that, I'm not yet able to provide evidence of "actual use in commerce" since I haven't sold a product across state lines yet. Within six months I either need to be able to provide said evidence and file the appropriate paperwork or I need to ask for an extension on my application.

As for the other names that some of my readers may assume I'll need to register? Well, those are all more complicated and I'll need more time and money to get the applications put together.

Tomorrow I'll start dealing with the complicated (but again not terribly difficult) task of forming a "business entity." I'm thinking S-Corp, but I won't really know until I get a lawyer and discuss the issue with whoever it ends up being.

Novacaine and Kitten Feasting

2007-11-27T09:53:00.000-07:00

Let me just state for the record how much I hate having Novocaine injected into my jaw. It sucks so very much. Still, I like the new dentist a lot more than the old one, even if her pain killer injection technique is a bit . . . brusque. Nothing like being able to feel the needle sliding into your flesh, even if it doesn't actually hurt.

With that yuckiness dispensed with, here's a funny picture. Hat's off to Banana Lee Fishbones for cluing me into this wonderful piece of political commentary.

Tryptophan Aftermath

2007-11-25T09:10:00.001-07:00

This year, I successfully cooked the majority of Thanksgiving Dinner for my family. We're talking about a 20 pound turkey with a bacon, apple, sage and carmelized onion stuffing. Real giblett gravy. Garlic mashed potatoes. And, of course, maple syrup glazed pecans with orange essence and shallot green beans. Other people handled the rolls, green salad and appetizers. My Aunt Nancy cooked pecan and pumpkin pies.

The closest I ever got to disaster was realizing that the turkey was not even close to being thawed on Wednesday afternoon. Apparently the temperature of of the fridge was 34 degrees Fahrenheit. Luckily, I had already decided to brine the turkey, and being immersed in cold water for 4 hours thawed the bird right out.

Featured Cartographer!!

2007-11-22T18:03:00.000-07:00

A map I put together over the month of October for my upcoming campaign has been featured on the "Cartographer's Guild" website. I'll be sure to mention all of you in my acceptance speech.

Sad Collie, Wicked Groomer

2007-11-21T08:48:00.001-07:00

I'm pretty confident that the new owners of the place Mikey gets his semi-monthly grooming at are muzzling him. I didn't actually see one on his face, but I certainly know what he sounds like when he's trying to bark but has something in his mouth. I'd wondered if they were muzzling him two visits ago, but I didn't hear him as clearly then as I did yesterday.

Look. I know my dog barks. I know he barks a lot. If they'd come to me first and said, "Your dog barks a lot and we'd like to be able to muzzle him if he's causing a problem." I would have told them "Sure. Just make sure it's not too tight." But no. Instead, they muzzle him without my permission. Then they make a concerted effort to keep me from seeing my dog when he's initially let out of the cage he's been kept in. Finally, when I ask the groomer if they're muzzling my dog, when it's pretty 'effing obvious that I already know they are, she lies to my face and lies poorly at that.

So yeah. Not so happy with the groomers right now. I'm thinking I'll need to find a new one or figure out how to wash the dog myself. Shouldn't be too hard, right? Just need lot's of soap or something.

Writing Report

2007-11-20T13:27:00.000-07:00

I managed to write four whole pages yesterday afternoon!!

Seriously, for me that's a good day. Usually I have to badger myself for most of the work-week before I actually manage to drag my butt to Verite and write.

In other novel related news, I think I've decided that the bio-engineered disease that wipes out a sizable chunk of the human race 150-250 years (I haven't settled on exactly how far in the future the book is set) before the period of time depicted in the novel is referred to as "The Fugue" because of how it causes its victims to drowsily slip into a coma from which they usually don't wake up.

I Finally Snapped!!

2007-11-19T16:13:00.000-07:00

You can read it here!!

The larger thread that the above link belongs to can be found here.

Playtesting Is Hard Work

2007-11-15T18:31:00.000-07:00

Progress on the card game is still firmly mired in the playtesting stage, as it has been for about the last six months. It really is a process that resembles taking three steps forward followed by two steps back.

If you had talked to me a few weeks ago I would have told you that the game design was nearly complete and I'd be printing the production deck sometime in January or February assuming I had the cash to do so. But now? I don't quite know, probably more like March or April. During playtest a couple of things kept happening over and over. At first I thought these events (let's call them "getting Meaganed" and "Rachaeling") were just random, but when they showed up in pretty much every single playtest game I concluded that they must actually be design flaws in the game.

The problem was, really fixing these problems so that no one could ever get "Meaganed" and it was very very hard to "Rachael" meant that I had to redesign the game on a fairly significant level. Good thing I've gotten pretty proficient at coming up with new rules and re-designing cards. Seriously, this re-design is fairly comprehensive and I pumped out 2/3rd of the new card design in two days. Of course, that also shows it really shouldn't take me a year to put together my next product.

Bulbs, Bulbs and More Bulbs

2007-10-23T13:48:00.000-07:00

September and October are the months to plant bulbs for the spring. So, over the last few weeks I've been slowly planting the ones I've been storing in the garage since mid-june.

Last year, I planted a bunch of Tulips and Daffodils willy nilly throughout the various beds in my yard. That was a mistake come summer, when I realized that they were seriously in the way of a bunch of perrenials and bushes I wanted to put in. We're talking about paper grocery bags full of daffodils and paper lunch sacks full of tulips bulbs.

The trick to storing bulbs if you're the anal type that likes to dig them up in the early summer is to keep them in a cool, dark place that provides plenty of ventilation and protection from rodents. So, once the bulbs were dug up, I sorted them and left them on the garage floor for a few days. Then I cleaned off the dried-up outer layer of dirt and put them inside large paper grocery bags, which then went inside big plastic totes (but left the lids off), which then went inside these big storage cases with doors we have. Voila! Cool, dark, well ventilated and protected from rodents!

Now that it's time to plant, I've been prepping plots to plant the bulbs in, with the idea that I'll plant annuals in the same locations once the bulbs go dormant. Supposedly (according to Cisco Morris) tulips are twitchy about getting watered while they're dormant in that the water will make them split into a bunch of little bulb-lets which will not grow large enough to bloom the following year. I'll probably experiment and dig up half of them and leave the other half in to see what happens. Ideally I'd like to not have to dig them up at all, but that may not be possible.

When prepping the soil and planting the bulbs I've worked in one bag of Cedar Grove Compost and one cup of blood meal to about eight inches over about 5 square feet. Once everything is in the ground I'm going to apply about half a cup of fish emulsion to each 5 square foot plot. Next spring I'll top dress with some more blood meal and fish emulsion.

The Future Is Drying Up (NY Times)

2007-10-22T10:37:00.000-07:00

An excellent article about water management issues in the SW.

Garlic and Gladiolas

2007-10-19T08:28:00.000-07:00

I finished planting my garlic yesterday. Yes, common tradition is that you plant your garlic on or around Columbus Day. This will be my third attempt at growing the plant, and I think I will finally be successful.

For the first attempt, I assumed garlic was like many other plants, and you put the cloves in the ground in the spring. Boy, that was the wrong move. For the second attempt, I planted the garlic in January. That was still too late in the year to result in sizable cloves, though at least I did get cloves of some kind.

So, I figure the third time is the charm. I planted four rows of Oregon Blue Softneck from Hood River Garlic. It may come as a surprise, but they're an organic garlic farm in Hood River, Oregon. I planted four rows of Elephant Garlic, with about 1/3 of the seed cloves being the undersized and undifferentiated bulbs from my second attempt last year and the other 2/3 being from some seed cloves I picked up during the Farm Day trip to Fall City Farms.

I amended the bed with blood meal, fish meal and gypsum. Why gypsum? Well, the blossom rot that occurred in some of the tomatoes I planted in the plot indicated that the soil was deficient in calcium. Gypsum will help to provide calcium without changing the pH of the soil.

