I feel like I need to make up for lost time. I’ve let things collect dust here for the past term, so it seems strange to be trying it again on the eve of the next wave of school. Yet right now, I want to. That’s all I’d like to say. I know am rarely interested in reading other peoples’ apologies for not writing on their blogs. So I’ll try to keep things topical from here on out.

Tomorrow will bring Popular Culture and Intro to Operating Systems, in the lovely city of bridges. I am very much looking forward to it, even though it feels a bit deadening to go back to school after merely a week’s break. Even so, it seems every time I get a break I see the alternative — diddling — which makes me wish for the linear deadlines of the school year. I’m kind of concerned that this is what it’s coming to: preferring force-fed work instead of real projects. It’s hard to be both productive and self-motivated.

I wonder occasionally if someday I’ll look back at these years and wonder how I had all this time and managed to choose this as what to do with it. I simply have not found something better to do. In his Stanford commencement speech Steve Jobs said:

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

And that’s where I’m at. I feel most purposeful when I am aware my time here is limited; when I remember things are temporary. Unfortunately, I’ve noticed that this feeling passes as soon as the thought leaves my mind. The problem is remembering. There’s the existential concept that as hard as we try, we’ll inevitably fall back into states of unawareness in our daily life. The challenge is keeping the context stored up somewhere. So that when it’s needed, it will return.

Once for a little while I became interested in lucid dreaming. I programmed myself to achieve consciousness in my dreams by training myself to constantly ask myself “Am I dreaming?” while I was awake. My process was linking this idea to as many thoughts as possible; so that many actions, feelings, and thoughts reminded me of the dreaming test. I reasoned that if this worked in my waking consciousness, it would when I was dreaming. It did. After some time, I stopped keeping up this mental practice, and the dreams stopped. Nowadays I rarely dream lucidly, or even remember my dreams.

Perhaps this can be applied to Jobs’ self-test as well. By linking the question of purpose to as many ideas as possible, I think I could remember to ask the question more often. The only tough part is remembering to get started. This sense of context is something that I’m so looking for… and hope for tomorrow, as the drone of school starts again. I want try it. Yet for now, I must be dreaming.

Sorry to those 5.8% (!) who are using IE, things will be looking pretty ugly here from here on out since your browser does not know how to display standards-compliant web pages properly…

For the other 94.2% of you out there, I think your taste in web browsers is damn cool.

http://browsershots.org/website/1152960/

Have you ever stared at someone’s mouth in the distance and tried to read their lips? When doing so, did it feel like you could hear bits of what they were saying?

Perhaps our senses truly are not as separate as they would at first seem.

For pandas has shown me the light.

I see books on tables nearby, realize that the side facing down is completely hidden from my view. While in my mind I percieve things in this room as objects, and my mind can fill their forms in, what I am really viewing is a but 2D shadow of their existence. Just “the tip of the iceberg,” with far more of the surface hidden from my vantage point.

Yet, even as I move around and view the room from another angle, this backside is still there, and there is just as much unseen to me as there was before. And there always will be. It is like this backside of non-perception is dependent upon my very context of perception: I move, and it moves with me. The backside of things is a natural antithesis to the frontside that is accessible to my vision.

While this should seem a very simple and commonplace rule of existence, the more I think about it, the more I find it rather disturbing. If I am sitting still, looking at my world around me, and from my perspective canot determine if these objects really do have a backside, methaphorically, what other parts of my world are going unseen? Further, this aspect of concentrating upon the backside of things makes me uncomfortable. In my mind, I feel the temptation to view things as “inside-out,” to try and envision the backside while I am readily viewing the frontside. Isn’t it kind of futile to be placing my emphasis on the part that I accept to be impossible for me to see?

I can look at my laptop screen, percieve the fact that the screen has a backside that is currently facing away from me. I see it in my mind, the “Dell” logo circle and the silver finish. But this backside is one that from my current vantage point I cannot see. So why do I assume it exists? Now I test it, I reach out and touch the back of the screen, run my fingers across the surface. But internally my mind reels! Where is the connection between this sensation of what I am feeling, and this surface that I cannot see but know is there? Yet now that I am looking for a visual contact to what I am feeling, I am forced to realize that it simply is not there! I am touching something that currently does not exist in my perception.

