a big year

This certainly has been a big year. Marriage and moving the school building stand at the top, but it has just been a long year with teaching. The recent nasal surgery is my first surgery besides wisdom teeth.

I am looking forward to next year hoping to regain a bit of bounce. So, raise a glass to the possibilities of a new year. I know it is just a continuation of what has been, but there is a psychological break and feeling of starting fresh.

Cheers.

Kaleidoscope Krazy

Yep, I have officially gone kaleidoscope crazy! Patterns, my Cafepress store, is testament to that. Here are a few more of my favorites shown on various products since the images are smaller than my source images.

Kaleidoscopes

I just started playing with a kaleidoscope plug-in for Adobe. What fun. There are quite a few examples on my cafepress site, but here is one of my favorites

nose job

Having not been able to breathe well through my nose for quite a while and not having any success with diet to change it, I decided to see an ENT. Deviated septum and thick turbinates led to a surgery yesterday. This morning was no cake walk, but I am doing better.

No pics with this post!

Yep, that is me in a tux! Hasn't happened since junior year in high school!

funky website kaleidoscope

check this one out! This is an image from our honeymoon that has been kaleidoscoperized.

Internet secured!

I did it. I moved the server and associated little boxes of blinking lights over to the new building, and it all works. Yay. A process started August 1 is now over, and I can move on to other things.

honeymoon pics

Honeymoon pics are up.

School on the horizon

The new building is coming together. It looks beautiful. The new year is fast approching, but I am not getting excited as I usually do. I have not spent hours developing curriculum or reviewing what I have already developed. I don't know what is holding me back, but I am sure when the kids hit the room that I will be energized.

On another topic, I have started editing my novel again. A group of friends have signed up to help edit and revise with me. This is a great way to keep the pressure on to continue doing it.

Reena and I have joined Netflix and we are seeing how that works to get some movies in the flow that were not coming in from my voracious appetite for buying movies.

busy day still going

Today was a very errand-running type of day. Actually it started off with my making a huge push to get the revamped freedmanriles site off the ground. Pretty successful with some minor issues to deal with. I am in the process of editing the pages Adobe puts out for a website of photos to resize the images on the page but not to actually resize them. Some wedding shots are ready. The site still needs work, but it is functional.

Then, I had a 1.5 hour, deeply-needed massage. I feel so much better. Ready for camping next weekend.

I then tried to send a bottle of wine through the mail. Oops. Can't do that. I deposited the marriage lisence in the safe deposit box along with other essentials that we don't need at hand (like passports). Next I stopped by school to get the next year's calendar and chatted with people including Alicia. If you read this A, congrats on the new kitty.

Off to Framingham (a 20 or so minute drive) to pick up a tent that can house both Reena and me this weekend. Luckily there was a FedEx next to the REI, so I shipped my package of glassware.

Back home to work on cleaning and straightening the house. Bedroom is now uncovered. This means that everything in there that had to find a room in my study is now crowding my already-crowded space. Tomorrow is going to be clean study day.

Tonight, after running a few more errands, is get back to revising story night. I have started, but must get through some more notes before I am ready to send out to the readers who will be checking, reading, or just ignoring it.

Oh, and I gotta get dinner.

new shirt

Here is my new fractal shirt!








Check it out in my store!

Back to norms

Normal is too many things to do.
Normal will be prioritizing those things-all of which are very interesting-and doing things that must be done and things that I really want to do.
One of those is writing.

In the mean time, here are a few picts from the honeymoon. More to follow!

Wedding Wear

Here is what I will wear for the wedding. For the many guys who have asked, "What shall I wear?" here is my answer. Hope it helps you.
This shirt in natural color.



























These pants. Hopefully not as wrinkled.


















These shoes. I will be wearing socks and undies, too, but I don't think I need to share those with you. All clothing is organic, natural colored, and sweat free labor. Changing my wardrobe over to these types of clothing has been a goal of mine, but this clothing is usually too expensive to buy regularly. I decided to do this for my wedding.