I also dug up my gladiolas. In the windstorm. Yes, I'm that dedicated. Actually, the wind was kind of nice, when it wasn't whipping up clouds of dust and blowing them in my face. I won't be planting these gladiolas again, since their growing cycle doesn't really work with the rest of my landscaping plan. Too bad though. Apparently I'm good at growing the buggers. The bulbs (or is it a corm?) came out HUGE.

Organic Gardening Vs. Vegans : Showdown at Noon?

2007-10-18T09:48:00.000-07:00

It's that time of year when I'm digging up beds, amending soil and planting for next year. I've been experimenting with organic fertilizers, stuff like blood meal, bone meal and fish emulsion and meal.

As I'm working the animal product based organic fertilizers into the soil, it occurs to me that it would be really really hard for a Vegan to farm organically. Most organic fertilizers are based on rendered animal products. Even manure is an animal product, and if a Vegan can't eat milk or eggs or wear wool, why would they be able to use cow waste to fertilize soil?

I suppose a vegan could rely exclusively on crop rotation, compost and plant based fertilizers (there are a few) but that would be very difficult and would require a fair amount of land. They pretty much couldn't grow vegetables in their back yard, I'd imagine, unless they planned on letting their backyard garden lie fallow every other year.

It's odd, considering that I would classify most Vegans as environmentalist types, that Veganism may actually be somewhat at odds with sustainable agricultural practices. It's something that probably warrants a little research and more thought.

Of course, if you cornered me and asked me what I really thought, I'd tell you that my personal philosophy is that the ideal is a little from column A and a little from column B. And I'm definitely NOT a vegan, or a vegetarian for that matter.

Winnona Ryder is The Enemy

2007-09-28T13:41:00.000-07:00

Or, at least that's what a new RPG product reviewed on rpg.net would have you believe.

In short, Covert Generation is an RPG whose premise is that Gen-X'ers are all part of an evil worldwide cabal bent on the subjugation of all free-thinking individuals that don't drink Starbucks.

Only those under the age of 18 have the skills and gumption to end this secret rule of tyranny. You know, once they get done posting on myspace, sorting out their drama, finishing their shift at Taco Bell and getting permission to borrow mommy's Escalade for the night.

I know, I know. It sounds really silly. And it IS silly. Part of me wants to laugh at the game and make fun of it because the premise is so lame. But then, I have to give the creator props for putting something like this together all on his own.

If you actually go and look at the material he's posted on his site you can see that it's reasonably well put together for an Indie production and the writing itself is snappy, easy to read and gives you a fairly good idea of tone of the setting.

Still, I doubt I'd actually bother trying to play this game if I had a copy. It just doesn't appeal. But then again, I'm a member of "The X."

Manticores of Yore

2007-09-24T13:54:00.000-07:00

As many of my devoted readers know, I loves me the D&D. Recently it was announced that a new edition (the 4th) was coming out in May of 2008. Since then, I've almost exclusively stuck to reading the 4E forum on ENWorld to get my gaming related internet forum fix.

The most recent thread I've been following has to do with changes to the artwork that depicts the monsters and characters. Every edition has its own look. Sometimes the look can even change as the edition ages. Generally this has to do with particular artists going in and out of style and also with what market research tells the publisher the target audience thinks fantasy should generally look like.

What does this have to do with Manticores? Basically, the Manticore is undergoing a significant artistic revision in 4E that puts it more inline with an "old-skool" understanding of what a Manticore should look like. Some people are happy with this. Some people are not. Personally, I kinda liked how weird the 3rd Edition manticore looked and wasn't too thrilled with the new version. Mostly because I thought it looked too much like the 2nd Edition version, which was essentially a fat, bearded dude's head pasted onto a lion's body.

I did get a chance to see a more complete version of the 4E manticore last night when Marty broke out the newest set of miniatures, and I must say that the picture online really doesn't do the creature justice. It still looks pretty bestial and scary and definitely doesn't look like the grognard's beloved Manticore of yore.

You can do it at a trot. You can do it at a gallop.

2007-09-21T10:48:00.000-07:00

I swear I never felt my heart palpitate though.

Yes, yesterday was our exciting annual trip to the Western Washington State Fair, AKA "The Puyallup." Scottland's digital camera is still broken so alas, I will not be able to deluge you with pictures of cute chickens, bunnies, horses, etc. Here are some highlights of the day's events:

*My inability to say "Pumpkin Spice Latte." Rather, I invariably refer to this drink as a "Punken Lahken." Needless to say, the barista at whatever Starbucks I'm at always get terribly confused about what I want. Why do I call it a Punken Lahken? It's all Rachael Eaton's fault. She called it that by accident in 2005 when ordering them for that year's crop of fairgoers and the name has just stuck.

*Rachael's retelling of the dream she had the night before. I can't repeat its contents here (without first getting her permission and clearing the room of children) but I promise to describe it to anyone that asks. Seriously. You have to ask. SERIOUSLY. It involves Ricky Schroeder in a butler outfit.

*In other Rachael induced hilarity, she bemoaned Shakira's "My Hips Don't Lie" song being stuck in her head on account of something her husband Scott had said to her earlier that morning. Needless to say, in a manner similar to the constant referencing of her nethers during the Port Townsend trip, every fifteen minutes or so I was either telling Scott and Scottland that Rachael's hips did not in fact lie or was asking her if perchance her hips were currently telling a lie.

*I finally got around to getting Stromboli chipped when she went into have her teeth cleaned earlier this month. Having done this, I picked up a collar for her fancy new tag on Monday. It's a cute little orange thing with very 60's looking flowers on it. It doesn't really fit her personality or the color of her coat though. So, I told Scottland that as soon as I found a black collar with skulls on it, I'd be switching it out. I found said collar in one of the craft booths at the fair and needless to say, Stromboli looks mighty fierce.

*The main exhibition hall, or Slice & Dice as we call it, was pretty cool. Lot's of lame booths for magnetic pain relieving bracelets, UV teeth bleaching stations and free back alignment tests. Lot's of cool booths though. I bought myself a new leather wallet and saw lot's of other things I would have bought if I didn't already have a pretty big backlog of geegaws I still need to find a home for. I did find a booth that was selling quick disconnects for garden hoses, which oddly enough I was recently wishing I had.

*The dizzy pass that lets us get onto as many of the fair rides as we wanted for a flat fee of 25 dollars paid off handsomely. We got onto pretty much every ride we wanted to at least once and even got to try out the fancy new haunted house ride. Imagine! A haunted house at a fair that isn't full of broken crap and mostly dark because most of the lights are burned out. I wasn't able to fit into one of the ride though, and I swear it mostly was because I was too tall. And yes, a little too wide.

*While on the Scrambler, Scottland and I spied a middle aged woman wearing what can only be described as a "Zeebrero." Basically, imagine a sombrero that's been decorated with faux zebra fur.

*We watched a bit of the Mutton Bustin World Championships. What's that? Well, imagine bullriding but for five years old. Yes, they strap children to the backs of sheep and let them loose. It's pretty crazy and very very cute.

*I picked up the coolest Marvin the Martian decal that I'll be attaching to the back window of the Tundra once it's back from having it's "cats" fixed/replaced.

*After leaving the fair, some guy approached Scott and offered to buy his dizzy pass for two dollars. Rachael subsequently offered to give him hers for free. He then pulls out a switchblade, grabs her hand and cuts the dizzy pass off her wrist. He then realizes that Rachael is freaked out by this and apologizes for scaring her. Neither myself, Scott or Scottland see this happen. Weird.

Anyhow, that this year's 2007 Puyallup. We managed to avoid too much crabiness. No one was sick or recovering from surgery and Scottland and I didn't have to sit through homophobic comments from a Jim Beam sales rep. All in all I'd say it was a good experience. Can't wait for next year! Yee Hah!!

