Yesterday's visit to the Lowell Kinetic Sculpture Race was pretty seductive.
The crowd at this event was very impressively diverse, both in terms of culture and age. I didn't feel like the oldest person in the place, which is not usually the case these days.
It's got me really thinking that Lowell could be the place to settle.
I'm still doing the Javi Drawing exercises. I haven't quit the program.
I'm not doing them quite daily, but I am doing them. I've paused posting them here because the result are cruder. I'm trying more challenging things, and the result are not something I want to post. But I hope to get back to posting them soon.
Here's one I did yesterday.
Freehand digital drawing in Procreate from a pic I took a couple months ago.
Trump Caricature.
Digital drawing in Procreate on Apple iPad.
I've always liked this pose of Iron Man.
This is a poor drawing, but I learned some things from doing it.
As I wrote in the notes underneath, I like the proportions and a bit of feeling the expression of the character.
I'm beginning to realize that this stage of "learning to draw" is not simply about learning to "draw". It is also about learning to "see". To become sensitive to the subtleties of the angle of the head, and the shape of the torso. With experience I think that I will be able to more quickly recognize these attributes of a scene, and thus be able to try and draw them accurately.
Learning.
Today we begin phase two of these drawing exercises. Now we're reproducing a drawing that we like. Here's the Jedi Droid Huyang from the Ahsoka comics.
Javi Drawing Day Three. (2 1/4 x 5 inches. #2 pencil on printer paper.)
Tomorrow the style of daily drawings changes. Stay tuned.
Although I'm hoping for the Democratic candidate to win, it's notable that regardless of party New Hampshire is likely to have a woman governor for the upcoming term.
Polling for the upcoming state primary:
"On the Republican side, 65 percent of likely GOP voters said they would cast their ballot for Kelly Ayotte," and...
"For the Democrats, 39 percent of respondents said they'd vote for Joyce Craig, with 30 percent of those polled backing Cinde Warmington"
Source: WMUR-TV
People around the country still think of New Hampshire as a conservative state, and it can be. But in statewide elections we've repeatedly elected women to leadership roles.
I like that.
Well this is cool. Figuring out the best route, then visiting the streets named after every day of the year throughout Europe. (Fair warning, it's a 'lightning talk' so the guy talks fast.)
For the past couple days they've been stringing fiber along my street.
I'm wondering if I should look into signing up for it.
I have two missions while there.
First is I have a "day job" assignment in Orlando. I'll be doing that first after arriving in Florida.
After the work is done I'll move on to a visit with my podcast partner Jeb.
And who knows what other adventures may happen before, during, and after.
More on the progress of this adventure in this blog. Subscribe.
Over the years I've absorbed enough unix/linux ability to be able to stumble around in the accounts I use. Mostly for web development.
It appears that many MIT curricula put students into a similar situation. And this course is to fill in the gaps in their (my!) skills at using the OS from the command line.
Shell scripting. Useful commands that I'd never heard of. A great illustration of using piping and redirection to splice commands together. Also a great overview of using the version control system 'git' from the command line.
I'm only halfway through, and I've already learned a bunch of things that I'll use all the time.
January 29, 2024
Hi!
I'm pretty sure no one noticed, but I missed last week's message here. I hope to not miss it very often.
My goal is to spend 2024 focussing on building my work in creating, and my audience for, content about things other than General Aviation.
I'm sure most of you know my work on the Uncontrolled Airspace Podcast -- with Jeb Burnside and Dave Higdon. And I'll continue to be involved with that. But I want to concentrate more this year on creating other media things, about other subjects that interest me.
For the first few months I'll be experimenting. Dabbling in too many subject areas and media forms. But eventually I hope to discover the intersection of, what I'm most interested in, and what you all want to see.
My work with the UCAP podcast has been almost exclusively audio, but in this new work I'm very interested in the visual arts.
January 15, 2024
Last week I reported that we finally got some snow (8.5 inches!) up here in Seacoast New Hampshire.
