I continue to be scattered; dipping my toes into a little bit here and there. Actually, that’s a little harsh – its more like, we got some interruptions, I got behind in various things, so I’ve mostly been trying to catch up on life, leaving only a bit of time for fun, creative endeavors.
But, I must create/fun, or I get grumpy. So, the symptoms of my creativity:
I created a full color 3D sandstone print for my nephew for his birthday. Instead of Shapeways, I used Sculpteo.. and was very impressed with their service. I haven’t received the print yet, but I hope its good.
In City:Skylines (no recent picture available), I finally let a city grow up to get metro stations. I’ve found that geographical arrangement is secondary to having a good pipeline for traffic flow. Ie, you can do almost any arragement as long as there’s a (elevated to stay out of the way) highway leading back and forth between I<->O/S/C<->R. Next up if I get back to it is Cargo / Freight / Ships / etc.
I’m watching an awesome lecture series on Human Behavioral Biology from Stanford. I 
started at the end (thanks to a reddit post that led me there), and now I’m watching the whole thing. Most wow for me so far: Game Theory and how that was discovered to exist in real species, and the differences between Tournament and ___ species, and how (unaware) humans have some tournamenty-ness driving their behaviors.
At work, very recently, I get to embed Lua in a business app! (Lua is the scripting language used by 
World of Warcraft, for example). The idea is I have a very dynamic set of data – that I need to map to a very fixed structure. Rather than write brittle code (change a field, change code), or very complicated code (to describe how things map into a multi-dimensional structure), I instead host a script and let the script do the mapping – and the user can change the script. Set up stuff before, clean up stuff after, done. Currently in the test console app stage. (click on image to zoom in to see sample code).
I’ve been watching the ISS HD feed more often lately. I keep trying to get an overhead 
view of KY during the daytime, but I keep missing it. My next opportunity is 6:50pm tonight as I write this. Satflare.com/isshd provides a map right next to the live feed, and an overlay of features – pretty awesome. Be aware that at night, the cameras don’t pick up any city illumination so it looks very dark.
I ordered a replacement wire sheath for my Solidoodle 2. It arrived, but I haven’t had a cha
nce to install it yet. I don’t have anything specific that I want to print.. so its not a priority. I do have a pattern growing in my head, having to do with collecting data from waze about driving habits and then making a 3D version of driving habits.
I’m halfway through a Football Kicker/Punter Coach-shopping video. This is actually for pay. Another hour left or so. This is my next priority; getting finished this weekend, its bugging me.
Oh! I also got to learn Photoshop in an evening, to make an advertisement for my mom’s business. Thanks to LFPL’s Lynda.com integration, I was able to watch the Photoshop Essentials course for free – and it got me enough mastery within an hour to be able to:
- Use layers
- Free-form crop to correct a picture of a sign
- Color correction (my video experience helped here a lot)
- using clip and mask layers to limit blurring to portions of the screen to make text more visible
- using clip and mask layers to apply some selective de-brightening of overly bright elements
Very proud of how quickly I picked it up, but its also thanks to good coursework available.
I am a Jack of All Trades, master of none, but Apprentice or Journeyman at several.
