April 2008 Archives

After a great surge of creative energy, I have finished chapter 3 of my novel, now all I have to do is write a 1 page synopsis of my entire novel and critique some really bad poetry.

ok, so its a little rainy and dreary outside, and well... my shoulders (and the rest of my torso) are covered. Oh, and I'm also under a tornado warning...

Anyway, returning to the point of this blog post. I woke up at 6:45am and was quite well rested and my multi-week writers block seems to have cleared up. I have gotten myself to a space where I can now think creatively and progress through my writing assignments. So far I have knocked out 3 of my remaining assignments, leaving only the completion of a poetry review and a page length synopsis of my novel. The poetry review will be the hard part. I hate the poetry book that I selected at the beginning of the semester and it is almost painful to read it. The book is Billy Merrell's Talking in the Dark. I can't stand it, its badly written poetry, although, it would be interesting as an autobiography. In poetry form it annoys me, but it could just be the line formatting he decided to use.

I suppose I should get back to writing about my under cover homosexual and his curious best friend...

Facebook paints an interesting picture of life. In the Facebook universe I have 116 friends and attend 4 schools, with a degree in progress at each. This is a highly over-optimistic view of things. While it is true that I know at least 110 people of the 116 it thinks are my friends, I only consider about 10 of them actual friends, the rest are acquaintances. It is true that I have 4 academic institutions (and probably 1 mental coming soon), but I am only actively seeking a degree at one of them (BA in SIS @ UNC-C) and passively earning a degree at another (AA @ Gaston). The other two are just places that have courses I like to take.

Also in my Facebook universe I recently purchased several of my friends. I purchased Chris for $540 and Guy for $620 (I keep having to rebuy Guy, hes in high demand). I really don't get the fascination with buying and trading friends (called "pets" on facebook). Is the world so bored that we now much place values on people like that and then "purchase" them? There are several people I know on Facebook that I would love to "buy", but I am afraid they would take it the wrong way (probably because I am not thinking of it in a pure way).

Overall, Facebook sucks and I really wish I had more to do today so I didn't have to think about this shit.

With 1 week remaining of this semester, it feels as though I have made a lot of progress this semester with things. There is only one course causing me concern. Drawing II is leaving me with a lot of uncertainty. I don't know what to expect during the final critique next Monday, I don't know whats she is looking for, and on top of that, I don't really have a feel for how I am doing in the course and on top of that, there is a final exam that will be administered before the final critique, and I don't know what will be on it. Earlier in the semester with the way things were being graded and then the way things went on the first test in the course (the mid-term I suppose) I began to question if I would be able to get an A in the course. Slowly I started thinking that it might be my first B on my Gaston College record, but I am terrified that when the final grades are in that I will receive something less than a B. I am questioning why I didn't force the instructor to discuss my performance in the course with me (via intervention of the dean) or simply move the course to audit status or any other act of academic uncertainty. In general my policy with courses is to stick with the course and have faith in the instructor unless failure is imminent, and then, well... I go to plan B. The only other course that feels in limbo at the moment is Creative Writing, and that is of my own fault. If I complete all of my assignments before the end of the semester (and I will), then I will get an A, no questions asked. No other courses are at risk even in the slightest. This evening I calculated my minimum final exam score to receive an A in my online math course... as long as I get at least 60% on the exam, there is no doubt that I will get the grade I am seeking. For all other courses, things are in motion such that my grade is already secured (such as Descriptive Astronomy Lab), or all that remains is to do well on a final exam and everything is clear. I am presently very nervous, but I think it is because for me to have a semester where things are lining up this well, the As start seeming like they are imprinted on glass balls and I just have to keep them floating in air for the duration of the week starting May 1 and ending May 6 to keep them at the end.

At this point in the semester I am usually exhausted and ready for things to be over, but this semester, other than some mathematical logic fatigue, all things are calm and easy.

I have now posted all of my Creative Writing 1 work (from last summer) on my personal website at http://www2.livecurt.net/eng125/.

I have not yet finished with things for the Creative Writing 2 work, nor have I finished the emotional disconnection from that work that is required for me to want to post it. It is mostly prose and I feel like I am learning to ride a horse. I'm not always falling off, but it is certainly a bumpy ride.