In the midst of report writing madness, this link made me laugh. It is rated Adult, but I did not see anything that would make it so.

I was the


bunny

Procrastination Station

Woot! The ultimate procrastinator. Here are my entries for the contest to rename the "Bag of Crap" that they put up once in a while to rid themselves of junk. It costs one dollar and ships for five. What a bargain, and it sells out in about two minutes! Before this, BOC was turned into Bulgarian Olympic Committee and regularly named Bride of Chucky by wooters.
Boat of Cheese, Bevy of Calligraphers, Battle of Crumpets, Bodacious Otherworldly Curves, Boiled Octopod Confection, and one I am not going to post here. Which one is your favorite? All told this was probably 5 hours of work.

Where is My Plate?

I have not posted for a while due to the inordinate amount of work general stuff to do around here (read that as end of school year reports and routines, wedding planning, new building planning, IT services at school, keeping up with regular chores, etc.) Do not think that I don't have time; I do. However, when I am under great pressure, my free time tends to be filled with mindless things such as solitaire or entering silly graphic contests at Woot(mine is the one with crumpets). And now, my cheese entry. My fractals have suffered similarly with very few out recently, and those I do make are just not making me happy. They have names like green mess and blue monster. Here is blue monster. Imagine a blue tentacled thing coming up from the deep. There is some neat texturing on a higher resolution version, but I am not sure if that came out in this smaller one.

Frankenstein's Monster

Here is a green Frankenstein's monster from Ultra Fractal. I was playing with some ideas, but the end product is not really what I had in mind. Fractals do grow organically, and I rarely plan them out, but in the midst of creation, there comes a point of synthesis and of decision in which I decide what I am going for. This one eluded me, though the end result has interesting elements. A true collection of parts that do not quite make a whole, the anti-synergy. The sum is less than the parts.

INVITATIONS!!!!!!!!!

Finally, our saga of hand-crafted invitations is over. This is what has been keeping every free moment, if not working on them, then thinking about them.

Supplies were purchased at the Paper Source. We had taken an invitation making course there earlier this year. Many trips were taken to the store, in Cambridge (located a small walk from our apartment) and in Brookline (a drive away), and we even ordered some materials as a special order.

Then, we assembled the tools we needed to create the invitations. The big items were a Konica-Minolta printer. This printer was won at an auction for my school. We had been wondering how we were going to print out the color pages of our invitation and avoid the hassles of going back to change files or dealing with the inconvenience of being away from home to do the printing. That was taken care of by this serendipitous auction, and a family from the school then turned around and paid for the printer for us. Wow!

Other tools and supplies came from Staples, Pearl Art, Bob Slate Stationer, and many other sources. In this picture, you can see the cutting board that made life easier. It had a regular cutting head as well as a perforator. Also, it was made of steel, so I stuck some business card magnets to the back of a ruler and was able to use that as a positive stop to speed up the cutting process.

After the printing was completed and the paper cut, we worked for a long time assembling the pieces. Envelopes lined the floor as the glue that ended up not working was drying. Stacks of unsewn invitations waited to be punched and sewn. The finished invitations then had to be stuffed in the envelopes, no mean feat if you have tried to restuff yours, and the envelopes had to be addressed.

Much work, and now it is mostly over. Yay! On to the next priority.

Invitations and the occasional fractal

These days are taken up with invitation madness. We are making our own, and the final fiddle-faddling with them has commenced. We hope to get them out by the weekend.

Recently, I have taken to reading a bit before sleeping. This has led to some late nights as I get caught up in a book. Right now, I am reading Lucifer's Hammer which I never read before. It is a good story with many characters whose paths are beginning to cross. Unlike the linked review, I like the book. The review complains about a slow beginning, but I thought it more like a European paced movie--enjoy the ride as it slowly builds.

I also cranked out another fractal amidst all of my curriculum development and wedding planning. It reminds me of tide pools.

