I promised a friend that I would post some pictures of cards from my friend's boutique. Now my girlfriend works there so I had a good opportunity to snoop through the cards and take pictures.
I was over at the Lab with Leo and found this video on Creative Commons licensing. I definitely found it worth posting, I'm one of the people who really believes that using this method to get your creative works out on the internet is far superior to conventional copyright which is very archaic.
Hi Voxers. I've been away.
Once a month for a few days I get leave from my burrow next to whatever oilfield site I've been planted on to come home to my neglected apartment and my equally neglected girlfriend and cat to spend some of my well-earned moneys.
This weekend I've been going out to The Garden, a little haven watched over by the parents of some very good friends of mine. It's lovely private property and secluded in the hills, and my friends have done a wonderful job making it a very homey place to spend their summer.
The garden is actually a very large rock-pit on some private property. The owner of the pit has Gail and Merle stay on the property to keep people from coming on and vandalizing the equipment or hurting themselves. And along with the arrangement they've created a lovely garden to grow all sorts of vegetables and a place for kids to play. The last two day's we've blown off over $500.00 of collectively contributed fireworks in the evenings, and we've contributed to some absolutely delicious fire-cooked meals.
Gail and Merle are salt-of the earth types, they work hard all the time, and impart that hard working spirit on everyone they know. They're an inspiration to me in that they're proof that it doesn't take money or things to have a life that people would envy. Through their own sweat and work and the help of their family they've built a little cabin with a tin roof that's still open on one side. It virtually has all the comforts of home, a table to eat, a sitting area, a wood-fire oven and a hose for water, they sleep in their holiday trailer.
This Saturday there was a bit of trouble. After we'd lit off our wonderful fireworks show, we found out that someone had snuck on the property and had started a fire up by some of the equipment. Then later we discovered that a car had been ditched by a drunk driver who was pretty beat up. We called the ambulance and sent him to the hospital, and afterwards when the tow truck arrived we found a bunch of tools stolen from where the fire was started. He could have gotten away free if he wasn't a drunk idiot and crashed his car. The idiocy of the criminal element in this town make me laugh.
Anyway, after the whole ordeal, it turns out that Tash and I might be getting a key to the gate here, which would be just amazing.
I'll apologize for the rambling unedited post, but I've been crazy busy lately and with everything going on I've not had time to devote to a nicely formed blog. Hope it's readable.
Today I give thanks for the things men should be thankful for.
1.) Porn – Porn holds a special place in my erm… heart. Without it my weeks and weeks spent away from home would be well… pornless.
2.) Beer – Canadian Beer, Granville Island Pale Ale, so good… I'm so looking foreward to days off tomorrow.
3.) BBQ Steak – New York or Porterhouse, with Watkins sauces… mmmm special recipe. And beer… *goes back to # 2 for a refill.*
4.) Summer Hotties – No amount of #1 can substitute for the real thing, and watching a few #4's walk by in shorts almost too small to be legal, while sipping a cool #2, and flipping a juicy #3 sounds like heaven.
5.) Forgiving Girlfriend! – After indulging in my various vices and watching my eyes wander enough that I've almost got whiplash, my loving and long-time girlfriend is still there to greet me with a kiss and a smile. I honestly have no idea why she keeps me around… well maybe I do 😉
It seems the universe has aligned to annoy me with various patent goofiness and stupidity.
Two events regarding patent law have come to the forefront of tech news over the past month, the first I will mention is that a company called Parallel Processing, is suing Sony over patent violations regarding it's Cell processor.
The patent, “Synchronized Parallel Processing with Shared Memory” was issued in October 1991. It describes a high-speed computer that breaks down a program “into smaller concurrent processes running in different parallel processors” and resynchronizes the program for faster processing times.
http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=6616&Itemid=2
Now I'm not an expert on the ins and outs of patent law… but here's the basics:
To patent a technology it must be 3 things: useful; novel; and in-obvious. The purpose of patents are to stimulate the spirit of inventiveness and drive humanity froward. With this in mind I show you my problem with Parallel Proceeding's suit. It was filed in 1991, over 15 years ago at the time it might have been a novel and in-obvious technology. Now however computers and the ways they operate has come up to the point where such concepts are obviously the next step, meaning that they're no longer in-obvious and the patent is redundant. SLI video cards work similarly, as does AMD and Intel's multi-core processing technologies.
Even if Sony is in patent violation (which likely means IBM and Panasonic are as well) the decision runs contrary to the purpose of patents, which is to stimulate inventiveness, it will be in the face of a decade and a half of advancements, and will certainly not be stimulating growth.
The second event, (though first chronologically) is Microsoft suing Linux for over a hundred software patent violations. But here's the caveat, they won't say what the violations are. This is obviously a scare tactic, Linux has already said that if the violations are revealed that they will be fixed… but Microsoft is obviously not doing this to aid Linux in further legal operations.
