Which brings us (eventually) to the main part of the post.  Remember a few years ago how digital photo frames were all the rage?  Every online electronic store, every photography store, department store, electronics retailer carried them.  You pretty much couldn’t walk through a mall without tripping over a few kiosks full of them?

Like some people, I ended up with a few, that I gave away or loaded up full of pictures, then mostly forgot about.  Never got around to loading new pics on them, and, well….  They’ve been collecting dust for a couple of years now.  It turns out, I like my family photos printed out, in a real frame.  As old-timey as that may sound.

Anyway, over Christmas I got given a free snow-globe from the Hallmark store when I bought a massive round of cards to send out.  It’s kinda a neat, in a trashy-hokey way, with a colour shifting LED, and a a little motor that stirs the glitter inside it.  I gave it to my toddler, who became instantly fascinated by it.  And the wife and I fell in love with its magical ability to zone out the wee one when we put her to bed.  Better than a shot with a tranquilizer dart.  Probably easier on the toddler too.

So how does this all tie together?  Fractals and digital picture frames and toddlers with high tech snow globes?

Well, the one problem with the snow globe is that it eats batteries.  So I got to thinking that what our wee one really needs is some kind of electric lava-lamp to help her get to sleep, and now I bet you can guess where this is going…

I loaded up one of the picture frames with a mess of different fractals, set it to random transition mode with the picture changing every 5 seconds, and BAMMO.  A plug-in-able mesmerizer for our precious that doesn’t eat batteries.

So, if you happen to have a toddler that has trouble getting to sleep, feel free to raid the collected fractals from here and give it a try.  Come on, when was the last time you actually turned on that digital photo frame anyway?

That isn’t to say I haven’t written anything here, just that I haven’t completed anything I was writing and actually posted it.

I could blame a busy work schedule (true) and a busy home life with my wife and daughter (also true), and I’ve also been getting out more and off visiting friends since I swore off social networking sites (again, also true).

But really, what it comes down to I haven’t had anything really inspire me enough to sit down and crank out a full post.

And that includes today.  Sort of.  I don’t have much to say really, other than…

With the Christmas season on us, I find myself in a warm house, with a loving wife and daughter.  Everything else, the daily grind of the office, and all of life’s other annoyances, are small in comparison.

I don’t think of this as a religious time of year.  For me, it’s a family time of year.  And with that in mind, I just want to wish everyone the same joy in being around the people they love, that I’ve come to be privileged with.

Happy Holidays to all.

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One of the great things about Canada is how freaking huge this country is.  People from other parts of the world have a lot of trouble grasping the reality of the enormity of this nation, coupled with a lack of population density.  If you’re from Europe, Asia, the US, or even from Africa, it’s difficult to conceptualize the vast emptiness of most of this country.  Huge chunks of countryside with almost no development or human impact.

The upside to that, for someone like me, is the relative ease with which you can drive for an hour or so, starting from a densely populated city like Calgary (with a population of over a million, it’s a much bigger city than most Americans or Europeans realize, if they’ve even heard of it), and end up…  Nowhere.  Completely cut off in a way that isn’t possible in Europe or the U.S.  Not only distant from any significant population center, but in areas so sparsely inhabited you can’t even get any cel coverage.  A few years ago, definitely within the past decade, that would have been an easy thing to do just about anywhere.  Now, it is an increasingly hard thing to do.  Cellular coverage has become ubiquitous throughout the developed world.  It is actually a challenge to find places in the U.S. or Europe that isn’t blanketed with some sort of coverage, except for some very small pockets of “dead zones” – and even these are becoming rare.

