Sunday, 10:42 pm, 16 January 2005

Thirty three boxes packed...

We are done. I think this photo is the closest pictorial representation I have of how I feel currently.

Tom circa 1997(?)

I found it while packing. During my third year of University I grew my hair out. This is the longest my hair has ever been. Nothing like the Australian sunlight early evening contrast on the face.

Now we are all packed up my only connection to the internet at home comes through my laptop. Five weeks t'row we depart. It is an interesting test how much we have been softened with a relatively fast Windows combo box. From 2004 to 1996 technology in a single day of boxing.

Towards the end we lifted our game quite a bit. The final four boxes were packed in around an hour and a half. Our previous record had been twelve boxes in a day. There are six customs forms to complete and a swag of additional paperwork to go with the boxes.

When I moved to the US in 1999, I took about thirteen postage boxes. I have one left for historical reference although I will throw it away within the next five weeks. I posted most of them discount airmail which existed in Australia at the time. About three weeks transit and roughly half-way between airmail and seamail.

Moving to the UK, I went with a commercial shipper and the postal service on what I couldn't get to the shipper in time. Logistically it was about ten boxes, roughly double the size of the ones I sent to the US initially.

Tracking the number of boxes - although there are two people now - the UK has clearly been good to us. Of the thirty three about two and half of the boxes are Fred Reeds. Probably about double that are my wife's china. Two CPUs, keyboards, mice etc.

I arrived in the UK with very little and will leave thoroughly middle class.

Good night.
Thursday, 10:41 pm, 13 January 2005

Justin at School

The Darwin@Home team at USC are at the same campus attended by Justin Hall. Justin and I have maintained one degree of separation for a number of years through Doug Rushkoff (on the new media theory side) and Jason Della Rocca (on the IGDA side). I dropped Justin an email tonight letting him know I might be on campus in six weeks or so. I don't know if I will be on campus, but it's a possibility.

Walking with Dogs

It's a finite time before we depart. Five weeks on Monday. The thing I am most looking forward to is being around dogs again. My wife's family and dogs. I'm not really a dog person. But I like to walk and dogs are good walking companions.

My wife is a quarter Blackfoot. I find it fascinating - partially through films like Smoke Signals but also through my sense of the Barbalet genetics coming from Mongolia.

I'm genuinely ignorant about the Blackfoot. What I can find out is that they were fierce warriors and have a strong connection with dogs. My wife has unbelievably low blood pressure which she attributes to the Blackfoot line.

Boxing Vision

The boxing continues. I am a much slower boxer than my wife and I have found the reason is simple. I like to hold and look at things. Through packing, I have found some photos my wife had never seen before. Some I took when I was four and some photos of me and my father in LA in 1990.

My wife's favourite snap - 'You look like LA nerds!'

Almost all my photos were destroyed when I moved to the US. A single box containing a number of photos and precious books was ruined by water. As the example above shows, the photos that survived, still showed water damage. I never worked out what happened, but the soggy contents were delivered in a blank brown box.

Good night.
Tuesday, 10:27 pm, 11 January 2005

Another snippet this evening. This time from a brain dump on the Darwin@Home version of the Noble Ape Simulation;

http://www.nobleape.com/docs/ape_at_home.html

There is a distinct lack of development information online. When I emailed Bruce Damer on this, he confirmed the development was only in the initial stages. Now is the time for feedback.

I haven't heard any more from Bruce. I suspect he is heading to Los Angeles for the launch. Good night.
Monday, 11:00 pm, 10 January 2005

It's All In The Numbers...

For clarity from yesterday's post, I went back and found the original post in Barbalet's Log circa 2003 with regards to actual weblog numbers. It's in the form of emails sent on an IEEE article about weblog words. I've extracted the text from the PDF and created an HTML snippet.

http://www.barbalet.net/log/log_numbers.html

Writing the entry last night made me think about the logtrack code. I have done a complete rewrite of the code. Shortened everything and made the functionality match the functions. I hope to have it released online within the next few days. It should be compiling Barbalet's Log before then.

Kirill is a Master Painter

The Kirill figures arrived today and they are stunning. There is a school of figure painting that relates to historical figures. They are more muted than the mainstream sci-fi/fantasy miniature painting. It works really well with the modifications Kirill made to the figures.

The photos did them no justice. There is a depth and an element of the sublime which is difficult to capture in digital images but touch you when you look at the size of the figures vs the depth. You lose perspective looking at them.

I also received the two Tammy Haye commissions a couple of days ago. Looking at Tammy's figures next to Kirill's you get a sense of two diverging schools of painting. Tammy defines the 'Eavy Metal style. There are elements of satire in Tammy's painting. Solid banks of silver for example. Not metallic - straight silver. The chaos terminator of Tammy's is a clear favourite from the two. It belongs in White Dwarf.

What Would You Like for Dinner, Charles...

I got an email today about the launch of a new ALife experiment. It seems like a really cute idea and I'd like to link Noble Ape to the API, ASAP.

http://www.darwinathome.org/

Rather than it being an ALife project, it is more an ALife infrastructure project. I'm hoping it will promote dialog between ALife developers, users and feedback. Fingers crossed.

Good night.

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