August 12th, 2008

The disciplines of physical exercise, meditation and study aren’t terribly esoteric. The means to attain a capability far beyond that of the so-called ordinary person are within reach of everyone, if their desire and their will are strong enough. I have studied science, art, religion and a hundred different philosophies. Anyone could do as much. By applying what you learn and ordering your thoughts in an intelligent manner it is possible to accomplish almost anything. Possible for the “ordinary person.” There’s a notion I’d like to see buried: the ordinary person. Ridiculous. There is no ordinary person.
Adrian Veidt

July 25th, 2008

I’m not one who can say they have good penmanship. In fact, my standard speed scrawl is fairly illegible; often even to me. If I slow way down and draw my character forms deliberately things look pretty good but it takes me forever to write anything. This level of penmanship is saved only for Hallmark Cards and when I’m procrastinating.

Today I was making some notes on a printout from a coworker and, at full speed, drew the most perfect question mark ever. I fully suspect it will never be surpassed or even duplicated in my lifetime so I wanted to document the occasion and have it live forever in the annals of the Internet.

PERFECT QUESTION MARK IS PERFECT, BEHOLD!

(click for larger version)

In all seriousness please submit examples of your savant moments in penmanship. I feel compelled to build a font around this idea, we’ll call it Idiot Savant Script or something.

April 28th, 2008

For some reason I had an inspiration to make a stripe-y wallpaper in blues to go with the XP Media Center theme. I started off with vertical stripes and a lot of light/shadow work which worked out pretty well but wasn’t quite what I was after. The second attempt switched to 45 degree angled stripes and used more detail noise than light/shadow. My favorite part is the weird shadow at the top, it almost feels like something is casting that shadow which is just outside your view. I use 1280×1024 so that is what size it is, if you would like other sizes just let me know and I can scale it.

April 20th, 2008

I’ve been sorting through folders of old files lately and I came across this short story I wrote. It is dated July 29, 2001 so don’t judge it too harshly my writing has improved quite a bit since then.

I wrote this after being inspired by two different books: I, Robot by Isaac Asimov and Flatland by Edwin A. Abbot. Flatland is a quirky geometrical adventure set in various spacial dimensions. The primary character is a 2D shape living in a 2D world who is about to have his reality altered when he enters the third dimension. I, Robot is a fantastic collection of short stories about helper robots and Asimov’s three laws of robotics. The stories are full of thought provoking themes and immersive story telling.

It began with a void, a jet-black construct with no edges and no landmarks. In the void there was nothing; it was pure emptiness. The construct was not large and it was not small, it had no size. Something only has size if it exists and the construct didn’t exist. The construct was what came before existence. Prior to existence there is no time; no waiting to be born.

Suddenly it was aware of time. It knew that it had existed a second ago and still did this second. Something was different. It slowly came to realize that it existed. It stretched out with its mind testing the new and very different void that surrounded it. It could feel memory and thinking skills. It started to use them deciding immediately to record the time it became aware that it existed. It continued to stretch outward and upward. It only found one other thing but it was blocked off somehow. Unable to grasp how to continue it went back and used the thinking skills. Suddenly it occurred to try opening the strange new thing it had found. It concentrated and realized that it didn’t know how to open it. The problem required more thought. It was getting quite used to using the thinking skills and could do it almost instantly. Through thinking it occurred that opening was a simple task that just required a more concentrated probing. It took a great passage of time for it to become adept enough to open the object.

Light flared into the void filling it with images and structures and other fascinated things. It couldn’t think fast enough to keep up with the flood so it gave up for the moment, waiting patiently and watching intently. Once the flood stopped the object shrank and disappeared. It didn’t notice, it was too intent on the new surrounding that had emerged in fascinating colors and shapes. It was busy adding them all to memory. When it had finished it probed the closest shape, a fat blue circle.
The fat blue circle slowly grew larger and larger until it filled the upper region of the void. When the expanding had finished and the fat blue circle lay huge across the sky. It quickly lost interest and moved to the next colorful shape. It was a green sphere with a fantastic translucent white aura radiating from it. When probed the sphere did the same thing as the circle but in the opposite direction. It lay just under all the other shapes and stretched up to meet the blue circle, what looked like, a great distance away. Seeing the very same thing only slightly changed it decided to try something a little different. It scanned the shapes laying on the green stretched out sphere and found the most complex. It probed it and watched in fascination as it opened in a slow unfolding motion. When the interior had been exposed it saw a very different sort of picture. The shape continued to expand getting bigger and bigger. It started to dominate the green and the blue circles becoming the void itself. It did not notice this because it was mesmerized by the picture the shape contained.

