Today's Well-Lit Pixel

Real Wealth Economy

Darzok the Pixel Slinger — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 21:39:00 -0600

Always interested in the value systems supported by our economic system, and the value systems most of us would prefer to follow instead, the way these affect our everyday lives, and most importantly, how deliberate changes in our everyday lives could...

Books to Get

Darzok the Pixel Slinger — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 15:42:59 -0700

I am too busy doing other things to read much this month, but maybe next payday, i will get one or more of these:

The God Theory, Bernard Haisch. browse the preface or Q&A. Haisch was recently on Coast-to-Coast.

Adobe Photoshop Forensics. As a professional image processing geek, this is very interesting. I don't do much investigating ...

Wine and side projects

Darzok the Pixel Slinger — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 11:41:33 -0700

Staying home today, a bit of flu, but i need a break from sleeping.

I've been working on a side project, a software thingy to analyze audio signals. It's destined for a windows machine which will control an industrial machine, but for now i'm developing it on Linux. This pleases the lazy part of me. While i could do all ...

Average

Darzok the Pixel Slinger — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 01:18:37 -0700

Fine reading for today: Thanksgiving Essay: In Praise of Average by Charles Hugh Smith. Mediocrity, excellence, cheating, status, American culture.

Hacking with Haxe

Darzok the Pixel Slinger — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 20:15:29 -0700

Toying with Actionscript. Finally made a Flash .swf file with an animated square spinning around. Used haxe and swfmill. Searching web for good tutorials, examples, tips and tricks suitable for linux users doing it all from scratch at the command line. Here is one: The Natural Entry Point Method (Tutorial & Source Files) - Introducing A New Way to ...

Projects i've been diddling around with

Darzok the Pixel Slinger — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 15:41:36 -0700

Been writing image processing program in Ruby. I haven't had time to try any image processing libraries/modules/whatever. Haven't gotten far at all. At CICLOPS, i tried writing a Ruby script to automated fetching a variety of information about an image from our databases. That turned out to be easy. At first, i used the Mysql class directly, but as ...

Natural Building Magazine

Darzok the Pixel Slinger — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 00:08:25 -0600

Websurfing while waiting for the latest layer of details on a sand painting to dry... found Natural Building Magazine, a new not-yet-quite-existing magazine in formation. If i could, i'd VC them fifty thousand dollars but...hmmm, i don't have quite that much in my wallet at the moment. Perhaps i could help some other way. Definitely will watch their site ...

Space Elevator Video

Darzok the Pixel Slinger — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 11:07:55 -0600

Fun to watch, at least if you're into science, engineering and space exploration - http://www.elevator2010.org/ Some of those ribbon-climbing contraptions do pretty well. We are far from an actual elevator to space, as described in Clarke's Fountains of Paradise, but we are on the road. Progress is being made!

I like the video "Alan Chan's Moonwalk Magic" - a short ...

The Moth

Darzok the Pixel Slinger — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 01:45:06 -0600

Found a moth on the front door one morning. Took several photos, some framed to show the moth in the center with the kitchen light in the distance beside it. Tricky, bad lighting. Had to get going - it was close to 9am. It's been a busy time at CICLOPS - we just released a big batch of images in ...

Bicycles and Veggie-Heads

Darzok the Pixel Slinger — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 21:47:11 -0600

Lunchtime presentation at SSI today: bicycling! A couple of bicycling nuts showed us handy tools, passed out maps, tips on bike maintenance, lighting for night riding, etc. and talked about Community Cycles. There are several frequent bicyclers at

Toofy, Gotye, and completely unrelated matters

Darzok the Pixel Slinger — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 22:41:58 -0600

Went to the Toofy Film Fest Saturday. Saw the "Heart's a Mess" animation by Brendan Cook - Hauntingly weird and oddly beautiful! Strange, strange beings following the singing "pied piper" character. Great animation, hypnotic lumbering swaying walks, otherworldly. Music by Gotye, which i never heard of til yesterday. Great music. Must find out more. Find quicktime here, and ...

Space Science Institute sites

Darzok the Pixel Slinger — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 14:04:04 -0600

Yegads, i haven't put a link to Space Science Institute in my "favorites" list yet? Well it's there now. Since i work there, and they do great things in astronomy and space science research and education, definitely they deserve a mention in my favorites.

Also a link to Space Weather Center, where one of my favorite physics education games can ...

Three-Dee Weekend

Darzok the Pixel Slinger — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 14:52:00 -0600

I meant to say "Three Day Weekend" but i'm working intensely on several 3D ray-tracing scenes, so i have 3D on my mind. Not saying anything about these projects, just that they'll be released to the public when they're done. Watch http://www.jeffcottwilson.com/ and http://www.zazzle.com/darenw5* for new images or products. That's assuming i can trick the kitten into doing the work ...

Photography work, work, work, and some movie watching

Darzok the Pixel Slinger — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 01:40:43 -0600

Been working on many photographs - turning some into artistic images that look like watercolor or ink drawings, sortof, no they're a bit more special - see www.jeffcottwilson.com to see a few. Uploaded a fun photo of Athena the dog playing in the water to Daily Camera's MyTown, and also thought it would make an interesting greeting card. Lets' see ...

Handsome New Mug for the Coming Winter

Darzok the Pixel Slinger — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 00:26:00 -0600

This evening, after another very hot August day, i designed a new mug on Zazzle featuring a photo i took last fall of the first snow of 2006....