Welcome to September!!

2007-09-13T11:26:00.000-07:00

Wait. What? It's almost half done? Sheesh. Where does the time go?

I'm finished up the rules write up for the next iteration of Syndicate. Play testing will commence again in the near future!

It was foggy this morning. Autumn isn't far away now, which is good. I'm getting tired of feeling guilty for not watering my plants as much as I should.

Dave Noonan (one of the designers for 4ED D&D) posted a link to the following bit of humor on his blog today. Though I think it's aimed more on those who are trying to design RPG's (I'm working on a simulative card game) some of its lessons definitely apply to what I'm doing. Mr. Noonan's blog may require you to sign into the WotC website.

Non-Conforming Loans

2007-08-29T10:46:00.000-07:00

For those of you who've heard me recently yammering on about Non-Conforming loans and how they're responsible for the meltdown in the housing market, this article sums up what I've been trying to say much better than I could.

Something Very Cool

2007-08-22T16:53:00.001-07:00

The Lyre Bird.

Get Out Of My Head

2007-08-21T10:04:00.001-07:00

Not much has been going on since the great conflagration. Scottland is currently away on a business trip and I'll be turning 33 on Thursday.

Mikey was sternly punished last night for blatantly sampling the "Kitty-Roca" while the Roca-making machine was in the box making said Roca. As in, I've just gotten into bed and the lights are off. The dog's on the bed. I can hear Stromboli in her box doing her business. Mikey suddenly gets up and walks into the Scooby room. Noises ensue. I get up and find him in the middle of the room looking at a chunk of Roca only half covered in its delicious crunchy outer covering of cat litter. Tempers flare. Noses get put into the Roca. Dogs get swatted, sternly admonished and then put into the walk-in closet for the rest of the night as punishment. Cat's luxuriate on the bed they don't have to share. I can't wait to have children.

In other news, before GenCon and the "Big 4nnouncement" Ryan Dancey, ex brand manager (I believe) of Dungeons and Dragons wrote a series of articles relating how he feels cooperative tabletop games (IE RPG's) must change if they are to remain relevant. I was rather shocked to see that many of his thoughts parallel my own. I'm going to post a link to the summary of his five article series. If you want to read the whole thing you can find it in the archives on his blog.

Evolve or Perish

On the one hand it's great to see the thoughts I've been kicking around on the subject validated by someone with a lot more "street-cred." On the other hand it makes me realize that some of this stuff that I thought was quite innovative isn't. Still, reading Mr. Dancey's post helped me crystallize some of my thoughts and I now think I have an idea of what GoatDog Game's first electronic product will be. You know, assuming GoatDog has products one through three and is turning enough of a profit roll money back into R&D.

Late Night Events

2007-08-17T09:29:00.000-07:00

Mikey's awake and alert, a low growl rumbling from his chest. Even in the darkness and without my glasses on I can see his posture. Whatever noise or smell it is that's bothering him, it's coming through the bedroom window.

"SNAP!!!"

That's odd. Fireworks in August at one in the morning?

"POP!!!"

Yeah. Definitely fireworks. Firecrackers maybe?

"SNAP! SNAP! POP! POP!"

A lot of firecrackers. Or maybe gunshots?

Then a high piercing shriek. Even more snaps and pops. Wow, maybe it's a regular shootout.

More screams. The snaps and pops have increased in frequency to the point where you can't tell where one starts and the other ends. I know this sound.

"Fire!" And then "FIRE!!!!"

Scottland and I jump out of bed and flip open the blinds. We can't see the source but the entire southern sky is filled with a towering, roiling, flickering orange column of smoke shot through with swirling streams of red-hot cinders. It looks like a volcanic eruption. Then we hear the first fire engine.

Mikey shoots off to the living room, barking at full volume. I dash around the bed, throw on my shorts, a shirt and sandles and follow the dog. I yell at him to go back to the bedroom and he obeys. Then I unlock the deadbolt and jaunt outside to get a closer look. I don't have to go very far.

Our house is located at the intersection of Andover and 42nd Street. One block to the west is California. Two blocks to the south and along 42nd street there's a catholic church, a row of new townhomes and some single family dwellings. Along California there's a couple of businesses, some sketchy apartment complexes and one of those mixed use luxury condo buildings I'm always joking about. The luxury condo building is under construction.

The screams have stopped now and the siren from the fire engine coming from the north is much louder. I can hear other sirens now. One from the south and another from the southeast. Flames are starting to lick above the buildings between me and the source. The plume is high enough now that it's hit the prevailing winds. It's bent over and trailing to the northeast in a flat, straight line. Without the rising hot air to keep them aloft, the glowing coals have started to rain out on the houses below. Luckily for us, the winds aren't quite northerly enough and it's the blocks to our south that are getting hit.

Then a great big cramp of fear hits me and I'm shivering and shaking. "This is what the Great Seattle Fire must've looked like," I thought. "This thing looks pretty bad. Are the firefighters going to be able to get it under control? Is it going to spread?" I marvel at what an amazing thing it is that we have professional firefighters and a robust water delivery system, such that great fires like those we had in the 19th century hardly ever happen anymore. The belltower of the Catholic Church is brightly lit with orange light and I wonder if it's the church that's burning.

I see a minivan driving slowly towards me up 42nd. It stops right at the corner in front of me and the woman sitting in the front passenger seat leans out her window. "It's that HUGE new building. It's burning." She sounds almost giggly, as if she's amused.

"Wow!" I reply. "That's crazy."

She nods. "Our house was right next to it. It caught on fire. We had to leave." She still sounds like the whole thing is really funny. I realize she's hysterical.

"I'm so sorry." For a change, I really mean it and I want my voice to convey my empathy for her situation. I wonder if it was her family that was doing the screaming if the building that's burning had no one in it.

She says "Thanks" and the mini-van starts driving to the north again. The fire is still intensifying and I can hear the shouts of what I think are the fire fighters at the scene. There are even more sirens now and its getting hard to tell how many there are and where they're coming from.

An older man walks up to me. He sounds chipper and looks like he's just out for a jaunt. "Is it the church?"

"No. It's the luxury condo building under construction on California."

"Oh." And he continues to walk down the street towards the fire.

A middle aged latino guy and someone else, maybe a man or a woman, I don't remember which walks down the hill along Andover.

"Is it the bank? It looks like it's the bank."

"No. It's the luxury condo building near the bank that they were building on California. I talked to a woman that lived right next door. She said it set their house on fire."

He says something in response but I don't remember what. A scruffy looking guy walks up from the north. He sounds kind of drunk.

"The website says it's the new building they were putting up."

There's already information posted on a website about this? Information sure travels fast. I decide to walk closer to California to see if I can get a better view. I reach the alley and can see straight down it to the backdoor of the fire. There are people standing in the alley, lit up so brightly that they're simply golden shapes in darkness. I can't tell if they're firefighters or gawkers. Flames are licking into the alley and I wonder which house the people in the minivan lived in.

By this time the flames are nearly as high as the belltower of the church and the sound of the fire is simply a roar. The smoke trail shifts a bit to the north and I head back towards my house, forming a plan in my head for what I'll do if the embers start falling onto it. The folk that were standing on the street corner with me have moved on.

Then, with a whoosh the fire climaxes. A giant mushroom looking cloud boils up and this one is qualitatively different from the cloud that came before in that it is GLOWING. Not with the reflected light of the fire below but with the ruddy light of its own internal heat. I realize that the building must've collapsed. I hope the fire fighters are okay.

After this it quickly becomes clear that the fire is under control as the flames disappear and the glow quickly subsides to a sullen lining barely visible above the intervening roofs and treetops. I walk back to the house. Scottland has locked Mikey in the walk in closet. With the sounds of the fire and sirens gone at this point, I figure it's okay to let Mikey out. He quickly jumps back on the bed and lays down. I follow him.