Until now, as an artist and as an existing human, what I have concentrated upon is what is being seen, what is presented to the viewer, but never what is naturally obscured from them. For me, “seeing is believing:” if I can see something, I can reasonably accept its existence as being there. But now, when thinking about it, I challenge my vision; I doubt its importance and validity. I begin to feel like I am seeing without percieving: I am blind. Oh, how strange it is to contemplate that which I cannot see!

Is there now?
Now there is.
Now is there?

This little poem sprang into my mind one night a few years ago, just out of the blue. Just three words, three orders, and reversed. But is it more than just wordplay? I continue to ponder what it means… and how it can have meaning.

And if that is the case, does that not simply become the concerted effort to a concerted effort be a good person? The concerted effort to a concerted effort to a concerted effort to be a good person?

Where did the good person go? Where did the original goal lose it’s meaning? Is this not the fallacy of this kind of self-referential definition? But then, is it not enough to simply try one’s best?

It’s time to start filling in the other sections of this site. I’ve been hoping to tackle an art gallery next, but it seems that every open source gallery system I check out turns out looking less than my hopes. I don’t know if I’ve becomed spoiled over at deviantART, but the demos and interfaces I’ve seen all seem to be based around the same clunky forum-ish page layout. Thumbnails are painfully small, the user interfaces are cluttered, distracting, and based on ugly web forms. And if you’re looking for a serious gallery layout, the standard white is about the worst color to choose for a background – dark gray and black can bring out so much more color in your images!

I’m hoping that perhaps Coppermine will have a flexible enough theme system for me to address most of these critiques – though I’m not holding my breath. Perhaps what I’m looking for is needs to be much simpler. I’ll be searching for alternatives over the next few days – we’ll see what turns up. I really hope that there’s a cleaner gallery system out there – surely someone else has had these thoughts before!

Good night!

日本語を勉強します。OMG! 名前は片仮名で書きました！

(I am studying Japanese. OMG! The name was written in Katakana!)

Yeah, I know it’s been a lot of fluff posts lately… I’m sorry, but I haven’t found the time to do (or write about) anything particularly interesting on the technical side. However, there are (and always will be) lots of interesting ramblings to share… so here’s some more.

Today I got to see the first video in my Japanese Culture class. It’s a neat little course, and so every other Friday I will be able to enjoy a bit more of this fascinating culture. The movie we watched today was pretty awesome… a samurai story exploring gender and social power and the ethics around them (in historic Japan). So anyway, it’s a real drawn out story about a Samurai’s son who is ordered to marry the lord’s mistress (who bore the lord a child), and they fall in love only to find that due to circumstances the lord wishes that he have her back. So of course, the father and son can’t let that happen. But long story short, we sit through 1:30 of pretty cerebral (and completely fight-free) tension, only to run out of time right before the real samurai style ass-kicking begins. You can look at the IMDB page… and yes, that movie poster seems to be showing the fight scene that will surely be bugging me all week.

This Firefox video seems fast on its way to becoming viral (omg! I used a buzz word!). But honestly, childish and poorly produced as it may be, I laughed. Hysterically. It’s kind of sad to see the anti-quicktime anti-firefox response these first contenders seem to have attracted… though it was also quite disappointing to see that the web designers had opted to use an open source unfriendly and hard to use quicktime embed instead of better distribution methods. But regardless, it’s quite silly to see some of the early adopters reacting in such a way that defaces the pages of some bravely uninvolved contest entrants. Surely there is a more mature way to express codec-induced anger than this.

Finally, if you like optical illusions, you’re in luck, because out of complete whim and amusement, here’s a feed for a more-than-daily updated blog dedicated solely to this purpose. There’s a lot of nice unique stuff there, and looking through them will certainly eat up at least 15 minutes of your time.

Yum.  Mighty Optical Illusions

Good night.