Axodys

Inspired by Evan’s entry on learning to draw I went out and purchased The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards and I’m really enjoying it so far. The key premise of the book is that the capacity to create realistic drawings is built into the right hemisphere of the brain in everyone, but for most people the dominant left hemisphere keeps interfering. Once you learn how to tap into the right brain and ignore the left when drawing, amazing stuff is possible.

One of the first lessons in the book involves drawing a self portrait so that you have something to gauge down the line as your drawing skills improve. What really impressed me about the book (and Mary too when I showed her) were the before and after self portraits for people that have gone through the five day intensive program. The improvement was phenomenal! So I’m pretty excited about what I’ll be able to do after a few weeks of dedicated work.

I’m hoping I’ll be able to convince Mary to try this book after I finish it up because I think it’d be a great addition to the Fine Arts portion of her sixth grade class curriculum. Her classroom is actually decorated with a bunch of self portraits that the kids made a while back and when I first saw them I thought they seemed pretty unskilled for kids that age. Now having read the first several chapters of Betty Edwards’ book it turns out that their skill level is completely normal for their age group. The cool thing to me is that the exercises in the book are totally suited for kids around fifth or sixth grade. I’d love to see Mary work with her kids on this over the course of the year and see the resulting before and after pictures.

Mary and I went for a long walk this evening along High Drive. The view was pretty impressive, but by the time we got back to our car we were both fairly tired. It was actually a pretty cold walk as the temperatures were in the 40’s most of the day. Hopefully we’ll get a little bit warmer weather by the weekend.

Tapestry holographic storage looks like a pretty sweet system. 100GB on one cd sized disc with 20MB/s access times to begin with and even greater access rates possible in the future. According to this InformationWeek article Tapestry drives won’t ship in volume until 2004, but I’m already really curious to see what kind of price point we can expect on the drives and media.

I was disappointed to learn today on CNN that Alice in Chains singer Layne Staley had been found dead in his Seattle residence Friday. I was familiar with his drug problems (how could you not be if you actually listened to the lyrics), but in all honesty hadn’t thought much about the band in several years. It’s really sad to see yet another musician from that era meet an untimely end.

AIC was a favorite band of mine back in my college days during the grunge period of the early 90’s. I can remember blasting “Them Bones” from Dirt countless mornings in my dorm room after returning from an early morning class during my junior year. Spring semester I snapped up Jar of Flies the day it was released. I liked that EP a lot, but for whatever reason by the time their eponymous album came out in 1995 I was starting to lose interest in the band and never got around to picking it up. Now seven years later my musical tastes have mellowed a bit and dark angry music has lost a bit of its earlier luster, but I still enjoy listening and reminiscing on occasion (Dirt’s playing on my headphones now in fact).

Today was fairly busy. Mary and I went out to my Mom’s house to check on my sister’s dog and do a couple other errands. On top of that we got in a half hour walk around the neighborhood and did a little laundry at the same time so that was pretty productive.

Our evening was fairly fun as well. The Cataldo Catholic School where Mary teaches had their big annual fund-raising auction so we spent a few hours there and managed to get good deals on a couple small items. The food was pretty good as well.

The wireless networking project at work is moving along quite nicely. We’ll be adding a 10-100 switch with around 24 ports as well so that means faster networking for the server room and my office. Should be very cool.

I really like the tab feature in Mozilla. It seems like the perfect way to manage several browser windows at one time. I’ve been using Mozilla a lot more since the .99 version and I’m pretty excited about 1.0. Of course that being said, I’m especially looking forward to.the cocoa-wrapped browser version whose name I can’t recall at the moment.

Only slightly ahead of my time. When I first heard about singlefile I thought it would be cool to do something similar in Radio Userland as a tool. Unfortunately my interest level bogged down when I discovered that there were no xml/xml-rpc available for pulling up book information via ISBN. Conveniently enough Slashdot covered this very topic yesterday and I gleaned a couple useful links from the discussion:

• The Book Scanning Project
• A link that takes an ISBN and returns an XML file!

From the getting a grip on NT Share/Directory permissions department: these are two seperate yet interrelated permissions. If the Everyone group only has read permissions for a Share then giving them change permissions at the directory level isn’t going to matter. Wish I’d realized that a few days ago.

Hey this is really cool! PB has put together a Weblog BookWatch page/mini-application. The Weblog Bookwatch searches weblogs that pass through the Recently Changed list at weblogs.com looking for links to books at Amazon.com.