Well, two days later, the temperature rose to 50 degrees F, and it rained for the better part of 24 hours. Almost all the snow was melted and washed away.
And now, this morning's low temp was 20F! And the forecast is for it to stay below freezing 24/7 for the next week.
We've moved, from the unseasonably warm of December, onto a weather roller-coaster.
Monday, January 8, 2024 -- Good morning.
The big news up here in Seacoast New Hampshire is that it's finally snowed.
This winter had shaped up so far for its historically low snowfall totals. Specifically, NO SNOW yet.
But this past Saturday night and through the day Sunday we got 8 1/2 inches of white fluffy. This is more like it.
Although the current forecast is for 2 inches of RAIN on Wednesday. So... it's the new normal.
We posted a new episode of UCAP, #1083 (lgy 722) with guest co-host Drew "172Drew" Poley. Jeb and I talked with Drew about Jeb's new avionics and Drew's new airplane, among other things.
I'd really like to start blogging regularly again.
Back in the aughts I was a very active blogger. Posting multiple entries every day. Some of those blogs are still available online. Maybe I'll pull together a list of links.
I've been thinking lately, and pretty much decided, that in response to the collapse (maybe I should write more on that claim) of social media, I want to return to blogging on a daily basis.
Then the problem becomes what platform to use.
There's this one, blogger. Not a bad choice. But being part of the google (alphabet?) ecosystem makes it concerning. Google's been known to end these things before. Frankly I'm surprised they haven't ended this one already.
Wordpress is a non starter for me. It's become too bloated and hard to maintain. Also it's database/php driven, which I think makes it too fragile for longterm existence.
I've always liked the Jekyll system. But I've never figured out how to get it running on my hosting systems. Maybe I should invest some time in figuring that out.
But somehow I want to blog. My goal is at least one decent post each day. Stay tuned.
This outfit tags sharks with radio trackers, and you can see the most recent "ping" from each shark's location. I came across this because the shark Anne Bonny" has been pretty close to shore here in seacoast New Hampshire.
In the world of World of Warcraft we are in the midst (nearing the end actually. Woo hoo!) of the "pre-expansion" period before the next Expansion of the game: "Dragonflight"
At the beginning of the pre-ex I set some goals for myself, and for my various playing characters ("toons", do they still call them that?).
I hadn't played the game at all in many months, maybe a year. I never really warmed up to the "Shadowlands" previous expansion. So, before the new expansion I wanted to get my main character up to the "level cap" so it was ready to move on into the new content.
I also chose two other of my characters that I wanted to improve, using the easier leveling capabilities that are available during the pre-ex.
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| My WOW characters. |
My "main" is a "Shaman", part of the faction "Alliance". I have another char that is part of the other, opposing faction: "Horde". It is also a Shaman. I don't play the Horde char very much, but I like to keep it reasonably up to date, so I have the ability to experience the game from that perspective when I want.
So I wanted to get my Horde char to the level cap too.
Finally, there's my Hunter. For years now I've played the character class "Shaman". But in an earlier period I spent a bunch of years as a Hunter.
In WOW all character classes play differently. They have different powers, and fight using different techniques. I've found Shaman to be a class that I'm pretty comfortable with. I'll never be a top level player, but I can succeed pretty well with the Shammy. But I recently got homesick for my Hunter.
So I decided to try to re-familiarize myself with it, and maybe get it to the cap as well.
I've achieved my main goals of getting the two mains to the cap, Level 60. And I've spent some time revisiting what it means to be a Hunter. But that last it turning out to be a challenge. Very different fighting style, that I wasn't very good at before, and I'm still not.
But anyway. I'm mostly ready for the Expansion. The mains are Level 60, and "geared up" as well as is available to we mere solo Questers. With the remaining time before the Big Day I'll chip away at leveling the Hunter, and see how far I can get it.
The World of Warcraft expansion "Dragonflight" drops on Monday November 28 at 6pm EST.