Here's what I'm seeing. As of even 2 years ago, there was one viable option for operating systems unless you belonged to one of two fringe groups of computer users; if you wanted to do anything mainstream easily with your PC the choice was clear. You chose Windows XP.
These days the choice is far less clear for a number of reasons. The first is gaming consoles. This year more money will be spent on video games than will be spent on music and there are three game consoles on the market, each of which is competing for a piece of the consumer pocketbook. Microsoft is in that race with their X-Box 360, and in order to stay on top of the console wars they are pushing game developers to create products exclusively for their console. This means less variety for computer gamers, and less desire to purchase a gaming computer, which was what demanded the most potent computer hardware.
This leads to the second reason; hardware. Gaming enthusiasts choose Windows based PC's, because the games almost exclusively ran on them, and because there was more selection in hardware. Two years ago there were two extremely competitive companies developing video cards; ATI and Nvidia, and two extremely competitive companies developing processors; Intel and AMD. These four companies drove the industry forward. This past year, ATI was purchased by AMD in order to better develop multi core processing, and this merger has slowed their development drastically. For the first time in ages there is only one clear choice for buying a sound computer, an Intel processor with an Nvidia GPU.
Now consumers want choice, but the variety in Window's based PC's has gone stagnant. The discerning buyer now looks beyond simply what Microsoft has to offer, and for the first time ever two non-microsoft Operating Systems are looking enticing. Apple has had a strong year, they've brought out some of the highest end peripheral hardware, itunes is now the 3rd highest selling distributer of music in the world, and their computers now function under the same processor specifications that other mainstream computers do which is easier for software developers. This means Mac is now a viable option for the mainstream market, and the games aren't present to draw the people who might have been wavering over to Windows. Coupled with the lack of Mac targeting spy-ware, and an OS that isn't bloated and buggy Apple's appeal is growing.
Linux has also had a phenomenal year, once only an operating system for savvy programmers, open source has truly become an option for anyone, and in fact is now simply the best choice for an older PC. Windows has become bloated and hardware demanding and there's no way around it, and older versions of the OS aren't supported by software developers. So Linux has stepped in to fill the gap. Ubuntu is not just the OS for the tech savvy. It is genuinely easy and well supported, and applications originally designed for it such as Firefox have become household names even beyond Linux users With Linux security is also considerably less of an issue, which draws more customers simply on the basis that they will not be required to keep abreast with the constant security updates. It has in fact gone from the experts-only OS to the choice for the casual user. And it's starting to eat into Microsoft's bottom line.
For the first time in 10 years, the Windows' lead in the market is wavering, the second and third place contenders are coming up fast and hard, and Microsoft doesn't know what to do. Longtime Apple users genuinely love their Mac's and Linux users love open source, but who really loves Windows? Microsoft doesn't have an inkling how to win over consumers through product superiority, so they're resorting to scare tactics. They're crying out that the other guys are in the wrong and if you use them, you're gonna get sued! Too bad for them it's all hot air. There's too many big fish in the open source pond. IBM, a long time developer of Linux servers, has thousands of software patents, and of them how many do you think Microsoft might be in violation of?
While these issues are very different I see one commonality in them. Both are late, and that tardiness to me, indicates they are nothing but sleazy attempts to grab cash and undermine another company's success. If Parallel Processing was seriously the first to developing the technology behind the Cell why are they only now bringing this patent to light 3 years after the Cell was developed? And if Microsoft was actually serious about protecting their software innovations why are they announcing the violations a decade after Linux has been active?
These are the sorts of underhanded legal manoeuvres that effect the entire world and anyone who would attempt to develop an idea or create a work of art. I for one hope that they are killed and buried in the spirit of the law that they are trying to exploit.
Every once in a while I'm going to attempt a short demonstration of what I like about Role-Playing. I'm going to describe a scene that intrigues me and ask you what you would do if you were in that situation. I don't ask for perfection or depth… but consider the concepts the alien nature of the experience… that's what role-playing is about for me.
One of the scenes from a movie that intrigues me still is from the movie Crash, where the Asian slaves were set free on the streets of LA. Imagine… you've been taken away from everyone you know and love to be a slave in America. Then after weeks in transit, rationing your food, in barely livable conditions, you find not only are you no longer a slave, you aren't even beholden the usual amount of money to the snakeheads for being smuggled in.
You're left on the streets, hungry, but not alone, you have the other once-slaves around you whom you've suffered with these past several weeks. Around you people walk by uncaring, unknowing of your horrible situation and your miraculous fortune, you are truly starting with nothing. This is your story, what do you do?
Fairie Wings always makes such nice things and shows you how to do it, so I'm feeling inspired by her.