I think I have found the most useless Facebook application ever. Blog It by SixApart (powered by TypePad). It doesn't seem to do anything unique. It connects to the Movable Type blog installation almost the same way I would manually, and then gives a really simplified editing tool. I don't entirely get it. If anyone has found anything useful about it, I would love to hear from you.

Chris and I took a look at the use of drive space on my servers this evening and I was surprised by what was discovered. It would appear that my fascination with collecting porn and my ever growing digital photography store are taking over the most space on my file servers. Since I will be pursuing photography as an academic interest, this causes me a little bit of a panic. I have never liked having my hard drives even close to full, I like to keep things open and clear for expansion, getting close to the 50% barrier makes me nervous. I started looking at 1 terabyte drives this evening and found that they are surprisingly affordable and are available in very fast models. It is true that I have 250GB remaining on one of the drives in the new server, but this doesn't comfort me. I feel cramped and I feel like I am just going to wake up one morning and find that all of my drives are full... drive paranoia.

In my preparations for the summer semester digital photography course, I obtained the camera, some filters and a few other little things, but one thing I forgot, a camera bag. I am so used to my Nikon N7900 fitting into its little leather case and not needing any accessories. For the last few days I have been looking for camera bags that are inexpensive but yet durable, and I am finding nothing that I like. I suspect that I will end up having to go to a photo store to buy an appropriate bag. Am I crazy for thinking I can be mobile with this camera? How do photographers handle having to keep so much crap with them? How do you determine (online) that a camera bag is the right size? I have seen many bags designed for "Fujifilm FinePix", but that series has a fairly large range of camera sizes.

Fujifilm FinePix S5200, table-top micro tripod, digital photography texbook, supplemental digital photography book, lens hood, 55mm lens adapter (for telephoto and wide lenses), UV filter, spare lens cap (when filter in use), and polarized filter.

Same stuff, but stacked and in its packaging.

I am having a hard time remembering how to really start a website. I am still fighting with LiveCurt.net and everything that it hasn't become yet. I want to have it as a central location for everything about me, but I don't know how to do it yet. I like having everything in its place, but I also want to have LiveCurt.net to bring everything together. At present, the website is set up in a fairly simple and standard way, waiting for content, waiting for me to take any interest in it at all. I have had many theories about the website, including having the major areas of my life (art, ceramics, things erotic) in their own space, while letting the smaller things (cooking, gardening, my library) come together on LiveCurt.net itself. There are also concerns with my blog subscriptions, address book contacts and things like that, that I hope to resolve on this domain. I have played with the concepts a little in a private SiteEngine, but nothing is really concrete enough to put up for use yet. There is a lot of useless code sitting in that SiteEngine that I would eventually like to pull forward and make work for something in the future. Some of the conflicts I am having stem from questions in my head like, "does anyone really want an email each time I blog?" and "MovableType already has notification settings, should I split it?". Then there are concerns over authenticating everyone in a unified way. Sure, GITI users of the world will be happy, they just log in and its there, but what about everyone else? Should I find a way to bind to MovableType's authentication, or should I write an authentication module for MovableType that is based on the SiteEngine/GITI hybrid authentication mechanism? I really don't know how to answer those questions and its pissing me off. The last thing I want to do is make something that no one will use, or worse yet, write something that ends up being non-functional because of the badly documented SiteEngine authentication structure (did I mention I build the structure, and also ignored writing the documentation for it?)

As all of my readers are probably now aware, I will be taking Digital Photography during the summer semester. I tried taking only one class last summer, but that didn't go too well, I obsessed over it and didn't let it have time to rest between interactions with it and overall I feel that I didn't get as much out of it as I would have if I were doing other things as well. This summer my plan is to have a single complimentary course in addition to digital photography. I am considering something along the lines of a fitness class. I began looking at the various course offerings last night and found two that seemed like they would fit what I was looking for. I found CPCC's BIO155, Nutrition, but that seems a bit too obscure and not useful. CPCC also has HEA110, Personal Health and Wellness, which matches more closely to what I want to take. The other option I gave myself for the summer was the potential of a history or literature course, but so far, that seems like it might be a little too much reading for a summer course. I want fun courses during the summer, I don't want to be the sad boy looking out of the library window, down on the other kids outside playing and wishing I was one of them. No, none of that for me (got close enough to that during Summer 2004). I want something exciting and motivating for summer. I might have plans for things other than classes this summer, so I really don't want to be tied down with a lot of reading and excessive bullshit.

