Stereoscopic

Well, now that they're completely passe', I finally got those white-noise-makes-a-picture-if-you-stare-at-it-long-enough type stereoscopics to work for me... Sorta... I can see them now and they're pretty neat, but I see them in reverse. Like if it's supposed to protrude from the page, it recedes into the page. Not so bad when it comes to letters or shapes but things like cats and people it's a little weird. There was a book of them sitting in the MOC and I had a half hour to kill during a pass. (Okay, I could have been working on another project in the interim but a half hour coding with likely interruptions isn't really generally worth it)

Anyhow, problem 2 with those things is that once I was able to see them, I had difficulty stopping seeing them. I tend to find shapes in irregular patterns anyhow. I often see faces, animals, and machines in the pattern of carpet fuzz or bathroom linoleum. Once I saw the images, I understood how they worked and thought about making a computer program that would generate them but I also started seeing them everywhere. Even text on a screen starts to form patterns that warp in 3D space. I dreamed them last night.

On the plus side, it's given me a new way of experiencing 3D form and I now have a trick for looking at relatively plain objects and pulling them into a new dimension. Probably take some time to be able to draw things in that headspace though.

I think I'm coming down with a code.

Blah. Too many projects, too much to do. Commanding the satellite is time-consuming but dull and interruptive. It's impacting my programming time. I brought extra food with me, I think I'm likely going to end up pulling an all-nighter here to get this Java app ready for demo tomorrow. I've got all the core stuff working but now I need to put the pieces together and make them pretty. In theory that's an hour job, but I know better than that. Also, building with only some badly spaghettied Matlab code, and no spec is proving a bit of a challenge.

Also, Lok wrote me back and asked if I was ready to do some coding. I mailed him back and said sure, so long as it's not needed by 10AM tomorrow. That's good at least. I haven't had time to put out any more resumes and if we're down to a trial by fire, with him, I've got whatever job I want there. Coding is the easy part. Although I seem to be setting up my strangest business relationship yet with him. It's very adversarial and unusually gamey. A subject that deserves its own post when I get time.

Haha. Believe it or not, I'm also still finding time to sketch and animate. I did ~50 frames yesterday morning before heading up to GPB and I've been doing sketches waiting for the train and in slack time during passes.

Good night, and good luck

So, I'm still listening to the WWII radio thing. Currently running is a newscast from Edward R Murrow. Reminded me that I'd seen a trailer for a movie about his battle with McCarthy coming up soon. Looked it up on Rotten Tomatoes and _YOW!_ It's got a 96% Fresh rating. I am completely stunned. I can't even imagine something this politically charged getting a rating that high. There are a lot of reviewers who would ding it just because they don't like the message.

Stunning! Now I really can't wait to see it.

PS: Discovered that the demo for tomorrow is a LOT less than I thought it was and that even despite hardware issues, I'm way ahead of schedule. Woot! That means I might actually get to sleep tonight! ^_^