Here…  Drive for an hour or so away from a city in most directions, pitch a tent, and open the glovebox and chuck in your phone for the weekend, because it won’t be any good to you.  And that is ever so wonderful and liberating.  Maybe, given my last post, the joys of disconnecting have been on my mind more lately.  More truthfully, it has always been something I have enjoyed.  The ability to head out and just turn it all off.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no Luddite.  I enjoy my modern conveniences, and unlike a lot of neo-hipster environmentalists and fringe animal rights activists, I am deeply aware of the costs we must pay as a global society in order to maintain a relatively high standard of living for the population as a whole, and the costs to natural spaces and wildlife.  On the balance, I’m  Ok with those trade offs.  Can we do a better job of managing our resources so that we have less impact on the natural world?  Certainly.  Would I be willing for us to sacrifice any of the quality of life mankind has worked so hard to achieve over the past few thousand years in order preserve the natural order?  No.  That would be a middle class conceit.  It is the conceit of idle suburbanites and white collar workers who have never experienced poverty, true poverty, and cannot understand its deprivations.  What people who have never gone hungry fail to understand is that while they can easily sacrifice 10-20% of their wealth, standard of living, and quality of life…  For more than half the population of the planet, you know, the ones that live in poverty, or on the edge of it, such a sacrifice would be brutal, dangerous, and quite possibly fatal.

If it comes down to a choice between saving a human and shooting Bambi, in my world, it is no choice.  Bambi’s going to take a bullet.

In an indirect sort of way, that brings me around to what it is I get out of camping.  First and foremost, I get a needed disconnect from the buzz and hum of everyday life.  Nothing puts all the crap you go through on a daily basis in perspective as taking a serious step away from it.  Getting out of cel range, pitching a tent, and having to sleep rough and cook over flame, not having the opportunity to jump online to google the name of that character actor, in that b-flick, you know the one?…  It has the ability to show you exactly how irrelevant a lot of all that really is.

The other thing I get from camping is that its hard.  As in, not easy.  As in, a lot more challenging than cracking open the freezer for a TV dinner, wandering across the street for a bag of chips , getting warm by adjusting the thermostat or cooling off by turning on the AC.  Sleeping in a nice comfy bed piled high with covers and pillows.  Flush toilets.  Showers…  The list of things that, while you can technically live without but would rather not have to for any extended period of time, is rather long.

The long and short of it is, essentially, camping reminds you of all the things you have in this modern world that are good to have.  It also reminds you of all the things you could just as soon do without.

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This is kind of an ugly fractal – something I rendered out from XaoS, ran through some colour shifting, de-selected the centre, and then distorted the heck out of the surrounding field. Can’t even remember what fractal it was based on, other than I seem to remember zooming in near endlessly on a tiny dot. I actually made this almost a week ago, but I’m posting it today because it has a slightly psychedelic look. It also reminds me how bloodshot my eyes must look, if I were to bother to look in a mirror.

I’m extremely tired right now.  Between one thing and another (and for once, work is only partially to blame), I’ve gotten two hours sleep in the past day and a half.  Soon, the caffeine is bound to wear off, and I have no doubt I will collapse into blissful oblivion for at least ten to twelve hours.

In the meantime, I’m in the midst of that kind of deep burn/caffeine buzz you can only really achieve through sleep deprivation.  It’s an odd kind of feeling, and for those of you have experienced it, you know that it isn’t entirely unpleasant.  I’m a firm believer that if you hit the exact right state of fatigue, you can achieve a mental focus that’s quite startling.  I’ve done some of my best technical and creative work in this type of state.

The problem is, it’s a fine line, and not maintainable for any length of time.  At some point, you just start nodding off in your chair.  It should also be noted that it isn’t for everyone.  I’ve have lots of practice at this over the years, and I take a kind of perverse pride in my sleep dep abilities.  My record is somewhere between 65 and 70 hours – years ago in University when I had a research paper deadline that I’d let creep up on me.  In spite of the fact that I’d gotten loopy enough by the end of it that I couldn’t even really tell if I was dreaming or typing, I ended up getting an A minus on the paper.  All the same, I’ve never had the desire to repeat the experience.  It may not have been quite my limit, but it was close enough that I don’t need to explore it further.

