:TESTO:Few things
are as satisfying
as putting down a book about Chaos
to look out an airplane window
at the edge of a cloud-system.

I swear I saw seahorses.

---

Fractals and Bach and scaled-out landscapes, oh my! I'm home from Cincinnati, and despite my pop-math reading selection, the trip itself was pleasant and tidy. I hiked the farm and picked black walnuts out of their shells and baked improvisationally (Upside-Down Pear Cake meets Corn Meal, and Very Fresh Spices in a fight to the sweet and gritty death), scrabbled effectively, drank in pleasant quantity with my parents and childhood friends, and was given the best baking dish ever.

The Cincinnati airport has a puffy-air explosives detector. You stand on a 3-walls-enclosed transporter pad and the walls go puff! and you stand there with the forward doors closed with an angry red stop-hand lit for the better part of 15 seconds before they decide that you haven't been fertilizing a garden or building a time machine in the clothes you're wearing or with your hair exposed, then the doors open and you get to step through the metal detector and the gene sequencer and the psychoanalyst. Then you board your plane, content that nobody but you managed to get through with a quart-full water bottle, and so you're safe.

Now I'm back and I'm here for all of 36 hours before running south to play briefly with Nathan, Jo, and maybe Rafe, then further south by train to spend a few days with sister Kate before enjoying the Twin Oaks New Years' scene, before heading back to Baltimore for a few hours at home to sleep before teaching on Tuesday, at which point Rafe may show up and hang around for a few days, fiddle in hand.

See? No chaos here. I'm clearly across the vacation-journey boundary, and have settled at home.
And if I'm not, I happen to be enjoying every iterative hop around my home, and the visits get better and better.

Maybe I'll go somewhere interesting for MLK weekend... :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:I got to play the part of the heathen at school last Thursday, discussing with students and faculty at opportune moments the True Meaning of Wintertime-Holidays:

"It's cold and dark and we're hungry and bored. Let's do something about it."
(I presented this notion in slightly more florid prose, and equally florid stick figures)

This winter, however, the notion of lighting great lights and feasting great feasts to ward off the dark didn't strike as deep for me, what with the miserably warm weather and patchy rain. I couldn't even say "it's gray and clammy, let's have a party" wth my heart behind it, because it wouldn't stay that way! How in nature's name are we supposed to have a heartwarming time of togetherness and joy if the world outside remains hospitable?

Lucky shmucks in Denver.


(In vaguely related news, I introduced a few of my shinier students to xkcd. I was pleased with their response. Thus I fulfill my role as geek-cultural inculcator) :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:A very pleasant wintertime to you all!

I'm in Cincinnati this week, and last night played a pleasant game of Scrabble with my father.

Then I went to bed, and dreamed of:
A fundraiser event for a prominent member of my home district's school board, taking place in a cross between Peters Hall at Oberlin and my mother's previous living-room, which was raided by the police (of which I was one), in which Erik stood fast against the law and barred me from searching the place,

and

A close page-by-page examination of a full-color Barnes-and-Noble-bargain-shelf-quality complete-works compilation of an author who I'm sure doesn't exist, apparently responsible for "Leonardo, the Fourth Musketeer" and some classic of the same ilk as Peter Pan, I think his first name was Orlando,

and

a small birthday celebration for George W. Bush, set in a cross between my classroom and Ten-Forward (the staff lounge on the Enterprise), where a handful of black-tie political folk mingled and sipped martinis, a hired entertainer (not quite Vic Fontaine) performed a touching birthday-song for the ol' commander-n'-chief, handing off the mic every other verse to mother Barbara Bush (who has the voice of my grandmother, apparently). Somebody poked me in the knee to tell me they were sneaking out before the party was over, but I couldn't (it was my room, after all).

I can relate almost all of the above images to events of the past few days, which is satisfying, if unmystical. :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:I have just baked 124* cookies, of a variety that shall be named "Mad Doctor Hrothgar's Blackberry Fnords." They feature black walnuts and dark chocolate chips and fresh blackberry jam-sauce-topping. Some of them have cocoa and blackberry in the dough, the others are standard back-of-the-chips recipe, aside from the topping and nut choice.

They are so named because the first batch was rather conical, and in general have the appearance of a great lumpy purple-red eye, which always puts me in mind of fnords. Don't you agree?

What? You've never seen a fnord? Well, then. Eat *these* cookies instead. Everything will be fine...

Anyhoo, they're delicious, and I had a blast making them. Most of them will be eaten by faculty and students. I think I shall give each student a fnord before they take their test on Thursday, to put them at ease.