Scottland and I talk a bit about how scared we both were. Eventually he drifts off to sleep. I'm still amped up on the rush of hormones I felt when I first watched the fire and it takes me two more hours to drift off. I wake up again at four when Mikey growls again. I can smell the smoke now. The wind must've fully turned in our direction. I wonder if people are going to be able to smell it on Scottland when he goes to work tomorrow.

The next morning I get a closer look at the fire after I finish my run. I'm amazed at how small it seems. The building really wasn't that large. There are cinders all over the ground behind it and I can't really tell where the family in the mini-van came from. The building to the north is one of those converted houses, with the front being some kind of eyewear related business. The building to the south looks like a couple of apartments. Those are the only two that look damaged. The houses across the alley look fine, other than some scorched and dried out looking trees. The car parked along the alley looks undamaged. No melted tires or blackened paint. Amazing considering how big the fire looked last night.

More Cowbell!!

2007-08-15T09:25:00.000-07:00

The week before last, I took a class on descriptive writing through the Hugo House. The Hugo House is a non-profit organization that seeks to further the art of writing in various ways. The class was helpful and informative and I'd strongly recommend that budding writers such as myself consider taking a class or two. After the week was done I had actually written a couple of things that I'd consider showing to other people. One of them is posted below. As you can see, I have "issues" with long run-on sentences.

The purpose of the writing exercise that spawned this little piece was to make something ordinary seem strange and foreign by playing up the stranger elements. I think I did relatively good work here, making my fairly normal suburban neighborhood seem strange and odd.

*******

It was that time again. Through the single pane of glass in the kitchen window I could hear the muffled sound of my father horse whistling and ringing the old cowbell hanging off our front porch light in that way that could only mean, “Come home at once.” I surrendered my money, properties and “get out of jail free” card to Joel, who had once again claimed the role of banker, and took my leave.

I left the ramshackle old farm house my bible-thumping friends lived in. Mounting my rusty blue ten-speed I pedaled past the row of caged rabbits their family raised as a supplement to the meager quantities of foodstuffs they were able to purchase with their father’s salary as a pest eradication technician. A faint acrid scent wafted off the symmetrical piles of dung beneath the wire-floored cages and their inhabitants stared plaintively at me, begging for their freedom with their liquid brown eyes.

More than once I had been tempted to liberate the creatures. Their cells were never locked. As it did now, fear of the unknown consequences of such a noble action had always stayed my hand. Who was I to consign the entire Butt family to slow starvation, no matter how furry and adorable their food source? Having recently witnessed one such prisoner rapidly stunned with the blunt end of a hand-axe and than dispatched in quick succession with the other, I was comforted by the knowledge that their executions would be quick and relatively merciful.

As the rabbit prison passed and receded from view my attention now drifted to the next yard down the narrow gravel drive. As I gained speed and began to kick up a thin gray cloud of dust from my tires, the guardians of this home trotted into view. They immediately noted my presence and charged wildly. The mated pair of enormous Golden Labrador Retrievers, Yogi and Cindy, wanted to make sure that I understood that this was their territory. As such, they kept pace while snarling, barking and baring their teeth in a vicious, rabid-like frenzy.

Only a high chain link fence protected me from the murderous instincts of these beasts. Knowing I was safe, I put pressure on my hand brakes and returned their aggression with barks and howls of my own, inciting the dogs into even greater exertions. I briefly allowed myself to imagine the day when I would induce such a paroxysm of rage that Yogi and Cindy would entirely forget about the wall of the house at the far end of the fence and smack into it at full speed like a scene from a Road Runner cartoon. Such an event failed to occur today, as the dogs sensed the oncoming obstacle and quickly pulled back. The racket subsided as the bulk of the house interposed itself between us. I let off the hand brakes began to move faster.

Reaching the final third of the long dusty driveway, the sounds of numerous exotic birds began to fill the air. These birds dwelled within a number of filthy cages that filled the back porch of the broken down two story home occupied by a woman I mentally referred to as “Giant Smelly Mamma.” I had no idea if the birds, like the rabbits, were raised as a food source but I found it difficult to believe that one could find any real sustenance on the bones of canaries and cockatiels. Perhaps a parrot could provide enough meat, but to my knowledge there were no parrots on that porch.

As if on cue, the relative peace was shattered by the misbegotten love child of a shriek and a bellow. Words were presumably contained within the sound, but if they were in English or some other language I couldn't tell. One of the urchin-like children of the woman resentfully lurched to her bare feet and slouched out of the weedy patch of soil she and her numerous dirt-smudged siblings had been playing in. The girl had clearly not responded quickly enough to the first summons as a second one pealed forth from the window of the upstairs bedroom as if it were in fact the cage of a giant mutant cockatoo. The girl of no more than eleven or twelve shouted “I’m Coming!!” in retort and then, with only a little less volume, “Fuck!!!” Her brothers and sisters sniggered derisively and then went back to playing House or War or whatever it was they were doing.

As if to remind me that I was really no different from the girl in any substantial way other than our relative willingness to use foul language, the sound of my father loudly demanding my presence once again filled my ears. Clearly, I had not responded quickly enough to his summons either. It upset me to think that there might not be much difference between my family and the filthy spawn that inhabited that house. After a moment of thought though, one difference occurred to me. Though our situations might be quite similar, at least my family was classy enough to use a cowbell. Thus being reassured, I strove to peddle harder, hit the blacktop and turned left onto 115th street.

Can A Professional League Be Next?

2007-08-13T13:08:00.000-07:00

I was mildly amused when roller-derby was ironically resuscitated on the emergency room table a few years back. What do I mean by this? Simply that I knew of a people that were members (or wanted to be members) of a female league. Rat City Roller Girls or something.

But this? I just don't know what to say. Imagine my amusement when I was told last week that Olga would be attending a friend's kickball tournament. Kickball? Tournament? That game we played in grade school because we weren't yet coordinated enough to play baseball and softball? Are you being serious? No, apparently you're being ironic. I hoped that it was simply a momentary outbreak but alas I was wrong. It's a full fledged epidemic.

How so? Simply this. I'm at Verite and logging into the wireless network. A cute little welcome screen pops up and simultaneously lets me know that I'm in and that new t-shirts are available. New t-shirts that will strike fear into the heart's of your opponents on the kickball field with their un-holy ironic badassness. There!!! That's what I mean! It's a conspiracy.

Personally I can't wait until the harvesters of irony stripmine nostalgia down to where they're reduced to advertising Cops and Robbers tournaments.

Escape From LA

2007-08-13T08:35:00.000-07:00

It wasn't easy getting to LAX. Scottland drove while I leaned out the window and cleared the road of ravenous zombies with the grenade launcher we'd just traded a case of cigarettes and 50 gallons of petrol for. "Bessy" didn't help much with the mutant flesh eating cockroaches though. Still, we manged to make it with only a couple of bruises and a few roach bites.

The flight was nice, though. Excellent service and Pay it Forward as the inflight movie. I had nice views of Yosemite, the Three Sisters, Mt. Washington, Mt. Jefferson and Mt. Hood. Oddly enough, the sky was nearly clear (except for a thick layer of smog over the central valley) until we got right to the Washington border. Than it was cloudy and I couldn't see anything. Welcome back to Washington!!

La-La Land

2007-08-11T13:58:00.000-07:00

I've been in Southern California since Wednesday evening. It's the SO's 20 year high school reunion and I've come along as moral support.

Let me tell you, LA is the pits. So INCREDIBLY smoggy. I feel like I have a fine layer of soot lining my nasal passages. Based on the large quantities of congealed snot I've been blowing out ever since I arrived, I'd guess that the feeling closely approximates the reality.

