October 24, 2005
It has been almost exactly
one year since I've completed a painting. This is my new one, and I hope to follow it up with another much more quickly this time.
October, oil on canvas, 18" x 36"
You can see my other paintings at my
gallery site (which is in some need of updating and repair, but the work is all viewable).
October 7, 2005
I've been doing some work at the theater lately. I've been given a key, which means that I can park at the Maynard structure and come in through the front door.
Slipping through the entryway, where the concession stand is, there's a big bag of last night's popcorn on the counter. I rarely see any people at that early hour, but sometimes there are a few big octagonal metal film boxes alone there on the floor. I'm never sure if they're coming or going and they remind me that the whole world isn't digital just yet.
But the best part of coming in is walking into the grand foyer in the dark. When you go there in ...
October 5, 2005
Yahoo has acquired
upcoming.org. There are press releases at
Yahoo and at
Upcoming.
I know there are a lot of people out there who don't like Yahoo. I'm not one of them. Yahoo has its flaws, but it does a lot of things right and I don't view it as a particularly Evil Corporation. I do think they botched the login switchover with Flickr somethin' fierce, and hope for Upcoming's sake that they've learned from that.
I hope the fact that they're now doing full time development of the site, there will be some more features added. For example, when you enter an event, it asks for what kind of event it is (music, ...
October 4, 2005
Did I say
center balcony? No no no, I meant -
ROW F, CENTER, MAIN FLOOR. I am a happy girl today!
October 3, 2005
I am getting more and more concerned about the competency of Jack's teacher. Do any of you out there know who I should talk to first? Do I go to the teacher first? The principal? Is there an ombudsman-type position at the grade-school level? And how do I approach this without damaging Jack in the process? She strikes me as petty and small-minded already, so I'm sure anything I try to bring down on her is going to come back to Jack doubly.
October 2, 2005
As for the meaning of life, I do not believe that it has any. I do not at all ask what it is, but I suspect that it has none and this is a source of great comfort to me. We make of it what we can and that is all there is about it. Those who seek for some cosmic all-embracing libretto or God are, believe me, pathetically mistaken.
- Isaiah Berlin
October 1, 2005
We all know that the only mental tool by means of which a very finite piece of reasoning can cover a myriad cases is called abstraction; as a result the effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer. In this connection it might be worth-while to point out that the purpose of abstracting is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.
- Edsger W. Dijkstra - ACM Turing Lecture: "The Humble Programmer"
This was written about programming and AI, but in my mind, it applies to many forms of abstraction, including art.
