Our cat, Leo, who travelled with us all the way from Australia, died this morning having struggled with FIV (the feline version of HIV) for the last year.
For those of you who have never had a pet, this will probably sound ridiculously sentimental. Others will know how much they are loved and treated as much as one of the family as any human. And how heart-wrenching it is when they pass away.
Leo adopted us when we moved into our house in Beattie Street in Sydney, having been abandoned by the previous neighbours, and quickly found his way into our hearts. I grew up with cats in the house and have known many, but rarely one with such character and never one that was so sociable. He was never aloof and always wanted to be around people. always sitting on our desks whilst we worked or on the sofa with us in the evening always chatty and purring. He even softened the hearts of even the most die-hard, anti-cat dog lovers.
He was truly one of a kind. For Karin and I he has been like a child over the past seven years. We both numb at the loss and sitting here swollen-eyed from all the tears. In some small way I hope that this little post secures his place and memory in the world.
Lastly, thank you to all the people who have cuddled him and looked after him whilst we were away. You all know what a lovely fella he was. Here are a few pictures to remember him by.
I’ve played with Processing a fair bit over the years, but never really got stuck into anything solid – most of my time has been spent fixing up my students’ projects!
Over the break I’ve been playing with some other ideas, working through the very good book by Casey Reas and Ben Fry, Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists. It’s probably one of the best books I’ve ever read in terms of introducing and explaining how to code for people without a computer science background.
Inspired by Robert Hodgin’s wonderful Processing work I thought I’d have another crack at particles as they seem to be all the rage at the moment. The particle creation part is easy, but getting them to interact with decent physics was getting too much for my mathematically challenged brain. Thankfully I came across the Traer Physics Engine by Jeffrey Traer Bernstein, which handles a lot of that maths for you.
My “Hello World!” code for any platform tends to be a bouncing ball (or an array of them) because it covers most of the structures – if…then, variables, arrays, etc.
So I started building and engine that has a bunch of particles that are all attracted to each other, but more attracted to a single one which is following a target invisible bouncing ball around the screen. (It would make more sense to collapse the particles into the ball code, but at the moment I’m just plugging stuff together.)
It’s very simple at the moment – just an ellipse as the graphic with some trails going on. The above is a version that rendered out in non-realtime with 20,000 particles. I like the way they seem to rope together and struggle to break free. Sometimes there’s a kind of breakaway flare.
There’s also a bit of gravity going on, which drags everything down. Any particles that go off the bottom of the screen are simply recycled up the top (you’ll see this in the initial explosion). A interesting upshot of this is that sometimes the tail of the flare/rope falls off the bottom and those particles make a break for it from the top.
I’m going to take a few days off for a break, so I probably won’t be blogging for a couple of weeks. But stay tuned, there is much more to come as well as some more podcasts. I’ll also be doing an online presentation for the AWARD Craft Interactive programme on the 27th August. It’ll [...]
A quick pointer to an interview about the Creative Waves VIP Project with Rick Bennett and I on the very excellent WorldChanging.com. If you’ve been wondering what it’s all about and why it might be interesting to take part, then have a read. Thanks to Regine for writing it too. p.s. If you haven’t bought [...]
It’s not been an easy year for deaths in the family. Although I rarely post personal things on my blog, for some reason – at least to me – it feels like way of honouring someone passing away. My Grandma, Lilian Dines, made it to 97 – which is an amazing age for anyone to [...]
or I’m about to upgrade machines and it’s time to go Macbook or Macbook Pro (the 15″). It wouldn’t be a primary design machine, so the screen resolution is not so much of an issue, nor is the speed difference (though see question 2 below). What I want to know is: What the [...]
I am very, very sad to report that my wife’s mother, Ursula Klem, died this morning after 15 years of cancer. She was remarkable in her lust for life and even right until the end showed an incredible strength in simply ignoring the pain and ailments that beset her for such a long time. She [...]
Whilst looking through some old archives of work (and also the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive) I re-found a gif that I made for my very first polaine.com website. I remember wanting to create something quite different and I rendered this out (of After Effects of all things) by accident.
Recently I have been giving much thought to the structure and issues that most of us in Higher Education have been struggling with for several years. There are three areas of thought that come together when re-imagining education, particularly within Art and Design education. The theory of the Long Tail, the Play Ethic and Cradle to Cradle sustainability. Each of these requires a radical turn-around in current ways of thinking. Tweaking the edges won’t do. What if we thought about education the same way we thought about our other precious resources or the same way that we think about the changing face of the media? The full post is quite a long essay, but it covers a lot of ground…
By co-incidence (and thanks to some birthday presents) I just read Pat Kane’s ‘The Play Ethic’ and William McDonough and Michael Braungart’s ‘Cradle to Cradle’ them back-to-back and I realised what a set of connections there are between the two ways of thinking. Kane’s Play-Ethic is a fascinating and well-researched literature review, Protestant work-ethic critique and manifesto for a new way of thinking and living. Cradle to Cradle is equally so – a manifesto for a new way of thinking and living as well as a rejection of the past 250 years or so of the industrial society
It’s exactly this sustainability which is also required from our working (read: waking) lives if we are not to all fall over in exhaustion. In short, play time or down time (and there is a difference) in order to sustain our lives. I believe it would have enormous social benefits that ripple out from this too…