We're actually down in the OC (Anaheim/Orange County) and staying at the Hilton right next to Disneyland. We have a fantastic view of the park and the nightly firework display. It's really kind of cool. Disney truly is the happiest place on earth. It's so happy that even the barbed wire topping the chain link fence surrounding the park whistles a friendly tune at you as you walk past.

Yesterday (Friday) I told the SO that I wanted to see something quintessentially LA, particularly as I had chosen the night before to read another two chapters of the last Harry Potter book rather than visit West Hollywood as we had originally planned. So we drove to the Santa Monica pier. The drive there took us 45 minutes. The drive back took us two hours. Luckily for me I'd brought the book I'm reading, the book I've just finished actually.

Only another twenty four hours and we'll be able to leave this mostly god-forsaken wasteland of a city. I've met a lot of nice people though. I feel bad for them. It must really suck to live here.

In other exciting news, for the first time since 1889, a tornado hit Brooklyn.

Everyone Else Is Doing It So Why Can't I?

2007-08-02T15:59:00.000-07:00

My Simpsons Avatar:

Le Sigh

2007-07-30T17:57:00.000-07:00

Shortly after I posted "clunky panorama" (ie within about 20 minutes) the hard drive in my Dell Inspiron 1000 decided to throw a rod. After much effort and cash I have a "phat" new laptop (Dell Lattitude 820) and an empty hard drive.

Yes, my last file backup (thanks to a CD burner on the fritz and my own laziness) was in March of 2006. All in all, I lost a bunch of D&D related work, a bunch of images from the interweb and my own digi-cam, all prior incarnations of my card game except the prototype deck and the outline and first chapter of my sci-fi book.

Yes. It sucks. But, life goes on and I shall rise to the occasion.

In other news, my "phat" new laptop allows me to play Civ 4, City of Heroes/Villains and I start my "intensive" week long writing course at Hugo House tonight.

Clunky Panorama

2007-07-06T10:43:00.000-07:00

Each individual picture I took from the Indian Watchtower really didn't do the view justice. It was just radically different from anything else I'd seen at the Canyon. In an attempt to "do it justice" I tried to piece together several photos to generate a panoram. Unfortunately, it didn't work quite as well as I had wanted. Next time I go to the Grand Canyon I'm bringing along a camera with larger field lenses.

Indian Watchtower

2007-07-06T10:39:00.000-07:00

The last South Rim viewpoint before leaving the park is the "Indian Watchtower" or "Desert View" point. It's pretty interesting because you can see a large swath of the Painted Desert, as well as up the canyon rather than across.

Moran Point

2007-07-03T08:15:00.001-07:00

After leaving the South Rim Village, we drove along the rim towards the eastern gate of the park. Originally we weren't going to stop, but I just couldn't help myself and shrilly demanded that Scottland stop at Moran Point.

Condors?

2007-07-02T23:25:00.001-07:00

After walking the rim trail we collected our booty from the Bright Angel giftshop and indulged in official Grand Canyon ice-cream cones. It was around this time that I took some pictures of what I think are California Condors in flight.

Nothing To Do With Phoenix

2007-06-28T15:16:00.001-07:00

Can you guess why I posted these two pictures to my blog?

Pictures From The Rim : Part Four

2007-06-28T08:13:00.001-07:00

Pictures From The Rim : Part Three

2007-06-27T14:41:00.000-07:00

Pictures From The Rim : Part Two

2007-06-26T10:37:00.000-07:00

Pictures From The Rim : Part One

2007-06-26T10:26:00.000-07:00

Along The Rim Trail

2007-06-26T10:19:00.000-07:00

After we ate lunch at the Bright Angel Lodge and perused the gift shop for swag, we took the "tram" down to the eastern end of the South Rim Village and walked along the rim trail back to the western end of the village, which also had the ice cream shop.

We started the hike about three hours after we had finished the Hermits Rest route. It was interesting to see how the canyon had visually changed. At high noon, the colors had seemed somewhat washed out but you could really see the various layers in the rock strata. As we were rounding into early evening, the colors started to become more intense, but the shadows had merged and expanded and now tended to delineate larger features, like mesas and valleys.

Don't Feed The Animals!!!!

2007-06-26T09:00:00.000-07:00

So there are signs posted all over the South Rim Village that tells visitors in no uncertain terms that they are not to feed any of the animals. This includes the squirrels and ravens, no matter how cute they look or how far up your pant leg they climb.

None-the-less, Scottland and I get to the oh-so-convenient snack stand at the end of the Hermits Rest Route and find tons of people sitting around feeding tastey little cheeze doodles to an army of squirrels and a flock (a murder?) of Ravens. I couldn't help but walk through the crowd while loudly (yet conversationally) telling Scottland how stupid people would have to be not to see the signs posted everywhere telling people not to feed the animals.

I did get a cool picture of a raven, though.

The End of the Line

2007-06-23T09:52:00.000-07:00

The views from Hermits Rest were all sort of the same, but the plants provided attractive framing for the views of the canyon. After we got to this part of the route, the "tram" turned around and went back to the South Rim Village. We could have stopped at Mojave and Hopi point, but decided we'd rather do other things. It was a good choice on our part to make. Besides, when we started to walk the rim trail at 4 PM, the sun had gotten much lower in the sky and the colors were much more striking.

Pima Point

2007-06-23T09:47:00.000-07:00

Looking west towards Hermits Rest and the end of the route.

As Scottland pointed out, after a while the overlooks start to all look the same. I think that's what was great about hiking the rim trail and seeing the other two points later in the day. The experiences were all really different.

Views From The Abyss

2007-06-23T09:42:00.001-07:00

I guess it's called the abyss because the angle between the viewer and the colorado river is much steeper, on account of the river bending towards the south rim at this point. These pictures don't really do it justice.

Powell Point

2007-06-22T12:43:00.001-07:00

The cliff/shelf/cliff nature of the walls of the Grand Canyon is a result of layers of easily eroded shale between more resistant layers of sandstone and limestone.

Looking west towards Hermits Rest. Visibility in the Grand Canyon (particularly during the winter) can easily exceed 100 miles. It was 93 miles the day we visited.

Trail Overlook and Maricopa Point

2007-06-22T12:36:00.000-07:00

A view of the bright angel fault and the trail down to the bottom of the canyon. Hikers are endlessly warned never to try to hike to the bottom of the canyon and back in a single day. The trail is 12 miles long one way

Views from Maricopa Point. There was a ranger here with telescopes set up to allow visitors to view a cave entrance in the canyon wall where a pair of California Condors were known to be nesting. We saw them flying over head, as well as one of their offsrping. One of them flew close enough for us to see the tracking number painted on it's belly.

The Hermits Rest Route

2007-06-22T12:18:00.000-07:00

Riding the "tram" and stopping at the various view points along the Hermit's Rest Route was the first thing we did when we reached the grand canyon. We skipped Mojave and Hopi point and walked from Maricopa to Powell Point. Between Maricopa and Powell is an abandoned Uranium mine that's been fenced off due to high radiation levels around the mine entrance.

Grand Canyon

2007-06-22T10:31:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday during our excursion to Phoenix, we drove north to the largest hole in the world, or at least North America. Perhaps the Marianas Trench is a bigger hole. I last visited the park in 2001 but Scottland hadn't been there since he was a very small child.

As usual, the place was just amazing. Before we got there, I told Scottland about my theory that it's the giant auditory nothing in one half of the world that makes the Grand Canyon so spectacular. It's not enough to see the giant hole, it's that you can really FEEL that it's there because sounds just go out and never come back.

Since we were coming up from Phoenix, our visit was limited to the south rim which is where I visited the last time. On that visit I did two thing. (1) I rode this tour bus thing between eight different lookouts over the canyon and (2) got horribly sunburned.