Ewige Mehlkraft.


*It so happens that the cookies are arranged in 3 containers of 32 for delivery to school (where I teach base-2 math, no less), with 23 left over for house eating and 5 already eaten... Jim Carey's late to the party.
:ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:Once it got into my head, I had to get it out. So have a Looney Toon.

Bee Seasoning

Early morning. Bugs Bunny has outwitted Elmer Fudd, and so takes a rest by a babbling brook, sun dappling in the way it does through big leafy branches above. He has a "Rabbit Season" hunting poster in hand, a trophy/prop from his recent Fudd encounter

Things flit about him. A close-up shot reveals them to be fairies.

Bugs swats at one ("darn rotten insects"), sending it tumbling. Bugs goes to sleep.
The angry fairy hovers over the sleeping Bugs, and waves a wand at him.

Subtle glowy effects, and Bugs shrinks until hidden in the grass.

Bugs awakes to find himself insect-sized, hunting poster still in hand.
After a things-are-big sequence (encountering giant bugs, climbing grasses, escaping the huge Elmer Fudd's oblivious boot), Bugs encounters Elmer's fairy-analogue, an overweight hunter-pixie with gnat-wings.

"What kind of cweature awh you?" etc. Bugs identifies himself as a rabbit, then Elmer spies the "Rabbit Season" poster.

Hijinks ensue, involving things-are-big-now gags, and occasional glimpses into fairy life (groundbreaking on a new fairy-ring, public officials and construction workers humorously wingéd).

Bugs is eventually backed into a corner by Faiwy Fudd, and pleads and insists that he's not a rabbit at all, but a bee! A big, gray, angry bee (perhaps he wraps himself in striped flower-petals, or otherwise manages to disguise himself as a bee - what's something else small and stripy?)

"Not a wabbit? So much fowah wabbit season..."
Bugs, relieved, moves away from the wall/flowerstem he'd been up against, revealing a "Bee Season" poster.
"I didn't have a wabbit-hunting license anyways!"

Cue "the flight of the bumblebee".

Fudd pulls out an Acme (W)apid-Fire Bee-Bee gun. Bugs dances and scrambles to avoid the barrage of BBs (overturning a toadstool or a pillbug or something to use as a barricade - perhaps he hides out in a pillbug pillbox), and more hijinks.
Bugs uses his ears as a propeller, and ends up in a tree, where, after Fudd's laborious journey upward on his tiny winges, and a chase in and out of knotholes, with humorous spatial incongruities involving halves of guns and bodies showing up in odd holes, and firing/moving in the wrong directions, and a few more amusing moments, Bugs comes across a bee hive.

"Hey fellas!"

(ominous buzz in response)

"This guy says it's bee season, and he wants to hunt bees!"

(angry buzz crescendoes to a thunder)
The hive rumbles and erupts an improbable number of bees, which pursue Fudd to the horizon.

Bugs, content with a job well done, leans back on the branch and takes a rest. Sunset, fireflies, etc. A little mote flits about him, which he absently swats. A closeup reveals the mote to be a classically rendered atom, with electron rings a-spinning and little angry eyes in the nucleus. It draws out a lightning-charged wand, and raises it over Bugs...

...who catches the atom in a lightning-bug jar. "Ooooh No. Not this time".
Zoom out on Bugs napping, the atom glowing and bouncing against the jar-walls.

Fade to black, and cut to "That's All, Folks!" :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:Mm... the snow doesn't stack, hey? It does now. It felt a bit funny having the old flakes on the bottom melt out from under the top, so a little heat exchange on the settling flakes evens that out. Maybe too much, but the shapes of the snowmounds progress nicely over time, including a nice everything-is-slushy phase near the end of a melt.

Enjoy.

src bin


The next step will be to replace  the call to [NSImage drawImage] with something zippier - that's where the app slows down, drawing and compositing hundreds of overlapping bitmaps per frame. Shall I bridge to the known OpenGL, or the apparently-integrated CoreImage? Your opinions are welcome, no matter which APIs you know.

---

And the Bee Seasoning is fermenting jollily, the most potent early fermenter I've met yet. It's actually making little "whee" noises as the airlock releases, every 15 seconds or so.

whee! :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:I've been reminded that there was a bit of magic in Jed's xsnow - he sampled the desktop background to color each flake. Now you can, too.

Other changes include:

• UI/preferential control of flake melt-rate
• better interaction between flake rotation and window-landing
• toggle for CPU load -> flake spin rate.
• fried-elf-onna-stick with every download!

