Good lord, it really has been almost a year since I posted here. Wow. I have 27 drafts here in OPW land, which is both amusing and pathetic. I'm slowly starting to think I have ADD. (I can hear you all saying, "Ya think?")

Lots to report, which is also to say hardly anything to report.  This is gonna be a boring post. 

I should be at Burning Man now, but I tested positive for Covid after Beatlefest (Beatlefest was August 9-13), and it kicked my ass... so much so that I couldn't do my usual pre-BurningMan prep. I was really disappointed to sell my Burning Man tickets, but it was the right thing to do. Anyone who says Omicron is mild can smooch my 'ttocks. It wasn't easy, and there was a day there where I thought it might be hospital time. The good news is that out of 40+ musicians involved in a week-long music festival, only two people got sick, and I was one of them. Oddly, Matt never got sick, and we shared a bed for pretty much the whole thing. 

I also had Delta in November 2021, and while that bout wasn't a treat by any means, Omicron was harder in many ways. I lost taste/smell with Delta and had a pretty high fever for several days, but Omicron was quite different: a low-grade fever that was on and off, and a headache that was so awful that I spent the better part of 5 days with a knee sock tied tightly around my head like a tourniquet to hold my skull together... and then I had a black t-shirt over my head for a few days because any and all light hurt my eyes and head (including my phone) I only ever had a migraine once in my life back in the 90s (it was a reaction to a prescription), and this felt like that. Ooooof. 

I tested positive on the 15th, and finally tested negative on the 23rd, but I waited until I had three negative tests under my belt before feeling like it was safe to emerge. 

Like my Delta experience, it feels oddly good to have a few weeks of immunity. 

I find that I'm sometimes having a hard time finding my words... moreso than usual. It's frustrating, and unnerving. I didn't have that experience with Delta. 

I also can't believe I've had covid twice; I feel like it's a moral failing or like I was careless. I tested every day leading up to BeatleFest, I tested before leaving the house for the theater each night, I ate well, I wasn't stupid, I masked up... I never shared a mic with anyone, I had my own platform on stage with plenty of room around me.... so I dunno. 

Anyway. 

This post is all doom and gloom, but things are otherwise good.  

Matt and I have been playing a lot of disc golf, which I suck at but also really enjoy. It's been cool noticing improvements. I got my first birdie (one under par) yesterday! Wheeeee! 

This time of year is always a bit bittersweet... I know we're going into the cooler months and I know winter is around the corner which I Do Not Like. But I bought I neat sweater that I'm excited to wear. (It's the little things.)

I wish I took advantage of fresh summer vegetables this season... I look at Annie Mollo's meal posts and I wanna drive up to Vermont and eat everything. :)

I miss my friends very much; I just haven't had a chance to see my peeps and I would like to do that. 

During my recent covid haze, I had an idea: Maybe the time is right to sell my house, get rid of all of the excess nouns in my possession, and go check out other cities. My house has been good to me, but I never really wanted a house and only bought it because everyone told me it was something I was supposed to do. I'm tired of doing things that other people tell me to do. I'm not getting any younger here, and Matt and I wanna live places that aren't Delaware.  We have no concrete plans or anything, but it's fun to think about. 

In other news, Dad is now 82 and he's doing great. He's found a groove and a routine that works for him. He misses Mom (we all do), but I think he's also enjoying being a bachelor. He never lived alone ever in his life, and I think it's good for him. 

Lastly: After Mom passed, I got myself a therapist and HOLY CRAP she's awesome. It's all self-pay, but it's pretty reasonable. I'm grateful. 

OK, this is a boring post. It'll be more interestin*

I love y'all. 

I'll be back*

--

* I didn't actually stop typing mid-sentence... my phone just randomly starts deleting words. Good times. 😁 It's all part of the, um, "charm" of using a 2017-ish phone. La la la!

Our son married his sweetie, who wore a dress made by my sweetie.

In "Odd Thomas" (2013), Anton Yelchin (1989-2016) says "I'm sorry your life was so short" but it might have been said by anyone, and about anyone. 

I did a little experimental thread over on my Twitter stream. I wanted to encourage a couple of things - namely audience interaction and I wanted to provide them an actual reason to share the thread.

Simply put: I provided a series of polls for folks to vote on to determine how I constructed a monster.

Here's a link to the thread in case you're curious.

The results to the first poll (bipedal or quadrapedal) was:

The second poll was what kind of terrain the creature spends its time in. The audience chose subterranean so I added digging claws and narrowed the torso to make the creature more wedge shaped.

The third poll was how many heads the creature has. Crowd said 2.

And the fourth and final poll was what kind of tail to give it (or to give it none). The crowd picked a long straight tail with a club end.

After the final poll, I finished the tail and posted it and then felt like I should go ahead and paint it. Since I was already in an experimental mode, I took the sketch, blurred it a bit, and then mixed the sketch lines in with the digital paint layers. The final results are at the top of the post.

Here's the process video if you enjoy that.

I really need to get back to the work for my Patreon page, but this was an excellent little experiment and I plan to do it again in the near future.