I managed to avoid getting sunburned by slathering myself with SPF 50 (this was a strategy I employed throughout the Phoenix trip to avoid getting burned) and was pleasantly surprised to discover that I could spend 10 hours in the sun of the high Colorado Plateau within getting even a little pink.

The vehicle tour was as cool as I remember, though Scottland was correct in his observation that after a while all the points start to look the same. After the vehicular tour we took a different bus to the east end of the south village and walked the rim trail (about 2.5 miles) to where we had parked our car. I didn't do that the last time and it was a cool experience. Very different from riding from lookout to lookout.

By the time we got back to the car is was maybe an hour and a half until sunset. We had gotten lunch at the Bright Angel Lodge (and discovered that you could rent rooms and cabins at the South Village), hit the gift shop and the ice-cream shop, which helped eat up a lot of time. I wanted to drive back to Flagstaff via the east entrance of the park so we hit a couple of the lookouts you can drive to on your way out of the park.

In particular we hit Indian Watchtower, which has this replica of an old Navajo (I think) watchtower that used to be there. The view from the watchtower is really different from the rest of the south rim, in that it's right at the point where the Canyon curves north. So, in addition to being able to see up the axis of the canyon rather than across, you can also see a long way across the painted desert and can see the canyon of the Little Colorado.

After we left the Indian Watchtower we exited the park and drove through the reservation that abuts it. As usual there were lots of weird little shacks on the side of the road selling trinkets. Scottland particularly liked the one that said "Nice Indians Ahead."

The drive back to Flagstaff was really cool, as we were driving across a relatively flat expanse of grass covered land as the sun was setting was setting behind a big clumping of cinder cones (We were in the area where you'd go to see Sunset Crater), with clouds covering the sky except in the west. The grass had already dried out and gone dormant, so it was brighter in color than the clouds or the mountains and more reflective. All of these things together had the effect of making it feel like we were driving through some enormous miles high cave. It was really cool.

The rest of the drive back was relatively uneventful, though Scottland was really freaked out by the multi-thousand foot descent off the Colorado Plateau on an unlit interstate where the maximum speed is 75 mph. We pulled off the interstate at one point to look at the desert night sky. It was amazing. I've seen the Milky Way before but never as an enormous, solid belt of milky white across the sky. Very cool.

Flight To Phoenix

2007-06-21T10:42:00.000-07:00

While flying to Phoenix we passed right over the top of Mt. Rainier, which was pretty much covered in clouds. Except for a little nub at the top. I took a cool picture of the phenomena. It looks a bit like an island in the clouds.

Phoenix Fest 2007

2007-06-19T07:36:00.000-07:00

For the last week of his six week sabbatical, Scottland and I flew to Phoenix. Why Phoenix? Well, mostly because we wanted to go somewhere warm and unfamiliar to either of us. We managed to visit the Grand Canyon, Taliesin West and the Phoenix Botanical Garden. Other than that, we mostly spent time in the pool reading and drinking. I also managed to do some research my book.

The picture is an interesting image of Phoenix and the area to the north of it. It was generated by combining a linear data set from the USGS and an elevation data set generated by some space shuttle mission, whatever that means.

Moses Lake Triathlon

2007-06-09T11:58:00.000-07:00

I managed to achieve one of my major goals for the year today when I completed the Moses Lake Triathlon. Your basic olympic triathlon consists of a one mile swim, a twentyfour mile bike and a 10 K run. A sprint triathlon halves all those distances. The particular event that I participated in was a "family" triathlon, which is a sprint triathlon where the swim distance has been halved again to a quarter of a mile.

Swim Time : 9:28
Transition 1 : 5:32
Bike Time : 55:23
Transition 2 : 0:58
Run Time : 34:33
Total Time : 1:45:56

To be frank, the race was really freaking hard. I managed to complete it and my times weren't abysmal, but the start of the 3K run after the 12 mile bike ride was pretty difficult. Still, I enjoyed myself and I'm planning on doing another one in Mid-September. It's funny how competative stuff like this can make a person. Though my only stated goal was to complete the triathlon, I'm already plotting ways to improve my race time.

Cardboard Cut-Outs or the Real Thing?

2007-04-29T12:13:00.000-07:00

My mother was in DC last week as part of the activities related to her winning the state of Oregon's teacher of the year award for 2006. One of those activities was having her photo taken with the President and Laura Bush.

Aquarium Setup - Steps One and Two

2007-04-27T09:30:00.000-07:00

I'm putting together a 55 gallon freshwater tropical community aquarium.

Step One :

Assemble aquarium stand

Place aquarium

Wash 60 lbs. of gravel and put gravel in tank

Add water

Assemble and install filter

Assemble and install lights

Place aquarium decorations

Step Two :

Calculate tank's watts to gallon ratio for lighting. (1.45)

Generate a list of desired plants based on light ratio and placement in tank.

Generate sketch of plant placement and determine number of plants needed.

Order plants from online distributor of aquarium gear.

Have plants shipped overnight.

Add chlorine and chloramine removing chemical.

Put plants in tank.

Add water to the lip of the tank.

Add fertilizer to water.

Biodiesel Production Facility of the Future

2007-04-25T13:16:00.000-07:00

I finished my research for the Biodiesel Production Facility Of The Future (BPFOTF) and was able to generate the attached map. I'll be using it to sketch out the bits of action that take place at this particular locale.

This chunk of research ended up being a very useful thought exercise for me as a whole. It serendipitously enabled me to sort out some related bits of setting material that I hadn't even thought to put effort into developing.

I'll definitely be applying this technique to other parts of the outline that are causing me trouble.

Syndicate

2007-04-23T11:11:00.000-07:00

Since December of 2005 I've been working on a card game that I have high hopes of being able to sell as an actual product one day. The game started off as a business based RPG, but I quickly realized that an RPG rule-set that simulated running a business would be about as fun as doing your taxes. It then occured to me that a card game might be a lot more fun, and I began putting said game together.

I've gone through about five iterations so far and have actually gotten to the point where I have a prototype deck I'm in the middle of playtesting. Iteration six will probably get printed and cut sometime next month, but so far things are looking really good.

The picture I've attached to this post shows the current prototype deck on the left with the three prior iterations on the right. The 1st iteration consisted of about 1,000 index cards and sadly, I didn't keep them.

Making a game is a lot more work than I thought it was when I started out.

King Canola's Coming to Kill You

2007-04-19T16:07:00.000-07:00

This post is part one in a series of posts that will fully cover my "down the rabbit hole experience" I had when I attempted to use the internet to do research for my sci-fi novel.

My daughter and her girls were telling jokes. Stephanie hit her mom's arm with the back of a butter knife in a gesture, "Oh mom", not hard enough to hurt. My daughters arm split open like it was rotten. She called me to ask what could have caused it. I said, "I'll bet anything that you are using Canola oil". Sure enough, there was a big gallon jug in the pantry.

Part One : A Writer's Toil

This whole thing started yesterday as I was toiling away on the outline for my sci-fi novel. I’m currently working on the part of the narrative that takes place in a bio-diesel facility south of Sacramento. Sketching out this particular set of scenes has been much more difficult than the rest of the outline so far.

After ruminating for a while on what the source of the problem might be, it occurred to me that I should engage in a creative exercise and see if that helped to knock some ideas loose. Sometimes, a bit of “world-building” helps me to really get into the center of what I’m trying to write about. So, I set out to do some research on the internets about how one goes about making bio-diesel.

This portion of the research went easily enough. Not surprisingly, most of the “civilian” websites on bio-diesel production weren’t very informative. What else would you expect from a bunch of hippies but poorly organized information? Eventually though, I ran across a number of academic sites that had plenty of relatively well-detailed information. From that information I was able to develope a generalized process schematic, and from that start generating an actual map of the facility.

In my head and on paper, the bio-diesel production facility of the future was taking shape.

