On Becoming My Father

I have a certain degree of renown among those who know me for my ability to go to sleep quickly (within 30 seconds of putting my head down), and under any circumstances (like in the back of a Jeep CJ5 on a freeway, without a seat, blanket, pillow, or anything else between me and the steel body. That appears to be done (for now), as I apparently have become my Father.

I go to sleep at around midnight, and I wake up around 4am. By 5, I'm pretty sure I'm not going back to sleep in the next hour, much less the next thirty seconds. So, I get up, maneuver around the three dogs and 1 cat (used to be 2 cats before this past weekend -- Lily, we all miss you so much), pee, and move to the next room to sit at the computer.

It almost doesn't matter what I do on it, hack Processing (processing.org), email, freecell, I'm going to be at it until 6 or 7am, maybe feed the cat (Dash is as insistent about his 6am breakfast, as I am about a noon lunch, even though he is clearly still looking for his sister Lily). I'll go back to bed then (but at this point, unless Mia Houdini has reserved a spot for me, all the normal human bed configurations are taken, so Molly has to put up with me stretched sideways and using her for a pillow) and sleep until Molly wakes me as she heads off to work.

I realized during this mornings cycle, that this is exactly what my dad did for, oh say, the last 30 years of his life, as his and moms sleep cycle transitioned from 8 hours a night to 2x4s or 3x3s through the course of the day. And now that I've realized this, I also realize I'm not freaking out about it (which I have in the past, when attempting to fight some of my fathers more onerous demons), and not even trying to circumvent it (I have a number of techniques for falling asleep quickly under stressful conditions, none of which I'm using). Whether I'm easing in to the next genetically-dictated phase of life, or taking a page from dads book, I have to wonder what this portends for the future.

Somehow, through the magic of some cruel psychological twist, I've tied the death of our cat (which I was present for) with the death of my father (which I was not, and barely), and I spent most of my weekend in a fairly vegetative state, during which of course several other deaths, medical emergencies, and other vagaries of life managed to pile on during. Fortunately for me, I married extremely well, and my fabulous wife was able to help me along, even in the face of her own burdens (we both practice the alternating-meltdown technique).

The idea for this blog-vomitus started out as me planning to send an email to my little (yet deeply fabulous) sister Liz, and I thought about cc'ing some friends who I've been through a lot with, and ended up posting here (planning on sending them all pointer to it). To some, blogging is just a step away from the verbal diarrhea that has infected modern discourse. To others, a chance to share information. To me, if I'm not solving a problem with it, I'd better use it to improve my writing skills. So let me know which of these 3 categories it seemed to fall into from your perspective (if you'd be so kind).

What's on my kindle (with help from the iPhone Kindle App)

Authors (without naming series):
Aaron Allston
Isaac Asimov
Jim Butcher
Lewis Carroll
Tory Denning
Ian Douglas
Warren Ellis
Harlan Ellison
W.E.B. Griffin
Neil Gaiman
Charlaine Harris
Stephen King
Edward M. Lerner
Richard K. Morgan
Walter Mosely
Naomi Novik
P.J. O'Rourke
Robert B. Parker
Don Rickles
John Scalzi
e.e. 'Doc' Smith
Hunter S. Thompson
Karen Traviss
Andrew Vachss

Books both read and recommended
World War Z
Soon I Will Be Invincible (Austin Grossman)
Storming Las Vegas (John Huddy)
Halting State (Charles Stross)
Spin (Robert Charles Wilson)
Generation Kill (Robert Charles Wilson)

Lets hear it for Anarchy!

I'm a big fan of creative anarchy.
Making change for changes sake can be
inspiring, powerful, and most of all fun.
And when it doesn't work out, sometimes
there are valuable lessons to be learned.

Recently (last week), ACM Siggraph did a major
change up, some of which I applaud, and some of
which I hope they'll learn from, move on, and never
repeat. In the former category, I applaud the return
of Friday Sessions (because traditionally, Friday
sessions have the best papers presented). In the
latter category, doing the 'Welcome'
dinner on the last night of the exhibition and the
penultimate day of the conference always strikes me
as silly; Making it impossible to see the best of
the CAF/Film Show/Electronic Theater at a single sitting
was disappointing. I'd also like to commend everyone who
stepped up and provided for an otherwise great CAF, the Stan
Winston tribute, the showing of Clone Wars, and other great
uses of the Nokia Theatre.

I'd like to give particular props to:

Diffusion Curves: A Vector Representation for Smooth Shaded Images,
A. Orzan, A. Bousseau, H. Winemuller, P. Barla,
J. Thollot, and D. Salesin (INRIA, Grenoble U, Adobe, UWashington);

Real Time Gradient-Domain Painting,
J. McCann, N.S. Pollard (CMU);

and
Interactive Visual Editing of Grammars for Procedural Architecture,
M. Lipp, P. Wonka, M. Wimmer (TU, Austria)

Oktopodi, winner of both the Jury and Audience awards, and
Our Wonderful Nature, winner of the 'Well Told Fable' award at the CAF.

And what of Siggraph 2009?

New Orleans has a great history and culture of
both food and entertainment.
I hope the committees take advantage of what the
community has to offer. It also seemed like the show floor was
both small and somewhat under-utilized...might I humbly suggest the
wheel of fortune for next year -- an interleaved circle/pavilion of
recruiting booths (DD, Imageworks, ILM, Pixar, etc.) and Schools
(SCAD, Ringling, etc.) perhaps surrounded by an outer ring of book,
Magazine, and DVD publishers (thanks Carmi for the initial idea).
And if the recruiting organizations or people don't like the idea of
everyone seeing who is talking to who, face the recruiting booths outwards...

Marriage

I've found recently that getting married was much more
interesting than I expected...because we had lived
together for some time before getting married,
and spent most of our spare hours together once we
started dating, I expected marriage to be a sort of
continuance of that. It wasn't. I'm trying to stay
away from trite and over-used cliches, but without them,
the nuance about the growth of the relationship
(and the responsibilities it brings) as we work out
various things (you know, the kind involving banging
your head against the wall), is that I'm looking
even more forward to it every day.

Thank you, Chris Evans!

It's nice to see the blogosphere actually helping people out, so if you
are another prisoner of python in Motion Builder, you might want to look at
Chris' very cogent example/tutorial on exploiting the telnet port
here

Love,
Wook

MoBuPy #8

Not so much a Python issue as a general Mobu issue.
I tend to leave Mobu up and running all day
(I have two machines side-by-side with 1 shared monitor),
and I find that Mobu tends to die an annoying
and horrible death within 2 to 24 hours.
Often it just decides to leap off to the low address range,
but right now it's just hung,
doing nothing (or as Windows puts it: 'Not Responding').
Other people seen this?

MoBuPy #7 -- why does it soil itself?

I've noticed that MoBu at Qt don't appear to get along well.
It seems like every 4 to 6 times I run something under Mobu during the
debug cycle, MoBu is crashing.
Even without necessarily making any changes to the code.
I'm having to go the diagnostic print route while getting this
code to work, and it doesn't seem to matter how simple a scene,
or how minimally I've changed the code, after a while,
it just crashes Mobu.

7.5 ext 2 for those who care.