Lets take a look at my summer semester history:

Summer 2004 - Art Appreciation, Sociology of the Family, General Anthropology
Summer 2005 - Java Programming
Summer 2006 - {Academic Break}
Summer 2007 - Creative Writing 1
Summer 2008 - Digital Photography, ....

Summer 2004 was hard and long, but was still a lot of fun, and the only course I regret is General Anthropology. I hated the course, but somehow still got a B in it, even though I did the very least I could in that course.

Summer 2005 was a challenge for me. I had never worked with any language that wasn't based on C, so Java was like diving head first into an orientation to object oriented programming. Overall I enjoyed the course, but I could have used a bit of a buffer with other material at times.

Summer 2006 wasn't fun. I went through a very bad spring semester and nothing made sense to me, I just sort of lost it. This was my first break in 7 continuous semesters. I remember being bored a lot during this semester.

Summer 2007 returned me to having an academically active summer. I loved the course, it made me a lot more expressive and sort of taught me that artistically, I have no boundaries.

I don't yet know what will happen this summer, but I believe it will be productive for me, or at the very least, I will learn a lot about optics that I didn't know before. I will try to keep things posted to the blog regularly as the summer progresses, oh, and I will fill everyone in on what happens when I get to register on Thursday at 5PM for summer classes at CPCC.

BTW, if anyone wants to enroll in Digital Photography with me, there are 6 seats remaining in the class and there is no requirement to apply for admission to UNC to enroll. The course is designed to be transfered to other institutions and is open to everyone. Course description and enrollment information

I have been looking to find some perineals to replace some of my "re-seeding annuals" in my front flowerbed. I was scouring the Burpee catalog and looking online for some good plants. I found many of the plants to be overly expensive for what equates roughly to a freeze-dried live plants. The other day in the Lowe's garden center (I had a valid reason for going, I really did) I found these nice hibiscus plants, all on sale :-), so I bought one. I bought one that had none of its blooms open yet, so that the plant would stay dormant a little longer. I was hoping to plant it shortly after I purchased it, but the weather went cold again, so the hibiscus (and the Moses in the Cradle that I bought the same day) have become house plants for now. I am hoping to get them both in the ground this weekend, although, the hibiscus gave us a nice show while inside (see above).

Tonight while doing some astronomy homework I managed to get lost in the last 2 chapters of the textbook, "The Beginning and the End" as well as "Life on Other Planets". I don't know how I got lost in these chapters, but they are more philosophical than the rest of the textbook. Its is very interesting to read about the big bang on one page, detailing how the universe began, and then a few pages later reading the few possible ways it could end. The most spectacular of ends involves all of the matter in the universe recollapsing once the expansion of the universe is complete, and then the tightly packed matter beginning to have gravity again, as well as internal heating and the whole damned thing starting all over again in a seemingly endless pattern of recycling. The most bleek is that the universe never reverses and everything keeps going away from everything else until radioactive decay has its effect on all matter in the universe and all protons fall apart, effectively ending the universe once and forever. Between these two theories, I am most likely to believe the recollapsing universe theory, since it seems as though the universe is constantly recycling and gravity tends to bring everything back eventually. The process is very plausible, since it would allow everything to be heated back to its original temperature, effectively breaking everything back to single electron elements (hydrogen). Funny thing is, go to the string theory people, they will tell you that our universe is much like a lightbulb, there is more than one in the box and one burning out isn't a big deal.

We are star stuff and we are the way that the universe knows itself. It is possible that we are the first sentient life to exist in the universe (at least in this iteration of the universe cycle), which means we are somewhat of an accomplishment. We can't know for sure if we are alone, but even if we aren't, we can't be sure that other civilizations would be as curious as us and want to explore space, or if they would be as persistent.