For tonight, this aging geek teetotaller is enjoying the experience.  But only in moderation.

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Another XaoS rendered fractal.  Reminds me of a Mardi Gras face mask.

A colleague from the U.S. was up for some meetings this week, and brought me a mighty fine pound of coffee from a boutique roaster in San Francisco.  It’s kinda an inside joke about the fact that I work really weird hours, and I’m pretty much never seen without a mug of coffee in hand.  Also, I have been known to go off about the lousy state of coffee culture in North America from time to time.

You see, your average coffee snob is actually an FP who thinks that the muddy, burnt, pig-slop they serve at Starbucks is actually good coffee.  Let me explain to you why that just isn’t the case.

First off, and perhaps most importantly, Starbucks burns their beans.  What most peasant paletted goons don’t realize is that there’s a VAST difference between “dark roast” and “charcoal.”  Starbucks, as a corporation, is well aware of this, and burns their beans for two very good business reasons:

1. The masses are asses, and associate the heavy, strong taste of an over roasted bean with “strong” coffee – they think it has more of a kick, that it will contain more caffeine, and give them a bigger energy boost (they’re wrong, and we’ll talk about that in a minute).
2. It’s cheaper to burn the bean than it is to roast it properly, which is big $$ when you’re doing things on the industrial scale that Starbucks is.  You see, Starbucks roasts its beans at a high heat, but for a shorter period of time, than a properly roasted bean.  This allows a much larger throughput, and results in a big savings.  It also results in a crappy bean.

So, let’s get one thing straight right off the bat.  Dark coffee may taste stronger, but it’s actually much less potent.  And the reasons come down to some fairly basic chemistry.  Caffeine is a relatively volatile molecule, and if you subject it to too high a heat, it reacts, disassociates, and produces some crappy side chemicals.  A classically trained Barista will be able to tell you that as a rule, the darker, stronger tasting the coffee, the less potent it actually is.   Quite simply, by darkening the roast (whether you do it properly by low temperature roasting for a long period of time, or the wrong way like Starbucks and charring it in a blast furnace), you burn off the caffeine and reduce the overall potency.

That’s not to say all dark roasts are bad.  A good dark roast, done properly, can be quite tasty.  It just isn’t going to have the same kick.

The second side effect of an improper roast is a bit more complex, but has a nastier side effect than just the taste.  It actually makes the coffee a lot harder on your digestive tract.  Chemistry is a complex thing, as any good cook will tell you.  Slight variations in heat can produce markedly different effects – sticking a soufflé in the oven at double the heat won’t just reduce the cooking time, it will destroy the soufflé.

With coffee beans, the roasting process triggers off several important chemical reactions.  Among the most important, is that it reduces the acidity of the bean.  Green coffee beans are quite acidic, and would give you one heckuva stomachache if you tried to eat them raw.  To break down the acidity, you need to roast them for a fairly long period of time.  Ever get the infamous “gut rot” from drinking too much coffee?  Well, odds are, you got it as a result of poorly roasted beans.  Roasting them at a high temperature for too short a period of time does NOT break down the acidity.  You need to roast them for a fairly extended period in order to do this.  Also, when you roast at too high a temperature, it “burns” the coffee which releases a whole raft of other nasty chemicals.

Over roasting has one positive effect for the big chains.  It produces a much more consistent flavour.  It’s going to taste like the same burnt crap no matter what the original bean.  Lighter roasts maintain the original signature of the beans you roast.  Burnt beans taste like burnt beans.  (source)  For an outfit like Starbucks, that’s great.  They can buy the cheapest crap available, burn the hell out of it, and it all comes out tasting the same.  And let me assure you, this is exactly what they do (in spite of all the touchy feely marketing pamphlets they have in the store).  They almost have no choice – given the vast quantities they purchase, they can’t expect a lot of fine grained quality control.

In the end, I’m not asking for people to give up on coffee snobbery.  All I’m asking is that you practice intelligent coffee snobbery.  Yah, that’s probably asking too much.

