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Reader, I'm tired. I've studied until my corneas dried up and crumbled out (and skipped Spider-man). I always wonder what infinitesimally small physical changes take place in my brain when I do these marathons. Is it looking like a rat's nest up there right now? I also wonder how hard the other people study. Judging by the scores whenever a professor presents the mean average for an exam, the other people are studying far less than I. I will be happy to be rid of this semester. It never really gelled with me the way it had the potential to. Multi-variable calculus and advanced statistics got me down. Looking forward to Summer 1 now, which starts in a couple of weeks. I'm skipping the May-mester in order to recover a bit. I had a couple talks with a couple people and now I'm actually looking forward to this wedding. Oh, I still think it's a sad waste of money (something like $50,000, I kid you not), and I'm still not all that fired up about ushering during the dry Lutheran/Jewish ceremony itself, but everything else including the reception sounds good. We have fun get-together/toast/shower type stuff planned for Friday, Saturday, and Monday, and the reception is going to be BIG. At least Bob didn't pick out light blue tuxes as I mused he might do. It will be interesting to have my Uncle Lowell, my mother's brother-in-law from Minnesota, and my Uncle Doug, my father's brother, from Massachusetts, in the same room at the same time. Ever since I was a boy, I've thought these two were two sides of the same person. Both extremely cool and worthy of being admired and looked up to unequivocally. Uncle Doug and Aunt Carmen are riding over on their bikes from their Summer home in Florida. Envy. Pretty much the only relatives who aren't going to be in town are the ones who are dead now. All my cousins and step-cousins, all my surviving grandparents. Wow. In fact, all three houses and the retirement home will be so full, I have to stay at a hotel!! Grumble, grumble. I'm going somewhere CHEAP. I had a major blowout in the front tube of my bike. I was going fast, maybe 20-25 mph down a decline. I was leaning to avoid the speedbumps and POOF the tube just gave up the ship and I nearly went flying down the road. About four different bad things could have happened to me, including a highside, a couple of different lowsides, hitting the curb, and others. But I didn't die and didn't even really crash. It was ugly though. All the air was gone in about two seconds. It wasn't glass or anything, just months of 80 psi. I was more pissed than I was startled. I have close calls all the time, I'm used to it, but where am I going to find another super heavy-duty 26x2.10? One thing I want to avoid is that 'adult sag' I see around me all the time. You know, those people who aren't necessarily overweight, but look as if the walk from the car to class is going to kill them, as if exercise eludes them at every turn, who look ill at ease with physical movement. Whose mannerisms suggest a painfully sedentary lifestyle and career and hobby. Who haven't 'run' for half a decade. I learned how to do cool effects with html text. I can do waves and shadows and fades and glows. It's kind of a lengthy syntax, which probably explains why to this day I've never ever seen anyone use it before. I just stumbled upon a site explaining what it was and I was skeptical, 'yah right'. But I came here to Diaryland and experimented with an old post. And it worked, every bit of it. So then I went to a message board which has full html enabled and amazed my friends. I'll have a few examples in my next post. I'm actually using a very subtle filter right now, look closely at the words and you might see a very slight shadow. Next up: embedded fonts. I'm also really enjoying the diversion that Renderosity provides. What is Renderosity? An international web community catering to 3-D artists (with some photography and computer-created or altered 2-D thrown in as well). They have 120,000 pictures, with new ones posted every five minutes or so. About eighty percent of them are pure genius, pure beauty. Gems. It's a joy to log in and see one hundred new pictures since the last time you were on, each of which shows the results of hours and hours of meticulous effort and care. I think the seed has been planted in me as well--maybe I'll dabble some more in some 3-D art of my own. However, if I do so, it won't be with the software I currently have (Ray Dream 4 and Truespace 3). I will buy something else. I heard 3D Studio Max 2.1 with Character Studio and several plug-ins can be had for $500 from time to time! Of course, you need horsepower to run that--my brother's 512 MB Athlon 1.4/Geforce 3-64 is probably bare minimum for any high-quality still or any animation, and a quad-chip Pentium 4 Xeon with 2 Gigs and a WildCat 256 is preferable. But dang. Some of that art. I could get lost in it. It stuns me to see what's possible nowadays. Well then, I will leave it at that. � � |