Download the Mac OS X application here, and the source code here.
I've given a lot of my ninja turtle collection, untouched for over a decade, to my nearly brother-in-law's 6-year-old (my nephew!) this winter - I feel good in a passing-of-the-torch sort of way, but I hope he'll let me play with them. Him.

Note to self: when shopping for previous-generation iPod shuffles on eBay, be sure to note the presence or absence of the word "style" between "iPod shuffle" and "MP3 Player". Damn, I'm gullible. I shall attempt to complain/arrange return, but at least it wasn't expensive.

I have brewed the wort for the mead that shall be "Bee Seasoning", using the wild mountain berry honey and a few pints of blackberries. The color is fantastic, but I decided not to let the berries ferment in the wort (which will become the mead), because I didn't have a big first-stage fermenter with a wide enough mouth, nor sufficient straining material to make a bag for the berries to live in. So the flavor will mainly come from the honey, and the grape juice, which shall be fine. I'm using a new 5-gallon carboy, so now I can keep two batches going at once, my kitchen looking evermore like a mad science laboratory.

The blackberry pulp that didn't make it into the mead made it into a very strange bread-cake, which is delicious and subtle, if not for the rather dense assortment of seeds and piths and such. I followed NO recipe, just my head's intuition, and while American sensibilities might call for twice as much sugar, I'm happy with the result. Except it's a cartoon-zombie shade of gray-purple-blue, and the seed thing. A near-boundary point in the Delicious Set, to be sure.

Foo. :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:Once upon a time,
Jed's computer was snowing.

In the lab, the flakes billowed merrily,
growing in drifts and piles
of purple-blue and pink
along windowpanes

Surely, said the youthful I
the wind and snow on his screen
must be related in some arcane way
to something computery!

Perhaps the snow fell heavier when the CPU was working hard?
Or blizzards came when the throughput increased!

For Jed was mythic,
and nothing was beyond his making,
but I was young and full of ideas, and thus disappointed.

He had only changed the color of the flakes,
the snow was simply decorative.
I wept, for the world was not magic.

So I carried that heart-sadness for years beyond count,
until the day I decided to pick up that thing of my dreams
and make every damn thing I could get my hands on
respond to the network's state.

So here's somebody else's desktop-snow program for Mac OS X,
hacked to snow harder when the packets are flying thick,
and the wind to blow faster when the bandwidth is best
and to stick the flakes to the top of the windows, the way they're meant to.

I've even included Jed's colors.

Happy Winter.

(the source may be GPL'ed, because I added a class that was)

//edit: was just Intel-architecture, now Universal. :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:Today, I

• Had several passerby ooh and ahh over my classroom winter-lights that respond to network traffic*
• Received unexpected heartfelt thanks for the work I did 3 years ago at Southwestern High School
• Won an eBay auction at a reasonable price
  
• Walked home afore and athwart a blustery wind
• Removed a flow-impeding mineral deposit from my toilet's siphon jet with a coat-hanger and white vinegar
• Used the words "calciferous" and "athwart" in conversation
• Baked a hearty meal of acorn squash and honey-ginger-garlic tofu
• Wrote a web-log post.

The second of the bunch is unquestionably the best. When I taught Geometry at Southwestern, I would spend ridiculous amounts of my evenings (especially relative to payoff) making worksheets and activities and teaching aids, of which I was rather proud despite their frequent use as intra-class projectiles. It kept me focused and sane, let me apply my bottomless love of graphic design against the love-debt that would have otherwise developed in the teaching arena. I shared these with a would-be physics teacher at another high school who was by administrative fiat also teaching Geometry - we would plan units together, share strategies and horror stories, and generally keep each other from giving up. Today I happened to run into an older teacher who happened to work in the Geometry trenches alongside my teacher-friend during the year in question, and when he discovered that I was the author of the worksheets she had shared with him, he very nearly hugged me in thanks (which would have had disruptive aftereffects among my classful of homophobic students, so his visible restraint was all the more touching). My mad, sometimes futile-feeling labors have been fully repaid by the look on that man's face.

So, yeah. I feel special.

---

*The network lights are a hand-hacked application of the X10 home automation system, controlled by an RF-transmitting serial dongle on a machine in my room (running Knoppix, because my RedHat installation didn't include gcc for some reason, and the livecd was closer to hand than the install disks), which will periodically time the download of a file of known size, and adjust the lights' brightness in proportion to throughput. They're strung between my laboratory racks in such a way as to resemble the Golden Gate Bridge of the Cisco logo, and make me feel extra clever. :ENDTESTO: