Ode to ArtRage2 and the Balance Game.

Hi. Sorry I missed last week. We were gone Friday and Saturday and then had family Saturday and Sunday. Monday I was working my tail off to catch up and then the week just flew by.

Let me start off by mentioning the coolest software I currently know of: Artrage2. What is it? It is a simulation of the painting experience.* A really good simulation but with the advantages that you don't have to buy paints or canvas and that there is unlimitted undo so you can't really be stuck on a mistake. The user interface is amazing. Wonderfully intuitive, good looking, and powerful. The paint actually mixes on the cavas as you paint unless you have it dry first. The brush can have different pressures. Default is a lot of pressure. In that case you slather on the paint in Van Gogh fashion and the texture is amazing. I've tried the program on a regular computer and on a tablet. It's about 30% cooler on a tablet. But it is still the neatest application I know about on an ordinary computer with a mouse. I have the free-ware version but plan to upgrade pretty soon to the 20 dollar version. And not only for the extra features. Also just to reward beautiful work that has benefited the world (and me personally) by throwing cash at it.
The whole thing makes programming seem like art more than craft. Maybe almost like some organic wholesome magic. They brought something to life.

*(It also simulates pencil, pastels, etc. but I'm focusing on the oil painting capability.)


On to the most interesting thing I am trying right now. I call it the balance game and the idea is to make life into a game. I have my life divided into categories of physical and spiritual health, family, work, church. Each category is divided up into specific things that I can do for points. Points in each category are summed and then the totals for the categories are multiplied to compute the overall score. That means if I flunk a category I flunk the game. All the math is done by a spreadsheet and I can see how I'm doing. So far it's been fun enough and a great reminder on a fair number of important things.

Anyway, goodnight.

Some fun things

Camping. Friday and Saturday evenings I went on my last camp out for my last calling. It was a great time with amazing stars, clean air, good company, plenty of rock formations to climb and wildlife. I saw a wild raccoon for the first time in my life and a huge owl. We got photos of the owl and of a woodpecker. I don't know what kind they are but the photos should be good enough for recognition.

A lot of my best memories involve being outside and seeing the beauty. Maybe all except for some births, baptisms, and things of the most human sort. My only conclusion from that is that perhaps I ought to take a bit more time for recreating . . .

I'm starting a bird photo collection. I'm pretty excited about it actually. The goal is to photograph as many different species as possible. Right now I'm at two with the owl and the woodpecker. I want to put the photos somewhere on the web. Perhaps Geocities or Flicker or something. I'm not sure the right place. Just want free and easy.

pbwiki.com The coolest free and easy sight I know about right now is pbwiki.com. You can start your own wiki in about one minute and from there it is super-easy to modify into whatever you want. The wiki is extremely easy to edit and can be password protected so that only a certain group can edit it. You can upload photos and files etc. and add pages with no real hassle. I think it is an awesome tool for collaborative creation of whatever you want to make. But right now I just use it to collect all the different ideas that I need to write down in one place that is easy to organize and accessible from anywhere.

Graphics. One thing I really haven't wanted to face is programing graphics. For whatever reason it just hasn't interested me very much. That's a shame because that is a super-important part of anything like a game or web-page. But that's that for now. I love text. I really like structure. (By structure I mean math, physics, game-rules, etc.) But not the graphics so much.

So what the heck. Maybe I'll focus on what I want to work on this week. Maybe this week I'll look at following a song and measuring how well that song is followed over time.

Oh. I got a new calling that should be pretty darn fun: ward website administrator.

Beautiful Day, Feedback Loop, What if corporations become mere husks?

Man, it is a beautiful day and I'm feeling great. It's a beautiful time of year and I get to spend it surrounded with these kids, and with excellent people at work, church, and school. Los Alamos is still fun. Yesterday I spent most of the day playing with coupled differential equations designed to model interactions between atoms and light. And a little time exploring general properties of density matrices. And about 4 hours commuting up there and back (not so bad . . . had a friend along who is a philosopher(5 years)-turned-computer-scientist(a few years and a lot of money)-turned-quantum-information-theorist along to talk with). And a bit of time at the temple. Today is more free. And tomorrow I will be released from my current calling and be given a new and fascinating one. More about that when the time comes.

