Underground and Surreal

Two stunning images appeared today on the New York Times site. Both are by Richard Barnes (for the New York Times).

Both are beyond words.

Progress Squared

This is what I'm working on. It's my palette "squared". The squares outlined in dark pencil (hard to see, I know) are the colors straight from the tubes. They run in a diagonal from top left to bottom right. Each of the other squares is a saturated mix of the two colors which meet at that square.

It is taking a lot of time, but it is fascinating and wholly instructive. I put this partial up here, in anticipation of when the paper is full. It should be truly splendid. I consider this my medicine which will make me better. And, to be sure, it is the finest medicine I have ever taken.

Resurrection

I think it time to rejuvenate White River. I would say that approximately two and half years of my life have been framed by the act of selling my house and land and moving. Miserable, nerve-wracking, painful, agonizing, and finally wholly debilitating. Today is the one-year anniversary of the paper signing and moving.

As the process escalated my creative life declined in direct proportion. I cannot remember the last time I had a creative impulse that wasn't "faked" or created artificially while I tried to fool myself into believing I was still an artist.

I realized I needed help. I got it in the form of a morning with Shanley Triggs who gave me a lesson in how to begin a watercolor painting. VALUES VALUES VALUES. That was a week ago Wednesday. She also loaned me a book How To Make Colors Sing by Jeanne Dobie. As I listened to Shanley, I honestly felt something stir inside. After she left I ordered a palette like hers (a Pike's palette) and the Dobie book.

The next day Susan Abbott, on a two-day painting trip through the Champlain Islands, spent the night. We talked far past my bed-time about many things. The next morning I told her about Shanley's lesson and she asked to see my sketch. She got her sketch book and we stood on the back porch for 45 minutes while she talked and I listened. While she sketched and I watched. I felt fire in the belly at last. Onto the fire which Shanley had lit, Susan poured gasoline.

Now I am waiting for the palette, which has not yet arrived, so that I can set it up per Susan's instructions and with the colors on the list she gave me. I will be making a palette chart with saturated colors also per instruction.

I've given you the description of what has happened; for what my soul has felt, there are no words that are not overused, and I refrain from trying to embellish the simple word "grateful".

That black hole inside me is now being filled with colors again.

Virginia Woolf's Birthday

. . . is today. One of the major contributors to the advancement of the British novel. Master of language. Lover of words. Supreme craftsman. Brilliant critic. Born on this day in 1882.

CS101 at udacity.com

Just signed up for Building a Search Engine. It's a 7-week course offered by one of the two Stanford professors who taught last year's AI course. That was a free course and a wildly successful experiment in Open Source Education.

One of them, Sebastian Thrun has since left Stanford to start Udacity. An online, open source university. I mean folks, this is gold on a platter. There are two instructors: Thrun, a Google Fellow, and David Evans, CS prof at University of Virginia and an MIT grad.

I've never used this term before, but two things are happening now to urge me to do it. The NEXT BIG THING. This idea and Raspberry-Pi. Two major efforts to educate those who want to be educated about computers. Doing the job our schools and universities are not. Sure, you can get a CS degree just about anywhere, but how about the youngsters coming down the pike? They show up in my community college classes knowing absolutely nothing about how computers work. Where will they get the spark that might set them on fire to learn, to experiment, to chase, to fiddle, to solve--to create, invent?

I'm not talking about students who pick CS as a major because it's where the jobs might be most available. I'm talking about the students who will dive into the field with passion, wonder, curiosity, and creativity. Those folks don't go after jobs; they go after knowledge and skill simply because they want to.

New Web Site

Starting the New Year with a New web site. I've moved all the contents of what was my personal directory hanging off clairdunn.com to borderlinegeek.com. I cannot believe that I got this domain at this late date! My jaw is still dropping.

Anyway, it's got all the old stuff, plus new stuff as it comes along. Today I added a page for the Raspberry-Pi -- can't wait to get my hands on one. That is one page you need to check out!

From Another World

I have moved. Sold house and land and moved.

Slowly settling in and curiosity, which I thought dead these last 8 months or so is starting to stir. A stumbled-upon word that seemed to be not in context; the word was "processing". I tracked the awkwardness, out-of-context-seeming use and found a new (to me) language call Processing. Two books from amazon.com and five days later, some fruit from the tree I thought dead.

VT2000 Adventures in Processing

I now have four books and my toe(s) is/are in the digital waters. We'll see. But I was excited enough to make the page.

And we wonder why the US is behind ... ?

Here's the subject line from today's email ad from Apple:

Go Back to School with the App Store, Role-Playing Games, and More

I'm getting ready for the fall term at CCV and this just plain ticked me off.

Ball Lightning

I've had a wonderful adventure this morning in using the internet as it was envisioned. It started on the BBC's Tech page following articles about the Bletchley Museum's computer collection, and from there I went to the Science page which led to the World Wide Lightning Locations page and from there to following links about about ball lightning. In one of those articles were these sentences:

And Dr Abrahamson believes their theory will even explain how ball lightning passes through windows and walls.

"Most, especially old, houses have cracks around their windows and cracks near doors," he says.

I've always been interested in ball lightning because of a story told in our family. I've no date for the story, but am guessing it was sometime in the 1920s or '30s. The house it happened in burned in 1937, so it was before that. The house was located in the northwestern corner of Fletcher, Vermont on the Buck Hollow Road. The house was likely close to 70 or 100 years old at the time.

My grandfather was sitting in the kitchen near the old cast iron wood stove when a ball of lightning came in, circled around the stove and wandered out through the wall again.

My family is not given to made-up stories, so I do put stock in this.