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So, I started messing around with some new (to me) fractal software, XaoS, on my Linux box, and this is the first one I’ve rendered out and captured.

Like a lot of things in Linux land, the UI for this software leaves a lot to be desired, and there’s a bit more of a learning curve for it than there is with equivalent software on proprietary platforms.  In fact, if you read through their project pages, they indicate that the version they’ve released for Mac has a much better UI.

But hey, to use that, I’d have to buy a Mac, which should happen sometime around the heat death of the universe.

On the other hand, like a lot of things in Linux land, once you get past the dodgy User Interface, you actually have a lot more fine grained control over the software than you tend to in the equivalents on  Windows or Mac.  Live zoom, instant capturing, really good control over the algo, colour…  And it’s really light on system resources.  It renders the fractals out instantaneously on my Linux box, which has much lower hardware specs than my Windows box.

I had a lot of fun coming up with this one.  It’s a zoom of an Octal Mandelbrot set fractal, with some colour tweaks.  I then took the resulting capture, and did some colour, hue, and level balancing in GIMP, and this is the end result.  Long story short, this is by far the most “manipulated” fractal I’ve posted here.

Oh, and for those of you who are about to jump up and down and complain about GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program), let me just say the following:

• It’s about $700 cheaper than Photoshop (as in, GIMP is free, and I just checked the price for Photoshop at the Adobe site).
• You probably haven’t used it lately – the newest versions of GIMP are actually quite easy to use and fairly feature packed.
• It will run/look the same on Windows, Mac, or Linux.  For me, the Linux part is kinda important.
• It’s incredibly lightweight.  The latest versions of Photoshop are fat bloated resource hogs.
• All those fancy features in Photoshop?  99% of you will only use a tiny fraction of them, and the equivalent features for those are in GIMP.  For the other 1% of you, there’s a plugin available.  In fact the fancy liquid rescaling that was recently released in Photoshop was available as a GIMP plugin for a year and a half  before it was released as “ground breaking feature” for Photoshop. (If you don’t know what liquid rescaling is, it’s way too hard for me to describe – search YouTube for “gimp liquid rescale” or just go to the plugin page for an idea – it is a vastly cool thing to be able to do to an image).
• My wife, the one with the BFA in Graphic Arts, who currently works in architectural design and drafting, abandoned Photoshop for GIMP several years ago and doesn’t for a minute regret the decision.  She actually finds that all the key features that you use on a regular basis are easier to find in GIMP than in Photoshop, and she’s the closest thing I have on hand to a graphic arts expert…  So it’s nice that she IS a graphic arts expert.

So, for a $700 savings, (which equates, I remind you, to FREE) you get a highly workable graphics editor, that even if you’re a pro and need all the “deep” features, you can get plugins and extensions from a pretty vast repository.

FOSS is a pretty fun world, and it keeps getting better by the day.

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I know a few people who are so scared of pretty much everything, that it takes an intense act of fortitude to even leave the house. They worry about muggings, terrorism, the weather, disease (which often, weirdly and irrationally, goes hand in hand with fear of vaccinations), children getting hung up in drop rail cribs, “sudden acceleration syndrome” in their cars, meteor strikes… You name it, and they’re afraid of it.

And it’s just so pointless, not to mention out of step with what’s actually going on in the world, that I’m not sure whether to pity them, laugh at their ignorance, or rage against those who have a vested interest in perpetuating it.

I can’t possibly list all the things people fear, and some of them pretty much warrant their own posts (fear of G.M. foods, fear of Nuke Power, I’m eyeballing you, you groundless, media stoked, irrational paranoias), but I think maybe I can tackle a couple of them.  Hey, maybe one person out there will actually pay attention and fall under a sudden grip of rationalism.  Don’t laugh! It could happen!

We’ll start with one of my favourites, the fear of terrorism.

