DuncanCoppedge.com - It's all about meI signed into Codeacademy.com today and suddenly was completely over my arbitrarily assigned cut-rate-space-invader knockoff:
So I whipped out the photochopper and this appeared:
And then this post appeared. Crazy.
Channeling Escher’s Day and Night, although didn’t realize how much till I just googled it. Hah. Oh well.
Post Office jumps have outgrown me so I went and hit the Polo Grounds jumps a mile away. These were a challenge for me, but doable.
Slow motion is fun to watch, especially interesting watching the deflection in the tires, even on “smooth” landings.
Finally got around to getting some slo-mo of me at the skate park. Considering the park is 2 blocks from my house and I’ve had the camera for a year, it was time. 210 FPS from a point n shoot? Too cool.
Since we became home owners (and incidentally, debt owners), my wife and I have been wanting to “do something” with our blank slate of a yard. For me, that meant make a 3d model of the house and the grounds. Of course! Right? I like to plan things out, sometimes to the detriment of actually doing them, which is a source of friction. Too much planning and playing on the computer, not enough actual landscaping / painting / doing.
However, because I’d never played with Google Sketchup I figured now was a good opportunity to learn it.
I measured all the dimensions of the house and the property and it came out pretty well. Using the Google objects 3d warehouse was really helpful. Modifying the objects from the library was more difficult. Which is why the windows aren’t quite the same as the real thing.
Here’s a screenshot from Sketchup, no rendering or anything. A little photochopping to get rid of some shadows that looked weird. Which reminds me, the shadow feature is pretty cool. Set the time of day, time of year, and Sketchup will put the sun in the right place in the sky and render the scene appropriately. Pretty slick for a free application.
Now to actually do some landscaping modifications and then do actual landscaping. Pretty sure this was the fun part.
My morning “epiphany”, staring into my bowl of on-sale-so-I-bought-it “Just Bunches”.
You might recognize this cereal from such cereals as “Honey Bunches of Oats”.
Or granola.
Bunches. Of Granola.
I laughed.
Time slows down sometimes. Seconds are minutes, and you experience “eternity in an hour”.
I’ve had it happen while riding my bike, playing tennis, playing computer games. The perception is that time has actually slowed. The difficult game becomes easy, the bike slides across the dirt, and you feel every grain gripping and releasing. Everything is automatic. It feels like an altered state of consciousness. In a good way. I’ve heard it called The Zone.
Drive at high speed on the freeway for a while and 20 mph feels slow enough to get out and walk. But go 20 mph for some time, and suddenly 60 feels like you’re flying. So it’s almost like we adjust our internal clock to mesh properly with our surroundings, to properly display our reality. But why can’t we move around in slow motion all the time? Why can’t we turn our perception clock up to 11, at will?
If we have our own personal time (observers don’t notice anything slowing down), and yet it feels like the world is slowing down, what’s going on? Are we slowing down our version of the universe, do we each have our own copy, which occasionally goes out of sync with everyone else’s, and we experience an unfortunately brief moment in the zone, then snap back in sync?
That would be cool. But most likely, it’s just focus, pure concentration on a single task giving us the illusion that we’re temporarily breaking free of time’s grasp.
So, our perception is altered, but observers notice nothing. Isn’t that what general relativity is about? A mystery for another day. My brain hurts.
Chips, salsa, and a beer: kicking back. Living large? Some say that living large involves bling, dubs, or having the last name “Large”. I disagree. I don’t need champagne or sparkling wine from Sonoma, California to tell me I’m a man. Yeah, I stole that last line from a deodorant commercial from the 80’s. But that’s what’s having a ummm, blog… is all about. All about me. And my idiosyncrasies. Joining the crowd, the mass of humanity. 18 posts per second according to technorati:
Just a drop in the ocean, except this drop is unique!… ok fairly indistinct. But this b-log is a drop in the bucket, or the toilet… Filling the basin, flushing it down. Probably enough for a first post. Why? Because it’s all about me. And my old site was a pain in the ass to update or do anything with. Ah, wordpress, so easy… ez if you will. And I will.