More photographs

Darzok the Pixel Slinger — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 16:30:06 -0600

not much to report on in detail - just out shooting lots of photos along streams, mountain scenery, wildflowers, some restaurant and cafe shots, and experimenting with crazy macro shots of small objects at home.

Very hot weather, the kind that makes you deperate for a large bowl of warm cookie dough with shredded cardboard and sand... uh wait, i ...

Ah, Friday, again

Darzok the Pixel Slinger — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 21:01:35 -0600

This was an odd week, wednesday off, seeming like a freak extra saturday surrounded by two very short two-day weeks. A nice change.

Been studying Python, MySQL and the databases we use at work. This started as a simple in-house web page to summarize some images and information about them. In the past with similar projects i'd write HTML ...

Photography Activity

Darzok the Pixel Slinger — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 22:35:00 -0600

Been taking pictures. Panoramas, multiple exposures for HDR experiments, capturing tiny flowers, mountains, trying to make an interesting photo out of a deliberately chosen drab subject. Hugin is a great panorama stitcher. Haven't nailed down the best HDR-related tools; i am so far sticking with my own peculiar tools written in C++ or python. I have software written in IDL ...

website updates

Darzok the Pixel Slinger — Sun, 27 May 2007 16:57:18 -0600

uploaded a fresher copy of my resume (text format). added new material to my personality type page.

For the rest of this sunny nice day, i'm reading Korten's "The Great Turning"

Misc Reading and Thoughts: Education

Darzok the Pixel Slinger — Sat, 26 May 2007 12:05:11 -0600

Nice article on education. I don't read much about education, being full with many other interesting things to do every day. Sweden starts their kids at age 7 and keeps 'em locked up in the system only nine years instead of the American twelve. Sounds like a good idea.

School for me wasn't as bad as some of the ...

Thunar

Darzok the Pixel Slinger — Wed, 23 May 2007 21:56:02 -0600

My main machine at home runs Ubuntu, somewhat hacked to my preferences. The windows manager is icewm for its simplicity, light memory and CPU usage. It's not the lightest, but good enough. Didn't like KDE or Gnome or XFCE (or is it XCFE?) for their eye candy, too many options, heavy resource usage. My computer is easily powerful enough to ...

Now i am a Guru

Darzok the Pixel Slinger — Wed, 23 May 2007 00:26:20 -0600

Just signed up for Guru.com today. I enjoy photography, image processing and 2D and 3D computer graphics, but heck, i might as well make a few bucks with it on occasion. My digital camera from 2002 already paid for itself in only a couple years. Now for it to make more moola-moola, to support my chocolate addiction, and for some ...

Website update, python

Darzok the Pixel Slinger — Wed, 02 May 2007 22:37:59 -0600

just updated my website. moved an index of special topic pages from the home page to its own page. other minor changes. added a link to show headlines from Wet Canvas on my new Stuff for Artists page.

I'm thinking of adding more live headlines or active info. I'm interested in alternative economic indicators, Quality of Life Indicators - Calvert-Henderson ...

Quick Python, Electrical Thermodynamics

Darzok the Pixel Slinger — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 20:42:25 -0600

Someone was talking about python at work, and that reminded me of some projects i had sitting around on my disk, and Python is a generally useful language for anyone seriously working with computers, so i bought a copy of "The Quick Python Book" and "Programming Python" and started fooling around. The Quick Python Book is especially good for experienced ...

Economics measures

Darzok the Pixel Slinger — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 00:08:31 -0600

Today was a drizzly day, gloomy, a good day for staying home and reading. unfortunately i went into work, so i haven't done much reading. But there is always time, at least some, for websurfing and tonight i read about economics measures.

We all have heard about the GDP, or the GNP - for my purposes the distinction doesn't matter. ...

Current Reading: Korten, Eisler, etc

Darzok the Pixel Slinger — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 23:54:21 -0600

I was bored a little while ago, actually i'm never bored just curious about things and nothing else pressing to do...well, there are pressing things to do, but i was too bored to do them... anyway, i went to some job-hunting sites to read about strange jobs i have absolutely no qualifications for. Like "Senior Financial Analyst" or "Dialysis Nurse". ...

Cell Phone

Darzok the Pixel Slinger — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 02:14:40 -0600

Finally, i bought a cell phone. Also got a bluetooth thingy to stick in my ear. Now i can chat with someone and have both hands free to, say, cook dinner, or yank the kitten away from a wet painting, while discussing the real estate market and latest Cassini discoveries with my mom, or coordinating a major art project with ...

Cell Phone

Darzok the Pixel Slinger — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 02:07:39 -0600

Most Horrible Story on the Web (for now)

Darzok the Pixel Slinger — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 19:06:47 -0700

Written by one of the terrorists in Iraq, first person point of view
of what goes on there...the most horrifying thing i've read onlilne in a long time
http://www.michaelmoore.com/mustread/index.php?id=835

I wonder if anyone who has been there can vouch for the accuracy of that account, if the events described are typical or common, or if this is exaggerated or misleading. ...

Websurfing for Art

Darzok the Pixel Slinger — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 17:52:29 -0700

Today started off pretty nice, but the clouds grew thicker and grayer. Now there's a drizzle and i'm glad to be indoors. A good day to get a lot of little tasks on my "do" list done. Soon. Later. So far all i've done is surf the web, catching up on a few blogs and freeware software sites. Someone told ...