And right there, my mind almost froze contemplating the irrationality of it.  Do you have any idea how vanishingly small the odds are of being caught in act of terrorism? Or that terrorism peaked globally in the late 80s – early 90s, and in spite of rising, ever so slightly since 9-11 (source), are roughly half now what they were at 88-91 peak? Here’s some fun numbers:

• Lifetime risk of being killed in a car accident, 1 in 83.
• Lifetime odds of being killed crossing the street (for crying out loud), 1 in 625
• Lifetime odds of drowning, 1 in 1100
• If the global Jihad suddenly got it’s act together and was able to pull off a 9-11 scale attack at least once a year (on top of the normal background noise of terrorism that mostly happens in the Middle East), 1 in 1300
• (source)

That’s right, even given a worst case scenario of terrorism, you’re more than twice as likely to be killed crossing the street as you are to be killed by a terrorist, and fifteen times as likely to die in a car accident.  Don’t believe me?  How many people have you known who have been killed in a car wreck?  How many people have you known who’ve been killed by a terrorist?  For most people outside of New York, the answer to the first question will probably be at least one or two.  To the other question, none.

So here’s a thought: Ditch the full body scanners at the airport, and instead stop yakking on your cel phone while you’re walking/driving around downtown.

Next up: Fear of crime.  I don’t have any good statistics for my country, so let’s take our most beloved wretched hive of scum and villainy (the United States) as a good baseline. In the past twenty years, violent crime in the US has dropped by half, property crime is down by 40%,  but our perception of crime is at an all time high (source).  How the heck could that be?

A big part of it is the 24 hour news cycle.  There’s an old adage in journalism: “If it bleeds, it leads.”  Violence, and violent crimes, are good for ratings.  So the news networks go out of their way to seek out crime stories, splash them on the screen, and milk the crap out of it until the ratings start to slide, then go find something else.  And this plays against our very basic instincts to be afraid of that movement in the shadows.

Also, “getting tough on crime” and a good “war on terrorism”, are really good platforms for getting politicians elected.  Much more effective than the “Elect me, because things are pretty good right now, so I don’t plan on doing anything” election campaign.

And I could go into all the other fears you might have, but really, it would just be an exercise in throwing statistics at the wall.  Really, the only statistic that matters is that, on average, you will live longer now than at any point in recorded history.

So you might as well get out there and enjoy it, because you’re going to be around a lot longer than you might think.

And it was great.

The mountains are beautiful this time of year.  Driving out of the city and into the foothills, the mountain peaks really stand out against the background, because the snow pack has crept down to cover everything above the tree line.  The tree line itself, mostly evergreens, provides a stark lower boundary.  It was slightly overcast today, so the white, craggy peaks stood out in relief against the roiling grey of the clouds.

Another benefit is that because it’s mid week, and off season, the crowds were low, and we got to stroll through the town in a way that just felt more leisurely.  I always feel more hurried in crowds, and I suspect many other people do as well.

Fall is about the only “off-season” in Banff.  Winter through early spring, it’s over-run with skiers.  Mid to late spring and all through the summer, it’s over-run with back-packers, tourists, day trippers (like me!).

Anyway, it was a nice day, and I’m glad we did it.

Post something, anything, at least once a day.  It doesn’t have to be long, or thoughtful, or important.  Just dump at least one idea a day in here.

Really, it shouldn’t be hard.  It should just take some discipline.

Realistically, I have at least one thought per day I wouldn’t mind sharing with the world.  Yes, that would be a thought that I’d be allowed to use my “outside voice” for.

And my thought for the day?  Well, you just saw it.

Fortunately, I was smart enough to backup the database on a regular basis, so nothing really lost.

I’ll get a new theme up and running to “celebrate” the upgrade to the newer, more secure backend.

Oh, and I’ll get the video plugin working again too.  There’s probably a pile of hacks and tweaks I’d forgotten I’d made, so it might take a bit to get things “up to snuff” so to speak.