***

In the next installment of the series, the author will blog about his efforts to select the ideal oil seed crop of the future.

Dungeon & Dragon Cancelled

2007-04-19T12:08:00.000-07:00

Yes. The news went out today. Finally. September will be the last month that the magazines of Dungeon and Dragon will publish issues.

I can't say that I'm surprised. In fact I'm not. Those of you that know me should know why.

I can't really comment on Dragon, as I've never read it, but I can tell you that the quality of Dungeon's material has lagged pretty badly for quite a while. Paizo had the the rights to use WOTC's entire catalog of D&D IP and yet all they did was continue to publish adventures that were nothing more than a rehash of 1st edition adventures.

I can't imagine that WOTC was ever pleased that Paizo wasn't supporting the new products they were putting out by publishing material that completely ignored its existence. Hello, Eberon?

I can say that I'm glad I decided to cancel my year-goal of submitting ten articles to Dungeon. It was a smart move on my part.

I can say that I'm excited to find out how this new online thing is going to work. From what I can tell, WOTC is going to be looking for contributors, and I plan to contribute.

Transitional Terrarium

2007-04-17T11:25:00.000-07:00

I originally put together my carnivorous terrarium in October of 2004. It's never done poorly, but when I finally managed to get rid of a scale infection it developed two years ago it really took off.

It looks quite cool now as the plants have grown around the objects I added to it early on and some unexpected specimens came in with the original sundews, venus fly-traps and pitcher plants.

I think I'm going to need to feed it again in the very near future. My hunch is I can buy fruit flys off the internet and just dump them in the tank.

Spring 2005

Summer 2005

March 2006

April 2007

Seattle Snowmageddon 2007 Part Deux : The Re-Freezening

2007-01-16T09:31:00.000-07:00

It snowed yet again in the wee hours of the morning. That's the third time this winter. Scottland is working from home again and we look forward to tales of 8 hour commutes to work from our friends.

West Seattle Winter Wonderland

2007-01-11T19:36:00.000-07:00

Complete with cars spinning their tires as they attempt to climb the supremely icey road immediately south of our house. Not as many people are trying it this time around, so I'm guessing a lot of people have learned their lesson from the storm in late November. Apparently west seattle got the brunt of the "Great Blizzard of 2007", as they're predictably calling it on the evening news.

Caught Comet McNaught

2007-01-11T19:31:00.000-07:00

As promised, I have managed to take a picture of the comet this evening as the weather was cooperating quite nicely. Nothing like a nice mass of freezing cold arctic air to suck the clouds from the sky. It's amazing what you can do with just a digital camera and a railing to set it on while you take a longer exposure.

Comet McNaught!!!

2007-01-09T18:47:00.000-07:00

You'll have to take my word for it, but the very faint smudge just a little below the center is my very own photo of Comet McNaught. This morning while perusing APOD I learned that this comet (which I'd read a bit about on APOD at an earlier date) had brightened significantly in the last few days and was now visible to the naked eye. I ran over to a good vantage point this morning to try and see it, but couldn't. Later that day I used "Your Sky" to figure out where and when I'd have to look to see the comet. I figured I would have to wait until Thursday (When a mass of bitterly cold polar air is forecast to rid the sky of clouds for two days) to get another chance. I was wrong. The sky miraculously cleared about half an our before sunset this evening (Jan 10th) and stayed clear long enough for me to watch the comet for about 20 minutes. It was awesome. I haven't seen a comet with my own two eyes since Hale-Bopp in 1997.

This House Is Clean

2006-11-20T13:20:00.000-07:00

I have just finished reinstalling my operating system and all other files on my laptop. My computer is squeaky clean.

Oh, and by the way, I was in Disney World for the last week.

Pineapple Express

2006-11-08T20:05:00.000-07:00

It's rained a lot the last few days here in Seattle. That's what happens when moist air blows up from the Southeast. I think this picture sums it up quite nicely.

Shuffling Cards Is Hard Work

2006-11-07T13:17:00.000-07:00

It's always weird when my Chemical Engineering background shows its ugly face in unexpected places.

I've been working on a collectible card game for the last couple of months and have just completed the second major revision of my game concept. One of the more annoying hassles with these revisions is that I have to print out, cut and then shuffle the revised deck. It always bothers me that putting the new deck together takes almost as much time as the re-design does.

I've managed to reduce the printing and the cutting to about as efficient a process as they can be without investing in new tools. There's definitely more fat to trim, but I need to wait until I know exactly what the base deck is going to look like.

Until recently, shuffling was the real beast and wildly inefficient in that I could spend a significant amount of time shuffling with a mechanical card shuffler and still come away with a deck that I just KNEW wasn't as random as it should be. The deck is currently quite large (I'll shrink it once I have a stable mechanic and can use play testing to figure out what the minimum optimal size is) so it's difficult to get all the cards spread out through the deck.

Usually what I do is split the cards (which start off as a highly ordered stack where numerous cards of the same type are all right next to one another) into a number of smaller decks that can be processed through the mechanical shuffler. I then split each of these smaller sub-decks in half, combine halves from different sub-decks and then run each recombined sub-deck through the shuffler a number of times. I then split each subdeck in half again and repeat the process. If I'm methodical I can get a decent amount of randomization across the deck, but I have to shuffle a number of different sub-decks that is, at minimum, equal to the square of the initial number of sub-decks. Even after all that, the amount of randomization is sub-optimal.

Shuffling is annoying and I hate doing it. So, having printed and cut the most recent revision, I decided to take a shower and vote before getting down to the business.

Oddly enough, showers seem to be where I've had most of my (hopefully) good ideas regarding my card game, and today was no different. My mind was wandering haphazardly around the topic of card shuffling, when I suddenly thought about, of all things, molecular diffusion.

Imagine if you will, a large tank filled with salt water. Then imagine that I very carefully and slowly add another volume of water, this time with no salt dissolved in it, such that the layer of fresh water essentially sits on top of the salt water. The dissolved salt will immediately begin to diffuse via brownian motion into the fresh water. The water will also diffuse from the fresh water layer into the salt water layer, though probably at a slower mass rate.

Diffusive mixing of liquids is an exceedingly slow process. I remember reading in one of my mass transfer texts that after a year the diffusing molecules described in the system above would only have managed to penetrate a few centimeters into the other layer. This why you stir when you want to mix two things together rapidly. Adding convection into the mix greatly increases the rate of mixing.

And that's the mental leap. Shuffling cards in the previously described manner is essentially a macro version of diffusive mixing. No matter what I do, it's going to take a long time to randomize the molecules, err I mean cards. The only way to increase the rate of mixing is to add in convection. So that's what I did.

I grabbed two large plastic tubs from the basement closet under the stairs and dumped the entire revised deck into one of the tubs. I then transferred those cards into the other tub by letting them fall into it over a distance of a couple of feet. Within about five minutes, the deck was entirely random. Now all I have to do is go through all the cards, repack them into a proper deck and flip half of them around. That will still take far less time than it would have to properly randomize the deck via diffusive mixing.

Sir! Please Put The Christmas Wreath Down!

2006-11-01T11:50:00.000-07:00

My partner sent out this email about something that happened last night. I'm just going to paste it here for posterity.

Happy Halloween!

You'll never believe the hilarious end that Aaron and I had to our Halloween night.

We go all out for Halloween with ghosts, ghouls, gravestones, dead bodies, cauldrons, mannequins - the works - and thus we've plunked quite a bit of money into decorations. In past years, teenagers have decided to steal some of the decorations out of our yard late on Halloween night and so we've begun the habit of moving all decorations into the garage after the last trick or treater to avoid theft.