Flying, Flowering, Fitness

My dear and loyal readers, my absence has been due to flying. Well, not entirely. I was not separated from the digital domain, but I was on vacation and decided not to write. We had about a week in Philly, and I am back now.

I have been marveling as spring progresses and the flowers burst forth. It always hits me anew, and I like that I never get tired of seeing life exploding out of tree branches and popping up from the ground. A faint sheen of green heralds this exuberance, and then the birds, the blue sky, and the flowers have a fiesta.

I am taking an exercise class through the Cambridge Adult Ed. program. It is fun, and it involves lots of stepping around in patterns with which I am unfamiliar. I seem to be getting the hang of it, but I still look like a fool compared to the rest of the class who have been doing these types of movements for a lot longer. Interestingly, I am the only male in the class. This seems to be a theme in my life with my classes at BMC and my career as an elementary school teacher. Good thing I got a couple good male friends out there to balance things out!

On my way back home from exercise, I used my new camera to get more familiar with it and to take picts of some of these beautiful blooms. I have a long way to go to get to the point where I know this camera as I did my last one. I did find in the dusk light conditions that I had to use the flash a lot more than I wanted to. Ah well, the learning curve commences.

The Eggs Hatched!

Here is what you get when the eggs hatch. A clutch of fire salamanders.

Clutch of Fire Salamander Eggs

This is what I imagine a clutch of fire salamander eggs might look like. The two in the middle might be ready to hatch!

Magnetic Fields

Yesterday, my students learned about magnetic fields by sprinkling iron filings on a sheet of paper under which they had placed a magnet. I still find this phenomenon fascinating and almost magical. Perhaps the preparation for this lesson led me in the direction I took on my newest fractal. It makes me think of two stars with their magnetic fields revealed.

Long Term Benefits?

What are the long term benefits of hacking? If we were all playing a game, and one of us decided that it would be fun to steal the ball and run like an idiot around the field with it (with or without clothes), that would make the game a lot less fun for the rest of us. After a while, running around the field like and idiot loses its appeal, and then the individual is confronted by a ruined game and pissed off people.

Similarly, I could go to the library, rip out page seven of every book I can, stuff the pages in my backpack, and run home chortling at the mischief I have wrought. Again, this would affect a lot of people in a negative way, I would have the temporary satisfaction of having a bunch of page sevens, but in the long run, I would not really get much out of it. In fact, if I needed a resource later on, it might be missing page seven, and I am sure I would not keep all of those around.

I only see hacking as a glorified I-can-piss-further-than-you kind of action. Bragging rights for how many people's work one can screw up.

One of my current, favorite sites appears to have been hacked. Woot is fun to check out for the wacky deals on items, the silly write ups, and the crazy competitions. I get great entertainment value from this site. This morning, the "I want one" button on the main page was chasing my cursor around, and I kept getting "server is too busy" pages. My guess-a hacker is sitting somewhere with his version of a bunch of page sevens and laughing like a possessed gibbon. It could also be Woot! just having some April Fool's day fun.

On another note, I just received my new camera, a Canon Powershot S80. I look forward to using it to take photos similar to the one on my Cafepress store. I will take it out with me today and see what I can capture. I already saw some forsythia blooming that I would like to image.

Movie

I find that I am not much for verbiage right now. I am going to exercise class tonight.

Inspired by Tim, I have been making low res(to speed up the rendering), wide-angle fractals. Just ideas in color or black and white. Here is an old black and white movie of snowfall.

Tired Eye

After wedding planning, curriculum design, crazy school days, and now taxes, my eyes are tired!

Woot Competition

I have recently been pulled into the time-limited, oddly-creative world of Woot competitions. Each week there is a challenge to create an image around a theme involving one of their daily products. This one revolved around the use of a paper shredder as a main character in an action film. While I don't have anywhere near the chop skills of many of the contest entrants, I do enjoy playing with the ideas. Perhaps I'll win a flying monkey. Here are my two entries for this contest. I even had someone reference one of my entries which is as much as I could hope for.