This is the character I'm currently working on for Patreon:

I am not particularly a tea snob. 

In fact, for my morning jolt I prefer Stok cold-brew coffee.  But, I do like an afternoon tea on occasion--a big cup that I can slowly sip over a period of hours.  So, I have certain tea requirements.  It can't go bitter; it has to have that muscatel taste; it has to be forgiving to varying preparation techniques; it must be loose leaf.  It must stand up without milk or sugar.  Today, I ran out of my secondary backup tea and had to switch over to my tertiary backup tea.  Ugh.  Some cheap and nasty Assam blend. About half way through, I had already ordered $75 of tea, which seems like a lot but it's probably four years worth of tea.  But still, this cup is that bad.

Maybe I am a tea snob. 

If you offer me a cuppa Earl Grey, you *will* get a tea lecture.

Midjourney created this image, given the prompt "white cat named Spike in the style of Marvel." If you've seen my cat, and if you haven't you must be new here, this is pretty amazing. I picked my favorite of the four initial images and upscaled it. I didn't do any further refinement.

Not a real photograph. Dall-E created this image, given the prompt "a big white cat named Spike with stripes like a raccoon and spots like a cow photorealistic."

My privacy-minded partner thought at first this was a photo of our cat.

So Dall-E is just better, right? It depends. The above was Dall-E's best effort on the same Marvel Spike genre prompt Midjourney nailed so well. I attempted to refine this with the words "Marvel cinematic universe" and so on, but it didn't get any closer to the concept.

Midjourney created these images from the prompt "Midjourney's mother." I didn't pick a winner or do any further refinement.

It is difficult not to read into this. But is it just telling me what I want to hear? And if it is, so what?

Midjourney created this image from the prompt "the true purpose of Midjourney." Three of these can be understood simply as riffing on the word "journey." The one at upper right is perhaps just riffing on images frequently associated with the words "true purpose." So as lovely as they are, they don't make me go "hmm" as much as the previous set.

"Dall-E's mother photorealistic" yielded this image, and other images of animal mothers. One was a chimpanzee. If they were all chimpanzees, it could be considered a little cheeky. But emphasizing one chimpanzee out of four images would just be cherry-picking on my part.

Dall-E generated these images for the prompt "the true purpose of Dall-E." There's a theme, at least for three of them, but if there's a message here this monkey isn't clever enough to figure it out.

A Google employee who claims their text-generating AI is a sentient being has been fired. On the whole, I tend to agree with those who say that particular AI (not Dall-E or Midjourney) is probably not a sentient being. And yet, I also agree with those who have serious questions about our ability to judge that. This will be more of an issue as the line gets fuzzier. And it's getting fuzzy pretty fast.

The second piece of tape is my doing...

11:00 all hands at work -- Didn't pay attention; pre-coffee.  Virtual meeting anyway.  Grab some lunch.

12:00-15:00 work - Determined that yesterdays mini-project was completely unneeded as I was testing the wrong thing.  Also, determined that third-party test team isn't going to test much with their firewall blocking important stuff.  Let's see if they bluster or just admit fault and get on with it. 

15:00-16:30 overview of new security project - Guess into whose lap this is getting dumped.  Correct, it's me!  It should be easy-peasy because there is no deadline and this project is mostly an extention of stuff I already wrote.  I can't decide if should be offended that I wasn't in on the design and planning.

16:30-17:30 digital ad pitch - Will my county's Democratic party buy some targeted ads for the primaries or the general?  Probably, but as a technical advisor, this doesn't put anything else on my plate.  Yet.

17:30-18:30 work - Find a comment I wrote that's cut off in the middle.  Did I do that?  Why wasn't it caught in a code review?  Because as a senior guy, no one challenges my code.  Fix the comment, I think.  I think someone besides me changed the code since I wrote the comment.  Too lazy to verify that theory and also I don't want verification that I'm losing it.

18:30 commute - note: I work from home.

19:30 - singing lesson.  My drummer is really hyped about improving our background vocals, so here I am.  Now, instead of struggling to find my pitch while playing my bass, I'll be thinking about the shape of mouth and how I'm using my diaphram while struggling to find my pitch while playing my bass.  Ultimately, this could pay off but as a noob vocally, it's fairly overwhelming.

20:30 commute - note: forty minutes is too long a comute for sixty minute lesson

22:00 work - Decide I'm too tired to properly review my own code so I just test some boundary cases to make sure nothing is broken.  Nothing seems broken, almost too quiet...  Suddenly, the network at work goes down.  Enough for today...

Just a super rough series of sketches (done separately and then laid out together) and there are plenty of issues, but I really enjoyed doodling these while playing D&D tonight.

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It's going to be pretty much the same as my Arizona entry. I.e., I drove through it, ate fast food, slept in a rest stop. Unless I remember anything ANYTHING else. It's very possible I've been to Little Rock for some software training and just don't remember. I think maybe MAYBE as a newly minted graduate in 1993 I stopped in the town of Hot Springs and couldn't figure out how to engage with tourist trap spas. But I'm not sure

So yeah, been to Arkansas. Kinda.