Feedback Loop

We are at a pretty fun time right now with SongPiper because there is nowhere to go but up. I want to get statistics each week on the number of visitors to the sight. Right now I think that the number is about zero. It should be anyway: there isn't much in the way of worthy content there at this point. Each week we can find out how many visitors we have and as long as the number is improving I guess we can say that we are succeeding. That's all I want to do right now is establish a positive feedback loop between the sight and the three of us. Then we'll see what happens.


What if corporations become mere husks?

A couple of my heroes are Sam Walton and David Packard. Both of them seemed to be pretty down-to-earth and seemed to have tried to do a lot of good even as they built amazing companies. I think both companies have done a lot of good as well. But now . . . both companies are both huge organizations. What guarantee is there that they will maintain their integrity as companies? I don't think there is one. After reading their biographies I wanted to do what they did. I wanted to found a great company. But now I'm not sure that a great company will stay great. And if you have created something powerful that isn't guaranteed to stay moral have you really done a great thing?

General Conference, Interstellar travel, uncomfortable truths (SongPiper)

General Conference today and yesterday. Now you can get it at any time by going to www.byu.tv. I love it. We decided to put the TV into the closet and take a more active roll in deciding what to take into our home. We want a way of finding out about the best things out there so that we can get them in our own time and in our own way. Also I've been using a neat site called Reddit as a source of news etc. But, after a couple too many surprises from following links, I've decided to stop using it. The key to sites like that seems to be finding one where the people who use it share both your interests and values. If I find one I will be all over it. For now I guess I'll go to the Economist for non-local news.

Interstellar travel

So I was quizzing the kids on the planets today and it got me to thinking about space. You know, the closest stars are still amazingly far away at a bit over 4 light years. It would be pretty cool to get a robot out there . . .

Anyway, I think the chances of finding anything as nice as earth anywhere close are astronomically low. So if we want to be settling other places it seems to me that we need to learn how to thrive in environments that aren't all that hospitable. It would be pretty interesting just to see how much we could do in Antarctica or under the earth or something. What would it mean to thrive? If we're talking about eventual space colonization it would mean getting to the point where you can grow and reproduce without much help. If we could make settlements on the moon or on Mars that could grow on their own then I would start to feel excited about the possibility of spreading out a bit.

I think it's cool stuff. Cool from the perspective of technical challenges, of human challenges, and of open-ended opportunity. The whole idea reminds me a little of the LDS pioneers making their way out to a barren wasteland and settling it and making a beautiful place to live.

SongPiper

Ok, so last week I talked about trying to make this whole SongPiper thing into a game with points. Well, having website means that we get immediate feedback on things like # visits, and visit depth. I think we can monitor the number of links to our site. Also if we made our games web based could we measure the time that people spend playing them? I could change the games over time trying to optimize that parameter with the idea that it gives some indication of the value people give to playing the game. So that is the direction that we are thinking in.

I figure that watching a few kids without much time playing around with things they know nothing about might be a little boring. But there it is. This blog is called Diligence and Temperance. If that isn't a promise of an unexciting ride what is!

Seriously though, the blog isn't earning its name. Rather, my actions aren't earning the name. The name should rather be “wandering about learning a lot but not sure where to go or how bad I want to get there.” The concept from the beginning was to answer the question of what one could do with an hour a day if one applied the dual concepts of diligence and temperance. I believe that one can accomplish a lot. I felt like I did accomplish a lot. But that ended somewhere in June, after only 3.5 months of progress. Then my clear initial goal had been accomplished and I looked around and found myself unsure of where to go next. And I failed to meet my short term goals for July 15^th. Since then I haven't done much worth noting and writing the blog has become embarrassing because I make public my lack of direction.

But now there is some direction. We have some clear metrics that we can work on. I'm not sure that we are committed to working on them yet so perhaps that is the next step: to see if we are ready to take complete ownership of our metrics. If we do we will make the sacrifices to see them improve over time. If we don't we might as well not waste our time with anything else. We have busy, full, interesting lives. There is no reason to pretend to do something we aren't going to do.

Let us see what happens.

Doug