Hello Sunshine

Spring is here, the sun has returned, soon warmth will follow. This image reminds me of the surface of the sun.

Impermanence

It is funny how things are absolute and then without looking become fluid. A while back, there was a fractal that would not render regardless of the many things I tried. I did all the highly technical things like restarting the program and computer, and then devolved into the less technical including sticking out my tongue, cursing, and singing silly songs about obstinate fractals. Nothing seemed to work. Out of sheer perverseness I tried again last night. Low and behold, it rendered. Here is the recalcitrant dancing light.

What's in a Group?

In searching for the name for this new fractal, I looked up collective nouns to find what a group of butterflies is called. My instinct was swarm, but that did not sound poetic or reflective of this image. Instead, flight of butterflies sounds much better. Other choices include rabble, roost and flutter. We humans take on collectives of other animals when congregating. A posse is a group of turkeys which accurately describes many groups of people who self describe as a posse. This was a particularly obnoxious group of guys in my highschool who had rather inflated egos. I thought I had escaped them by going to college far away, but one member also went to the same college a year before I did. When I arrived, there was the same arrogant group of guys claiming to be the "posse." I only just found out that they were turkeys.

What other collective nouns describe groups of humans? Do we need new ones to accurately describe our collective actions when in a group? Cattle, kangaroos, and emu gather in a mob; elk, weasels, bison, buffalo, dogs, and turkeys (they keep coming up) are also known in groups as gangs. Shouldn't our gangs really be prides, ambushes, aeries, or batteries? I just get this picture of wanna-be toughs with their in-fashion falling-down pants strutting around like turkeys.

Here is my flight of butterflies. They are fluttering through sunbeams and something that looks like webs in the background, but I did not see this as sinister. Just a more gentle and beautiful image than I normally go for.

Five or Two

This recent fractal reminds me of a sand dollar. I remember reading something about a significant correlation between starfish (another animal with fivefold [pentalateral?] symmetry) and human DNA. There are many weird articles on the Internet relating to this. What if we evolved with five or ten eyes, arms, legs, etc? Would our problems be seen as a balance between five possibilities instead of right/wrong or good/bad? Would our lack of bilateral symmetry (yes Sand Dollars do have bilateral symmetry) change the idea that there are two sides to every problem? This is interestingly similar to the design of Magic the Gathering card game with its five colors.

Oh, I'll take number 4490

I just made the number up after laughing myself silly.

Order your own...

Here is my latest, a sea monster plowing through the currents of an ancient ocean:

A Week of Fish and Fish

This week seemed to pass by so quickly and yet take forever. In school, my students probably remember this week as the week that the placid algae eater (see picture of a the pleco's cousin at right) attacked and killed one of its new tank-mates. This was during a read-aloud that was promptly cut short for the nature show. I am not sure that tank is moving with the rest of my classroom materials to the new building next year. I never kept fish as a child, and while I enjoy a nice fishtank in someone else's house or business, I do not like the maintenance and upkeep they require.

And now to fish today. It is a rainy day in Philly, and we are going to the food tasting for the wedding meal. There will be several fish courses as well as some chicken. I imagine I will be stuffed after that. Along the way there is another photographer. Much to be done this weekend, and I still have not even touched my grading.

Why do people misuse apostrophes so regularly? Isn't it another keystroke to put one it? I find they are added incorrectly more often than left out, and this happens most often with plural's. (See that sneaky example of what I am talking about, hmm?)

Woot! There it is

My first post to Woot was in their just finished challenge to create the worst movie of a TV show that has not been made yet. Scroll down this linked page for my Arsenio Hall entry.

My school is having a fundraising auction, so I contributed some items from my store and will donate all proceeds from April 8-23 as well. Here is the business card I created for the event.

Welcome Speedsnail!

Here is Speedsnail. Is it a fractal constellation racing in a blaze of greens, yellows, and oranges across the mathematical firmament? I have taken details from its heart and from its orbits in the upper left corner. Click on them to really see the detail.