Up in the air

Viv had a tooth out today, which was trying for both of us but in the end not that big a deal. The dentist is located on the shore of Lake Washington in the extremely well-to-do neighborhood known as Madrona, and with the gloriously sunny weather it was a lovely drive over this morning.

She’s to be on a mush food diet for a couple of days so I knit my brow to come up with a decent dinner. In the end I served poached eggs on polenta with pureed cooked carrots and finely chopped spinach. I did something spectacularly right with the polenta because it was like eating some sort of soft, spicy cheese.

While we were out at the pharmacist I idly checked my email to find a note from my London-based internet friend Sumit wondering about my absence from Twitter. I wrote back explaining. I was very glad to have heard from him as although our exchanges have been brief and reflect the compression of the medium I recognize my relationship with him as important to me and he had been one of the folks on Twitter I knew I would most miss.

After Viv went to sleep I spent some more time wrestling with my setup for Rise of Flight. For years I have been frustrated by unaccountable difficulty with TrackIR, an infrared-based head-motion tracking system which, when it works, becomes an essential aspect for POV style games such as RoF. Last week I thought I had solved this issue by applying it directly to my forehead. Earlier this week it became apparent that I had not.

Eventually it became clear that the issue was that I had sufficiently moved the infrared camera as well as the three-point tracking reflector widget from their design-intended relative locations that it was not gonna work the way I had hoped. So I went back to the drawing board.

In the end, I found a short strap made of stiff black nylon webbing originally made for use on a small piece of luggage. A bit of fussing, and it became a headband, to which the widget is no affixed in reasonable emulation of the designed position on the brim of a baseball cap. I was able to successfully fly a couple of scenarios with this in place, so, huzzah.

Like, what else? There was a white dress that was a blue dress, and Leonard Nimoy died. Still ploughing thru Imperial to no accountable purpose. My ex-bandmate announced he has cancer and needs cash to help with treatment. Waiting on my accountant to return our books so I can get to the next stage in our taxes for last year. Started on the post processing for a shoot, imagine that will be done Monday. Looked for gigs on Craigslist, no plethora of product photography to be found. I imagine I’ll start tossing some retail items up next week.

Turner

Watched the Mike Leigh “Mr. Turner” tonight. It was lovely, with a central and startling CGI depiction of the anecdotal encounter that inspired “The Fighting Temeraire”.

As always, movies about painters remind me how much time I have already wasted, how many pictures I will never make. Not that it ever affects me to the point I actually exert a daily practice, even now when paint and canvas and setup and cleanup are no procrastination excuse ever again.

a bit of a haul

Long day of driving (by my standards, anyway). At about noon Sunday I headed over to the Issaquah highlands west of Tiger Mountain and south of Lake Samammish to do a Craigslist pickup of a Lillberg loveseat. I brought the dog with the intent of a stop at the north end of the lake, at the expansive offleash area in Marymoor Park.

He surprised me by clearly recognizing the area as we drove in. To my knowledge this was only his second visit there since he’s been with us. I suppose it’s possible he might have gone there with shelter dogs but that seems somewhat unlikely as his shelter was based in Snohomish County.

All went well, and we returned by driving north through Woodinville to Kenmore around the north end of Lake Washington. I had reset the trip odometer as I set out and happened to glance at it somewhere about halfway through; it showed about 45 miles. So I expect we drove around 90 miles in total, arriving back home at about four.

Airborne

Rise of Flight remains in rotation. For many years I’d struggled with positioning the monitors and TrackIR such that I could get 180 degrees plus of vertical head motion. The issue stems from TrackIR’s default design position at the top (or bottom) of the monitors. I position my monitors with the bottom bezel about a foot up from the desk, placing the top bezel two feet up. My head position places my eyes more or less in line with the bottom bezel.

If the TrackIR clip is on a baseball-cap brim, as intended, then, when I look down, the TIR camera loses the reflection strips as I tilt my head down. adding reflection dots to the cap works to an extent.

Moving the TIR to the bottom of the screen allows the camera to see the head motion, but the hat brim then occludes the monitors.

I finally resolved this by placing the TIR at the front of the desk, angled up toward my face, and by mounting the TIR reflecting clip directly to the bridge of my nose and to my forehead with cello tape. Experimenting, I have learned that I could also just hold it on my face with my eyeglasses.

However, my eyeglasses don’t provide optimum visual correction to the screen and I prefer to not wear them while working in that setup. I suppose the resolution here, at least in the interim, is to buy or find a cheap sunglass frame and pop the lenses.

The wizened MS SW FFB2 is still absolutely perfect, to my surprise. I have a CH pedal set but for whatever reason I have found them to be hard to calibrate. I’ll bring them online in a couple weeks, I think.

FUCK broadcast TV news

Viv just turned on the tube and it dropped right into a headline rebroadcast of the fucking “it was a rock” Pasco police shooting. She managed to change the channel before the fucking money shot but good god. When she asked me why I was yelling at her to change the channel I had to explain what had happened to her, a task I did not relish. She has heard nothing about it and has a well-formed, fully earned distaste to hearing me rant about social justice issues.

ants

aaargh. we are under attack by the small black ants known around here as ‘sugar ants’. they showed up very early this year and have proved unusually persistent. i believe this is an unfavorable augry for their future fecundity.

Mating whine

Out my window, I can hear one of the resident hummingbirds performing his mating dives. The dives produce a birdcall which is actually produced by the bird’s feathers as he comes out of a high-speed dive.

This particular fellow is acoustically interesting because he seems to have the ability to change the pitch and timbre of the call, sometimes higher, sometimes lower. I suppose it could be that he’s attracting conversation from a member of a different species.

The Starlost

Metafilter takes a look at the forgotten and reviled 1973 generation-ship SF series The Starlost, which I have never heard of. Sounds totally fascinating, combining elements also seen in Silent Running, Space: 1999, Logan’s Run, Roddenberry’s Genesis II, and of course the original Battlestar Galactica.

Boy, mainstream TV SF sure had a hardon for the apocalypse, didn’t it?

Back to the skies

And a successful test sortie in Rise of Flight after a catastrophic machine failure about six months ago. Still need to twiddle with this and that controller driver setting but on the whole satisfactory.