There is nothing I hate more than writing love scenes! Well, ok, maybe that isn't true, but I don't like writing them for academic assignments. In Creative Writing this week, that is our assignment. I am perfectly happy writing my fluffy love scenes for keeping to myself, or really hot erotic fictions for sharing with those closest to me. Lately I have even developed an ability to take on the persona of a character in one of my stories, although, thats mostly for verbal story-telling. I am uncomfortable with sharing things I write that resemble that with an academic class, maybe its because I am gay and tend to sometimes create gay characters (although, last summer, I created a straight couple). I have no reason to feel that a love scene between my two male lead characters or perhaps one of my male lead characters and another character would be received badly. I don't know what I am scared of. I am often timid in drawing and in writing because of how I think things will be received, even when there is no reason to think anything negative, its like somehow with myself, being myself outwardly isn't allowed.

My drawing instructor is now bellowing on a daily basis the number of class meetings we have left. For drawing, we will only meet 4 more times, and for astronomy, we meet 5 more times. There are only 2 weeks left of class and things are going by pretty quick. In previous semesters this timing became stressful. This semester is a bit different. I am quite relaxed about things. I have a ton of stuff to do, but I have plenty of time, and am ready to tackle all of it. Creative writing is the biggest source of stress for me. I can't seem to get any quiet time to work on my pieces, primarily my novel. I suppose I feel like I haven't been very "creative" in creative writing. The words are going on the page, but there isn't much behind them. Drawing has picked up some steam since I last visited that topic for blog purposes. I am enjoying a lot of the newer projects and I feel like my drawing style has developed beyond where it was when I started the semester. I would love to take a figure drawing class, but those are hard to find and when you do find a school that offers them, it is usually difficult to meet the pre-requisites to get into the course. If nothing comes of my desire for a figure drawing course, I may just have to teach myself figure drawing. It will take longer, but I will be able to take things at my own pace and experiment.

My astronomy course is going well, all concepts are coming to me with great ease, and I feel like I am ready to take on the final exam. My online math course is a little more of a challenge, but I do feel like I am understanding the material. Its hard to believe that i'm over half finished with the 8 week course. I have never really been good with math, but somehow, the way the tool we use (MyMathLab) handles the material and gives demonstrations, it is a lot easier for me. When working on my offline mid-term for the course last week I noticed how bad my handwriting is, especially for numbers. Doing things electronically seems to be helping most with that.

The semester will come to a crashing halt on April 30th, and then there is a week of exams and other fun stuff. After that week I get about 10 days to recover from spring semester before my digital photography class begins, then I have another 10 week semester to work with. Somewhere in there, I have to figure out my plans for fall, whatever they might be.

A few sample images from the new camera are now available at: http://www.disturbingthoughts.net/gallery2/v/album/album/.

The Fujifilm FinePix S5200 arrived before I woke up on Friday, perfectly on schedule. In the past few days the camera has taken a little over 100 test images, not a bad start. The camera is certainly more sophisticated than my N7900, which in some instances is a good thing, and in others, not so good. So far the best things about the camera are the natural light mode and its adapting flash. The camera has a lot of manual controls availible, even in some of the assisted modes. I feel like I still have a lot to learn about the camera, and photography in general, which I suppose is the reason for taking the class to begin with.

I am hoping to prepare some sample pictures from the camera to post to the blog's gallery in a few days.

After a long delay and the absence of a departure scan from Bloomington, CA, there is an update on the camera:

Apr 3, 2008 3:46 PM
Arrived at FedEx location
CHARLOTTE, NC

Looks like it will be a Friday delivery.

Today my very wonderful UPS driver brought me my textbook and the accessories for my camera. My camera's last known status was arriving at a FedEx facility in Bloomington, CA, so I am little worried about it, but I do have some amount of confidence in FedEx to not completely lose a package.

My camera won't arrive until Friday, a whole day later than originally planned. This makes me want to jump up and down and scream at the sky. The worst part is, the camera is going FedEx, so I can't do a service upgrade over the phone, and the package will likely arrive in their shipping center on Wednesday evening, in time for a Thursday delivery, but they will hold the package for an additional day because it isn't yet scheduled. Anybody know the going rate for bribing a shipping person to release a package for station pickup?