By about 9:00 p.m. Halloween night, the trick or treaters had peetered out and Aaron and I, along with our friend, Suzanne, began to remove our Halloween deocrations from the front garden. This took only approximately 20 minutes (setting up takes 2 days!). Suzanne then took her leave and Aaron and I began to take care of the mannequins and pumpkins that were inside the house. By 9:30 p.m., I was standing on a stool on the back balcony removing a hanging ghoul. I noticed a group of late trick or treaters walking across the street. I quickly jumped down and shouted to Aaron to turn off the lights and close the blinds (as this is what you do when you don't want anymore trick or treaters). I ran inside and helped blow out candles and the like until the inside of the house was completely dark and all Halloween decorations had been removed.

Aaron sat down to work at his computer in the dark kitchen while I ran downstairs to fetch the Fall wreath to put on the front door. When I returned to the main floor, I noticed a light flash across our side windows. I didn't think much of it until I looked through the window adjacent to our front door and saw two people moving around in our front yard with flashlights. I moved closer to the door and noticed two police cars outside and recognized that the people in the front yard were police officers.

"Aaron?" I called into the kitchen, "Why are their police officers on our front lawn?"

Assuming the officers were looking for a thief who had escaped into our neighborhood I opened the front door, the fall wreath still clutched in my hand, and walked out onto our porch. The porch was pitch black as we had turned off all outside lights in addition to those inside. Suddenly, flashlights were pointed at me and a voice shouted at me from the yard (our porch has a half flight of stairs down to the yard).

"Sir! Please step down here! Quickly, Sir!" The voice boomed from behind the flashlight.

I descended our front stairs assuming that I was in danger as there was a "bad guy" using our backyard to hide from the police and the officers were attempting to protect me. I came face to face with one of the officers, a stocky, somewhat attractive white male, and he looked at me very seriously and continued to speak in his firm tone.

"What do you have in your hand? Do you live here, Sir!? Who are you?"

For a fleeting moment, I thought my friends had gotten me a stripper and this was all a joke. But then I noticed a third police car pull up to the house and before I knew it, six police officers were surrounding me. They continued to ask me who I was and if I lived in this duplex. I kept explaining that my partner and I lived in the house and that it was a single-family dwelling, not a duplex. I also explained that it was just a Fall wreath in my hand and I slowly set it down on the front steps.

By now, Aaron had descended the stairs and joined me on the front lawn. The officers continued to pummel us with questions and we kept explaining that we lived at this residence and that there was no one else in the house. They didn't seem to believe us and they kept asking the same questions over and over.

One of the officers checked Aaron's car in the driveway and asked if one of us was Aaron Cooke. Aaron, of course, raised his hand in response.

The head officer finally explained that a burglary had been reported at our house and they needed to confirm that we were not the burglars! The lightbulb went off in my head and I told the officers that we had quickly removed our extensive Halloween decorations and it may have looked as if we were robbing the house - especially when I was high on a stool on the balcony removing a hanging ghoul.

Two of the officers then asked if they could come inside with us and examine our ID's. We continued to explain that the fast removal of our decorations most likely looked suspicious to a neighbor who had not yet met us. When the officers entered the house, they saw the back balcony and it became clear to them that the neighbor assumed that the back balcony was the entrance to the second-half of our supposed "duplex" and my actions to remove the ghoul very much could look as if I was breaking and entering.

The officers examined our ID's and clearly saw that we did indeed live in the house. By then, the officers had calmed down and began laughing with us over the circumstances. At that point, a fourth police car pulled into our driveway! The officers explained that they take burglary calls very seriously and had responded within minutes (no lie!) to the 911 call from our neighbors.

As the officers apologized and thanked us for our cooperation on their way out the door, I asked them if they'd be willing to take a picture with us as our friends would never believe what happened.

Five officers posed with us on our front stairs - the sixth officer took the picture and the other two remained in their car.

As they departed, I jokingly told the lead officer that I thought, at first, he might be a stripper. This caused all of his colleagues to burst into laugther. He looked up at me sheepishly and told me that I had just given his fellow officers teasing ammunition for weeks to come. I apologized, but he then grinned at me. I think I gave him a bit of an ego boost that night!

So...if you live in West Seattle and your report a burglary, know that four police cars and eight officers will come to your rescue!

Enjoy the pic of Aaron and I with Seattle's finest! We're considering using it as this year's Christmas picture!

Happy Halloween!!

Scottland & Aaron

A Bio-luminescent Future

2006-10-30T14:05:00.000-07:00

Saturday was the annual Halloween Party at the HOF. Pictures will be forthcoming. My main contribution to the party (besides general help setting it up) was in the lighting department. In particular, I contrived to generate mason jars full of a murky liquid that radiated an eerie glow in a variety of colors. Most party goers seemed to be pretty impressed by them. I know I was.

At one point in the evening, I spoke to Elyse about a concept I have that's related to my science fiction novel. In the novel, a small group of people have access to some pretty far out bio-engineering technology. One of the many non-reproductive artificial life-forms they've created is a type of tree/bush that constantly produces small fruit-like organs. These fruit-like bodies produce luciferin during the day and luciferase at night. The enzyme (luciferase) and the substrate (luciferin) combine after dark to generate a soft green (or whatever color you want I suppose) glow and are used as a means of lighting public spaces (and private ones as well, I suppose.)

Anyhow, the point that I'm getting to is that said organisms already exist!

Gay Book Signings Are Not Different From Straight Books Signings!!!

2006-10-26T11:14:00.000-07:00

'Twon and I were chatting on the phone this morning. After a while we got off track and started wandering through a discussion of what makes a twink a twink. We bumped into Lance Bass, who kindly offered himself up as a proto-typical (though rapidly aging) twinkbot. Naturally, he was followed (at a respectable distance so as not to get any twink on his smooth, worked out chest) by Reichen.

Distracted by all things Reichen (Did you know that his original name was Richard and that he's not actually a German citizen?) I sent 'Twon on his merry way. Perusing through Reichen's personal website I discovered that he's just written a book on being closeted and in the Air Force Academy.

He wants you (the potential book purchaser) to know that you DO NOT need an invitation (it's at the bottom of the book tour schedule) to attend a book signing. For some reason, I find this amusing. If I ever manage to get something published, I hope I don't have to make this clarification to my potential readers.

Oh, and by the way, in case you were lucky enough to be invited, the appropriate dress for a Book Party at the Broadway Bar and Grill is business casual, not a fishnet thong.

I Have Seen It

2006-10-21T13:03:00.000-07:00

My prediction for future episodes of BSG.

Baltar will be put in some sort of position of power over the Cylons as a counter to the loss of consensus that the Cylons appear to be experiencing. This jives pretty well with the original series.

I'm still waiting for the Space Nazi's and the Glowing Angels.

Inflatable Klingon War-Birds

2006-10-19T12:27:00.000-07:00

In Robert Jordan's blog, a recent entry talks about how a writer friend had died. One of the works of this fellow that Jordan mentions is "How Much For Just The Planet?" Jordan considers this to be the only Star Trek comedy ever written.

The little gears in my brain start spinning and I think to myself, "I've read what can only be described as a Star Trek comedy. I wonder if it's the same book?" I pop over to Amazon and look the title up. Sure enough, it IS the novel in question, one of only two I've ever consumed.

I'm not sure I would consider it "good" but it does contain a number of hilarious descriptive scenes that to this day occasionally pop into mind when my brain starts wandering. Just to get a sense of what this literary masterpiece contains, here's a short list of things I remember.

Di-lithium cookies sheets.
A partially inflated Klingon War-Bird.
A Pie fight between the crew of the Enterprise and a number of Klingon diplomats.
A replicator that uncontrollably spits peppermint milkshake all over the inside of a cramped escaped pod.
An avian-based humanoid star fleet officer that eats what looks like a bird seed ice cream cone.

Good times.

My Mom Is Famous

2006-09-21T16:02:00.000-07:00

Here is the article.