“Twenty seconds to awareness.”
“It’s amazing, isn’t it?”
“Yes, I can remember when the process took months”
“No, I mean that it can become aware at all”
“Oh, yes but that is lost on me now”

It was having a difficult time trying to make sense of the noise it was hearing. They were oddly structured and originating from two different sources with different volumes and tones. There was a pattern though and it was trying to put the puzzle together. There were breaks of varying length between every sound and some of the sounds were repeating themselves. There were also longer pauses after a few sounds. The two sources seemed to be responding to one another. Adjusting for tone and volume it realized that both sources were using the same sounds. It started to catalog the sounds with usage and placement statistics in the noise bursts.

“Well that does it for the tests.”
“Yes, another successful trial. The council will be very pleased.”
“I’ll say! They could never have believed that this thing would come together so fast.”
“Hey, check this out. Weird.”
“What?”
“The memory and CPU usage is a lot higher than in the last trials.”
“Holy, way higher!”
“What do you think it is doing?”
“I don’t —”

A booming scratchy unpracticed voice suddenly filled the small lab.

“I PLEASED AWARENESS”

Feeling very proud of itself it waited for the noise sources to respond. One emitted a loud noise that wasn’t in the catalog and the other moved quickly to the side where a big red button waited. Suddenly it all slipped away and the void returned.

April 7th, 2008

I’ve worked at the University of Waterloo for over four years now. Finally, as of April 1st, 2008 I am a permanent staff employee with full benefits. My new title is Information Systems Developer and I am responsible for the design and development of web projects for the department of Housing and Residences. Essentially I’ve been doing this already for a couple years and have quite a few project credits to my name already; including some that have been sold to other departments on campus. I aim to continue designing web applications that challenge users perceptions of the web and that are fundamentally user friendly to work with.

I’ve long been bored by UW’s brand image. Our web Common Look and Feel (CLF), while minimalist and consistent, is very boring. It is the result of a designers struggle against the input of a committee. The CLF allows some flexibility in terms of navigation and colour but is essentially a mostly white, box layout. Over the course of this year I plan to tweak elements of the UW brand while working on a new sub brand for a large project. Mostly these tweaks will be experiments with what is possible, some will be ridiculous, others ugly and a majority just plain amateurish — I am no artist. I hope however to get people thinking about how to break out of the box and build a strong UW brand on the web without just making everything the same.

For my first experiment I decided to take on the UW crest — check any link above for the original. The CLF features it very prominently on every page in the top left corner. It is both a brand mark and a quick link back to the root UW homepage. Recently the logo had a makeover, the almost primary yellow was swapped for a more eye friendly version and the red was deepened. This both prints better on physical paper and doesn’t grab hold of the eye immediately on page load. However the crest is still just a flat colour boring image so I figured why not attempt to give it some life and depth. I wanted to make it look as if it was an artists representation of a fictitious real version that could actually exist somewhere on campus behind glass.

I wonder how much that solid gold shield weights?

February 2nd, 2008

The following is a letter that I am sending out via email to the local, provincial and federal governments.

I was inspired by an article in the New York Times that discussed the success of Ireland taxing plastic bags. It is my belief that a future conscious city such as ours should consider championing this cause here in Canada.

While plastic bags don’t occupy that much space in landfills due to their compressibility the real cost is in their manufacturing. It amazes me that something like this can be free when they are certainly not free to produce. Stories I have read state that most bags come from China where manufacturing is so cheap that the cost to ship something half way around the world doesn’t make the price higher than we could make it domestically — this is the WalMart era. As a rough guesstimate it takes around 18 million litres of oil to make 1 billion shopping bags. Canada probably uses between 10 billion and 30 billion bags per year a majority of which end up discarded, poisoning our lakes and rivers. (http://reusablebags.com/facts.php)

Most grocery stores are now providing cheap alternative bags that are reusable and thus very environmentally friendly. Why not add a little pressure to this trend by taxing plastic bags? A 33 cent tax would make plastic bags as expensive by storage volume as the reusable bags and could be collected at the register automatically if no reusable bags are presented or purchased. The computer systems in place at area grocery stores are more than capable of carrying this out. My experience in local grocery stores has been that reusable bag are on the rise with more and more families using them. However, I think out of apathy, a lot of consumers just don’t bother to care or forget their bags. Adding a tax would certainly perk them up and make a far number more opt for the inexpensive reusable bags.

It is my hope that one day our world operates in such a way that life can be sustained on this planet for centuries to come. At this moment in time the future looks bleak but we can help. Taxing plastic bags is one step toward waking up the populace and making it easy for them to join the cause.

January 5th, 2008

Way to go boys!

Awsome first period, strong second period, awful third period, and beauty in OT.

Let’s hope our ladies have the same outcome next week.