Today I saw a neat segment on making a flash game out of your children's drawings on the The Lab. I'm hunting for a video of the segment, but it hasn't been placed online yet, I have faith I'll find it though, and I'll update with the video attached when I'm able. For now, here's a quick how-to so you too can work with your children to make flash games.
Episode #53: Show Notes
Jim Rutherford : Turn your Kid’s Artwork into a Video Game
My four year old son and I have a Saturday morning ritual where the two of us go out for a “special” breakfast at a local restaurant. While we are waiting for our food, Owen always draws a very exciting battle scene on the back of the paper placemat using the crayons provided by our server. One day, after he was done drawing, he asked “Dad, can we turn this into a video game?”. I answered of course I could!
So we went home and pulled out an old scanner, scanned his drawing, and went to work in Gimpshop and Adobe Flex! After a little cropping, resizing, ActionScript coding and a trigonometry refresher, the result is a Flash game titled Crayon Battle.
If you would like to produce a Flash game out of your children’s artwork, here are some simple steps.
1.Download our crayon_battle.zip file from http://www.digitalmediaminute.com/howto/crayonbattle/2.Extract the zip file to your local disk
3.In the folder where you extracted the file, you will notice a folder named gamePieces. In this folder are the “building block” files that contain the artwork for the game. The files and their function are as follows:background.png
This file is the backdrop for your gamegoodguy.png
This is your game unit that will blast the badguysbullet.png
This is what your bullets will look likebadguyx.png
This is the badguy. You can have multiple badguys – just replace the x with a number from 1 to 44.When scanning the artwork, make sure the background image is scanned to a dimension of 800×600 pixels. Your scanner software should allow you to do this, but if it doesn’t, you can use GIMPShop.
5.When scanning the goodguys, badguys, and bullets, I would recommend that each should be no larger than 70 pixels in either direction. You also need to remove the background from these images so they float cleanly over the background. This can easily be done in GimpShop using the Magic Wand tool.
6.If you are intereted in looking at the source code for the game, in the folder where you extracted the zip file, there is a folder named source that contains the ActionScript files and Flex project used to create the game. You can modify the ActionScript using any text editor and recompile it using the free Flex SDK that is available at http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/downloads/.
I consider myself a writer even though I've never had anything published and as of yet I don't think my writing for various sources has yealded me even $1000.00 over the course of my lifetime. In some ways it's presumptuous but we all have to have a dream right?
So today I'm going to offer the five primary sources of inspiration to keep me writing. They effectively are the food that feeds my dreams, which is why I'm grateful for them. Maybe someday I'll post an update to these sources but these are what they are now.
1) Simple Abundance – It's not so much the group or the subject matter that has inspired me, as it is the goal. Dee's gentle requirement to post 5 things a day is a healthy deadline. It's not hard, but it's there and it makes me think more, all day, and thinking is good for inspiration.
2) G4 Tech TV – Or more accurately 3 shows on it. Attack of the Show, X-Play, and The Lab with Leo Laporte.
Attack of the show is my primary source for news, which may be limiting myself, but I find other news sources are overly negative and lacking in actual legitimate news. AOTS is primarily geared towards the tech aspects of news so in that it is limited, but it portrays pop culture in a trendy way and it's a pleasure to watch. I honestly wish that more networks would develop news programs like it.
X-Play is a Video Game Review show. It's funny, trendy, and enjoyable to watch even if you don't really care for video games.
The Lab is a call-in show featuring Leo Laporte, who in my opinion is one of the most credible and knowledgable people involved in the tech scene today. His web of influence spreads far, and the more I learn about the web the more I see traces of his involvement.
3) John Chow's Blog – This is a relatively new addition to my inspiration sources. It's mostly about money, which might be mundane, but it fills my mind with new ideas for blogs, so it's inspiration.
4) Mythology – It's a source for my fictional works that I always return to. And really what better stories than the ones that have stimulated minds and hearts for thousands of years?
5) Frustration, Guilt and Disappointment – These three things could be #1, but I don't care for them very much so they get to be last, but to ignore their value in my writing would be naive. Frustration urges me to change my tactics, guilt leads me to try harder and do better, and disappointment leads me to think of a better idea. All are inspiring.
There you go.
I love my job. It give me the time to devote to blogging, writing and playing games while making me good money. One of the hidden perks to my job is the view though. Here's some pictures right from where I work this month.
Enjoy.
Last night was a bit of a downer for me and this morning I woke up no better. I spent a bit of time trying to figure out what to post for Simple Abundance. It took a quick visit to an old post here to listen to the halo rock song to raise my spirits I especially like the violin.
So today I offer five precious tunes involving my two favorite instruments. The Piano, and The Violin. I've tried to vary the tunes between the old, the new, the well known and the obscure, the peppy and the mellow to give a nice variety. I think there's someone here for everyone… unless all you listen to is Hip Hop or Death Metal.
Old Line 