Its all good

Went to Birmingham on Monday to visit a landscape architecture firm with a class. We also went to a new urbanist development called Mount Laurel. Nice place but expensive. Check out their website. With residential real estate as it is right now, they have stopped building. It is sort of a cross between Southern Village and Governer's club, for those of you who know Chapel Hill. I missed the turn at Tuscaloosa on the way home and tried to get back to HWY 82 by navigating the country roads around tiny hamlets like Union and Aliceville, which was a little unnerving. Made it home just in time for cub scouts. Now I have four projects going in four classes and not enough time. In Design I we are developing a landscape plan for the local mosque. The leader of the mosque owns a Middle Eastern restaurant in town and every time we go over there to measure or take photos he brings us out a ton of really good food. Today I must come up with a concept and some design elements. I'm thinking symmetry. Also get ready for trick or treating tonight. The dog busted out yesterday by getting into the crawl space and removing some loose bricks under the front porch. I came home to her standing on the front porch and a note on the door saying "Punkin is in our back yard. She got out earlier today. -R, next door." So she broke out of two yards, actually.

sloggin

So far the forecast of rain for the entire week has proven to be accurate. I snapped a photo of myself with my phone of me slogging across the green pastures of Mississippi State University last Tuesday. If I look strange in the photo it is probably because I was very busy and had a lot on my mind. My woman and I have given all the pets nicknames that reflect their individual idiosynchracies. Cody, who bites us every morning to get us out of bed (to feed him we surmise) is now "Chomper," Spooky, who wanders about the house commenting inanely on the state of affairs, is "Talkie Walkie," Tarot, who is about 105 years old, just doesn't want to put up with this shit anymore, and occaisionally pees in our shoes, is "Surly," and the dog, Punkin, the excitable puppy who loves to eat, in a nod to the grocery chain that just took over our neighborhood Southern Family Market, is "Piggly Wiggly."

It all comes down to perspective

Here are some sketches I did for one of my classes. In both cases I was given a site in plan view (view from directly above, as in a typical plan) and had to render a sketch that dipicted what was on the plan. Sketches always have people, to show scale. Most of my fellow students trace the people, but I prefer to draw my own. In the two-point perspective, I set up most of the perspective lines, such as the arbor, the walls and the joints in the paving, in a SketchUp model and traced over them.

Tuesday again

Rain today, yesterday, forecast rain for the rest of the week. This after a long dry spell. So much for the fall color. In my back yard, a ginormous pecan tree drops nasty brown leaves and diminutive pecans over everything. Lotta work to do in the studio, I'd best get crackin.

Dicynodonts

I don't have anything to say, so I am passing along a scrap of news I came across while researching the geological time line. I think this guy lived during the Triassic, but me not sure. The dicynodonts were mammal-like reptiles. This guy munched on grass like our cows do today. I thought you'uns might like to know that they were here, doing their thing, back in the day. The image is from Wikipedia, where you can read all about them.

Sentences

Trotline Freddy rolled into the dirt lot of the Buckhorn Road Flea Market with a five-pack of Mickey's big mouths on the floorboard, three ferrets in a wire cage on the seat beside him, and a hundred and thirty-six dollars in his wallet, all in ones. Woodsmoke in the air cut the fresh chemical stench of the port-a-johns, and a single duck marked a tangent overhead with her steady, lonely bleating. It was the first cool day of the season, and it was going to be a good one.

crash

When you are drawing in SketchUp, you should always use the the 2D trees instead of the 3D trees. The 2D trees take up much less file space, and they rotate with the viewport so they will always end up looking pretty good in the final image, which will be rendered in D2 anyway. Same with the brick cladding, the tiles, all those details slow down the response time of your input and make the drawing difficult to work on. Put that stuff in at the very end.

In Second Life, the trees, the houses, everything is 3D. The level of detail is astounding. But Second Life is notoriously buggy and there is often a lot of lag time. If you are using a slow connection speed, Second Life crashes all the time. The amount of disc space and RAM needed to just wander around is considerable. But, you know, it is nothing compared to the amount of RAM required by real life.

Reality, as we now know, is a sort of compromise or a collaboration between physical matter and consciousness. Both have their limitations. The greatest problem with over population is not that people are consuming resources at a rate that is not sustainable (although that is a problem), but that more consciousness is created every day, and the universe just doesn't have the capacity. I am sure some of you have noticed driving around, how the leaves on the trees don't look as sharp as they did when you were little, how they cut on and off, how sometimes, especially during peak usage moments, everything just freezes up. I sense the big crash coming. One day we will all wake up to the big blue screen of death. And where will Tech Support be then? Lost in the virtual world....

Anniversary

It was a warm October day, much like today, when Missus Icker and I were wed some fourteen years ago, in Schley, North Carolina, at my buddy J-skull's country home. Seems like just last week. We toasted each other with some bubbly wine and ate dinner on the back porch with the kids. I have a cold, and am working hard on a big project that involves creating a geological timeline of the history of the earth. The earth is four point six billion years old. I figure, if I can cram a thousand foot long path into my space (the front of Hilburn Hall, the geosciences building here on campus), that gives me 4.6 million years per foot, 46 million years every ten feet, and four hundred and sixty million years every hundred feet. You get the idea. At that rate, there will still be large spaces in the path where not much is happening, such as in the first billion years, when the moon was created, oceans formed, and continents arose. Dinosaurs would appear in the last twenty to fifteen feet. Humans, or hominid creatures, rather, would show up in the last six to twelve inches. I am thinking of putting some of the path underground, in a tunnel. I have a long way to go.

Married life has been very good. We are so happy together. We hope to go out and celebrate properly, maybe shoot some pool, this weekend.